Chapter III: Part 3

The dew was not yet gone up from the shadows nor the virgin morning warmed a whit toward noon; the creek sang at the curve, I felt the axles of the earth sing as it swung eastward. I spread out my arms in the trail and touched the tips of the growing things, and felt the tide of abundant life rise through my fingers. Herman strode in the trail ahead and called over his shoulder:

“What are you laughing at back there, Mona?”

“News,” I answered, for I had remembered suddenly something Trastevera had said to me.

“What news?”

“How should I know, except that it is good news? The meadowsweet told it to me. What’s yours?”

“That Treasure you’re so keen about; they’ve really got it. I’ve talked with men who’ve seen it.”

“Noche?”

“He hasn’t come back yet, but Waddyn, one of the keepers—there were four of them—dug it up ten years ago and reburied it.”

“But why?”

“That’s my news. On account of Trastevera. She was the Ward ten years ago, and they were afraid to give her their wretched drug lest they should destroy her gift of Far-Seeing, as they call it. So they took counsel and decided to change the hiding-place. Prassade said it wasn’t an altogether popular movement. Some of the Wards haven’t taken kindly to the Cup when their turn came, and they feared the precedent. But anyway they did it. They made a cordon round the place where it was hid, three days’ journeys wide, and the four old men went in and dug up the Treasure and buried it again.”

“All those jewels and beaten gold?”

“Whatever it is they’ve got, colored pebbles most likely. It wouldn’t have been so bad, Prassade says, changing the place of the Treasure; that has happened several times in their history. But while they had it up they had a look at it, and Noche’s head has been turned ever since.”

“I should think it might. It’s all true, then?”

“Folk tales, likely; all tribes have them.” Though his face was turned from me on the trail, I could feel Herman’s professional manner coming on again. “It is extraordinary, though, how their social organization is so nearly like to what you would expect of a highly civilized people thrown suddenly back on the primal environment. Take their notions of property now——”

What he was going to say must have been very interesting, but just at this point we came to Fallen Tree, and saw the irised banner of the Leap floating before its resounding crash of waters. A little spit of grassy land ran here from the clearing into the dense growth, and the trail entered by it. Beyond it, pale late lilies censed the shadows of the redwoods, and below in the meadow there was nothing fairer than the bleached, wind-blown hair of the children, as they ran and shouted through the scrub. Evarra came hurrying with the Cup against her breast. Prassade and Persilope took up a station of some prominence on the point opposite us, with Mancha behind them, leaning on his long weapon. Presently the flutes began.

The sound of them stole upon us softly from far within the redwoods, keyed a little under the bell tones of the creek, and rising through it to the pitch at which the water note seems forever at the point of breaking into speech. As the procession skirted the meadow, the music emerged in a tune fetching and human. Now you heard the swing of blossoms by runnels in the sod, the beat of spray on the bent leaves by the water borders; then the melody curling and uncurling like the ringlets on a girl’s neck. With the music some sort of pageant passed, boys and girls wreathed and dancing, forming as they wound in the wood glooms, breaking and dissolving where the trail led through the bright, sunned space of the meadow. We could hear from the Outliers ranged about the clearing, light applause of laughter like the patter that follows the wind in the quaking asp.

The pageant circled the open space around which rippled the curved blade of the creek, and came to halt behind Persilope and the Council. Then a drum-beat arose and rolled steadily, the four keepers came out of the wood; Noche and Waddyn and two others I did not know or observe, except that they were not young and carried the occasion solemnly. The keepers took up their station on either side of the meadow, and the two foremost, saluting, passed on a little beyond the chief. Into the hollow square thus formed for her, came the maiden Ward.

First as she stood there, one realized in her figure the springing pose of immaturity, in her gaze the wraptness and fixity of the devotee. Altogether she was of so exquisite a finish and delicacy that one would wish to have plucked her like a flower. She was dressed in a smooth, seamless bodice of tawny skin, baring the throat and rounded upper arm; below that a skirt of thin green was shaped to her young curves by the vagrant wind. Her hair, which was all of burnt gold, powdered with ashes of gold, was drawn loosely back and confined close to her head, but fell free to her hips, blown forward, defining her like the sheath of a flower. Her brows also were touched with gold and the eyes under her brows were like agate at the bottom of a brook.

She wore no jewels but a thread of scarlet berries that, in its revealing femininity, in the way it took the curve of her slender throat and ran into the little hollow between her breasts, so seemed to me as if I had never seen a more endearing ornament. As she appeared among us,—for though she had walked very quietly out of the forest there was that appealing quality of her loveliness which gave to her coming the swiftness of a vision,—as she appeared thus, a ring of smiling ran sensibly about the hushed, observing circle.

She moved in the exultation of her shining mood, unconscious of the way her feet went or what eyes were upon her, to the sound of the shallow drums and the delicate high flutes. As the music dropped she stopped before Persilope, who stood forward a little with some formal words of ritual or salutation. I missed the exact words, all my attention taken up with what had happened to Mancha. He had been standing just behind the chief, and in the brief interval while Zirriloë had come ten steps or so out of the shadow, he had passed, as though her beauty had been some swift, vivifying shock, from being a grave beholder to an active participant of the occasion. Deep red surged up in his face and left it pale again, his eyes, which were blue, burned amber points and took her like a flame. He shook as though the joints of his spirit were loosed, and took the full red under-lip in his teeth to keep back the tide of strength that came on him as he looked at her. His breath came purringly. I saw the soul of the man lithe and rippling in him, the glint of his eyes, the mass and thickness of his body incredibly lifted and lightened by the consciousness of the Mate. He did not know what had happened to him, but he laughed to himself his joy in her, as she moved wrapped in her high errand down the still summer glade, and across the meadow.

“Herman! Herman! Do you see?” I whispered.

He was sitting on the fallen tree next to me, and as I moved my hand toward him in that vague pang following quick on the shock of inexpressible beauty, I felt his fingers cold. His lips were open and I saw his tongue move to wet them, like a man unconsciously athirst.

Beyond the clearing, thick purplish trunks of the redwood upbore the masses of foliage like a cloud. The space between the first twenty feet or so of their gigantic columns was choked with laurel and holly and ceanothus, pierced by long tunnels that the deer had made. Down one of these the two foremost of the keepers plunged and were lost behind the mask of loose, wild vines that festooned the front of the wood, lifting and falling in the wind that by mid-morning began to set seaward from the high ridges.

But the girl, some ten steps behind them, still in her half-seeing mood, missed the moment of the out-streaming of the vines, checked and faltered. The wind caught her dress and wrapped her in it, the drapery of vines swung out and caught her hair. Before the other keepers could come up with her, the long arm of Ravenutzi reached out from his point of vantage on a heavy, slanting trunk and gathered up the offending vines, holding them high and guardedly until the girl could pass. The detention was slight, but long enough for the annoyance of it to have pierced her abstraction before he let the curtain fall almost on the heads of the hurrying keepers, long enough for her to have looked up at Ravenutzi and accord to him the first conscious recognition of her solemn passage. Whatever flattery there might have been in that, it could not draw so much as a backward glance from him. With the swish of the long vines flung back upon the wall of boughs, he sprang forward from his perch, and as if that action had been the signal, drew with him a ring of staring faces toward the grassy spit by which the trail entered the meadow.

The music, which during the ritual had melted into the undertone of forest sounds, emerged again more pointedly human and appealing. It summoned from the bluish glooms an interest so personal and touching that it drew the Outliers from the shy wildness of their ways. The ring of watchers surged forward a step, the music rose like a sigh of expectation and ushered in a group of women who, without any order or solemnity, but with a great and serious kindness, supported a young woman in their midst. It was she who had been the Ward and was now to receive forgetfulness.

As soon as I saw Trastevera, upon whose arm she leaned, I understood that these were the former Wards, come to afford her such comfort as their experience justified. It was not until I saw her mother hurry forward crying: “Daria! Daria!” that I began to realize what need of comfort there must be. Evarra beside me stirred the Cup. Its faint aromatic odor was of a cold and sickly dread, reflected from Daria’s widened eyes on some secret surface of myself.

She was a pretty girl, warm-tinted, eyes of a wet gray, the broad brow and sensitive short lip of women whose happiness centers in approval. It was easy to read in her face that of all the restrictions of her Wardship the one against loving had been hardest borne; plain to be seen now in the way she clung to her mother, who took the face between her hands, that of all the forfeitures that lay in the blue flower of forgetfulness, that one of loving was most difficult to pay.

“O mother, mother,” she said, “I cannot bear it!”

She shuddered sick, looking on all she had lived among and knowing that she might never know them again with that one of herselves which stood hesitating between the meadow and the wood. There was not one of all those trails, if she set foot in it to-morrow, that she would know where it went or what she might meet in it. She was to die in effect, to leave life and memory, to wake mutilated in the midst of full-blooded womanhood, without childhood, girlhood, parents, intimates.

“O mother,” she said, “I cannot bear it!”

She clung crying to her mother’s hand, while the other women crowded comfort upon her.

“Indeed, Daria,” one assured her, “but I knew my mother. There were four others with me when I woke, but I knew her. I did not know what she was to me, nor any name to call her, but my heart chose her from among the rest, and I held out my arms.”

They said many more things to this purport, while the girl turned her face to her mother’s bosom as though she admitted all this, but it did not touch her case.

Then her father, coming forward, distressed for her, but somewhat more concerned for the situation, taking her by the shoulders, recalled her to herself.

“Daughter,” he said, “have you carried the honor of the Outliers so many years to fail us at the last? How do you make life worth remembering with broken faith? And who will respect you if you respect not your word?”

She cleared a little at that and recovered, so that she was able to go through with some dignity the farewells which the elders now came forward to bestow with fixed cheerfulness. Then came her young companions, saying, “We have nothing ill to remember of you, Daria,” and “Good-waking, Daria.” She broke out again, desperate rather than despairing.

“Do not say so to me, I shall not drink it!”

“Shall not?” It was Persilope taking the Cup from Evarra, and moving forward as he spoke. “It is a word that has never been heard before from a Ward.”

Quick red leaped in Daria’s face, which she turned this way and that, searching the meadow for some prop to her determination. It seemed that she found it, though there was nothing I could read there but commiseration and disapproval.

“Shall not,” she breathed; and then quite low, sweeping his countenance once with her glance, and then fixing it steadily on the ground. “_She_ did not drink it.”

The emphasis was slight, slighter than the flicker of her eyes toward Trastevera, but the impact of her meaning drove the chief’s wife from her. One scarcely saw Trastevera move, but there was now a rift between the two women, which widened with the shocked perception in the listening circle. Persilope’s recovery was instant, some sternness with it.

“What had been done,” he said, “was done by all the Council with good reason. But what reason is here beyond a girl’s protesting fancy?”

Again Daria’s mutinous eyes searched the meadow, and her resistance rose visibly in advance of its support.

“Reason enough!” The group of young persons at the foot of the circle turned upon itself, and released the figure of a young man about thirty, tall and personable.

“I have reason”—his voice shook, as though the words had been too long repressed in him and escaped bubblingly—“the best of reasons, for I ... we love....”

He had hesitated an instant over the admission, wanting some quick assurance which flashed between the girl and him. Instantly it brought from the women, in whose care and keeping she had chiefly been, quick cries of protest and denial, falling almost on the stroke of his declaration.

“But you”—Persilope voiced the general knowledge—“you have been these three years at River Ward, you have not seen her.”

“Not for three years,” admitted the lover, “for as soon as I knew that I loved her I went away, that I might keep her honor and mine.” His thought worked uneasily, but he went on. “I have always loved her, but I had not told her so when it came my turn to serve with Mancha, and while I was away you chose her to be the Ward. I went back and served my time. When I returned to Deep Fern I saw her walking with the women in the cool of the morning and knew that I loved her. That was the year the water came down from Water Gate and tore up the valley. In the flood I carried her——”

He smiled; the inexpressible joyousness of the woodlander broke upward in the remembrance.

“The next day,” he said, “she sent me word to go back to River Ward, and I knew by that that she loved me. So I went, and by the evidence of the work I have done _you_ know how I have loved her.”

“By the evidence of the faith I have kept,” said Daria, “you know how I have loved him.”

All this time I could see the faces of the men, especially of the girl’s father and of Prassade, growing sterner. Trastevera looked down, studying the pattern of the meadow grass. Persilope bit his lip in the midst, with the Cup in his hand, and the lover grew bolder.

“Is love so cheap a thing to you, Persilope, that you take it from us before we have tasted it? It is Daria I love as she is, as I have seen her grow from a child into a woman, not a stranger, looking at me with unremembering eyes. Let the men take up the Treasure and bury it again, as they did for Trastevera.”

“There was a reason,” the chief began, and stopped, as if he knew that to argue was to lose.

“Oh, a reason——” I do not know by what imperceptible degrees and mutual consentings the lovers had got across the open space to each other, but there they were, handfast, confronting him. “Reason you thought you had, but what good came of all your reasons seeing that Trastevera has lost the Far-Seeing for the sake of which she was excused from the Cup. Let them bury the Treasure again—or give it to the Far-Folk, for all I care, since nothing comes of it but wars and forgettings.”

He caught the girl to him fiercely as he spoke, irritated by the hardening of the elders’ minds against that very touch of wildness and rebellion by which he urged the disregard of custom. Whatever advantage he had with Persilope because of the precedent, he had lost by the hint of its insufficiency.

“If,” said the chief, holding the bowl before him, “there had arisen any occasion, which I do not allow: _if_ there had arisen such an occasion for doubting the wisdom of our former breach, it would be greater cause for our not admitting it now. Do you propose”—forestalling the rising thought—“to bring it to Council? Look around you and see that we who make the Council are already agreed.” The eyes of the young couple traveled about the group, they saw regret, but no relenting.

“If she forgets you,” said the chief more kindly, “she forgets also the pain of her forgetting, and you shall teach her to love again.”

“Girl,” said her father, “if you shame me there is no forgetfulness deep enough for that.”

I suppose that the mere acknowledgment of their love had eased the tension of dread, had waked, perhaps, that foolish human certainty of passion to survive the loss even of its own identity. Perhaps they had never had any real hope of avoiding the issue; insensibly, too, as the matter had increased in gravity, the young listeners had melted from the circle, leaving a ring of older, sterner faces, before which they felt their resolution fail. We saw the girl turn piteously in her lover’s arms.

“You,” she said, “at least will not forget me.”

“I will not forget.”

“See,” Persilope smiled faintly, and shaking a little of the pale green liquid from the bowl, “I have made it light for you.”

The girl kept her eyes on the young man. “And I am yours,” she urged; “whether or not I remember, I am yours.”

“Knowing or unknowing,” the young lover assured, “I call these to witness that you are mine.”

Daria put out her hand and took the bowl from Persilope, but her lover put his hand upon it over hers, holding it back until he charged her soul again.

She lifted the Cup and shuddered as she drank; once she faltered, but he pressed it firmly to her lips. No one moved in the listening circle. The wind was busy with the forest boughs; we saw the redwoods bend and the curdling of the water at the falls. We saw Daria’s head bowing on its slender stalk, like the wild white columbine which the wind shook behind her.

“You will remember,” still her lover warned her.

“I will remember.”

She drooped, all her body lax with sleep, but still he propped her on his bosom. Her mother took up the girl’s flaccid hand in hers and fondled it softly; she did not urge her claim.

“Daria, Daria,” pleaded the lover, “say you will remember.”

She could not answer now except by the turning of her head upon his bosom; color, drained away by the drug, forsook her, the lips were open and a little drawn. He would have gathered her up then, but a motion from the elders stayed him.

“Remember, oh remember,” he called upon her soul, and the soul struggled to reassure him, but it lay too deep under Forgetfulness. With a shudder she seemed almost to cease to breathe. Evarra, stepping softly, lifted the relaxed lids and showed the eyes rolled upward, the pupils widened. She made a sign at which the circle parted and made way for the youth down the green aisles through which he bore her to his house.

VI
IN WHICH I AM UNHAPPY AND MEET A TALL WOMAN IN THE WOOD

When the vines dropped back from Ravenutzi’s hand upon the wall of boughs through which the Ward and her Keepers passed, it was as if the step that carried them out of sight of the Outliers had also carried them out of knowledge. Not an eye that any other eye could discover, nor any inquiring word strayed upon their vanished trail. In the three days before they returned to the Meet, or it was proper to mention them, they would have visited the King’s Desire, and Zirriloë would be informed of everything pertinent to that connection.

During these three days no Outlier concerned himself with their whereabouts lest he should be thought to have some concern about the Treasure. With the exception of Noche, I believe no Outlier had even so much as curiosity about it. It had been so long since any man had seen it, that until Noche’s account of what the cache contained began to be current, I think they had not any clear idea what the Treasure might consist in. It was something that the Far-Folk wanted and the Outliers did not mean they should get. The struggle kept alive in them tribal integrity and the relish for supremacy.

The practice of not speaking of the Treasure during the three days’ absence of the Ward, had taken on a rigidity of custom which Herman and I did not feel ourselves bound to observe. We could talk of the Treasure and of Zirriloë, and we did that same morning.

When the shadows were gathered close under the forest border, and even to our accustomed eyes there was no sign of the Outliers, other than the subdued sense of gladsome life spread on the pleasant air, I found a place I knew. There the creek went close about the roots of the pine between shallow sandy shoals, and there Herman came to talk to me of the Love-Left Ward. As he sat there at my feet pitching stones into the shallows, that effulgence of personality which had streamed from him at the opening of that day, and now suffused his manner with an unaccustomed warmth, lay quite beyond my reach.

Some of the dread with which Daria had met the obliteration of memory and identity, moved me to draw from Herman an assurance that nothing could quite wipe out from him all recollection of the fellowship and the good times we had had together. It began to appear an alarming contingency that I should be turned out at any moment in a strange country to find my way back to life in company with a man I did not know and whose disposition toward me was still to be learned. It would have become Herman to be very nice to me at this juncture, and while I sat feeling blankly for the communicating thread, he began to talk of the Ward.

“Some of the women should have gone with her,” he said; “somebody interested in her. It’s all stiff chaparral from here to the ridge. The girl will never stand it.”

“You don’t really know where they have gone,” I hinted, “and Daria doesn’t seem to have suffered.”

“Oh, Daria! But this girl needs looking after. You can see that it means a lot to her, losing—everything. She would have appreciated—things. That string of red berries now—she would have done justice to rubies.”

“The great necklace of red stones? Well, she probably knows where they are by this time.”

“A lot better use for them than keeping them in a hole in the ground,” Herman insisted, “especially when it costs the youth of a girl like that to keep them there.”

“I know at least one Outlier who will agree with you.”

“Who, then?”

“Mancha.”

“Did he say that? What makes you think so?”

I have often wondered why having gone so far I did not go further and tell Herman frankly what I thought I had discovered of Mancha’s state of mind. I have wondered oftener, if I had spoken then, if anything would have come of it different or less grievous than what did come. Whatever prevented me, I answered only that he seemed to me a man less bound by custom and superstition than his fellows, and Herman agreed with me.

“But I can tell you,” he said, “that Zirriloë wouldn’t hear of it. You can just see how her whole soul is bound up in the keeping of her vows. She could be true as death to—anybody.” He went on to say how he derived this assurance from the way the sun-touched color of her cheek spread into the whiteness of her neck, and from the blueness of the vein that ran along her wrist, and her springy walk. He ran on in this fashion taking my agreement very much for granted. What I really had thought was that in spite of her beauty and wraptness, the girl had rather a shallow face and would be as likely to be as much engrossed and as sure of herself in any other circumstances. And I was so much disappointed at Herman’s extraordinary failure of perception that I could not allow myself to say anything about it. I felt that a personal note must unreasonably attach to any woman’s attempt to show that a more beautiful one is not necessarily a woman of more personal fineness. I was so irritated with myself for being irritated that I was glad to hear Evarra calling down by the willows, and to leave Herman pitching pebbles into the shallows. Though it turned out that Evarra was asleep under a madroño and nobody had called me.

During those three days while the Ward and the keepers were away, there was a great deal going on in the fenced meadows and by Deer Lake and at the bottom of deep wells of shade in the damp cañons. It was a broken, flying festival, no two events of which took place successively in the same quarter, for the Outliers wished not to occupy ground long enough to leave upon it any mark of use by which House-Folk might suspect their presence. The great events of the Meet went on in so many places that nobody ever saw the whole of them. That was why I had no more talk with Herman and saw him but once or twice until Zirriloë came back again. I heard of him, though, and that in a manner and matter that surprised me very much.

The morning of the second day I went up with the girls to race in Leaping Water. We left the Middle Basin by a trail that took the side of the hill abruptly and brought us out at the foot of the second fall, above the long white torrent of the Reach. They meant to come down with the stream to the meadow again, and the game went to the one who was least out of water in that passage. I followed the windings of the creek as near as the undergrowth allowed and heard their laughter, now louder and now less than the water noises, and saw between the trees the flash of foam change to the glancing of white limbs, and the flicker of the sun on fair bodies as they drifted through the shallows. They took the falls feet foremost, curving to its flying arch, white arms wreathed backwards and wet hair blowing with the spray. The swimmers so mixed themselves with the movement of the water and the well-sunned, spacious day, that they seemed no more apart from it than the rush of the creek or the flicker of light on leaf surfaces displaced by the wind. They were no more obtrusive than that mysterious sense of presence out of which men derive gods and the innumerable fairy host.

I had walked thus in that awakened recognition of sentience in the wild, in which all Outland had become a dream which hunts along the drowsy edge of sleep. I had continued in it for perhaps half an hour, in such a state that though I had no idea where we were on the map, I believe I could have set out suddenly in the right quarter for home. I had not heard my name pronounced, but I began to be aware within myself that some one had called. I was so sure of it that, though I had no intimation yet of any presence, I began to look about. After a little trouble I made out Trastevera on the opposite bank, between the willows, making signs that she wished to speak to me, and yet enjoining silence. The creek widened here and the girls were coming down, following like trout. I saw her press back among the swinging boughs as they went by, and guessed that something more than the ordinary occasion of the day was astir. Presently, when we heard from below the splash of laughter as the swimmers struck the rapids, she came across to me.

“Where were you yesterday when Daria took the Cup?” she asked immediately.

“By Fallen Tree, not twenty steps from you—but you were so taken up with that affair that you did not see me.”

“You heard, then, what her young man said about”—she flushed sensitively—“his reasons for her not drinking. Have you heard anything of that in the Meet?”

“Nothing that need disquiet you.”

This was not strictly true, for Evarra had told me that all those who had opposed Trastevera’s exemption ten years before were now justifying themselves in Daria’s rebellion.

“They are saying what I feared,” she said, “that it is a mistake to release the possessor of gifts from the common obligation.”

“They are wrong, then, for nothing has come of it but the momentary outburst of a sensitive spirit. After all, Daria fulfilled her vows.”

She looked at me curiously for a moment, as if she were not sure what to make of me. We were walking up and down behind the trees, her dress a-flutter, her small hands clasping and unclasping, her body rippling with the expressive accompaniment of excitement which was as natural to her as the unstrained stillness of repose.

“Do you not think it wrong,” she said, “when the findings of the Council are scorned, and I—even I—make secret occasion to talk of forbidden things?”

She wheeled upon me suddenly:

“And this plan which is hatched between your man and Mancha, perhaps you see no wrong in that?”

She was too guileless herself to have taken that method on purpose, but I felt my spirit curling like a dried leaf out of all proportion to her news. I managed to answer steadily.

“He is not my man.” It did not occur to me until afterward that it would have been a surer form of denial not to acknowledge so readily what man. “And as for any plans he may have with Mancha or any other, I do not know what they are. Nor would I be interested except that I see it troubles you.”

All the time I was resenting unreasonably that Herman should have any plans with anybody and not broach them first to me.

“I do not know very well what it is myself,” she said more quietly, “except that it grows out of this unhappy episode of Daria’s. It must refer to the Wardship, because it is rumored about that the Meet, instead of breaking up on the evening when the keepers come back, will hold over another day for Council. That must be because they wish to talk of matters that may not be opened earlier. It is Mancha, I think, who wishes it. When some of the elders reproved Daria’s lover for having allowed himself to love a Ward, and for speaking so lightly of the Keeping, Mancha said that a man could not help where his heart went, and that there was too much truth in what the young man said. Myself, I cannot account for it.”

“I can,” I said, “and though you might not feel at liberty to question me, I at least may tell you that it has to do with the Ward. He is in love with her.” And I told her all that I had seen or surmised.

“And your friend?”

“Not knowing what his plan is, I cannot give his reasons.”

“Ah!” she said for all answer, and we walked on without saying anything further until I asked her what had become of Daria.

“Gone on her wedding month; they went away this morning as soon as she was fully recovered, having seen no one. They went out by Singing Ford. And even in that,” she added, “there is something to criticize, for it is not customary for any one to go away from the Meet while the Keepers are abroad. Oh,” she cried, striking suddenly upon her breast, “it is through me, through me, that all this breaking of custom comes.”

“Why do you care so much? All customs pass and in the end are replaced by better ones.”

“If that is not so,” she said, “if it is not so, Daria’s lover was right.”

She walked a little from me and bit her hands, as though she would have eaten down the mortification of one who sees harm come through what is best in him. Having recovered herself a little came to ask me when I had last seen Ravenutzi, and if I had observed anything unusual in him. I had not, and naturally wished to know if she had.

“The shadow,” she said, “the long shadow.”

“Has it come again?”

“It lies at his feet, it stretches behind him and blots out the good day, it runs before him and covers the Outliers when they sit happy and at ease. Oh, I am weary because of it, and yet I can find no fault with him. During the last three days, which must have tried him, he has been most discreet. But did you think”—she turned to me—“when he broke in upon the singing to provoke debate, that he meant to turn the talk to some other meaning than it had?”

“I thought so.”

“Then I am sure of it. Listen,” she said; “if this is true what you tell me about Mancha, I shall have enough to watch, for the greatest danger will be when the Ward comes home again.”

“Why then?”

“She will have been six months away from her friends, she will be tired in body and the glow of the ceremonial will be gone, her heart will turn toward her family, and the secret will weigh upon her. Then, if ever, she will need counsel and support—when she comes back—when she first comes.” She said the words over to herself. “Mancha I can trust as far as I can trust any man in love; but the girl—I will say no more of her than that she is much like other girls. I shall be busy there. Ravenutzi I cannot watch, he disturbs me too much. Do you see as much of him as possible and bring me word.”

There being no reason why I should not, I promised readily, and so concluded the interview.

I was anxious though to see Herman as soon as possible, and sent Lianth that evening to ask him to come to the middle meadow when the stars came out in the blue above the dim, receding ranges. But he did not come, though I walked there a long time and saw the dark well out of the cañons. I felt the night scents begin to stir with the little winds, and the tall sequoias bend their tops and talk together, and my heart cracked with expectancy with every snapped twig and rustling of wild things going down to drink. I shouldn’t have minded his not coming if he had anything else to do, but I minded being kept waiting for him. I minded it still more the next morning when I met him at Fallen Tree and he said, quite as if he had not thought of it until that time:

“Oh, by the way—I was down at the Hollow last night with Mancha and some of the others. Was it anything particular you wanted to say to me?”

Well, of course, I had supposed it was rather particular when I had given him such an opportunity to tell me all about his plan and get forgiven for not telling it before. I had meant to warn him that Trastevera, and so, of course, Persilope, had reason to distrust his mixing himself too much in the affairs of Outland. But of course if he didn’t see it that way himself there was no occasion for me to be concerned about it. So I said:

“No, nothing particular.”

“Well,” he said, “when this affair is all over”—just as if it were in any wise his affair—“we must get together and have a good talk somewhere.” And though it was mid-morning and there was nothing whatever to do if he wished to talk, he went off up the creek, and that was the last I saw of him until evening.

Directly after noon I took Lianth with me and went out toward the Leap and then up the bank of a tributary rill, and so into a part of the wood where the Outliers did not much frequent. Lianth, who was a great talker, grew more and more quiet as my replies were more absent, and the way grew steeper. We could see the ground rising in front of us through the trees, and hear the noise of the creek falling far behind.

The boy was walking very close to me, and there was a shy color coming in his cheek; he glanced right and left under his half long lashes and came very close.

“Well, isn’t she?” he said. “Isn’t she as beautiful as I said—you know who?”

“Zirriloë?”

“Well, isn’t she?”

“Lianth,” said I, “if you think I have brought you out here to give you a chance to talk about forbidden things, you are mistaken. I came because I wished to be alone. I’m going a little farther among the trees, and don’t you come until I call you.”

He was helping me up over a broken ledge as I spoke, and stopped there looking at me irresolutely.

“You aren’t going to try and run away, are you? You look as though you were—from something.”

“Only from you. You can give the call, and if I don’t answer you can come to look for me.”

I had learned already many of the Outland methods of communicating by forest notes rather than trust to the betraying, high-pitched human voice. None of these was of more use to me than the call for refuge. If any Outlier wished to be private in his place, he raised that call, which all who were within hearing answered. Then whoever was on his way from that placed hurried, and whoever was coming toward it stayed where he was until he had permission to move on. Though Lianth was somewhat taken aback at my demand, I knew I should have some little space unmolested.

I climbed on between great roots of pines where the litter lay in hummocks between the tracks of winter torrents, and Lianth had called twice before I bethought myself to answer him and claim a longer time. I lay down at last in a place where the scrub was a screen to me, and before I understood what had happened, the laboring breath of my climbing had burst into thick, choking sobs. I lay face down on the pine litter and was most terribly shaken with the grief of some dumb, wounded thing in me that did not know its hurt, but wrenched and cried a long time unrelievingly. It was so new a thing for me to cry and so strange, that though I knew this was what I had come there for, I did not know why I was torn so almost to the dividing of soul and spirit. The crying lasted a long time, and I was so exhausted by it that it was only by faint degrees I became aware of eyes upon me. I roused up hastily, afraid lest in the violence of my grief I had failed to answer some inquiry of Lianth’s and he had come to find me.

Instead, I met the curious, commiserating eyes of a woman fixed on me through the leafage of the scrub. As soon as she perceived that I saw her she parted the brush and came through, holding it still in her hands behind her, as though it were a door of exit to be kept open. I saw at once by her figure, which was slight and tall, by her dark hair and by her dress, that she was not one of the Outliers. Over her tunic she had wound a long cloak of dark stuff, concealing her limbs, and over that bound vines and wreathed the leaves in her hair, for adornment or concealment. As she stood in the shadow there was little to be discerned of her but the thin oval of her face and the long throat clasped by linked silver ornaments finely wrought.

“You are not of the Outliers?” she questioned, though I felt she was already sure of the fact.

“I am their prisoner.”

I thought she seemed pleased at that, more pleased if, with a swift searching of my swollen eyes, I could have answered yes to her next question.

“They do not treat you well? But no”—answering herself—“it is not so that captives cry. What is your name?”

“Mona.”

She said it over two or three times to fix it in her memory; and then, caution and curiosity struggling in her:

“You have just come from them? You know them?”

“Yes.”

“Do you”—I could see the pulse of her long throat and the bushes shake behind with her agitation—“do you know Ravenutzi?”

“I know him.”

“Is he well? How does he look? Is he happy?” Impossible to conceal now what the question meant to her.

“He is well. As to his looks—sometimes he looks younger, sometimes older. His hair, I think, is not so gray.”

“Not so gray?”

“I think he dyes it.” I do not know why I should have said this, except as I saw that no detail of him was too small to seem trivial to her.

“Oh!” she said, startled, looking at me queerly. “Oh!” she gave a short laugh, “you think he dyes it. Is he happy?”

I considered.

“You are one of the Far-Folk, I believe, and though I am prisoner, the Outliers have been friends to me. I am not sure I ought to answer you.”

She let go of the bushes and came a step nearer in her anxiety.

“As you are a woman who has wept in secret, and by the hurt which brought your tears,” she said, “only tell me if he is well and happy. Surely that cannot touch your honor.”

“I have already said he is well. He has the vigor of a young man. As for happiness—he says very little, and that not of himself. At least he is not openly unhappy.”

“Tell me,” she urged, “if you could imagine that in his own land he is well loved, that there is one there who lives in him, dreams of him, counts the hours; could you say that he found the time of his hostage heavy because of her?”

“He is thoughtful at times, and walks by himself. Otherwise I could not judge. I have not loved myself.”

For answer she let her eyes wander pointedly over my disfigured face and fallen hair.

“Tell me again,” she said after an interval. “This girl who is the Ward, is she very beautiful?”

“Very;” but not so beautiful as you, I thought, for there was in the vivid red of her fine lips, in the purple of her eyes and the delicate tragic arch of her brows, in the long throat and bosom, all that fire and motion of passion which the Ward’s face hinted at elusively. I was casting about for a way of saying this to her not too boldly when I was advised by the tapping of her foot on the needles that she would not be turned from her inquiry.

“And Ravenutzi, is he interested in her? Is he much about her? Does she care for him?”

“She is the Ward,” I said, “she may not think of men; and besides, she is only a girl, her thought would hardly turn to a white head.”

“True, true”—she pinched her lip with thumb and forefinger—“I had forgotten; as you say, he is a very old man. No doubt he might be judged old enough to have speech with her.”

I, not seeing fit to reply to that, rose and stood looking at her, very curious on my own account, but knowing very well that I should get nothing from her except what pleased her.

“Shall I tell him you inquired for him?” I wished politely to know, and was startled at her whiteness.

“Ah, no, no! Do not tell him—tell no one lest he hear of it; he would be very angry, he would——” She recovered herself. “Ravenutzi is very honorable. He would not wish to break the terms of his hostage, which are that he should not communicate with the Far-Folk for three years. It is a long time,” she said piteously.

“A long time.”

“Then,” she said, “if you could understand how I—how his friends would wish to assure themselves that he is well, you can see that we would not wish him disturbed by knowing how much he is missed.”

“I understand very well.”

“Then”—relieved—“you will perhaps tell no one that you have seen me. And if I could come so near again—I could not have managed it except that they are all busy at their Meet—if I could let you know, you would not deny me?”

I suppose the exhaustion of long sobbing had left me in a yielding mood. I saw no harm in satisfying her anxiety, and said so, though I added that I might not be long myself among the Outliers.

“If you are there I will find a way to let you know,” she assured me, and with that she threw herself into the arms of the waiting wood, which received and seemed to snatch her from my view.

VII
HERMAN DEVELOPS HIS IDEA

On the third day, when the shadows were all out full length in the upper basin, the sun blinking palely from behind a film of evening gray, the Maiden Ward came back. Some children paddling for trout in the soddy runnels saw her come and ran crying the news among the evening fires. Hearing it the women all ran together distractedly, declaring that there could be no proper welcome with no men about. This, I thought, was very quickly noted by the girl, glancing this way and that, losing a little of the high carriage and manner as she saw how few observed it.

The girl was white, her eyes strained wide in dark circles of fatigue. Streakings of her fair body showed through the torn dress. I saw her check and stumble, putting out her hands blindly, overburdened by her hair. Remembering what importance Trastevera had attached to this returning, I looked about for her, ready to serve or see. Before I could reach her, up came Ravenutzi from his pot of coals and anvil of flint stone down where the rush of the cascade covered the tinkle of his hammers. I could not help noting the likeness between him and Trastevera as he came, putting off his smith’s apron ready to her use like a proffered tool. Some nods, I think, a gesture or two of Trastevera’s, were all that passed between them. Some essential maleness leapt up in him at the motions of those small talking hands, and took command of the situation. I found myself running with the women at his word to spread skins for the Ward to rest upon, and ordering the children in two lines to some show of ceremonial welcome. There were some young brothers of hers in that band, and as she kissed them heartily I saw tears stealing, and realized how young she was and how hard a thing she had undertaken. She stood with a palm behind her flat against a pine for support, overtired and wanting her mother, no doubt, who was not allowed to come to her. Finally the women took her away to rest.

In all this I had never seen Ravenutzi show to so great advantage. When we were quite alone Trastevera put out her hand to him as she did not often in the presence of Outliers.

“Kinsman,” she said, and it was the first time I had heard her call him that, “I owe you thanks for this.”

She meant more than that he had contrived some warmth for what must otherwise have seemed to Zirriloë a cold returning. She was thankful that it had been his wrinkles and streaked grayness to meet the Ward rather than the hot eyes and shining curls of Mancha.

“I do not know how it is,” said she, “I never pitied myself for being the Ward, but somehow this pink girl seems to need to be pitied.”

“Any bond,” said Ravenutzi, “will wear at times,” and said it with a wistful back-stroke of self-commiseration that caused me to think swiftly of several things. I reflected that in his own place among the Far-Folk he must have been more of a man than the Outliers conceded to any smith. Next, that the condition of tame cat, which his hostageship incurred, pressed more heavily on him than they were in the habit of thinking. Also I thought of the tall woman, but I did not deliver the comforting reassurance about her which came readily to my tongue. There was so intimate and personal a quality in his brief surrender to our sympathy that it made the mention of another woman an intrusion. It began to seem likely that she could not be so much to him as he to her. That would account both for her anxiety not to have him know of her inquiry, and for his not having mentioned her to Trastevera.

We continued walking up and down under the linked pines, without many words, but with a community of understanding, which led later to Trastevera’s opening to him more of her anxieties than she realized. In the course of an hour or two the women brought the Ward back again, and made her a little entertainment of compliments and songs. There was a hard, bright moon in a pale ring, and the breath of the young year stealing through the forest.

Prassade sang, and Evarra’s man and old Noche. The women sang all together, rocking, as they sat, but Ravenutzi sang the most and most movingly. Mancha sang nothing; sat off fondling his weapon, and drank the girl’s looks. She was very lovely, had got back a little of her saint’s separateness which became her, and the conscious support of being admired. If she had looked at him, she might have seen his heart swimming under his gaze, but I could not see that she did. What favor she was disposed to show went to Ravenutzi, praising his songs and affecting to be affected. I thought she built too much on the mere incident of his having been the only one of the men to meet her. It was a mere accident growing out of the nature of his work, but it was natural, perhaps, to have rewarded him for it. The women took her away early, and nothing whatever had happened.