Chapter IV: Part 4

The next day, which ordinarily would have seen the parting of the Meet, occurred the Council, which broke up in some disorder, without having accomplished anything. Very early a blind fog came nosing up from the sea, cutting between the round-backed hills, shouldering them like a herd-dog among sheep. It threaded unsuspected cañons, and threw up great combs of tall, raking trees against its crawling flanks. It gripped the peaks, spreading skyward, whirling upon itself in a dry, ghostly torrent. The chill that came with the fog drove us down toward Deep Fern, to a sun-warmed hollow defended by jutty horns of the country rock. Shed leaves crackled under us, the wind and fog were stayed by the tall pines at our backs, the sun warmed whitely through the hurrying mist.

Evarra and some others of the women were there, Zirriloë and the two keepers beginning their daily turns, and Ravenutzi, sitting with his long knees drawn up under his clasped hands. Somewhere out of sight the men were holding council on a matter they had not seen fit to speak to us about. We had scarcely settled ourselves on the warm leaf-drift when one of them came to the head of the Hollow and shouted for Noche. There were so many of us about, the old man could have safely left the Ward but it seemed to him scarcely courtesy to do so with her Wardship yet so new. He glanced around through the smother of the fog and found not another man who could be spared to that duty. Ravenutzi, with his chin upon his knees, and his velvety opaque eyes looked idly at nothing, but was aware of the old man’s difficulty. Noche clapped him heavily on the shoulder.

“Hey, smith,” he said, “will you take a watch for me? I am wanted.”

At this the man who leaned to us dimly from the rim of the Hollow gave a grunt.

“What,” he said, “will you set the Far-Folk to watch a Ward? These are gentle times.”

“Why, he is as gray as I am, and twice as wrinkled,” answered Noche, mightily disconcerted. “Would you have him come to the Council instead?”

The other laughed shortly.

“No, not to the Council, though I daresay it will come to that yet.”

He released the young tree upon which he leaned, which sprang back with a crackling sound. From his silence Noche drew consent to his half-jesting proposal and, smiling embarrassedly, like a chidden child, swung his great body up by the trunk of a leaning oak and disappeared behind the smoky fog. By such intimations we knew there was something going forward among the men, but we did not know how much of this the Ward, who was most involved by it, surmised. She might have guessed from our not referring to these mysterious comings and goings that it concerned the keeping of the Treasure. She grew uneasy, started at sounds, would have Trastevera hold her hand, was in need of stroking and reassuring.

The fog increased, hurrying and turning upon itself. Runnels of cooler air began to pour through it, curling back the parted films against the trees. Now and then one of these air-streams, deflected by the rim of the Hollow, would rush up its outer slope, blowing leaves and dust like a fountain, and, subsiding, leave us more sensible of warmth and ease, in the thick leaf litter below the oaks.

Ravenutzi came over to Trastevera, who sat holding the Ward’s hand, and stretched himself at her feet, smiling up at her his fawn’s smile. He held up his hand between him and the pale smear of sunlight with one of those slight, meaningful gestures so natural to him that it served as a more delicate sort of speech: “Surely it seemed to say, to-day not even I can cast a shadow?”

Trastevera, like one too deep in thought to rise to the surface of words, smiled back. Not finding himself in disfavor, Ravenutzi ventured a little more to lure her from disturbing meditation. He turned upon his side, leaning on his elbow, and began to sing. His voice was mellow and of a carrying quality, with a tang in it like the taste of the honey-comb in wild honey. Some half-governed energy of passion kept it under his breath as the warm earth was held under the smother of the fog. It was a song of the Far-Folk, I know, for there were some words in it not common to the Outliers, but it had their method of carrying the mood in the movement and the mind of the singer, rather than in the words.

“‘Oh, a long time.’

it said,

‘Have I been gathering lilies in the dawn-dim woodland.
‘Oh, long—long!’”

and ran on into a sound like the indrawing of breath before tears, and began again:

“Scented and sweet is the house
And the door swings outward,
It is made fair with lilies:
But there are no feet on the trail to the house
And the door swings outward.
Long, O long, have I been gathering lilies.”

Just that, three times over; and the first time of the singing it was a girl wreathing herself with flowers and looking down the trail, sure of her lover but sighing for his delay. Then it was the tall woman I had met in the wood, keeping her empty house with fierce loyalty through the years of his hostage.

“Long, oh long, have I been gathering lilies!”

Finally it was a heart made fair with unrequited tendernesses, singing to itself through all the unimpassioned years. Strangely it was I singing that song and walking through it in a bewildered mist of pain.

I do not know how long it was after Ravenutzi ceased before I could separate myself from the throbbing of the song. I was recalled sharply by the wish to comfort Zirriloë, whose young egotism, suffering perhaps in the withdrawal of attention from herself, had startled us all by turning her face on Trastevera’s shoulder and bursting into tears. It was pure hysteria, I thought, but she was so very pretty in it. There was such appeal of childishness in the red, curling lip, the trembling of her delicate bosom, that I was drawn in spite of myself into the general conspiracy to restore her to the balance of cheerfulness. Ravenutzi, realizing that his song was in a manner to blame, was so embarrassed in his dismay and so wistful of our good opinion, that the girl was obliged to come out of her tears to reassure him. He, to requite the forgiveness, began to be at once so gay and charming in his talk that in a very little time we had returned to that even breathing lightness of mood which was the habit of the Outliers. Content welled out of the earth and overflowed us like some quiet tide, disturbed only as some sharp jet of human emotion sprang up fountain-wise momentarily beyond the level, and dropped back again to vital, pulsing peace.

We had no more disturbances that day, and I felt that Trastevera, much as she was concerned about the Council, could only have been thankful for so commonplace an occasion. We were both glad that the quick-blooded Mancha had business, which kept him out of the way until the Ward had recovered a little from the self-consciousness of her situation. When about three hours had gone over us, Persilope came stooping under the hanging boughs, gave us Good Friending somewhat briefly, and took his wife away with him. From time to time after that, one or another woman slipped away, answering some call of her mate out of the mist. When we heard the fluttering shriek of a hawk given rapidly twice, and again impatiently, without space for replying we all laughed.

“That is your man, Evarra! One would think the woods were a-fire!”

Evarra blushed.

“Assuredly, he would set them a-fire when he is in that state if he did not find me.” She made a sign to me. “Come,” she said; “now we shall hear what it is all about.”

The Council, so Evarra’s husband told us, was not the immediate outcome of the incidents of the Meet. Matter for it had been growing these ten years past, ever since the unearthing and reburial of the Treasure had been undertaken on Trastevera’s account. It had been so long since they had any feeling of its reality, except as the point on which their honor hung! But after Noche had seen the Treasure, the craftsman’s soul of him was forever busy with the wonders of it, brooding on the fire of its jewels as a young man on the beam of a maiden eye. All the children who had come to maturity these ten years past had been nourished on the Treasure tale, livened and pointed by Noche’s account. With the advent of the hostage, interest in the King’s Desire as a possession had rather increased through the awakened appreciation of smith’s work among them. Ravenutzi had made curious ornaments for the women of bits of metal found in deserted summer camps, the patterns of which reproduced, so far as the Far-Folk remembered them, the wrought gold of the King’s jewels.

Both the items which were responsible for this liveliness of curiosity—the exemption of Trastevera and consequent reburial of the Treasure, and the acceptance of the hostage—had been strongly opposed by part of the Council. Now they thought themselves justified by the turn of events. They thought further that the incident of Daria and her lover called loudly for measures which should stem this current of departure from old usage. A Ward had been released from her obligation of forgetfulness; another had ventured to plead for it. A young man had loved a Ward and dared to avow it during the term of her Wardship. Here was one of the Far-Folk teaching smitheying to the Outliers. Here were House-Folk going about among them talking of forbidden things. Matter enough for Council if ever Council was. More disconcerting, here was Mancha, Ward of the Outer Borders, Mancha of the Hammerers, who had opposed the hostage and stood for the inviolateness of obligation, come out suddenly as the leader, the precipitator, of revolt. Evarra’s man fumed over this and the probable reason for it. Upon which point, though I was at no loss myself, I did not see fit to enlighten him.

The Council had begun soberly in the consideration as to whether some formal penalty should be visited on the Ward who had dared to love, and the man who had ventured to love her. It had been disrupted widely by the question, which seemed to spring up simultaneously among the younger men, as to why there should be a Ward at all.

It was the nature and the exquisite charm of the life of Outland that it could not carry superfluous baggage either of custom or equipment. Question as to the continuance could not have arisen had there not run before it some warning of dead weight, like the creaking of a blasted bough about to fall. Such warning they had in the incidents about which the Council was met. The mere question was not so disquieting as the speech Mancha made upon it, a speech which, proceeding from an impulse perhaps not very well defined in his own mind, and not guessed by his audience. His private determination to get Zirriloë free so that he might make love to her, was neither very direct in its process nor clear in its conclusion.

Why, said Mancha, waste the youth of a girl, always the chiefest and loveliest, keeping a Treasure for which the Far-Folk had ceased to struggle. Did they not prefer pilferings of House-Folk? Had they not sold their best man for a free passage to the Ploughed Lands? Honor, said he, had been kept alive by the custom of the Maiden Ward. But was honor so little among the Outliers that they had to buy it at the price of a girl’s love-time?

Moreover, declared Mancha of the Hammerers, it was a form of honor which they did not trust her to keep. Besides, keeping was the business of men. Further, said the Ward of the Outer Borders, not having made it very clear where his speech tended up to this point, there was a better way of keeping the Treasure effectively out of reach of the Far-Folk. There was a way costing them nothing of which, since it was new to him, and he no speech-maker—this much was sufficiently clear at any rate—he begged leave to let Herman of the House-Folk put for him. This was what broke and scattered the Council like a blast of wind on burning leaves. They blew out this way and that, sparking and flaring, saying it was an incredible thing and impossible that the House-Folk should come to Council, or, coming, should have anything to say worth hearing. Some blamed Mancha and some the occasion. Some there were who laughed, unbound their slings and went hunting. Said they:

“This is mere child’s talk, when you have business afoot call us.”

Others, deeply angered at the flouting of old customs, went out suddenly, picked up their women with a sign and set out without farewells for their own places. Of these we heard nothing again until a greater occasion grown out of that same slighted Council called them.

There were many, however, and these chiefly of the younger men, who stayed to hear Herman’s idea, which was as he explained to me a little later at the pine tree by the shallows, perfectly feasible. It was nothing less than that the Outliers should become, as he said, civilized.

“It is quite impossible, you know, that they should go on living like this indefinitely. They are practically cut off from the sea already, and every summer there are more and more campers. Think how these hills would be overrun, and with what sort of people, if we went back to Fairshore and told what we know of the Treasure?”

“Well, we aren’t going to be allowed to. Do you remember last summer how one of a hunting party in these same hills wandered away from his companions and was found afterwards, dazed and witless? He was thought to have had a fall or something. But now I know that like us, he stumbled on the Outliers and they gave him the Cup.”

“That may work very well when they get us singly,” Herman agreed, “but a whole party of campers now—the wonder is they have been exempt so long. Their trails go everywhere.”

I could have reminded Herman then of one who walked in their trails and believed them trodden out by deer, who caught them nearly at their faggot gathering and thought only of wood-choppers. Or I might have asked him if even now he could find any Outlier in the woods who did not wish to be found. But I waited to hear the whole of his idea.

“They are getting no good out of their Treasure as it is, and paying too dear for its keep. A girl like Zirriloë ought to be married, you know ... with all that capacity for loving ... what a wife she would make ... for ... anybody.” I had not said anything to the contrary, but Herman took on an insisting tone. “She would pick up things,” he said, “and her beauty would carry her anywhere——” He broke off, staring into the brown shallows as if he were watching of that beauty carrying her somewhere out of the bounds of her present life, and the sight pleased him.

“But your idea?”

“Well, it’s only that they should take up their Treasure, abolish all this business of the Ward, and with the proceeds of the jewels buy themselves a tract of land in which the law could protect them from the encroachments of House-Folk and Far-Folk alike. I know a man in the forestry bureau who would be able to tell me how it could be managed.”

He said that with so great an implied indifference to any objection I might entertain, that I began to feel a very quick resentment. I began to wonder if that old inclusive sympathy had ever been at all, if indeed it had not grown, as I felt this whole Outland experience to have done, out of my expectant wish for it.

“It would mean so much to us ... to those of us who care about such things,” he corrected himself, as if already a little less sure of me, “to have their social system working in plain sight. Their notions of the common good ... I’ve talked with the men a bit ... what they’ve worked out without any of our encumbrances, if they could take it up now with all our practical advantages—the University might establish a sort of protectorate——But you don’t seem to care for the idea, Mona.”

I don’t know what I thought of the idea as a solution of the troubles of the Outliers. I thought of a great many practical objections afterward, but just then I knew what I thought of Herman for proposing it.

They were our Outliers—or I might have said _my_ Outliers, for I had imagined them, believed in them and discovered them. It was only Herman’s interest in me which had brought him within their borders. It was a unique and beautiful experience, and it was ours. We had said that and had felicitated ourselves so many times on its being an experience we were having together. If we forgot it we must have even our forgetfulness in common as we had so many things—and here was Herman willing to throw it open to the world as an experiment in sociology. If Herman felt that way about it, how was I to claim that exquisite excluding community of interest in which the adventure had begun!

“I daresay,” I answered quickly, for I had thought all this while he talked to me, “that it is as good as most ideas of yours, but it doesn’t interest me.” And I walked away and left him staring into the water.

VIII
IN WHICH HERMAN’S IDEA RECEIVES A CHECK

To the dry fog succeeded showers and intervals of super clearness. Vast blunt-headed clouds blundered under a high, receding heaven. Brown croisers of the fern uncurled from the odorous earth, some subtle instinct responded to the incessant stir of sap. The Outliers left off debating to run together flock-wise in the recrudescence of the year. The wet wood was full of whispering, all hours of the night feet went by bearing laughter, not loud but chuckling and daring.

Nevertheless, the clearing of the weather did not scatter them. Some there were whose affairs had called them at the end of the Meet. A few had gone in displeasure at the turn of the Council. Mancha’s supporters, and they were chiefly the young men, remained in the neighborhood of Leaping Water and Deep Fern, to which we had moved when the rain began. Fretted argument would go on where two or three of the men were met, disrupting suddenly. There was a sense of expectancy abroad. Men watched the Ward for more than her beauty as she went with the keepers, in a green gown like the sheath of a bud, her face a flower.

Ravenutzi got from Herman what silver coins he had, and smithied them into a brooch for her; it was rumored that you would find the twin of that pattern in the King’s Desire. Women grew curious, questioned me how the House-Folk lived and loved. They laughed and looked sidewise, but listened.

All this curious possibility of Herman’s idea, and the pricking sense of stir and change, drew off attention from Mancha’s passion, which burned up to the betraying point. Trastevera, who remained steadily aware of his state, credited to it mistakenly all her unease and intimations of disaster. Trouble ranged openly in the wood, but hid its face. It seemed to swell at times toward betrayal: I could see small hair bristling on the necks of the men when they had sat quietly together, or one would throw up his head like an uneasy hound. I think as the newness of Herman’s proposal began to wear down, some of them became aware of Mancha’s state, but said nothing lest, uncovered too much in speech, it would burst the quicker into scandal.

He had very little talk with the girl, as little communication was allowed, even in company, and Mancha made no special occasions. Anywhere in her trail you might come upon him mooning upon a flower she had dropped, the bough she had leaned upon, the crumpled fern. He would sit in the pleasant pauses of the noon, the joints of his face loosened, his gaze swimming as he looked at her, his hair above his face was like pale fire. He was all molten white with passion; if the girl breathed upon him he would have burst ravening into flame.

Trastevera was afraid that the Ward, quick, for all her simple seeming, to observe her effect upon men, would become aware of Mancha’s love for her and kindle her imagination at the vanity of this conquest. Any girl might well have been touched by the love of a man worth so much as men are accounted worth. Ravenutzi knew, and managed to make his knowledge seem to grow out of his wish to relieve the perturbation of Trastevera, of whom he was always considerately observant.

There was a quick sympathy of instinct between those two dark ones, and he served her with that fatal appeal to women, of sweetness struggling with some baser attribute, toward her good opinion. He had the air when in her presence, and under her approbation, of having climbed into it out of some native unworthiness.

It was an air calculated to make any woman generous in the bestowal of her company. By degrees Trastevera fell into the way of letting him serve her by interposing a screen between Zirriloë and the Hammerer’s too unguarded gaze. Often in the still noons when Mancha’s adoring mind burned through all the drowsy silences, he would make a diversion, singing or relating one of his long tales.

For my part, I was not so sure either of Mancha’s inarticulateness or of Zirriloë’s unconsciousness.

I have times now of believing that the girl had observed him, and contrived ways to keep our attention turned on the possible chance of his passion coming to a head. Though I cannot now name any single circumstance that points the suspicion, except as I came finally to believe her capable of any duplicity! I remember how Lianth attached himself to Mancha with what seemed then the natural devotion of youth to a hero. Now this appears as a subtle movement of jealousy, to bring himself more to attention by keeping in conspicuous company.

The girl herself had a trick lately of turning her head; little fluttering, nesting movements as she sat, pretty pursing of the lips, as of a woman knowing herself adored. She had a way, when left to herself, of letting her work fall in her lap, lips a little apart and dreaming eyes. There was a soft flutter of her young breast like a dove’s; a woman owned adorable.

There was more, though it never came to the point where I was justified in speaking of it. Once in the clear interval between the rains, I walked beside the tributary rill that watered the meadow of Deep Fern and saw the Ward sitting close against a bank clothed thick with laurel and azaleas, an impenetrable screen. She had been helping Noche and one of the women strip willows for fish-weirs. The two keepers were down by the streamside, steeping the white wands and turning them in the water in full sight of her and scarcely out of earshot. Whatever Noche and the woman might have been saying was cut off by the frothy gurgle of the creek. They said it to one another without so much as an over-shoulder glance at Zirriloë. Yet there she sat by the laurel bank, _listening_.

Plainly she listened; with her head turned a little aside, the lips curling and the lids half drawn on the luminous dark eyes. A woman beguiled if ever there was one! Behind her the laurel swayed slightly though there was no wind. It swayed and showed the light underside of leaves, and then was still as I came walking by the waterside and Noche called to me.

I had to walk some distance down the creek to the stepping-stones and across them toward the laurel bank. Before I had gone very far on that trail I met Ravenutzi returning by it. I had no sooner caught sight of him than there flashed up in him that suffusing spark of personality, so excluding of all other considerations that it gave to our casual meeting the appearance of a thing done for its own sake. That was why I did not go on to discern to what or whom Zirriloë had listened, but I found myself turning in the trail to walk back with him, quite as if, as his manner assumed, I had come out on it expressly to meet him. He began to tell me at once, as if that were the object of his excursion, that he had not found some herbs on the high bank that Evarra had sent him for, and that he thought they could hardly be out of the ground yet.

“And did you meet any one in the wood as you came through?” I remember asking, my thoughts returning to the Ward.

“Only Mancha.”

He gave me an odd, quick, sidelong look as he spoke, and began to talk of other things, as if he had seen more than that and did not mean to tell. Whether he had kept the same inviolacy with Trastevera, or she herself had seen something, the very next day she sought out the Hammerer, sitting on the burl of redwood, nursing his hammer between his knees, and taxed him with his passion for the Ward and its unworthiness.

He admitted the fact but not that it discredited him. He would not remind Trastevera that she had been excused from part of the obligation of her Wardship, but he said:

“Am I worth so little to the Outliers that they would not excuse this girl to be my wife? Ay, I want her,” he confessed; then as his stout-built body thrilled at the thought, threw out his arms, reddening, and laughed shamelessly.

“Do you know the rocking-stone on the top of the ledge by The Gap, that four men can barely stir on its pivot? I could rock it into the river to-day with the strength of my wanting.”

“And what would come in through the River Wall if you did?” said she; but Mancha would not talk of that.

“Do you know,” he said, “what the years of my life are to me, the years I have gone mateless? They are the stops in a pipe that plays a tune to my need of her. I hear them piping behind me and my blood runs to the music.”

“It shall play you a ten years’ measure yet,” she answered him, “before it pipes you your desire.”

“Not ten moons,” he insisted.

“Then,” said she, “it will pipe death to you and to your honor.”

He hid his face in his hands at that, groaned and bit upon his fingers. At last:

“I thought I should have had sympathy from you who have loved so well,” he said.

She could not deny him the comfort he so sorely needed on that point, but neither could she let him go without advising him what confusion must come of his persistence in his unhappy passion. He heard her, sliding his great hammer from hand to hand as though it were the argument balancing this way and that in his mind.

“True, true,” he would admit; “it is all true that you say.” And more quietly, as she went on with an ingenuity of entreaty and explication: “You are right, Trastevera, you are always right;” and at last: “I thank you for this, Trastevera; now I see what I must do.”

He stood up, putting her aside, for she had got down on the ground attempting to stay the rocking of his hammer as she would have stopped the wavering of his mind. He stretched himself under the redwood and rapped so loudly with his weapon on the trunk that the squirrels and nuthatches in the upper stories came out to see, and wood bees droned discontentedly within.

“It is true that she may not be loved during the time of her Wardship,” said he; “there must be an end to that, or worse will come of it.”

“And you will end it, Mancha, for your honor’s sake?”

“As soon as may be; I have dawdled too long. Where is Herman?”

“With Persilope at Lower Fern. What do you want of him?”

“What you wished: to put an end to this business of the Ward.”

“Mancha, Mancha! That is not what I meant. You must put an end to your loving!”

“Does loving end?”

Trastevera gave up.

“What will you do?”

“I will find Herman first.” She heard him rapping his purpose to the fore on the deep-sounding trunks of trees as he went.

You may guess how much comfort Trastevera got out of this interview, of which she told me very little at this time, perhaps because she had failed, and perhaps because of an incident occurring about that time which put it wholly out of mind. One of the Outliers who had set out for home on the breaking up of the Council had found a suspicious circumstance, and came crying with it all the way up by River Ward to Deep Fern and Deer Lake Hollow.

He with his wife and young brood passing over Singing Ford into the district of broad-headed oaks, where there was low scrub of lupin and rhus, had met Daria setting snares in the rabbit runways. He had sung out a greeting to her, for the moment forgetting her state of forgetfulness, and she had stood up in the knee-high lupin with her hand across her eyes, taken unawares, and called him by his name. It had popped out, startling at sight of him like a rabbit from a burrow. Then as he stood still with astonishment she checked and stammered, recalled the word, protested that she had mistaken him for another, and at last broke and fled crying through the chaparral. The Outlier, a just man but a little slow, considered the circumstance, went on, in fact, a whole stage of his journey before he arrived at a conclusion. Whereupon he sent on his family toward home, and came back all the way to Deep Fern with his news, which had grown upon him momentously as he traveled. Daria remembered! How much?

Had the drink been made too light for her. Had the tumult of her mind resisted sleep. Or had her soul been so upborne by love that it floated clear of the drug that drowned her sense?

No one of the women had been with her when she recovered. Those whose custom it was to watch the Ward into wakefulness delicately withdrawing for the lover’s sake.

“Remember, oh remember,” he had insisted to the last, and she had remembered the name and face of a man not in her own district. How then would her memory stand toward familiar things?

This was disconcerting news indeed. There were some who blamed Persilope, who had poured out a portion of the drink. Others blamed the women for not staying by her. Trastevera blamed herself, and was tormented afresh, seeing as a departure from good usage of which she herself was source and center. Mancha and Herman found it another reason for pushing their idea, which the Hammerer by this time openly avowed. As if his admission of his passion had in a measure defined him to himself, he had shaken off the outward evidence of it, and was occupied chiefly in bringing his purpose to completion. He had not spoken to Zirriloë since his talk with Trastevera, sat no more mooning in the woods, but went about everywhere among the young men with Herman at his shoulder, making adherents.

“But what is your objection to it?” Herman had asked of me, sitting under the drawn flaps of Evarra’s hut, upon which the rain drummed hollowly. I had a great many objections, based upon my conviction that no amount of Treasure would buy immunity for the Outliers once they were made known to men. But all my reasons would have lacked their proper cogency with Herman, who was like the Outliers in being too honorable to predict dishonor on the part of others. I knew too little of business to forecast the hindrances likely to fall in the way. All I was sure of was that it was a mistake, first and last it was bound to be a mistake, and very little progress of the affair would prove it.

“If you think so well of their way of life,” said I, “why do you wish to change it? They wouldn’t be happy in our way; it wouldn’t agree with them.”

“If you’re thinking about happiness, how about Daria? And Zirriloë; do you call it happiness to be cut off from all that belongs to youth and loveliness? Why, the girl was made for loving.”

“But I thought that was something you didn’t believe in.”

He had the grace to blush here and to be disconcerted, but he protested:

“They believe in it—and I—sometimes I think I am only learning what it is to be alive. All alive, not just the intellect of me, like mistletoe at the top of a tree. And it’s good”—he scuffed with his feet strongly on the ground as though he liked the sting of it—“so good that I want to make it sure.” Before I could ask him what that had to do with making a sociological experiment of the Outliers, he had turned the argument again.

“Besides, Mona,” with almost an injured air, “I’m thinking of you. We know too much ever to be allowed to leave here in possession of all our faculties. Unless we go in some such way as I suggest, as emissaries to arrange for the title to their lands——”

“Yes,” I assented; “I hadn’t thought of that. We could go out that way, and then we needn’t say any more about it.”

“Well,” he admitted doubtfully, “that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. That doesn’t seem quite—right, does it?”

I thought it would be as right as turning loose on the Outliers all the ills of our social disorder. But I didn’t feel like saying anything further just then. I sat and watched the sheeted rain that veiled the world a rod beyond our door, saw the sun break and silver it, and heard the wind calling from the high ridges.

“It is either to go back that way,” Herman insisted, “or stripped and unremembering.”

“If you were to forget all you know and had to begin over again,” I suggested, “there would be a sociological experiment for you.”

“Mona, you don’t really want to forget all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said; “a little forgetting is good medicine.” And singularly I thought of the tall woman in the woods, and wondered when I should see her again, and what she would have thought of Herman’s idea.

This was the last of the rains, and the very morning of the day when the Outlier from beyond the Singing Ford came back with the word about Daria. Messengers were sent to fetch her and her husband, and all we of Deep Fern went down half a day to meet them. The messengers had found the former Ward and her young husband on their way, drawn by our wish and their own willingness. Love had made them subservient, emptied them of self.

The examination took place in a half hollow full of trees. What sunlight there was lay in white patches like a stain. All up the green and golden slope the women sat listening, now discovered by the stirring of the wind on their loose garments, now disappearing in stillness. Daria stood up among the men and answered faithfully. It was true, she admitted, that she remembered things. Some things. She did not know how much. She had just begun to connect facts with the vague sense of familiarity. Questioned, the memories revealed themselves but sticks and straws, wreckage of experience, a name here, there a trivial circumstance, and there a blank. All of them such images as might have been floating in her mind at the time, or a little before she drank forgetfulness.

Did she remember the place of the Treasure?

The question, when it came, took her fairly. She spun about, rocking her arms, burst into dry sobbing. Give her the Cup, she said, she would take the Cup again if they wished it, but let her not be questioned any more. In a broad splash of sunlight I could see her shiver, but not her judges; their faculty for quiescence served them better than speech.

Did she remember?

How could she say? She had not remembered that there was a treasure until her husband explained her situation to her. And then suddenly while he talked there had come into her mind a place in the hills, rocks, pine trees, she did not know quite where, all the rest of the country cut off in a mist like a landscape in a dream. But there was the picture, young pines posturing for the dance, and all her attention centered on a certain spot. If she happened upon that district she thought she could have gone straight to that spot. She broke off: begged them to deliver judgment. But there were other considerations. Members already scattered to their homes must be summoned—there were formalities. The meeting broke up quietly. Daria moved over and placed herself beside Zirriloë, between the keepers. Her husband did not come to her, nor she look toward him. She was in Ward again.

There was a sense of urgency now on all the Outliers that led quickly to a final adjustment. Everybody talked openly of the King’s Desire and of Herman’s plan, of which they had no very clear idea, I think, beyond its being a more effectual way of hiding the Treasure. It had also the merit of keeping their district clear of House-Folk who fouled the meadows and made them unlivable.

I sought out Trastevera and said what I could, with no success except to augment her uneasiness.

“This is no doubt what I saw entering by Broken Tree with you,” she said, “but now it is so close upon us my opinion is no better than another woman’s, nor so good, I think. I see trouble coming from afar and declare it, but if I forget what I have declared, I fall into it myself.”

I looked for Herman then and found him at Lower Fern.

“So,” I said, “you are determined to go on with this?”

“What else?” He looked surprised, and then reproachful. “If you would stop to think, Mona, what it might mean to me, to all of us, to take back to our world, where as yet we have only theorized about it, news of a social order already accomplished where every man’s greatest benefit is the common good——”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t. What I’m thinking about is what we would bring to the Outliers.”

“Of course, if you look at it that way——”

“And there is something you ought to think of, and that is if you promise to buy land and protection for them, whether you have the price. You haven’t really seen the Treasure, you know.”

“But—but—Mona,” he expostulated, “it’s all been so real. I never thought—that ceremony—the Ward and all—of course I haven’t seen it——”

“It may be pebbles,” I said, “or colored glass.”

“But I thought you believed in it? You were the very first to believe it.”

That was just like Herman. Of course I believed in it.

I can believe six impossible things before breakfast if it suits me, but Herman never could be got to understand the difference between a literary belief and a working certainty.

“At any rate,” I said, “before you guarantee the price of the King’s Desire, you would best have a look at it.”

IX
HOW THE KING’S DESIRE WAS DUG UP, AND BY WHOM

How Herman injected into the hot plans of Mancha this cold doubt I do not know. If he accepted it as a check to his enterprise there was no visible abatement of its urgency. He was forever and fatiguingly busy; crossing over Singing Ford and returning between two days. Passing beyond Moon Crest he visited Alderhold and Bent Bow, fetching a circle almost to Broken Tree to make adherents. He was still and hungry as to his inner want, but outwardly as noisy as a bear, rapping the trunks of hollow trees or prodding the soft earth with his hammer. If in the wood at Deep Fern or Deer Lake Hollow he met with his young men, he passed them without greeting. It is doubtful if he saw them. Plainly the man was ravined with desire.

All this time he gave no trouble to the Ward or her keepers. When she went among the young fern, between the budding willows, he did not seek her, never talked of himself in her company. It was as if the eye of his mind, so fixed upon the Mate, passed over the Maid she was. Otherwise I do not know how he could have withstood her, for she went flushed and glorious. Trastevera, I know, had expected tears and pining. Watching, she was relieved to find the girl still sustained by ecstasy, grew more at ease and trusted Ravenutzi.

For the rest of the Outliers the hesitation of Herman’s enterprise on the probable unworth of the jewels proved no disappointment. It was, in fact, a means of hurrying the movement for removing it from its present cache. They were curious to discover if the Treasure really had such an intrinsic value as Herman had taken for granted. Even though it proved of no value to the House-Folk, it was something the Far-Folk wanted very much. The keeping of it provided an occupation, and the promised unearthing an excitement for which their long truce with the Far-Folk gave them an appetite. In any case it must come up and be hidden again, or they must administer the Cup to Daria a second time. This involved a wrenching of their sympathies they were unwilling to endure, even if it lay in justice to twice enforce her. They were the readier for the enterprise since it appeared not necessarily to involve the acceptance of Herman’s idea.

Prassade and Persilope then, with Mancha and Herman, of course, two of the keepers—the same who had buried it—and several strong men beside, set out for the cache of the King’s Desire. They went north and seaward by a shorter route than the Ward had taken, since they had not the same need of doubling for concealment. They passed the upper limit of redwoods and came to a region of thin, spiked spruce and pines, knuckly promontories encrusted with lichen sticking out of a thin, whitish soil. By afternoon they struck into a gully where an opaque stream purled in shallow basins and spilled in thin cascades to gravely levels. Here they began to take note of landmarks and measure distances. First there was a sheer jut of country rock, stained black by the dribble of a spring. Below it a half moon of pond as green as malachite. Directly up from that, on the shoulder of a stony hill, five pines, slender and virginal, stood circlewise, bent somehow by weather stress to the postures of dancing. They balanced in the wind and touched the tips of their stretched, maiden boughs.

From here, ascending, the stream spindled to a thread, and led the eye under the combe of the ridge to a high round boulder, gripped mid-long of its fall by the curled roots of a pine. Under the boulder was the cache of the King’s Desire.

I asked Herman afterward how soon the intimation of what they were to find there began to reach them, and he said, to himself not at all. He remembered Prassade asking of Noche, if this was the trail they had taken with the Ward, and the old man’s quick, sidewise glance that questioned why he asked. He remembered as they came by the green water, one of the keepers stooping to examine something, and Noche beginning to twitch and bristle like a dog striking an unwelcome trail. They came to the boulder. Signs of the recent rains were all about, the half-uprooted pine that braced it showed a slight but fresh abrasion of the bark. The two keepers had their heads together, whispering apart.

They would not believe it! Even when the first scraping of the wooden shovels showed the soil loose and yielding, and below the percolating dampness of the rains they found filling of fresh, dry gravel, they would not believe the cache had been rifled.

The jewels were in a great chest, red and rotten, corded up with skins, half a man’s length under ground. So said Noche, who had buried them. They dug; they were waist deep, they were up to their armpits; they dug steadily.

Suddenly there was a sound of the shovels striking solid. They exclaimed with relief. Noche was old, and in ten years had forgotten. Then the diggers cleared the ground and showed the solid country rock.

Whoever had lifted the Treasure had done it most cleverly. Every particle of the soil removed had been taken out on skins and put back again with filling brought ready for the purpose, so that no sinking of the surface should betray the theft. It had been done recently, between the rains. On the white, abraided bark of the pine there were splatterings of the rapid downpour of the last heavy shower.

Let but a few weeks of stormy weather go over and it would have been impossible to say that the place had been visited.

The Outliers might have gone on guarding an empty cache for generations. They shuddered back from such a possibility like men suddenly upon a brink. They were, in fact, so shocked and astounded by the theft that their faculties were all abroad. They dug wide and furiously, Noche pawing over every crumbling clod with a whimpering sound like a hound at a fox’s earth.

High up as the place was, higher ridges made a pit of it which now, as the light receded, they flung full of blackness. On the combe above, the young pines were black against pale twilight, dancing and deriding.

Night-eyed as the Outliers were, they dared not risk the loss of the faintest clue by trampling heedlessly. The theft and the cunning manner of it pointed to one thing—the Far-Folk. On that point they were sure; and on one other.

The King’s Desire was gone, it should come back again. They swore it. One of them lifted up his hand to take the oath, as the custom was, by the honor of the Maiden Ward.

“Stop!” said Prassade.

I do not know what things leaped together in the man’s mind, what circumstance but half observed, what weakness of his blood yet unconfessed, what scrupulosity of honor. “Stop!” he said, and the swearer’s hand slacked limply. Mancha propped it up fiercely with his own.

“By the honor of the Maiden Ward,” he swore, “it comes back again.”

Prassade gurgled in his throat. In the gray light as they looked at each other, it grew upon them that the loss of the Treasure meant betrayal. Daria, Zirriloë, the four keepers, to whom should they apportion dishonor? From that time, said Herman, no man looked full at his neighbor or spoke freely what he thought until they came to Deep Fern.

In the meantime it had occurred to me that I was not seeing as much of Ravenutzi as was implied in my promise to Trastevera. Besides, I thought it might be interesting to know what he thought of the redisposal of the King’s Treasure. I had followed the use of the Outliers up to this time in not speaking of it to him.

I was sitting between the roots of a redwood steeped in the warm fragrance and languor of a pine forest in the spring, when this notion occurred to me. The force with which this idea caught me might have arisen from Trastevera’s wishing it at that moment, or Ravenutzi’s being engaged on some business that made my presence advisable. Accordingly I looked for the smith in the accustomed places, where, in the fulfillment of his hostage, he made a point of being unobtrusively and contentedly about. He could be found oftenest with Noche, the only one of the men who afforded him an unaffronting companionship. But this morning I could not find him in the Fern, nor at his smithy under the fall, nor with the fishers at the creek. It was quite by accident that I came upon him some hours later sitting on a stump in an artificial clearing not much frequented by the Outliers, since it had been a hunters’ camp and had the man taint about it. As he sat turning over some small matters in his hand, his brow knitting and unknitting, the whole man seemed to bristle with some evil, anxious intent. If there had been flames jutting from him, green spitting flames from eye and brow, they could not have given to him an aspect more sinister and burning. The mobile tip of his nose twitched slightly, the full, gracile lips were drawn back, bracketed by deep, unmirthful lines. The whole personality of the man pulsed and wavered with the fury of his cogitations, which, when he looked up and saw me, he gathered up with a gesture and disposed of like a snake swallowing its skin.

From the moment that his eyes lighted on mine his look neither flinched nor faltered, but all the evil preoccupation of him seemed to retreat and withdraw under their velvet. His mood yielded, as it seemed to me he always did yield, gracefully to my understanding and the security of sympathy. He had been busy as I came up, with some bits of leaves and blossoms and sticks, all of special significance, by which the Outliers could communicate as well as by letter. He was tying them in a bundle, which, as soon as he saw me, he began to untie and scatter as though there had been no object in it but mere employment.

Seeing him set his foot on some shredded petals of a sentimental significance, I thought he might have been composing a message to some woman of his own, to her who had come to me at Leaping Water perhaps, and destroyed it as one tears verses written in secret. I was quite willing to help him from the embarrassment of being caught at such an occupation by falling in with his first suggestion.

“Come,” he said, making room on the stump beside him, “it is a good day for teaching you to be completely the Outlier that I believe you are at heart.”

He lifted a heap of twigs and flowers, chose a spray of laurel and berries of toyon, with two small sticks, one of which was carefully measured three-fourths of the length of the other.

“Now what does this say?”

“The toyon means courage, but taken with the laurel probably means a place where they grow together,” I answered, proud of knowing so much; “two things of the same kind mean time—two days—no, one day and three-quarters.”

“Say to-morrow at mid-afternoon.” Then he considered, and added a small feather. “And this?”

I was doubtful.

“Speed,” I hazarded.

He gave the two low, warning notes of the quail, and I clapped my hands, recognizing it as a quail’s feather.

“Be quick and cautious!”

He laughed encouragement, and then shyly, after some consideration, he bound them all together with a sprig of a vine that spells devotion, and stuck it in his girdle.

“See,” he declared, “you have sent me a message appointing a secret meeting, and I shall wear it openly to show that, old as I am, I am not too old to appreciate ladies’ favors.”

He roughed his streaked gray hair as he laughed again with a delicate whimsicality that took off the edge of offence.

“Sometimes, Ravenutzi, I think you are not so old as you look.”

“Ah, when?”

“Just now when I came upon you. And when they talk of the King’s Desire. From the way you look when they talk of selling it to secure the title to their land, I gather the Far-Folk won’t be very well pleased with that disposition.”

“Would you expect it, seeing that it belongs to us?”

“But does it?”