passed a trail’s breadth from the house of Evarra and not suspected it,
so skillfully was it contrived within one of those sapling circles that
spring up around the decayed base of ancient redwoods, like close-set,
fluted columns round a ruined altar. Every family had two or three such
rooms, not connected, not close together, but chosen with that wild
instinct for unobtrusiveness with which the Outliers cloaked the
business of living. From the middle of one of these, smoke could go up
through the deep well of green and mingle undetected with the blue haze
of the forest. Deep within, tents of skin could be drawn against the
rain which beat upon them with a slumberous sound and dripped all down
the shouldering colonnade.
The tent was half drawn this morning, and no drops reached us, but
seldom, light spatterings from high, wind-shaken boughs. Evarra was
abroad looking after her family, and Noche had come over with Herman to
sit housed with me. The Outliers had, from such indifferent observation
as they had made, got the notion that House-Folk were of great fragility
as regards weather. They were exceedingly careful of us, though I had
seen Noche laugh as he shook the wet from his body, and take the great
gusts of wind as a man might the moods of his mistress. He sat opposite
us now on a heap of fern, busy at his sling-plaiting, with the placidity
of a spinning Hercules, and in a frame to be entertaining. It occurred
to me it might be an excellent time to beguile him into talk of the
Treasure, much to Herman’s annoyance, for he was of the opinion that my
having been a week among the Outliers and no harm having come of it, was
no sign it wouldn’t come eventually.
“Don’t meddle with their tribal mysteries,” he protested; “if it hadn’t
been for their confounded Treasure we would have been on the trail for
home by now.”
“But consider,” I explained to Herman for Noche’s sake; “if we drink
Forgetfulness at the last, what does it matter how much we know before?
And besides, he is suffering to tell me. Go on, Noche.”
Once you had old Noche started, his talk ran on like the involute
patterns he loved to trace upon the sand, looping to let in some shining
circumstance or set off some jewel of an incident. It was a wonderful
treasure by his account: lamps thick with garnets, crusted with
amethysts, and the cup of the Four Quarters which a dead king held
between his knees.
Outside we could hear the creaking of the boughs as the wind pounced and
wallowed, stalking an invisible prey. Within the hut we saw in the old
man’s story, the summer island from which the tale began, far southward,
rising from the kissing seas. All at once he left off, breathing quick,
his nostrils lifted a little, quivering, his head turning from side to
side, like a questing dog’s. We had heard nothing but the trickle of
rain down the corrugated trunks, but Noche, turning his attention toward
the doorway, twitched his great eyebrows once, and presently broke into
smiling.
“Trastevera,” he said; and then a very curious thing happened. Some
patches of the red and brown that had caught my attention from time to
time at the burl of the redwood opposite stirred and resolved into
Ravenutzi. How long he had been there I had no notion. Though I was well
acquainted with that wild faculty of the Outliers to make themselves
seem, by very stillness, part of the rock and wood, I was startled by it
quite as much on this occasion as on the first time of my meeting him.
It was not as though Ravenutzi made himself known to us by a movement,
but drew himself out of obscurity by the force of his own thinking. The
fact of his being there seemed to shoulder out all question as to why he
was there in the first place. He was looking, with that same curious
fixity that held me when I caught him dyeing his hair at the spring, not
at me, but at Trastevera approaching on the trail. She came up the trail
in that lifting mood with which the well body meets weather stress, as
if her spirit were a sail run up the mast to catch the wind. She came
lightly, dressed as the women mostly were, in an under tunic of soft
spun stuff, of wood green or brown color, but her outer garment was all
of the breasts of water birds, close-fitted, defining the figure. She
looked fairly back at Ravenutzi as she came, smiling from below her
quiet eyes. He walked on past her so casually that only I could say that
he had not merely been passing as she passed. But I was sure in my own
mind he had been sitting close by Evarra’s hut for a long time.
She gave us Good Friending as she came in, but it was not until Noche,
in response to a sign from her, had taken Herman out by the brook trail,
that she spoke to me directly.
“If you made a promise to me in regard to your being here and what you
shall see among us, would he, your friend, be bound by it?”
“Well, in most particulars; at any rate, he would give it
consideration.”
“Does he love you?”
“No,” I said. I was sure of that much.
“How do you know?”
“By the best token in the world. He has told me so.”
“Ah!” She looked at me attentively a moment, as if by that means she
might discover the reason.
“Then in that case he will probably do as you say. If he loved you,” she
smiled, “he would expect you to do as he said.”
She loosened her feather coat, shaking out the wet, and took from
Evarra’s wall an oblong piece of cloth, brown and yellow barred like the
streakings of sunlight on the bark of pines, and disposed it so that,
with the folds lying close and across the slender body and the two loose
ends falling over the shoulders, she looked like some brooding moth that
bides the rain under a sheltering tree.
“You are so much more like us,” said she, “than I would have expected;
so much more understanding. Have you Far-Seeing?”
“How Far-Seeing?”
“There are some among us,” she said, considering, “who can lie in their
beds at night and hear the deer crossing at Lower Fern; some who can
stand in their doors and see the face of a man moving on the cliffs at
Leaping Water. But I am one who can see trouble coming before the bearer
of it has reached Broken Tree. Have you such?”
“I have heard of them.”
“Do you know then if they see better or worse, for loving?”
I could not tell her that, though I wished to, since she made such a
point of it. I had to content myself with asking her how it was with
herself.
“Very much better,” she laughed, and colored; “or worse.” She frowned,
sighing. “I will tell you how that is.”
“When I was just grown,” said Trastevera, “I was chosen to be—to fulfill
a certain duty which falls every ten years to some young woman of the
tribe. It was a duty which kept my heart occupied so that there was no
time for loving or being loved. I was much apart and alone, and it was
then that my Gift came to me, the gift of Far-Seeing. It served the
tribe on many occasions, particularly on one when we were at war with
the Far-Folk. I saw them breaking through at River Ward, and again I saw
them when they tried to get at us from the direction of the sea——But it
was not of that I meant to tell you. After I was released from my duty I
had planned because, because——” She seemed to have the greatest
difficulty getting past this point, which for so direct a personality as
hers was unusual. I gathered that the matter was involved in the tribal
mysteries which Herman had warned me to avoid, so I could not help her
much with questioning.
“Because of a certain distinction which they paid me, I had planned,”
she went on at last, “to have no love and no interest but theirs. It
came as a shock to me when Persilope was made Warden of the Council, to
find that it was agreed on every side that I should marry him.”
“Didn’t you love him then?” I was curious to know.
“I scarcely knew him, but I knew what he was, and if it was thought best
for me to love him, I wished, of course, to do what was best. And
Persilope wished it also.”
“You could do that? Love, I mean where you were told to love.” Somehow
the idea filled me with a strange trepidation.
“If the man was love worthy, why not?” She was surprised in her turn.
“So long as my heart was not yet given, it was mine to give where the
Outliers would be best served by it. Do you mean to say,” she asked,
sensing my incredulity, “that it is not so with the House-Folk? Do you
not also serve the tribe most?”
“With our lives and our goods,” I admitted.
“But not with your loving? But if you love only to yourselves, is not
the common good often in peril from it?”
“Often and often,” I agreed. Suddenly it began to seem a childish and
ineffectual thing that we should be in the most important issues of life
so at the mercy of place and incident, obscuring coquetries and tricks
of dress.
“Sometimes it is so with us,” she agreed, “but not with people like
myself and Persilope. When it was brought to our notice how all the
Outliers would be benefited by our uniting his practical sense with my
far-seeing, we held our hearts out like a torch and lighted each from
each.” They could do that it seemed, these Outliers, apt full natures,
they could rise in the full chord of being and love without other
inducement than the acknowledgment of worth. That was why the Outliers
took no notice of what I was secretly ashamed of having noticed, that
she was years older than her husband.
Leaving the habits of the House-Folk, Trastevera went on with her
narrative.
“We have a custom when we are married,” she said, “of choosing where it
shall be. We set forth, each from his own home, all our friends being
apprised of what we are about to do and wishing us well. Then we come to
the place, each by his own trail, meeting there under no eyes. When a
month is done we go home to our friends, who make a great to-do for us.
There is a hill I know, looking seaward, a full day from here. There are
pines at the top and oaks about the foot, but the whole of it is
treeless, grassy, with flowers that sleep by day among the grasses. It
is neither windy nor quiet, but small waves of air run this way and that
along the grass, and make a changing pattern. Here I chose to meet
Persilope. All day I went down by Deer Leap and River Ward to meet my
man, and he came up by Toyon and the hiving rocks to meet me. All day I
felt him come, and the earth felt him: news of him came up through the
grasses and touched my finger-tips.” She flushed a little, and finished
simply: “When we came back,” she said, “I had reason to believe I had
lost the gift of Far-Seeing. It was while we were away that the Far-Folk
had opened the matter of the hostage, and the Council waited for
Persilope to come back from his wedding to decide what was best to be
done. The people were for the most part glad to put an end to
quarreling.”
This was the first time that I realized that there was another sort of
woodlanders beside the Outliers. Up till this time, when I had heard
mention of Far-Folk, I thought it perhaps another sort of name for us,
House Livers, as they called us indifferently, or Diggers, or They of
the Ploughed Lands, as people will speak of a wild species, very common
but of too little interest to be named or known.
“So soon as I had heard of the Far-Folk’s plan to send us their smith as
a perpetual hostage,” she went on, “I was chilled with prescience of
disaster, and said so freely. But when Ravenutzi came to council, and I
had looked him through, I was warm again. You heard how I said last
night that I could not tell if it was the blood of the Far-Folk playing
traitor in me, or if there was, in fact, no shadow coming. So I was
obliged to say to the Council, and they on their own motion, without any
help from me, accepted him. No one has blamed me”—she mused a little,
with her chin upon her hand—“but ever since I have been afraid. There
might really have been some intimation of coming evil which my
happiness, going from me to everything I looked upon, dispelled as a
bubbling spring breaks up a shadow.”
She rose and walked from me a little space, returned, and stood before
me so intent upon getting some answer more than my words, that I thought
it best to let no words trouble her. Presently she went on:
“Since then I have had no serious forecasting that concerned the
Outliers at large. But some days before Prassade first found you, I had
a vision of Broken Tree and a bird rising from it crying trouble. There
was shadow lying on my world, and dread of loss and change. But this is
the strangest thing of all. When I had seen you I saw more than that.
Between you and Ravenutzi there was some bond and understanding.”
“No, no!” I protested; “on his part, yes, some intention toward me, some
power to draw me unaware to meet some end of his. And yet....”
“And yet you like him?”
I admitted it. Though I had no special confidence in his purpose, I felt
my soul invite his use.
“And that,” said Trastevera, “is why I have kept you here and advised
that you be told anything it is lawful for an Outlier to know.
Ordinarily when we find House-Folk among us we give them the Cup and let
them go. But since you are to drink forgetfulness at last, before that
happens you may be of use to me.”
“But how?”
Though I had more curiosity than concern, I could see doubt pulsing in
her like the light breathing of a moth. She resolved at last.
“Even if you betray me, there is still the Cup,” she said. “You have
already been of use to me, for as I came into camp last night I felt the
shadow; it was not on you when I looked, but when Ravenutzi looked at
you I saw it fall, and it fell from him.”
She considered me attentively to see what I would make of this, but not
willing to say until I had considered it myself, I spoke of the Cup;
beginning to take it seriously for the first time.
“Of what,” said I, “will it make me forgetful?”
“Everything at first, but by degrees the past will clear. Only around
all that happens here, and around the circumstance of your drinking it,
there will be the blank of perfect sleep.”
“But why are you so sure in sparing me, that I shall be able to serve
you?”
“How could you help it?” She looked at me in quick surprise. “You are
not like your friend is who says this is good or not good, and that is
the end of it. You are one in whom the vision clouds and colors. By the
color of your mind when it falls under Ravenutzi’s I shall learn perhaps
whether to trust my old distrust of him or my present friendliness.
“Oh!” she cried, perceiving so readily at that instant the half
conviction, half credulity, of my mind toward her that she was
embarrassed by it. “Is it so among House-Folk that they must always
explain and account for themselves? If I said to an Outlier that he
could help me he would not have questioned it.”
“But what am I to do?”
“Hold the will to help me. Be friends with the smith if he is friendly,
and say nothing of this to any one but me. When your time comes to take
the Cup I will see that it is made light for you.”
It did not sound very difficult, and perhaps I did not take it very
seriously; at any rate I gave the promise. Trastevera unwinding herself
from the striped cloth like a moth coming out of a chrysalis, resumed
her feather coat and left me with that suddenness I had learned to
expect of the Outliers, like a bird flitting or a weasel slipping in the
chaparral.
On the very first occasion of our being alone together after that I
demanded of Evarra what Trastevera had meant by saying that she was of
the blood of Ravenutzi, and that the blood was traitorous. I could ask
that safely, because I had learned that, except in the one important
matter of the Treasure, the Outliers had no skill in concealments and no
knowledge whatever of indirection. It was as if somewhere in their
history they had so sickened of the stuff of treachery that their teeth
were set on edge at the mere attitudes of it, tricks, pretensions and
evasions.
So I knew that if I opened a forbidden matter, Evarra would tell me so
flatly, and that would be the end of it. And if it was permissible to
speak at all, she would do me no such discourtesy as not to speak
freely.
It was a very old affair, she said, but one well known among the
Outliers. In one of their quarrels with the Far-Folk one of their own
women was taken and kept. Afterward she had been returned to her home by
purchase, and had had a child shortly after, begotten upon her
unwillingly by one of the Far-Folk. From that child Trastevera was
descended. The blood of the Far-Folk, said Evarra, was a foul strain,
but they had mixed it with the best of theirs, and there was no more
treason left in it than there was soiling of last season’s rains in the
spring that watered Deep Fern. None of the Outliers had even remembered
it until Ravenutzi came. As for these Far-Folk, they were to the
Outliers all that cat was to dog, hill-dwellers, seeking treeless
spaces, holes in the rock and huts of brush; wiry folk, mocking and
untruthful. But they were such inveterate craftsmen that a man of them
could sooner smudge himself at a forge making a knife to trade you for a
haunch of venison, than go a-hunting for his meat himself. It was so
most of the iron implements I had noticed had been circulated among the
Outliers. For their part they preferred casting themselves joyously
forth on the day to come back well furnished by their own hands.
But a man of the Far-Folk would sit all day with his nose to a bit of
hammered metal, graving on it strange patterns of beasts and whorls and
lacing circles. When it was done, said Evarra, there was no great
pleasure in it, for it would not glitter as a bit of shell, nor brown
nor brighten as a string of berries, nor be cast every hour in a new
pattern like a chaplet of flowers, but remained set forever, as the
Far-Folk in their unkempt ways.
They were piliferous too, and lived in such relation as weasels might to
the people of the Ploughed Lands; by which term she always spoke of the
few farmers whose homesteads I could occasionally see from Outland. The
Far-Folk would go down by night across the borders of the Outliers to
the farmyards for their scraps of metal, and ate fruit from the
orchards. It was to purchase free passage for such expeditions through
disputed territory that they had given hostage to their foes at Deep
Fern; free leave to go and come from Deer Leap to the River Ward, and
between Toyon and Broken Head. Up to this time the compact had been
scrupulously kept, though it was evident from Evarra’s manner of
admitting it, she begrudged any good opinion I might have of the
Far-Folk on that account.
“And what harm have you had from Ravenutzi?”
Ah, that was as might be, if you counted the failure of Trastevera’s
visions and his making a fool of old Noche with his smith’s tricks. The
old man had thought of little this year past but forge work and
designs—and prating to the children of the King’s Desire. “If it had
been my child listening to him,” finished Evarra, “I should have smacked
him.”
All of which I told to Herman at the first opportunity. And also that I
should never be happy one moment until I had found out what fact, if
any, lay behind the story of the King’s Desire.
“What’s the good of finding out,” said Herman gloomily, “if we have to
take their everlasting dope on top of it?”
“And within three days of the most sophisticated society on earth,” I
reminded him. “They are having the golf tournament at Mira Monte this
week. Could you believe it?”
“Oh, I don’t believe a word of it,” he insisted. “This is just one of
the tales you’ve made up, and you’ve hypnotized me into going through
with it, but I don’t believe it at all.”
V
THE LOVE-LEFT WARD
I was sitting under a toyon tree watching Evarra brew forgetfulness in a
polished porphyry bowl, when Herman came by. It was the morning of the
Meet. The Cup was wanted for her who was the Ward, and Evarra took a
great deal of pains with the brew, heating the bowl slowly and, when the
dry leaves began to smoke and give off an odor of young fir, dropping
water gently and setting it to steep in the sun. I had hoped to discover
what plant it might be, but there was little to be guessed except that
it had a blue flower taken in the bud, and smelled like a wood path in
the spring. Evarra sat and stirred under the toyon and answered my
questions or not as she was inclined.
“Do you know any sort of an herb, Evarra, that will turn gray hair black
again?”
“That I do; and black hair gray if you wish it.” But I had not caught
the significance of her statement, when Herman came along, bursting full
of news. He was looking almost handsome that morning, for he had put on
the dress of the Outliers for the first time, and though he had managed
it so as to cover more of his skin than was their fashion, it became him
very well. Some satisfying quality streamed from him, according with the
day. As if he had laid off something besides the dress which had come
between him and the effect I had wished him to have on me.
“Come up the trail with me; I have some news for you,” he began. “May
she?”
This last was to Evarra. With all the basin of Deep Fern and Leaping
Water full of their own folk we had been allowed to move freely about
among them, but there was still a form of keeping us under guard.
“Go up,” said Evarra, probably glad to get rid of me, “as far as Fallen
Tree, where you can see the Leap between that and the clearing. I will
join you presently. You can see the procession best from there, when it
first comes out of the wood.”
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.