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.”