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?