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?”
“Who but our fathers brought it from the Door of Death? It makes no
difference with belonging that the Outliers have kept us out of our own
so many years.”
“If it comes to that,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to me to belong to
either of you.”
“It was ours in the beginning. Be sure it will come in the end to our
hand again.”
“Was that what you were thinking about when I came up?”
“I suppose so. I often think about it. An ill subject for a good day.”
He rose up to dismiss it. “Let us go and see if the spring is full.”
We went up through the tall timber through a chain of grassy meadows,
little meadows planted fair with incense shrub and hound’s tongue and
trillium. We nibbled sprigs of young fir, surprised birds at their
mating and a buck pawing in the soft earth. I do not remember if the
spring was full or not, but I recall very well that as we came back
skirting the edge of under-grown forest, stiff with stems like a wall,
Ravenutzi made a great to-do because he had lost my token. That was
singular to me, because a little time before when he helped me over a
bog I had seen it sticking quite firmly in the crossing of his girdle.
He would not go back to look for it, insisted rather that we should go
around by the Laurel Bank where toyon grew, and gather its belated
berries to make another. So being very gay about it, and laughing a
great deal, we got back to camp with Ravenutzi’s belt stuck full of
laurel and toyon, the last hour of the morning. This was about the time
the treasure diggers, setting three of their party on the faint trail
they had found, turned back toward Deep Fern.
They arrived about two hours before sunset, went straight to Persilope,
talked with him apart, remained otherwise separate and uncommunicable.
Already some invisible warning of their approach ran about the basin and
drew the Outliers in from whatever business they were abroad upon. They
came hurrying and crowding into the long narrow meadow between the creek
and the wood, fluttered and full of questioning. The unexpected return
of the party, empty handed, the lessening of their number, their grave
silences, Noche’s distracted appearance, Mancha’s head held high,
Prassade’s hung down; all these kept enquiry and supposition rife.
The wood began to resound with calls, which were answered from far and
near as the belated ones came hurrying from fishing and hunting and
isolated huts. In the middle meadow the treasure hunters sat together on
the ground. Persilope walked up and down. Around the edge of the wood
ran the whisper and jostle of fresh arrivals. Now and then Persilope
took note of them, awaiting the last impatiently for the time to speak.
The sun traveled seaward, and the fan-spread, vaporous rays of blueness
ranged through the redwoods and melted into twilight. The noise of
coming fell off by degrees, and every man began to count and question to
know for whom they waited. It appeared the Maiden Ward was still abroad.
She had gone that afternoon with the one keeper and two women to the
ridge behind Deep Fern to dig certain roots for dyeing. She was late
returning. Two or three stars had come out in the twilit space when far
back under the redwoods there was the sound of a man running. The _pad,
pad_ of his feet on the thick needles drew near, burst upon us, cleared
the ring of listeners and carried the man full into the open, gasping
and panting.
“Gone! Gone!” he shouted. “Lost! Seized and stolen!”
The words, sharp and startling, brought all the sitters to their feet
like the cracking of a whip.
“Who? Who, and where?” cried Prassade, taking the man, who was the
fourth keeper, by the shoulders and wheeling him round face to face. “Is
it my daughter? What have you done with her?”
“Gone!” he declared again in the midst of panting.
“Of her own will? When? In what direction?” With every question Prassade
shook him as if he would have jolted the answer out of him in default of
words.
“Let me breathe. Just now. I came as fast as I could. Not of her own
will, I think. There were others—one other.”
The man struggled with his agitation. Persilope counseled patience; the
hearers closed round him in a ring, as he grew more coherent.
They were out, he said, on sodden ground along the foot of the Laurel
Bank, he and the two women digging roses. Zirriloë strayed along the
lower edge of the Bank. There was a toyon bush, full berried, grown up
among the laurels, and she gathered the scarlet clusters for her hair.