green of the dawn, and between them spread a veil of silvery mist. Down
in the hollow the Outliers were all astir; rearward two lines of men
moved toward the Gap. I saw them disappear in the willows and emerge
again in the stream rounding the point of the Ledge. They walked
mid-thigh in the turbid water and braced themselves against the force of
its running. I saw the lines bend and right themselves like the young
willows. These were the Far-Folk moving under guard toward Leaping
Water. Below us as we came down the knoll were Mancha, Prassade, Noche
and some others, with one in their midst whom, as they turned and looked
toward us expectantly, I recognized as Ravenutzi. He looked dry, I
thought, and stripped. His glance, which took me dully, when at last it
was aware of me, appeared to turn inward for an instant as if to call
that old excluding charm of personality. I felt it flicker and expire.
But all that group continuing to look toward us curiously as we went
down, I enquired of Trastevera what it meant.
“It is Herman,” she said. “They wait for him. Mancha has asked if he
would like to go a day’s journey with them.”
“He will go,” I answered for him, for I knew at once whither that
journey tended, and what they would find at the end of it. To this day I
do not know what prompted Mancha to invite him. Whether he thought the
opportunity due to him who had first gone on the trail of that unhappy
girl. Whether he had some inkling of Herman’s state of mind, and divined
in him an excusing understanding of his own hopeless infatuation, I do
not know. At any rate he would not set out on that day’s business
without Herman. That was how we learned what happened in the Place of
Caves, half a day beyond Windy Covers, and as much as was ever known of
what had occurred between Ravenutzi and the Maiden Ward, no maid by now,
and in a more inviolable wardship.
They were afoot nearly all of that day, for besides having far to go,
the men were stiff with battle. They traveled in this order—first
Ravenutzi, limping a little, and Mancha stumbling close upon his heels.
Neither of these spoke a word more than necessary the whole of that
going. Then came Prassade, who groaned at times and made a gesture with
his hands as though his heart were torn out of him and he saw it there
in the trail and trampled on it with his feet. Next Noche, muttering in
his beard and seeming at times to rehearse the incidents of battle,
lifting and hugging somewhat in his arms and shaking his huge shoulders.
After these came Herman and the men, among whom was that one who,
following the tall woman, had found the smith and betrayed the Far-Folk
to capture.
They came behind the others a little distance and whispered at times
among themselves. They talked of Mancha’s fight with the smith and how
Oca went mad with rage bestriding the dead body of his son, striking so
furiously with his pike he could not fetch it back again, and how
Prassade had taken him from behind.
They told also how the women of the Far-Folk had come in from some bleak
hilltop where they hung like buzzards, and surrendered, asking no
privilege but to tend their wounded. Once it occurred to Herman to ask
if Ravenutzi’s wife was among them, and the men said no. At that Herman
and Mancha looked at one another and the same thought was in the minds
of both but they kept it to themselves. About an hour after midday it
began to appear that they had done wisely in bringing with them this man
who had followed Ravenutzi’s wife. The smith seemed determined to
mislead them. He wished to turn out of his earlier trail very far to the
right, and could not understand why this man protested so much nor why
Mancha paid any attention to him.
“This is the way,” he said; “who should know it if not I?”
“By the Friend, smith, it may be your way,” said the man, “but it was
not the way your woman took following your trail, and I hard upon hers.”
“You saw that?” cried Ravenutzi. “A woman, my wife, following me to—to
the place where we are going?” Herman said it was the first time he had
seen Ravenutzi beside himself; he grew gray, a film came before his eyes
through which the pupils opened, blank pits of horror.
“You saw that,” he cried, “and you let her go!”
“Ah,” said the man, “but I judged you the better game.”
Ravenutzi twisted like a man on a rope. He set off running.
“This is the way,” he said, “it is shorter so.” And the rest ran on to
keep up with him. They came in this running fashion to the place of the
boulders where the woman had lain face downward in the dust, and passed
over the sag in the hills where she had been last seen disappearing.
Beyond this was stony country; great boulders huge as houses lay all
a-heap at the foot of a steep ridge. Smaller stones and rubble from the
slope had drifted down and choked the upper crannies between the
boulders, so that under them were windy galleries and spacious caves.
There was no game nor foodful plant, only coarse tufts of grass between
wide stones, nothing to draw men, only shelter and safe hiding.
When they came near this place, Ravenutzi began to go more slowly,
forewarned perhaps and afraid of what he should find there. He raised a
call, cautiously at first, got no answer, called loudly, grew anxious,
set off running again, the men hard behind him. The place fronted
westward; the shadows retreating inward gave to the caverns under the
rocks a shallow look. The men could not have told from the outside which
of them would have yielded passage, but Ravenutzi plunged into one,
which proved an arched gallery. It opened into a sort of court, from
which a water-worn gully led steeply up to a ledge on which opened a
cave, overhung and guarded at the entrance by fire-blackened stones.
They were slow enough going up this steep, to observe a woman who sat at
the mouth of the cave with her knees drawn up under her hands, and her
head bent upon them. They saw that she was tall and had long hair that
coiled flatly about her throat and between her breasts.
She looked up from her knees as they climbed and clustered on the narrow
platform before the cave. There was neither astonishment nor fear in her
eyes, only weariness, as of one who has accomplished what she has long
sought and found that after that nothing mattered. Some color sprang in
her face as Ravenutzi stood before her, the faint tinge of expectancy.
But he never looked at her.
“Where, _where_ is she?”
It was Ravenutzi who asked, and got no answer except as by the turning
of the long throat she indicated the cave behind her. Resting her head
upon her knees, the tall woman went on looking quietly at nothing.
The floor of the cave sloped downward. It was low at the mouth, and the
men stooped going through it. It was large and airy, and had been hung
with tawny and dappled skins; some light broke through high crannies in
the roof and showed them in the midst of these the Ward. She was very
beautiful. The sparkling masses of her hair drifted out on either side
the cameo face. Over the eyes, that were brown like agates at the bottom
of a brook, the pale lids half drooped like the rims of snow that lie
along brook borders in the cold. She was partly dressed, the bosom bare,
and over its soft curves ran a line of blood-red stones, wickedly a-fire
on that cold breast, tremblingly, shiftily alive in the light that
sifted through the crannies of the rocks. Around the throat and in the
hollow of the bosom they led the eye down where they melted, and ran in
redness and spread dully on the floor, still wet and dripping.
He was so moved by that sight, Herman said, and for the moment so little
believing in it, that he had no realization of how the others looked at
it nor what they might have felt. He was first roused to take note of
his companions by seeing the smith turn from the body with a movement of
deprecation, and the sudden swinging of Mancha’s hammer into position.
He heard it click as it rose against the roof of the cave. He heard an
exclamation but could not tell for the life of him whether he himself
had not uttered it; and then he saw the hammer caught from behind by the
girl’s father.
“Mine,” he said; “mine, not yours.”
Prassade was as fierce upon the point as if some one had denied it: his
the greater offense, to him the punishment. Then as quietly as Mancha’s
hammer dropped, the wrath of Prassade fell off before the unimpassioned
quietness of the Ward. Stillness seemed to rise from her and crowd them
out of the narrow chamber into the overhung and guarded entrance where
the woman sat winding and unwinding the long coils of her hair. They did
not look at the Ward again nor back at what Prassade did; it was a
relief to watch the woman. She stood up and her head was high, her lip
was bitten red, two spots of color glowed upon her cheeks. She looked at
Ravenutzi as a child might who has broken a delicate thing and refuses
to be chidden for it.
“The place was too small for us both,” she said, and then after a
little: “I thought you would never come,” with a gesture of weary,
ineffable tenderness. “Oh, I thought you would never come.”
She was all alive to him and very beautiful, so flushed and so alive you
could not understand that death could be so close behind her. All the
rushing of her blood and the swaying of her slender figure demanded of
him what, even with death behind, he could not deny. He took her in his
arms. He put up his hand to turn her face on his shoulder away from the
hard eyes of the men. But he could not conceal as he did so the flush
upon his own and the tremor of renewal.
Whatever the girl had been to him, she was now the evidence of how much
his wife had loved him; as much as _that_! It was a declaration which
shamed him by its publicity but purchased him anew to passion and
protecting tenderness. They stood so, she superbly conscious of her
right to a place she had cleared for herself, and he still shielding
her. Nobody spoke a word. Behind in the cavern Prassade put back the
dead girl’s hair from her soiling blood and covered up her breast.
Presently he called Mancha, and the others by one consent moved down the
water-worn way, out of the sound of their sorrow. Ravenutzi’s arm was
still about his wife. At the foot of the ascent he put her from him
quietly.
“Go wait by the outer caves,” he said. “They will not wish to see you
when they come out.” And she, lifting up her head from his breast, went
quietly, all gentleness and submission, never seeing how the others
looked at her, never taking her eyes from him till the boulders closed
on her and hid her from their view.
“I should say to you,” said Ravenutzi, “what, perhaps, I may not have
time to say again”—for he thought then and the others thought, that
Prassade would kill him when he came out of the cave. It was to spare
her that sight that he sent his wife away. “You may say to the others
when they are able to hear it,” he went on, “that much you may have been
thinking of that fair child is wrong. She never told me where the King’s
Desire was hid.
“She never told,” he insisted, “not of her own consciousness”—looking
about for some point of interest or attention to fix upon, and settling
upon some small stones which he pushed together with his foot—“something
I had from her without her knowing it ... but there were others”—here,
his gaze rested an instant on Noche, and dropped to the stones
again—“... several others ... in whose minds the facts lay like trout in
a lake for him to make rise who was able.... Among my people there is
great skill in this.... You yourselves gave me the opportunity ... all
your minds ran full of it as a creek after the rain.”
He looked up from his stones, which he had pushed into line as though
they were a class who could nowise hear him until they had been so
ordered. He must have found some hint of belief in Herman’s face, for he
addressed himself to that more confidently.
“It is true I wooed her ... so as to have an open road to her mind. She
had no chance against me ... but she never knowingly told.... I do not
think I could have persuaded her.”
I believe the man spoke truth. For a certainty he felt death close upon
him. Whether the men believed him or not they honored his intention to
clear the girl. Some slight easement of their manner toward him made it
possible to say more openly:
“I meant no harm to her. She had none at first.... I brought her away
because I thought you would not believe ... you would have killed
her ... she came....”
He stopped full at that, there was no need to say how she came nor what
believing. They were all still together, thinking what he had done and
despising him too much to question at all. He essayed to speak once or
twice after that, and Herman observed that look to come upon his face
which he had often remarked there. The faun’s look, half wishful, half
defiant. A wild creature that abates none of its creature ways, but is
desirous to have touch with man.
“How fine a piece of work she was,” he said. “... The way her chin was
fitted into her throat ... the gold fret of her hair.... I was the
smith....”
He stopped; there was nothing in the faces of the men that gave him
leave to say his craftsman’s delight in her who was to them the injured
daughter of their friend.
Prassade came out presently and Mancha with him. They looked nor spoke
to no one as they came down the gully, but each took up a stone, walking
with it laboriously, and laid it at the cave’s mouth. Then one of the
men went and did the same, and the others, and Herman. At last
Ravenutzi, seeing no one hindered him, took up a stone and went up and
down with them, carrying, until the mouth of the cave was quite full.
Presently Ravenutzi’s wife, grown tired of waiting, crept back through
the stone arch and stood watching them with red bitten lip, coiling and
uncoiling the long strands of her hair.
XIV.
THE KING’S DESIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF IT
The party of us that came up from River Ward to Leaping Water turned
aside from the meadow where the Meet had been, and settled in one of the
galleries of that amphitheater looking down on its veiled cascades. The
shouting of the falls came up to us mixed with the faint, incessant
murmur given off by a great forest. From here the rim of the world sank
westward into the thin blue ring of the sea.
We had come so slowly, being joined at times by families of Outliers,
come out of safe hiding and already furnished with news. We were
scarcely well settled in the place when word of the death of the Ward
began to circulate among them in that mysterious way of news to travel
in the open. Doubtless it came by way of runners stationed out toward
Windy Covers, by which trail the seekers of the Ward returned. Rumor of
it was rife in the camp a full hour before Mancha and Prassade came in.
There was very little said about it, they were at all times as private
in their griefs as wild creatures, but I think they felt better
satisfied to learn that the natural progress of her betrayal had
furnished its own punishment and spared them the necessity of putting
Zirriloë to death.
Herman came and told me this, walking at dusk on an open hill where
there was long grass blowing and shut-eyed heavy flowers among the
grasses. But it was a long time before he would talk freely of that
suggestion of excuse, put forth by Ravenutzi, which lay in the appeal to
his craftsman’s soul of the girl’s bodily perfection. He had been no
more able to resist taking into his hand that fair contrivance than any
other jewel of gold and fine stones, and its turning to flesh and blood
under his touch had been a bitter and unavoidable consequence. I think
Herman’s inarticulateness grew out of feeling himself involved in the
ruin of a lovely woman in the common culpability of men. She was a vase
which they had pulled about among them in admiring, and dropped and
shattered.
I say I think Herman felt this, though I do not now recall any words
that passed between us on the subject. Yet I was at that time much
nearer to understanding the beguilement of beauty, and the pain of its
bafflement which drives men to create of words and paint and stone,
forms of it by which no confusion can come. When I saw Ravenutzi sitting
among the Far-Folk, with his knees drawn up under his hands and his
delicate faun’s profile bent above them, looking out at me in the old
way, at once wishful and compelling, the look I sent back to him was
almost kind.
The whiteness of his hair had been cut away, the drawn look of his skin
smoothed out. I saw how young he was, a little of what those two women
had seen who had been drawn by it to death and killing. His wife sat
with her head propped against his shoulder. And for so long as she sat
there, assured, accepted, it was plain there was for her neither anxiety
nor pained remembrance, nor any other thing.
One supposes death at all times so natural that the wound of it heals by
its own processes. It was so with the Outliers. No later than the next
morning much of the bitterness of loss had drained away with the dark.
The business of the Ward being finished they turned without
discursiveness to disposing of Ravenutzi, the Far-Folk and the King’s
Desire. Though we had no inkling, Herman and I, what would be done to
the smith, we felt it would be just; and whatever would be done to the
Far-Folk, more than kind. Concerning the Treasure there must some
command have circulated. Though we had seen it glinting in the camp at
River Ward—there was scarcely a man who had not brought something away
with him from the last fight—there was not so much as the red sparkle of
a jewel to be seen at Leaping Water.
The Council met early on the second morning, going down toward Council
Hollow before the dew was dried upon the fern. All the camp, scattered
as it was in a great treeless tract, hung in the breathless quiet of
suspense. There was scarcely any stir of talk or movement except now and
then among the Far-Folk, who lay all together like cattle on a warm hill
slope, turning toward the sun.
Herman and I, since no one seemed to regard us, thought of going down to
revisit the meadow and the lovely open water below the Leap. But the
expectant sense that brooded over the camp bound us to the consideration
of what might be decided about us personally at the Council. If we
looked afar at the sea rim, trying to make out at what point we were, we
looked suddenly back to see if the councilors were not coming up the
hill. If we heard a lark rising with its breast all brightening yellow
from some grassy water border, we listened the more anxiously
immediately to hear if any one had come to call us in to judgment.
When the shadows were gone far toward midday we heard what might have
been the breaking out of bird songs low and urgently through all the
open woodland. There was a sound of feet moving all together, and then
some one calling us by name. The Council men were coming up from the
Hollow and the Outliers crowded up to them to hear what they had to say.
They said nothing whatever until we were all come into hearing, and
ranged, the Far-Folk on one side and we on the other, on the crown of a
hill, open, and having a large grassy space beyond it.
I thought then, and I have not since reconsidered it, that of all times
the noon is the most solemn in which to deliver judgment. When all the
earth is quiet, shadows folded up, no bird singing, no beast abroad, all
the outer sense drowses under the sun glare. At such a time to hear a
voice crying punishment and doom is more terrible than any hour of
night. A convocation of wolves in the open sun would not have seemed
more singular, but this was not a business which could await a gentler
time.
We could see Persilope standing up, all expression beaten out of his
face by the sun, like leaf under the gold beater’s hand. Presently when
we were all well quieted, he began in a voice pitched for carrying, but
toneless as the light, ordering some skins to be spread in the grassy
space in front of him. Then it was ordered that all the Outliers who had
anything of the King’s Desire should bring it to that place. The chief
held up as he spoke, the circlet which he had taken from Oca’s head; and
as he turned it in the sun, it melted and ran a ring of changing fire.
When he had done speaking he cast it down with so much force that the
setting, which was old and delicate, burst and sent the stones
scattering like broken coals. There was a little pause after that, and
then Noche, springing up from behind him, held up the King’s Cup, but
neither so high nor so steadily. A little laggard of perception, as the
very strong commonly are, the point of what Ravenutzi had said about the
way in which he had come to learn the secret of the Treasure, had driven
slowly to the old man’s brain. Now it troubled his countenance: his eyes
were dark sockets between the drift of his brows and beard. He held up
the vase in his hands.
“Cup of the Four Quarters,” he said, “O Cup of Tears!” His strength
surged in him with the recollection; the bowl crumpled in his grip, he
bent back the base upon the stem and dropped it on the ground.
After him came every man with what he had; armlets and buckles and
chains of wrought and beaten gold and jewels, and the jeweled lamps and
vessels. The heap grew; it glittered and darted pain into the eyes; it
had green and blue and ruby gleams in it that winked and mocked the sun.
When it was all in—all but the great rubies which lie still in a place
known only to some few of us who are not likely to go there to fetch
them—and the men had sat down again, Persilope began.
He spoke steadily and without passion, saying what was well known to
them, that a curse was laid on whoever lifted the King’s Desire. But the
truth was, the curse lay in the mere possession of it by whatever means;
as if one should expect to keep a viper in his house and not himself be
stung by it. Itlan had been destroyed for it, and all those of their own
people who had kept the Treasure since, had purchased nothing but wars
and trouble with it. All of which being within their knowledge and true,
it was agreed for the safety of the Outliers to cast out the King’s
Desire as men would a poison snake which they had found among the huts.
At this there was a spark, a quiver of expectancy among the Far-Folk. As
if they imagined, eyeing it so greedily, that the treasure heap was to
be handed over to them as it lay, not so very unlike the snake of his
comparison, coiled glisteningly upon itself with red jeweled eyes.
Such an expectation, if it amounted to that, died with Persilope’s next
sentence, which was, briefly, to the effect that for all these reasons
it had been determined that when the Treasure was buried again, as it
shortly would be, it was to be followed by a forgetfulness from which
there would be no revival. It was to be forgetfulness of such a
fashion—here he looked over at Ravenutzi and the bleakness of his
delivery augmented—that there would be no picking of their brains
afterward.
I could see that the news of this conclusion had already spread and been
accepted by the Outliers. It was, perhaps, in the eye of all that had
recently occurred, not strange they should accept it with so much
gravity, and on the part of the women with some consternation.
I looked over at Trastevera where she sat close to her husband. I saw
her look doubtfully; write with her finger in the dust. Then I saw that
no Outlier looked at any other, but down or up. I thought I understood
that though they agreed with the judgment, no one wished to assume the
responsibility and drink so deeply of the Cup. It had not yet occurred
to me that there was any other way in which complete forgetfulness could
be secured.
I saw Persilope search his people slowly with his glance before he spoke
in a voice heard to the outer ring.
“Outliers, are you all here?”
It was followed by the rustle and murmur by which they took account of
themselves and of those left beyond River Ward with the wounded. The
murmur, swelled to affirmation, passed from group to group and was
handed up to Persilope by the nearest council-men.
“We are all here.”
“Know then,” he said, his voice and words shaping to formality and
sounding drearily in the white aching noon, “that there is a service to
be performed for the common good, and a penalty to be undertaken. The
Council leaves it open to any man who loves the common good so much, now
to offer himself. Is there any so offers?”
And still the eye of no Outlier sought any other eye, only I saw
Trastevera look up from her drawing and, leaning a little past the
others, gaze steadily toward some spot beyond her with a long,
compelling look. Before I could follow it to its point of attention,
almost before Persilope had done speaking, I saw Noche getting on his
feet, blinking a little as though the light abashed him, and fumbling
embarrassedly at his girdle like a child.
“If I should be counted worthy ... if I could be trusted again....” He
shook with eagerness. “Tribesmen, it is my right, for it was through my
doddering old tongue the secret escaped.... Ask him.” He pointed to
Ravenutzi. “He said so; ask _them_.” His great, gnarly arm, like the
stump of an oak, was stretched toward Prassade and Mancha, and it
trembled like an oak when the axe is at its roots. “Ask them if he did
not say so at the Place of Caves ... though I would have died
rather....”