seduced her mind ... fool, fool!” This was the voice of Waddyn, who rose
up in his place behind Noche, tall and very gaunt, as some old wolf of
the wilderness. He struck himself on the breast. “We are old men,” he
said, “shall we have discredit at the last? Chief, are we accepted?”
In their eagerness he and Noche had struck hands together like two
children come to beg a holiday, dropping apart as the murmur of
acceptance ran among the Outliers and made them men again. “You are
accepted,” announced Persilope. So they sat down again, each in his
place, quite contented.
There was a little pause here. I was trying from where I sat to have a
glimpse of Ravenutzi, to see how this affected him, if at all, when I
heard some disturbance behind me, and a voice crying out:
“No, no, I cannot lose you both!”
I turned, and I saw Prassade stooping to disengage his knees from his
wife’s clinging, and holding her from him by the shoulders, begin to
speak.
“I also....”
“Outliers,” he said, and by the hollowness of his voice and the sinking
of his cheek under the red beard they saw what havoc grief and disgrace
had made in him, “Outliers, it is through my blood dishonor came, and
one of my blood must cure it. There is none but me.”
There was a general outcry of dismayed protest and assurance.
“Not you, Prassade, not you....”
“No fault of yours....”
“She has paid....”
“She was but a child, she has paid in full....”
And then from the woman at his feet:
“Think of _me_, Prassade.”
“Think of what I think on day and night,” cried Prassade, “and let me
go.”
“Prassade,” said the young chief, greatly troubled, “in that which we
propose to do, when this business is settled, I shall have great need,
as in the past I have had great benefit, from your interest and
advice....”
“No, no!...” The man’s voice was a desperate gasp merely. “Never shall I
give counsel who could not advise my own child against dishonor”—holding
his wife from him still, though the poor creature worked toward him on
her knees. “Never shall I beget children again who have been betrayed by
my own child.... Ah ... let me go ... let me go ... and by service ...
by forgetting....” There was something almost of madness in his wounded
desperation. I suppose his wife must have seen that. She left off
entreaty and took his hand, fondling it quietly, turning as she was,
upon her knees, toward Persilope and the elders, quite broken and
submissive.
“It is best you let him go,” she said, “he will be happier so.”
Prassade caught at this, his lip was wet with eagerness.
“Ay, ay, how can I know happiness again? She knows I cannot.”
“Are you sure,” said Persilope to the wife, “that you are prepared
for ... that you understand?”
“I understand,” she answered back, neither of them looking at the man in
question. “If it means peace for him, I am....” She threw out her hands
to show how obedient she was to destiny.
“Am I accepted, chief; am I accepted?” The man trembled with the hope of
deliverance.
“You are accepted,” the chief admitted, seeing there was no one disposed
to deny him. There was a space of stillness in the bright palpitating
noon before Persilope, measuring the heap of gold and jeweled vessels
with his eye, had turned back and said: “It wants yet another.”
Then I saw his wife leaning a little from where she sat with her glance
still fixed and compelling. I followed it past the line of elders and
found it fixed on Ravenutzi. Before I could shape in my mind what
wordless urgency lay behind that look, I saw the smith rise slowly, and
stepping carefully among the rows of seated captives, come and stand
beside Prassade and the two others. Trastevera sunk backward in her seat
with the look of one justified in a long belief.
“I,” he said, “offer myself.”
At this simple and unexpected intrusion of the smith into the situation,
there burst from the Outliers a sudden sharp hiss of refusal and
indignation. It was followed instantly after by harsh ironical laughter.
Cries sounded, here and there two arms and a head cast up, like the
crest of a wolf out of a pack, protestingly, and hands pulled him down
again.
“The smith, the smith!” they cried. “A reparation, a reparation!”
They were fierce for the moment with the irony of the situation and
their grim enjoyment of it. Yet, though there was a kind of justice in
making the man who had dared most to possess the King’s Desire the best
keeper of it, I thought they might easily have found a better
punishment. Ravenutzi was, as I believed, a man of great sensibility.
There must have been many things in that connection he would be wishful
to forget. And I could not understand why his willingness to take the
Cup in such company confirmed in Trastevera the hope of a latent
nobleness in him which had been her own excuse for her former kindness.
Neither could I any more understand the unmirthful humor of the
Outliers.
Nor, I think, did the Far-Folk then understand it, looking askance and
half hopeful, as if in spite of everything they expected Ravenutzi’s wit
to bring something out of the situation to their profit. But the
Outliers continuing to shout: “The smith, the smith! A reparation!”
Persilope was obliged formally to announce his acceptance.
Ravenutzi’s part in the reburial of the Treasure being settled, the four
men went to work to cord it up conveniently for carrying. Without
further ceremony they took tools for digging and set out from the camp
with the Treasure swung between them. They went toward the deep forest
and by such a trail that, when they had passed over a little rise of
ground a few hundred yards from us, no one could see the way they went.
No one moved from his place lest he should accuse himself of a wish to
do so.
We sat and watched below us the banner of the Leap stream through its
irised changes, saw the shadows shrink and stretch toward afternoon. Sat
so still that a little black bear came out of the manzanita and
_whoofed_ and ran across the outstretched legs of the Outliers, and a
troop of deer trotted up from the valley and stared soft-eyed at us,
skirting the rim of the hollow. Two or three hours went over us, and
hawks began to dart out of the scrub to hunt before we heard the four
returning. They were tired, overdone, but they had bathed at the creek
and set their clothing in order. No soiling traces betrayed where they
had been.
They came up and delivered themselves as for inspection to Persilope.
What followed was very brief.
“Is it accomplished?” said the chief.
“It is accomplished.”
“You are prepared, then?”
“We are prepared.”
Some slight bequests followed concerning articles of property, which the
chief took as executor.
“My young sons ...” said Prassade.
“Are mine.”
“Then we are ready.”
All this time Ravenutzi had not said a word. One by one the Outliers, as
I had seen them do with Daria, came up to take their leave. It was done
with a deep and moving brevity. I came in my turn and cried a little
over old Noche.
“Have you forgiven me for overhearing what you never meant for me?” said
I.
“Child, I bless you for it: but for you we might not have had back again
what my prattling lost.”
All this time no one spoke to Ravenutzi. Trastevera stopped before him
for a moment or two, and some wordless assurance of reconciliation
passed between them. He had not asked for farewells from his own people
and the Outliers had not suggested it. All being over, the four men
began to walk from the camp and away from the sun. As they passed the
old King of the Far-Folk, he stood up, biting his long beard.
“Oh, my King,” said Ravenutzi, speaking loud that the Outliers might
suspect no hidden communication, “I have done what I could.”
“O smith,” said Oca, bitter with impotence, “it shall be remembered.”
They passed on until they had reached a knoll that lifted them clear of
intervening scrub. They stood there, turned facing us; the light, strong
against them, made them indistinct, the wind blurred the folds of their
garments. I looked about expecting one with the Cup, and saw instead a
score of the slingsmen measuring off their ground.
They stood with the sun to their backs and swung their slings lightly to
free them for action. Until that moment I had not a notion what was
really forward, nor I think had the Far-Folk. When they heard the slight
preparatory whistling of the slings I saw the wife of Ravenutzi start as
if they had stung upon her flesh. She looked up and saw the four
standing so quietly and the young men with their slings drawn to
position across the grassy intervening space. Noiselessly she sprang up
and began running. Swiftly as she cleared the space between her and
Ravenutzi it was not swift enough. The word was given, the slings were
up and whirling; swifter than birds the stones took their flight. I saw
her leaping on the knoll and her husband’s arms opened to receive her,
then I heard the singing of the stones and saw them go down, with her
body across his, all so quietly, as grass is mown in summer.
XV
HOW HERMAN AND I CAME BACK TO BROKEN TREE
Before any bird awoke, and while the wood was morning gray, the Outliers
began to move westward next day from Leaping Water. Morning did not
break but there was a widening of the gray space, a warming of the
slight wind, and then the chill that settled into weeping fog. Blunt
crowns of hills peered at us through the parting mist, and seemed
mysteriously to move behind it and at the next lifting peer upon us from
another quarter. Dim files of trees marched down upon us from obscurity
and marched away again. Far to the left we heard the rain charging the
river cañon, and the stir of invisible cohorts enfilading behind the
locked ranges.
I could not make out where we were, except that our general movement was
toward lower ground, and from the position of a pale yellow blur that
appeared in the sky about midday, I gathered that we had moved south and
west. In this space of half obscurity, wet mist, sodden grass, pale
shadow and pale sun, the Far-Folk moved with us. Neither they nor Herman
nor I cared to ask what was meant toward us, nor speculated as to what
we should do about it. I suppose no philosophy could have devised more
justice in the end than the working of their own natures had brought to
pass. Whoever had met death on this occasion had met it so much of his
own act that the event left no sense of mal-adjustment, and with it died
both remorse and recrimination.
We had reached by this time, Herman and I, a large faith in the
reasonableness of nature. Whatever came to us, we felt the processes of
life rising to heal it like the sap to a tree’s scar.
We kept close together, saying little, going all that day in
intermitting fog and rain, until the sky cleared well toward sunset. We
had come to a halt an hour past on a wild open headland, and saw huge
uncouth shapes of cloud hurrying to caverns of the sun. Fog lay thick in
the hollows, hills islanded above it; as it cleared and sunk and the dry
land appeared we saw how large and good the country was; hills upon
hills, and hills beyond, wooded and bare, broken and rolling land.
Nowhere was there a man trace, no smoke going up from the cañons, nor
window lights below the trees. To the west the fog lay unpierced,
stretching seaward, level and roughed on the surface like waves,
beginning to take a red tinge from the sun. It was not until then that
we had some hint of why we had halted in this place. We saw the Outliers
drawn up into some sort of order, with the Far-Folk opposing, and the
two chiefs between.
We hurried and came up to that privileged place near Trastevera which
her favor reserved for us, and I observed that the eyes of Oca burned
red like a weasel’s, as he turned them this way and that on the emerging
hills, fingering his great beard. The glitter of wet on his shoulders
like bronze, touched with reflected color of the westering fires, the
bearskins that clothed him below, and the blowing of long lip locks gave
him an appearance most wild and befitting the hour. He looked, and
Persilope looked, standing poised and at ease as a stag gazing.
“It is a good land,” said the King of the Outliers.
“Good enough.”
“And large.”
“As you say, large,” admitted the King of the Far-Folk, looking askance,
his hands forever busy with his beard.
“Large enough for two peoples to live in it, each unmolested?”
Oca’s eyes roved over the whole circle of the outlook before he
answered.
“Large enough.”
“Oca,” said the young man, not the least troubled by this curtness nor
put out by it, “you have done us as much harm as you could, which is not
so much as you wished. I leave you to count the good you have got by it.
It was an old quarrel, but it occurs to me that since the chief cause of
it has ceased to exist, there is little use in our quarreling. But there
is no reason why we should be friends. Do you follow me?”
“You are plain enough.”
“I will be plainer. Not only do we Outliers wish no quarrel with you but
we wish never to set eyes on you again, nor so much as to happen on the
places where you have been. Therefore if you will choose you out a
quarter of this land, which, as you say, is large enough, you and your
people will have leave to go seven days in that direction, after which
you shall see no more of us. But all this part where we have been, from
the Ledge to Broken Tree, is forbidden ground. Neither you nor any
generation of yours to set foot in it. We will see to that.”
He spoke with a controlled and quiet energy that fell on the old man’s
fury of defeat like steady rain.
“As for us, we shall go south from here a great distance. So,” said
Persilope, “if you choose, to-morrow my men will set you on your way,
and you shall have no more to do with us except of your own seeking.”
Oca looked back over his people standing sullen and attentive, and read
but one thought in them.
“We would go now,” he said.
“As you will. Only choose.”
It was a generous offer, but perhaps Persilope knew his man. Oca looked
north and south: he must have had by his wild instinct the better
knowledge of the country. He might have seen in that unstinted gaze some
trace—pale smoke ascending or pointed roof—that advised him of the
neighborhood of men, men to be plotted against, evaded, pilfered from,
to give to his life the zest of cunning that it craved. He stretched his
hand northward.
“I will go there,” he said.
“From those three far peaks, then, to this broken headland, and from
thence as the crow flies to the sea. Do you accept the conditions?”
“O Persilope, what else is there to do?”
“Go, then.”
On the motion of Persilope stepping back all the Outliers fell back a
little also to give them room. We saw the Far-Folk set in motion. Oca
himself went a few paces, but he was, after all, a king; words of thanks
stuck in his throat no doubt. He dragged them out, perhaps by the
process of tugging at the locks of his beard.
“Your offer is just. We will keep faith with you. My thanks to you,” he
said, and when Persilope had dismissed the subject with a gesture, he
turned his back in departing and did not look our way again.
We saw them go down the hill and drown in the lake of mist, and after an
interval come out on the other side rounding a hill front, after which
we saw them no more. It was a visible relief to the Outliers to be rid
of them. We moved a space down the headland, made cover from the rain
and slept quietly.
In the night all the tide of mist and fog drained out to sea and left
the heavens tender.
By the sun we saw that we had come much nearer the coast than I had
realized; we saw the sapphire spangled belt of the sea lying low under
the hills, and suspected a faint odor of drying weed mixed with the
breath of the budding forest. Gladness came up with the sun and sang the
love of life awake.
Spread abroad seeking food, we heard the Outliers laughing in the well
sunned spaces. It was still very early and the shadows airy when they
called to us. They came about us in a ring of friendly faces, and it was
so good a day to be alive in, we had forgotten to be afraid what they
might do with us.
“You heard us say last night,” began Persilope, when we had been brought
before him in a grass walk between the madroños, “how we should go south
from here where the forest comes down to the sea and there are no
House-Livers. The places where you knew us we shall not know again.” He
saddened at that, and a shadow of sadness fell on all their faces. “But
I doubt”—here he smiled—“if we were still there, whether you could find
us again.”
“Not without your consent.”
“You came to us strangely,” he went on, “in a strange time, and trouble
entered with you.”
“Not of our making,” Herman reminded him, “nor our wishing.”
“We are sensible of that, and also that we had good from you.
Therefore”—he looked about on the Outliers and the nudging and whisper
of agreement ran from group to group of them—“we wish to give you good
in return. We have nothing to give you such as House-Folk value, nothing
but your memory of us, which we hope you may hold as lovingly as we do
yours.”
“We do so,” said Herman.
“Will you take that memory then, as our gift of parting, so to keep it
as the best we have to offer?”
“So to keep it as the best we have to keep,” consented Herman solemnly,
and I after him.
“Why then,” said Persilope, “there is nothing more for it but to set you
on your way to Broken Tree again, and to wish you Good Friending.”
The good-bys were said very quickly; they came about us with light
laughter and good wishes and broke and parted into the wood again. The
sun and the spring and the wind out of the south called them. I sent
messages to Evarra, who stayed in the wood beyond River Ward to bury
Lianth. Trastevera and some others came down the hill with us. When we
had traveled rapidly for an hour they showed us the moon-shaped bay and
the moon-white curve of the beach around it, and the point of cypress
running far into the blue water. Later we could see the white specks of
the houses, and then the close shouldering hills and the moss-hung
pines, the oaks leaning all one way of the wind, and the sea-blue slopes
of ceanothus. As we went our companions slipped from us, melted between
sunny space and woody shadow, and mixed with the brown and green of the
wood side. Now we saw bright regardful eyes and fingers laid on lips—who
knew what men folk might be stirring? And now we felt to right or left
the friendly presences. Finally, when we had been walking I do not know
how long, suddenly there was only Herman and I in the wood, and no
other.
“Herman, Herman!” I said, “they are gone, we shall never see them
again.”
He looked and listened; nothing moved but the flicker of sun on a
wind-stirred leaf or a winged insect in the green arcades of fern. Far
back we heard the call of jays ending in a light high note of mocking
laughter.
“Herman, shall we never find them?”
“Perhaps. Who knows? The trail is very plain here. If we take pains to
notice it, we might come this way again.”
“Yes, let us keep the trail at least. We must find the place again. They
have not forbidden us.”
We followed it close where it left the trees and ran in the grass
between the blossoming lilacs. Wet folded poppies bent above it.
“It was a good time we had with them. I cannot bear to think it will
never come again.”
“Yes, it was a good time. How long was it, Mona?”
“How should I know? Do you remember, the first day we went in by Broken
Tree there was the first spray of lilac blossoming?”
“I remember.”
“And now all the slopes are blue and the air too sweet with them. How
long is that?”
“A long time, I think. I was a professor of Sociology then.”
“And what are you now?”
“Something more, I hope. And—Mona, I think we are taking the best part
of Outland away with us.”
I agreed to that too, as we walked between the blue sprayed fountains of
ceanothus, and felt the swing of the earth under us.
“Are you happy, Mona?”
“Yes. Though we have lost them, and I shall never walk alone in the wood
again without hoping to find them. I am happy, but I do not know why.”
“And have you quite forgiven me?”
“For what, Herman? I have nothing to forgive you.”
“For not being more, seeing more in the first place—for such a number of
things. Have you—quite?”
“Yes, quite.”
We walked on and saw the curdled line of the surf, and heard the long
sigh that passes up from the sea along the pines, and smelled the
beaches. All at once I was aware of the soft springing of the grass
under foot.
“Herman! Herman! Where is the trail? Look! We have lost it.”
We looked, and there was the locked wood behind, and the soft, untrodden
turf before.
“It was here by the buckthorn, I think.”
“By the ceanothus; it came out between two pines.” But though we looked
and ran, it was not in either of these places.
“Herman, we shall never find the trail to that country again.”
“Yes, Mona.”
“Ah, look for it, Herman, come and look!”
Herman stood by the ceanothus and looked at me instead. “Mona,” he said,
“the trail is here.”
“Where, Herman?” But I could not look at him where he stood because of
the shining of his eyes.
“Here, Mona,” he answered with a gesture, “here!”
And I turned and found it on his breast.
THE END
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
2. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as
printed.
3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.