Part 3

I do not know why in our sort of society it should always seem regrettable, when not a little ridiculous, for a woman to be ten years older than her husband. Since I have known the exquisite maturity of Trastevera’s spirit, tempering her husband’s passion to finer appreciation of her ripened worth, I have not thought it so. As she came lightly through the thick grass of the uncropped meadow there was, as often, a glow upon her that might have come from the business she had been abroad upon. It sustained her a little above the personal consideration, so that almost before she had recovered from the flush of her husband’s embrace, she turned toward Prassade—the red man who had found me in the wood—to say that all was as he would have wished it, and he had good reason for being pleased. This being apparently a word he had waited for, he thanked her with a very honest satisfaction. Then, with her hand still in Persilope’s, he looking down on her more rejoiced with having her back from her errand than with anything she had to say about it, she turned a puzzled, inquiring glance about the camp.

“Ravenutzi?” she questioned doubtfully; but the smith smiled and shook his head, and with one consent, as if she had answered expectation, the company parted and showed us to her where we stood. Without having any previous intention about it, I found myself rising to my feet to meet her, and heard Herman scramble lamely up behind.

She stood so, confronting us without a word for as long as it took Prassade briefly to explain how they had taken us, and why they had not done that to us which I already understood had threatened me on the first day of my captivity. This was long enough for me to discern that she was darker than the other Outliers, that her hair must have been about the color of Ravenutzi’s before it turned. Her eyes were gray and clouded with amber like the morning surf. She moved a step toward me, nodding her head to what the young chief said, and shaking it slowly to something in herself. Wonder and perplexity deepened in her. Delicately, as seeking knowledge of me and not realizing that I could understand her speech or answer in it, she drew the tips of her fingers across my breast. There was no more offensiveness in the touch than in the questioning fingers of the blind. Wonder and perplexity deepening still, she turned back to Persilope.

“I grow an old woman,” she said, “I have failed you.”

He took the hand which she put out deprecatingly, and held it strongly against his breast, laughing the full, fatuous man’s laugh of disbelief.

“When have you failed me?”

“I do not know,” she protested; “I cannot tell;” and I understood that the doubt referred to her failure to get from me by that contact, the clew she sought.

“Surely these are they whom I feared for you to meet when you set out for the sea by the cypresses. Not for what they would do to you”—her look was toward Persilope—“but for what they might bring to all Outliers. But now I am not sure.”

She spoke as much to the company at large as to her husband. The number of them had increased, until I could see the outer ring melting into the twilight of the trees, eyes in formless faces of amazement and alarm. Now at the admission of a difficulty, they all turned toward her with that courtesy of inward attention by which, when one of them would understand more of a matter than lay directly before him, each turned his thought upon the subject gravely for a time, like so many lamps lighted in a room, and turned it off again with no more concern when the matter was resolved. But even as she smiled to acknowledge their help she shook her head.

“No,” she repeated, “I cannot tell.” She turned and looked at me, and I gave her the look back with so deep a wish to have her understand that no trouble should come to them by me, that she must have sensed it, for her look went on by me and stopped at Herman.

“You?” she questioned.

“Tell her,” said Herman, who had not caught all the words, but only the general purport of her speech, “tell her that all we ask is to go to our own homes, unharmed and harming no one.”

Now that was not exactly what I had in mind, for though I would not for worlds have made trouble for the Outliers, I wished nothing so little as being sent away before I had got to know more of them. But before I could frame a speech to that end, Trastevera spoke again more lightly.

“Now that I have seen them, there seems nothing in them but kindness and well-meaning. Indeed it is so unusual a thing that House-Folk should discover us, that I am not sure we ought not to pay them some little respect for it.”

She made me a little whimsical acknowledgment of this sentiment, but before I could think of a reply, some slight shifting of the ringed watchers thrust forward Ravenutzi. I recalled suddenly what I had neglected to state in the midst of Prassade’s explanation, that his finding me was not the first intimation I had had of the presence of Outliers in the neighborhood of Broken Tree. Up to this time I had observed that when the Outliers had their heads together on any matter of immediate concern, it had been Ravenutzi’s habit to keep a little to one side, as though not directly affected. Now as I saw him pushed into the cleared space by the stream side, it stirred dimly in my mind that the circumstance of my first meeting with him, which I had not before mentioned, might mean something. I hardly understood what.

I must have made some motion, some slight betraying glance which the smith detected. While the words were in my throat he looked at me, subtly, somehow encompassingly, as if he had projected his personality forward until it filled satisfyingly all my thought. I no longer thought it worth while to mention where I had first seen Ravenutzi nor what I had found him doing. I was taken with a sudden inexplicable warmth toward him, and a vague wish to afford him a protection for which he had not asked and did not apparently need. Swift as this passage was, I saw that Trastevera had noted it. Something dimmed in her, as if her mind had lain at the crossing of our two glances, Ravenutzi’s and mine, and been taken in the shadow.

“For the disposing of the House-Folk,” she finished evenly, as though this had been in her mind from the first to say, “you had better take counsel to decide whether they shall be given the Cup at once, or be kept to await a sign.”

I saw Persilope stooping to her, urging that she was tired, that she had come too far that day, she would be clearer in the morning. She shook her head still, looking once long at me, and once almost slyly at the smith, and then at us no more, but only at her husband, as she walked slowly along the meadow against the saffron-tinted sky. Then we were taken away, Herman and I, to our respective huts.

The place called Deep Fern by the Outliers lay in the middle of three half hollow basins looking seaward, and clearing all the intervening hills. Barriers thick set with redwood, dividing the cupped space like the ridges of a shell, ran into a hollow full of broad oaks and brambles. Between the ridges brooks ran to join the creek that, dropping in a white torrent to the basin called Lower Fern, made a pool there, from which it was also called Deer Lake Hollow. The upper basin, long and narrow, was named from the falls, Leaping Water.

The camp of the Outliers lay in one of the widest of the furrows between the ridges where the redwoods marched soldierly down to the stream side. Above it, between Deep Fern and a place called Bent Bow, lay Council Hollow. It was there, when the moon was an hour high, a battered-looking moon, yellow and low, went all the Outliers to consider what was to be done about us. It was a windy hollow, oval shaped, with long white knuckles of rock sticking out along the rim, where no trees grew, nothing taller in it than the shadows of the penstemon which the moon cast upon the rocks. Whenever the wind moved, there was a strong smell of sweet grass and yerba buena. There would have been about thirty men of the Outliers gathered when we came up the ridge from Deep Fern. We halted with the women at a point where we could see, near to one end, a little fire of crossed sticks low on the ground. The Outliers were at all times sparing of fire and cautious in the use of it.

The Council had been sitting some time, I think, upon other matters, when we took up our station on the rising ground. Trastevera went down, winding between the rocks toward the ruddy point of fire. The moon was moving in a shallow arc not high above the ranges, and some hurrying clouds scattered the light. We could see little more than the stir of her going, the pale discs of faces or the shining of an arm or shoulder in the clear space between the shadows of the clouds.

She went on quietly, all talk falling off before her until she stood in the small, lit circle between the leaders, who inquired formally of her had she anything to say of importance on the business of the two strangers.

“Only this,” she said, “that although I was greatly troubled before they came, by a sense of danger impending, I am now free from it so far as the House-Folk are concerned.”

“But do you,” questioned Prassade, “sense trouble still, apart from these?” He motioned toward Herman and me, who had been brought behind her almost to the circle of the flare.

“Trouble and shadow of change,” she said, and after a pause: “Shall I speak?”

Without waiting for the click of encouragement that ran about the Hollow, she began:

“You know all of you that I have, through no fault, the blood of the Far-Folk, which has been for a long time the blood of traitors and falsifiers. And yet never at any time have I played traitor to you nor brought you uncertain word, except”—I thought her voice wavered there—“in the matter of the hostage.”

If there had been any wavering it was not in the councillors, whose attention seemed to stiffen to the point of expectation as she went on steadily.

“When it was a question more than a year ago whether the Far-Folk should send us their best man and cunningest as a hostage for accomplished peace, you know that I was against it, though I had no reason to give, beyond the unreasoning troubling of my spirit. Later when Ravenutzi was brought into our borders, and I had met with him, there was something which sang to him in my blood, and a sense of bond replaced the presentiment. All of which I truly admitted to you.”

So still her audience was, so shadowed by the drift of cloud, that she seemed, as she stood with her face whitened by the moon, and the low fire glinting the folds of her dress, to be explaining herself to herself alone, and to admit the need of explanation.

“And because,” she said, “I could not be sure if it was a foreseeing, or merely my traitor blood making kinship to him, you took the matter to council and accepted the hostage. Are you sorry for it?”

At this, which had been so little anticipated, there went a murmur around the hollow as of doubt not quite resolved. Several cried out uncertain words which a ruffle of wind broke and scattered. Prassade wagged his red beard, shouting:

“No! By the Friend!”

“Then,” she went on, more at ease, I thought, “as it was with Ravenutzi, so with these. I saw trouble, and now I do not see it; trouble that comes of keeping them, or trouble of letting them go. That I cannot determine for you. So I say now, if you do not regret what you have done by Ravenutzi, do the same with these, accept and hold them, waiting for a sign.”

She left off, and the moon came out of the cloud to discover how they stood toward it, and went in again discovering nothing.

Then a man who had already pricked himself upon my attention, stood up to argue the matter. He was short and exceedingly stout of build. Above the thick bands of leather that protected his lower limbs, he wore no dress but a cougar skin bound about the thick columnar body and held in place by a cord passing over the shoulder. He was armed with a crotched stick that had an oblong pointed stone bound in the crotch by thongs, the handle of which was so long that, as he stood with his hands, which were wide and burned but shapely, resting upon it, the head of the weapon lay upon the ground. What was most singular in his appearance, as he stood blocked solidly against the half-lit sky, was his hair. It was pale yellow, crisp and curling, and rayed out erectly from his head as though it were the emanation of some natural force or property of the man, curiously and independently alive above the square and somewhat meaningless regularity of his countenance.

“Why,” inquired he, “were these House-Folk brought here to Deep Fern? Why not made to drink forgetfulness when first taken?”

“Evarra had forgotten the Cup,” Persilope explained; “she thought it could be gathered at Broken Tree, but she had forgotten how much further the season is advanced in that neighborhood.”

“But now,” said Evarra, “I have prepared it, and there is nothing more to do.” She came forward, and I observed that she held a wooden bowl against her breast from which steam arose, and an aromatic smell.

The moon had risen early on the track of the sun. The shallow lap of hills in which we stood gave directly westward to the belated glow that diffused through the moon shadows an amber bloom, in which, though the faces of the Outliers shone indistinctly, every motion and purpose was discernible. I could see then that Evarra’s purpose was to give Herman and me to drink of some herb which should cause us to forget all that had happened to us since we had crossed their borders at Broken Tree, and so send us home again. It met with so much approval that I spoke hurriedly to forestall it.

“No, no!” I cried. “We have done no harm to you that you should do so great a harm to us. If you must send us away, why, send us, and we will give you our word, and that is the best thing we have to give, that no one shall know of what has happened these four days. But do not take away the recollection from us.” I spoke so earnestly and meant so much what I said, taking Herman’s hand so as to include him in the vehemence of my request, though I do not think he had any particular feeling at the time, that I made some way with them.

“Nothing is farther from our thoughts,” I said, seeing Evarra hesitate, “than to bring harm upon you. Not for the world would we betray your ways nor your homes nor your treasure——”

I do not know why I should have mentioned treasure, except that seeing old Noche’s flowing head outlined against the pale luminosity of the sky that instant, brought it to my mind. The word popped out on my tongue as suddenly as it had popped in. Instantly there was a sharp crackling of exclamations and a stir as of people rushing together when a brand has snapped out of the fire, followed by a portentous stillness. Into this bay of sound the red-pointed beard of Prassade projected itself.

“Who,” he cried, “has been telling of treasure in the hearing of House-Folk?”

“No one, no one,” I protested, anxious not to provoke blame; “it is only that I overheard the children——”

“It was I,” admitted Noche regretfully, “old fool that I am. I was telling the children, and I did not think she understood so much.”

“Fool!” said Prassade; “and twice fool for being an old one!”

But Persilope corrected him.

“At the time of the Wardship it is permitted to tell the children of the King’s Desire and the keeping of it.”

“But not in the presence of House-Folk,” Prassade insisted, “nor by one who thinks there is no harm in a jewel if only it shines well and has a story to it.”

There was more to this which the wind broke and carried away, arms lifted and heads cast up within the shadow, turbulence and murmurs of denial. I heard Trastevera say, half to herself:

“Trouble come indeed, when one Outlier calls another a fool in open council.”

“It is nothing,” whispered Evarra at my shoulder, “all this talk. Though you had the King’s Desire in your hand, yet you would stay if Persilope thought she wished it.”

Then the yellow head of Mancha crinkled in the circle of the fire, his face under it grotesquely blocked with light, like some ancient mask, crying:

“Signs—do we wait for Signs? Here is a Sign: first the woman comes, and then the man seeking her. Now, if they are not returned speedily to their own place who may not come looking for the two of them? And if, being kept, they escape by chance and go back talking of treasure——”

“But a Sign!” cried Persilope, interrupting him. “Outliers, here is a Sign. These House-Folk have found us in a place where none of their kind so much as mark our trails. Within a day after being in our camp they have heard of the King’s Desire, and talked openly of it. This is a Sign that they are more favored by the Friends of the Soul of Man than any of their kind. Is it not a Sign?”

We could see men rising to their feet here and there, and some cried out: “A Sign! A Sign!” And then other broken phrases, torn and trumpeted by the wind. Persilope took the bowl from Evarra, holding it out over the fire with a motion to extinguish the dying flame.

“One has seen strangers coming, and strange things have come; shall we not wait upon her word?” he cried. I could make nothing of the confused murmur which ringed the hollow. Persilope must have read acquiescence in it, for he partially emptied the contents of the bowl upon the fire and then passed it to Mancha, Ward of the Outer Borders, to see what he would do. Mancha, smiling, handed the cup to Trastevera as a sign of unbroken confidence; she, as I guessed, so accepting it. That was the last I saw of her before Evarra hurried me away, holding high the bowl, slowly pouring the ceremonial water, silvered by the moon.

IV THE MEET AT LEAPING WATER

Within five days, during which it rained and cleared, a fine long growing rain that left the world new washed and shining, the Meet of the Outliers was moved to Leaping Water.

This was the amphitheater of the terraced basin lying next above Deep Fern, and took its name from the long leap of the creek that came flashing down arch by arch from the high, treeless ridges. Five leaps it took from Moon-Crest to the Basin, where it poured guttering, in so steep a channel that the spray of it made a veil that shook and billowed with the force of its descending waters. It trailed out on the wind that drove continually, even on the stillest days, between the high wings of the mountain, and took the light as it traveled from east to west and played it through all its seven colored changes. It was like a great pulse in the valley, the throb and tremble of it, flushing and paling. The Basin was clear meadow land, well-flowered, close set by the creek, but opening well under the redwoods, with here some sunny space of shrubs, and there stretching up into the middle region of white firs dozing on the steeps above the water.

It was here we began to learn about the Love-Left Ward which was the occasion of their coming together.

The very first I heard of it was from Evarra’s slim lad, Lianth, who, when he was sent to keep me company, would lie on the fern, propping his chin upon his hand, and sing to me in his reedy unsexed voice, of a maiden who had left loving for the sake of a great service to her tribe. Then plucking up the brown moss by the roots, examining it carefully, he would ask me if I thought it was really right for a girl to do that sort of thing.

“What sort?”

“Give up loving and all her friends, boys she’s always—liked, you know, and keep a Ward, like Zirriloë.”

“Did she do that?”

“Well, they chose her to be the Ward this year, and her father let her. I don’t think he ought!”

“Why not?”

Lianth was not very clear on this point, except as it involved the masculine conception of beauty as the sign of a real inward preciousness. Zirriloë had a way of walking, like a wind in a blooming meadow, she had a cheek as soft, as richly colored, as the satin lining of unripened fir cones which he broke open to show me. _Therefore_ Prassade shouldn’t have let her forswear all loving for ten years.

“She can’t even look at a boy,” said Lianth; “only at old men, Noche and Waddyn and Ravenutzi, and if there was—anybody—had thought of marrying her, he’d have to give up thinking about it for ten years. And anyway, what is the good of giving a girl secrets to keep if you have to watch her night and day to see that she keeps them?”

There was a great deal more to this which Herman learned from the men and the girl’s father. Prassade, whose eldest child she was, felt himself raised to immeasurable dignity by the choice of Zirriloë, who was in fact all that Lianth reported her, and more. To his pride it was a mere detail that during the ten years of her Wardship she was to live apart from all toward whom her heart moved her, kept by old, seasoned men, who never left her except with others older and less loverly than themselves. These six months past she had been with her watchers in a lonely place, learning by trial what it meant to have left all love to become the Ward of mysteries.

It was there Trastevera had been when I first saw her, to examine the girl and discover if her mind was still steadfast.

So she found it, and so reported it to Prassade, and all things being satisfactory, the feast of the Love-Left Ward was to take place on the fifth day from this. When her term was done the Ward took the Cup, and so forgetting all she had heard, returned to the normal use of women.

“But,” I said to Lianth, once when we were gathering elderberries by the creek, “what is it all about, this secret which Zirriloë must keep, and is not trusted in the keeping?”

“Ah!” he exclaimed impatiently, kicking at the mossy stones in the water-bed. “Ask Noche—he is one of the keepers.”

I should have taken that advice at once, but Noche was away at the Ledge, or River Ward, or wherever the girl was, and Evarra was much too busy to talk. Practically all the Outliers were expected at Leaping Water, and there was a great deal to do. As to how many there were of them, and what places they came from, I could never form any idea, since outside of Council Hollow they never came together in the open. At the fight at River Ward there were forty picked men, slingsmen and hammerers, but counting women and children there must have been quite four times that number at Leaping Water. They ran together like quail in the wood, and at a word melted like quail into its spacious silences.

There was that subtle essence of rejuvenation in the air that comes after rain. Buds of the incense shrub were swelling and odorous. All the forest was alive and astir with the sense of invisible friendly presences and low-toned happy talk that seemed forever at the point, under cover of a ruffling wind or screening rush of water, of breaking into laughter.

We came often upon lovers walking in the high arched aisles, children scuttling pink and unabashed in the dappled water, or at noons, men and women half sunk in the fern deep in gossip or dozing. Such times as these we began to hear hints by which we tracked a historic reality behind what I had already accepted heartily, and Herman with grudging, the existence of the King’s Desire.

They would be lying, a dozen of them in company on the brown redwood litter, the towered trunks leaning to the firs far above them. Then one would begin to sing softly to himself a kind of rhymeless tune, all of dead kings in a rock chamber canted in their thrones by the weight of jewels, and another would answer with a song about a lovely maid playing in sea caves full of hollow light.