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 277returned. 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.
278I 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 279of 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 280over 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 281up, 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 282high 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, 283saying 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 284from 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?”
285It 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 stead............