It was always so that they came together about the time that the blue haze and the late light rayed out long level bars across the hills. They would be awake and about at whatever hour pleased them, and take their nooning in whatever place. Through the days there would scarcely be so much seen of them as a woman beating fiber between two stones by a brook, or a man cutting fern on a steep slope. So still they were by use, and so habituated to the russet earth and the green fern and the gray stone, that they could melt into it and disappear. Though you heard close about you low-toned talk and cheerful laughter, you could scarcely, unless they wished it, come bodily upon them.
On this evening all those in the neighborhood of Deep Fern had come together, not only because of the news of House-Folk brought to camp, but because this was the time set for the return of Trastevera from some errand connected with the great occasion of which I had been told. It was she who had seen trouble walking with us on the trail from Broken Tree, and without whose advisement, so Evarra had already explained to me, nothing would be determined concerning Herman and me.
This Trastevera was also the wife of Persilope, and whatever the business that called her from Deep Fern that day, she was late returning. All the Outliers had come in. The light had left the lower reaches of the forest and began to shine level through the fan-spread boughs before Persilope came out of the grass walk where he had been pacing up and down restlessly. Advised by some sound or sense too fine for me, he lifted up his hand toward that quarter of the thick-set grove that fenced the far end of the meadow. In the quick attentiveness that followed on the gesture, he stood in the flush of rising tenderness until, with some others behind her, she came lightly through the wood. One perceived first that she was smaller than the others, most delicately shaped, and next, that the years upon her were like the enrichment of time on some rare ornament.
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.