Outland

by Mary Austin

She moved in the exultation of her shining mood, unconscious of the way her feet went or what eyes were upon her, to the sound of the shallow drums and the delicate high flutes. As the music dropped she stopped before Persilope, who stood forward a little with some formal words of ritual or salutation. I missed the exact words, all my attention taken up with what had happened to Mancha. He had been standing just behind the chief, and in the brief interval while Zirriloë had come ten steps or so out of the shadow, he had passed, as though her beauty had been some swift, vivifying shock, from being a grave beholder to an active participant of the occasion. Deep red surged up in his face and left it pale again, his eyes, which were blue, burned amber points and took her like a flame. He shook as though the joints of his spirit were loosed, and took the full red under-lip in his teeth to keep back the tide of strength that came on him as he looked at her. His breath came purringly. I saw the soul of the man lithe and rippling in him, the glint of his eyes, the mass and thickness of his body incredibly lifted and lightened by the consciousness of the Mate. He did not know what had happened to him, but he laughed to himself his joy in her, as she moved wrapped in her high errand down the still summer glade, and across the meadow.

“Herman! Herman! Do you see?” I whispered.

He was sitting on the fallen tree next to me, and as I moved my hand toward him in that vague pang following quick on the shock of inexpressible beauty, I felt his fingers cold. His lips were open and I saw his tongue move to wet them, like a man unconsciously athirst.

Beyond the clearing, thick purplish trunks of the redwood upbore the masses of foliage like a cloud. The space between the first twenty feet or so of their gigantic columns was choked with laurel and holly and ceanothus, pierced by long tunnels that the deer had made. Down one of these the two foremost of the keepers plunged and were lost behind the mask of loose, wild vines that festooned the front of the wood, lifting and falling in the wind that by mid-morning began to set seaward from the high ridges.

But the girl, some ten steps behind them, still in her half-seeing mood, missed the moment of the out-streaming of the vines, checked and faltered. The wind caught her dress and wrapped her in it, the drapery of vines swung out and caught her hair. Before the other keepers could come up with her, the long arm of Ravenutzi reached out from his point of vantage on a heavy, slanting trunk and gathered up the offending vines, holding them high and guardedly until the girl could pass. The detention was slight, but long enough for the annoyance of it to have pierced her abstraction before he let the curtain fall almost on the heads of the hurrying keepers, long enough for her to have looked up at Ravenutzi and accord to him the first conscious recognition of her solemn passage. Whatever flattery there might have been in that, it could not draw so much as a backward glance from him. With the swish of the long vines flung back upon the wall of boughs, he sprang forward from his perch, and as if that action had been the signal, drew with him a ring of staring faces toward the grassy spit by which the trail entered the meadow.

The music, which during the ritual had melted into the undertone of forest sounds, emerged again more pointedly human and appealing. It summoned from the bluish glooms an interest so personal and touching that it drew the Outliers from the shy wildness of their ways. The ring of watchers surged forward a step, the music rose like a sigh of expectation and ushered in a group of women who, without any order or solemnity, but with a great and serious kindness, supported a young woman in their midst. It was she who had been the Ward and was now to receive forgetfulness.

As soon as I saw Trastevera, upon whose arm she leaned, I understood that these were the former Wards, come to afford her such comfort as their experience justified. It was not until I saw her mother hurry forward crying: “Daria! Daria!” that I began to realize what need of comfort there must be. Evarra beside me stirred the Cup. Its faint aromatic odor was of a cold and sickly dread, reflected from Daria’s widened eyes on some secret surface of myself.

She was a pretty girl, warm-tinted, eyes of a wet gray, the broad brow and sensitive short lip of women whose happiness centers in approval. It was easy to read in her face that of all the restrictions of her Wardship the one against loving had been hardest borne; plain to be seen now in the way she clung to her mother, who took the face between her hands, that of all the forfeitures that lay in the blue flower of forgetfulness, that one of loving was most difficult to pay.

“O mother, mother,” she said, “I cannot bear it!”

She shuddered sick, looking on all she had lived among and knowing that she might never know them again with that one of herselves which stood hesitating between the meadow and the wood. There was not one of all those trails, if she set foot in it to-morrow, that she would know where it went or what she might meet in it. She was to die in effect, to leave life and memory, to wake mutilated in the midst of full-blooded womanhood, without childhood, girlhood, parents, intimates.