“I daresay,” I answered quickly, for I had thought all this while he talked to me, “that it is as good as most ideas of yours, but it doesn’t interest me.” And I walked away and left him staring into the water.
VIII
IN WHICH HERMAN’S IDEA RECEIVES A CHECK
To the dry fog succeeded showers and intervals of super clearness. Vast blunt-headed clouds blundered under a high, receding heaven. Brown croisers of the fern uncurled from the odorous earth, some subtle instinct responded to the incessant stir of sap. The Outliers left off debating to run together flock-wise in the recrudescence of the year. The wet wood was full of whispering, all hours of the night feet went by bearing laughter, not loud but chuckling and daring.
Nevertheless, the clearing of the weather did not scatter them. Some there were whose affairs had called them at the end of the Meet. A few had gone in displeasure at the turn of the Council. Mancha’s supporters, and they were chiefly the young men, remained in the neighborhood of Leaping Water and Deep Fern, to which we had moved when the rain began. Fretted argument would go on where two or three of the men were met, disrupting suddenly. There was a sense of expectancy abroad. Men watched the Ward for more than her beauty as she went with the keepers, in a green gown like the sheath of a bud, her face a flower.
Ravenutzi got from Herman what silver coins he had, and smithied them into a brooch for her; it was rumored that you would find the twin of that pattern in the King’s Desire. Women grew curious, questioned me how the House-Folk lived and loved. They laughed and looked sidewise, but listened.
All this curious possibility of Herman’s idea, and the pricking sense of stir and change, drew off attention from Mancha’s passion, which burned up to the betraying point. Trastevera, who remained steadily aware of his state, credited to it mistakenly all her unease and intimations of disaster. Trouble ranged openly in the wood, but hid its face. It seemed to swell at times toward betrayal: I could see small hair bristling on the necks of the men when they had sat quietly together, or one would throw up his head like an uneasy hound. I think as the newness of Herman’s proposal began to wear down, some of them became aware of Mancha’s state, but said nothing lest, uncovered too much in speech, it would burst the quicker into scandal.
He had very little talk with the girl, as little communication was allowed, even in company, and Mancha made no special occasions. Anywhere in her trail you might come upon him mooning upon a flower she had dropped, the bough she had leaned upon, the crumpled fern. He would sit in the pleasant pauses of the noon, the joints of his face loosened, his gaze swimming as he looked at her, his hair above his face was like pale fire. He was all molten white with passion; if the girl breathed upon him he would have burst ravening into flame.
Trastevera was afraid that the Ward, quick, for all her simple seeming, to observe her effect upon men, would become aware of Mancha’s love for her and kindle her imagination at the vanity of this conquest. Any girl might well have been touched by the love of a man worth so much as men are accounted worth. Ravenutzi knew, and managed to make his knowledge seem to grow out of his wish to relieve the perturbation of Trastevera, of whom he was always considerately observant.
There was a quick sympathy of instinct between those two dark ones, and he served her with that fatal appeal to women, of sweetness struggling with some baser attribute, toward her good opinion. He had the air when in her presence, and under her approbation, of having climbed into it out of some native unworthiness.
It was an air calculated to make any woman generous in the bestowal of her company. By degrees Trastevera fell into the way of letting him serve her by interposing a screen between Zirriloë and the Hammerer’s too unguarded gaze. Often in the still noons when Mancha’s adoring mind burned through all the drowsy silences, he would make a diversion, singing or relating one of his long tales.