“What will you do?”
“I will find Herman first.” She heard him rapping his purpose to the fore on the deep-sounding trunks of trees as he went.
You may guess how much comfort Trastevera got out of this interview, of which she told me very little at this time, perhaps because she had failed, and perhaps because of an incident occurring about that time which put it wholly out of mind. One of the Outliers who had set out for home on the breaking up of the Council had found a suspicious circumstance, and came crying with it all the way up by River Ward to Deep Fern and Deer Lake Hollow.
He with his wife and young brood passing over Singing Ford into the district of broad-headed oaks, where there was low scrub of lupin and rhus, had met Daria setting snares in the rabbit runways. He had sung out a greeting to her, for the moment forgetting her state of forgetfulness, and she had stood up in the knee-high lupin with her hand across her eyes, taken unawares, and called him by his name. It had popped out, startling at sight of him like a rabbit from a burrow. Then as he stood still with astonishment she checked and stammered, recalled the word, protested that she had mistaken him for another, and at last broke and fled crying through the chaparral. The Outlier, a just man but a little slow, considered the circumstance, went on, in fact, a whole stage of his journey before he arrived at a conclusion. Whereupon he sent on his family toward home, and came back all the way to Deep Fern with his news, which had grown upon him momentously as he traveled. Daria remembered! How much?
Had the drink been made too light for her. Had the tumult of her mind resisted sleep. Or had her soul been so upborne by love that it floated clear of the drug that drowned her sense?
No one of the women had been with her when she recovered. Those whose custom it was to watch the Ward into wakefulness delicately withdrawing for the lover’s sake.
“Remember, oh remember,” he had insisted to the last, and she had remembered the name and face of a man not in her own district. How then would her memory stand toward familiar things?
This was disconcerting news indeed. There were some who blamed Persilope, who had poured out a portion of the drink. Others blamed the women for not staying by her. Trastevera blamed herself, and was tormented afresh, seeing as a departure from good usage of which she herself was source and center. Mancha and Herman found it another reason for pushing their idea, which the Hammerer by this time openly avowed. As if his admission of his passion had in a measure defined him to himself, he had shaken off the outward evidence of it, and was occupied chiefly in bringing his purpose to completion. He had not spoken to Zirriloë since his talk with Trastevera, sat no more mooning in the woods, but went about everywhere among the young men with Herman at his shoulder, making adherents.
“But what is your objection to it?” Herman had asked of me, sitting under the drawn flaps of Evarra’s hut, upon which the rain drummed hollowly. I had a great many objections, based upon my conviction that no amount of Treasure would buy immunity for the Outliers once they were made known to men. But all my reasons would have lacked their proper cogency with Herman, who was like the Outliers in being too honorable to predict dishonor on the part of others. I knew too little of business to forecast the hindrances likely to fall in the way. All I was sure of was that it was a mistake, first and last it was bound to be a mistake, and very little progress of the affair would prove it.
“If you think so well of their way of life,” said I, “why do you wish to change it? They wouldn’t be happy in our way; it wouldn’t agree with them.”