That was just like Herman. Of course I believed in it.
I can believe six impossible things before breakfast if it suits me, but Herman never could be got to understand the difference between a literary belief and a working certainty.
“At any rate,” I said, “before you guarantee the price of the King’s Desire, you would best have a look at it.”
IX
HOW THE KING’S DESIRE WAS DUG UP, AND BY WHOM
How Herman injected into the hot plans of Mancha this cold doubt I do not know. If he accepted it as a check to his enterprise there was no visible abatement of its urgency. He was forever and fatiguingly busy; crossing over Singing Ford and returning between two days. Passing beyond Moon Crest he visited Alderhold and Bent Bow, fetching a circle almost to Broken Tree to make adherents. He was still and hungry as to his inner want, but outwardly as noisy as a bear, rapping the trunks of hollow trees or prodding the soft earth with his hammer. If in the wood at Deep Fern or Deer Lake Hollow he met with his young men, he passed them without greeting. It is doubtful if he saw them. Plainly the man was ravined with desire.
All this time he gave no trouble to the Ward or her keepers. When she went among the young fern, between the budding willows, he did not seek her, never talked of himself in her company. It was as if the eye of his mind, so fixed upon the Mate, passed over the Maid she was. Otherwise I do not know how he could have withstood her, for she went flushed and glorious. Trastevera, I know, had expected tears and pining. Watching, she was relieved to find the girl still sustained by ecstasy, grew more at ease and trusted Ravenutzi.
For the rest of the Outliers the hesitation of Herman’s enterprise on the probable unworth of the jewels proved no disappointment. It was, in fact, a means of hurrying the movement for removing it from its present cache. They were curious to discover if the Treasure really had such an intrinsic value as Herman had taken for granted. Even though it proved of no value to the House-Folk, it was something the Far-Folk wanted very much. The keeping of it provided an occupation, and the promised unearthing an excitement for which their long truce with the Far-Folk gave them an appetite. In any case it must come up and be hidden again, or they must administer the Cup to Daria a second time. This involved a wrenching of their sympathies they were unwilling to endure, even if it lay in justice to twice enforce her. They were the readier for the enterprise since it appeared not necessarily to involve the acceptance of Herman’s idea.
Prassade and Persilope then, with Mancha and Herman, of course, two of the keepers—the same who had buried it—and several strong men beside, set out for the cache of the King’s Desire. They went north and seaward by a shorter route than the Ward had taken, since they had not the same need of doubling for concealment. They passed the upper limit of redwoods and came to a region of thin, spiked spruce and pines, knuckly promontories encrusted with lichen sticking out of a thin, whitish soil. By afternoon they struck into a gully where an opaque stream purled in shallow basins and spilled in thin cascades to gravely levels. Here they began to take note of landmarks and measure distances. First there was a sheer jut of country rock, stained black by the dribble of a spring. Below it a half moon of pond as green as malachite. Directly up from that, on the shoulder of a stony hill, five pines, slender and virginal, stood circlewise, bent somehow by weather stress to the postures of dancing. They balanced in the wind and touched the tips of their stretched, maiden boughs.
From here, ascending, the stream spindled to a thread, and led the eye under the combe of the ridge to a high round boulder, gripped mid-long of its fall by the curled roots of a pine. Under the boulder was the cache of the King’s Desire.
I asked Herman afterward how soon the intimation of what they were to find there began to reach them, and he said, to himself not at all. He remembered Prassade asking of Noche, if this was the trail they had taken with the Ward, and the old man’s quick, sidewise glance that questioned why he asked. He remembered as they came by the green water, one of the keepers stooping to examine something, and Noche beginning to twitch and bristle like a dog striking an unwelcome trail. They came to the boulder. Signs of the recent rains were all about, the half-uprooted pine that braced it showed a slight but fresh abrasion of the bark. The two keepers had their heads together, whispering apart.