In the early half light, as they traveled, they were aware of a tall woman with long hair blowing, who came and stood on a hill overlooking them for long enough to have counted all the captives. When she had told them over, she wrung her hands and bit upon them, and vanished into the morning mist. I supposed it must have been Ravenutzi’s wife. She was still looking for some clue of him and had not found it.
We moved, all of us, from Windy Covers that day to a place beyond the Ledge, but near enough to the Gap for us to fall back upon our own country if need arose. That night, before Mancha got in from the Smithy, Herman came back again. It was the pale end of night, the moon was gone ghost white, and the wind was awake that runs before the dawn. I was lying sleepless in my bed under the buckthorn when I heard the whisper of their arrival on the far side of the camp.
I had said to myself that I owed Herman no welcome. Though there was no personal tie between us, there was in our common condition of aliens among the Outliers an obligation to look out for me, which he had no right to neglect. Here was I left to he knew not what pains and inconveniences while he ran after this wild girl and a faithless, dishonored man. The more I considered this, the less of satisfaction it brought me. For whatever the pitiableness of the girl’s case, and I felt there might be something in that, it was no affair of Herman’s. Why should he set himself beside her and against all other women who had kept right and true, by what pains and passionate renunciations I seemed now to feel myself seized and participated. I saw myself with the others affronted by any excusing of Zirriloë. That my friend should so excuse her pointed and made personal the offense.
I was so sure of this resentment, and it was so palpable a barrier in my own mind to the renewal of intimacy, that when Herman, before he had eaten or rested, came stealing among the stretched figures, I could not imagine what he was looking for. He crept with long, stooping pauses where an arm thrown up or a drawn cover concealed an identity, until he came to where I lay, wrapped in a cougar skin under the buckthorn. Then I knew by the full stop, and by the long breath of easement after strain that it was I he wanted.
He sat down a very little way from me, on the hillock of a broken pine. Though I could not see his eyes in that light, I made out that his face was turned toward me, and that he leaned it upon his hand. Whether he felt some emanation of my resentment and was troubled by it, or whether from weariness, he moved uneasily and sighed. He must have grown more accustomed to the dark by traveling in it, for presently he reached out to brush lightly some small twigs and leaves that had fallen on my bed, and felt or saw the barely perceptible stir I made.
“Mona?” he whispered.
“Well?”
“Did I wake you? I did not mean to. Do you wish to sleep again?”
“I am not asleep.”
I suppose he expected some question which would give him leave to begin with what his mind was full of, but I had already heard the whisper, handed from bed to bed. I guessed what ill success the expedition had, and I had no wish to hear Herman’s part in it. I lay still and made out the faint movement in the leaves of the buckthorn, until, by the slow clearing of the dark, I could see the droop of his figure with fatigue, and I was not proof against that.