Outland

by Mary Austin

When they came near this place, Ravenutzi began to go more slowly, forewarned perhaps and afraid of what he should find there. He raised a call, cautiously at first, got no answer, called loudly, grew anxious, set off running again, the men hard behind him. The place fronted westward; the shadows retreating inward gave to the caverns under the rocks a shallow look. The men could not have told from the outside which of them would have yielded passage, but Ravenutzi plunged into one, which proved an arched gallery. It opened into a sort of court, from which a water-worn gully led steeply up to a ledge on which opened a cave, overhung and guarded at the entrance by fire-blackened stones. They were slow enough going up this steep, to observe a woman who sat at the mouth of the cave with her knees drawn up under her hands, and her head bent upon them. They saw that she was tall and had long hair that coiled flatly about her throat and between her breasts.

She looked up from her knees as they climbed and clustered on the narrow platform before the cave. There was neither astonishment nor fear in her eyes, only weariness, as of one who has accomplished what she has long sought and found that after that nothing mattered. Some color sprang in her face as Ravenutzi stood before her, the faint tinge of expectancy. But he never looked at her.

“Where, where is she?”

It was Ravenutzi who asked, and got no answer except as by the turning of the long throat she indicated the cave behind her. Resting her head upon her knees, the tall woman went on looking quietly at nothing.

The floor of the cave sloped downward. It was low at the mouth, and the men stooped going through it. It was large and airy, and had been hung with tawny and dappled skins; some light broke through high crannies in the roof and showed them in the midst of these the Ward. She was very beautiful. The sparkling masses of her hair drifted out on either side the cameo face. Over the eyes, that were brown like agates at the bottom of a brook, the pale lids half drooped like the rims of snow that lie along brook borders in the cold. She was partly dressed, the bosom bare, and over its soft curves ran a line of blood-red stones, wickedly a-fire on that cold breast, tremblingly, shiftily alive in the light that sifted through the crannies of the rocks. Around the throat and in the hollow of the bosom they led the eye down where they melted, and ran in redness and spread dully on the floor, still wet and dripping.

He was so moved by that sight, Herman said, and for the moment so little believing in it, that he had no realization of how the others looked at it nor what they might have felt. He was first roused to take note of his companions by seeing the smith turn from the body with a movement of deprecation, and the sudden swinging of Mancha’s hammer into position. He heard it click as it rose against the roof of the cave. He heard an exclamation but could not tell for the life of him whether he himself had not uttered it; and then he saw the hammer caught from behind by the girl’s father.

“Mine,” he said; “mine, not yours.”

Prassade was as fierce upon the point as if some one had denied it: his the greater offense, to him the punishment. Then as quietly as Mancha’s hammer dropped, the wrath of Prassade fell off before the unimpassioned quietness of the Ward. Stillness seemed to rise from her and crowd them out of the narrow chamber into the overhung and guarded entrance where the woman sat winding and unwinding the long coils of her hair. They did not look at the Ward again nor back at what Prassade did; it was a relief to watch the woman. She stood up and her head was high, her lip was bitten red, two spots of color glowed upon her cheeks. She looked at Ravenutzi as a child might who has broken a delicate thing and refuses to be chidden for it.

“The place was too small for us both,” she said, and then after a little: “I thought you would never come,” with a gesture of weary, ineffable tenderness. “Oh, I thought you would never come.”

She was all alive to him and very beautiful, so flushed and so alive you could not understand that death could be so close behind her. All the rushing of her blood and the swaying of her slender figure demanded of him what, even with death behind, he could not deny. He took her in his arms. He put up his hand to turn her face on his shoulder away from the hard eyes of the men. But he could not conceal as he did so the flush upon his own and the tremor of renewal.