He stopped; there was nothing in the faces of the men that gave him leave to say his craftsman’s delight in her who was to them the injured daughter of their friend.
Prassade came out presently and Mancha with him. They looked nor spoke to no one as they came down the gully, but each took up a stone, walking with it laboriously, and laid it at the cave’s mouth. Then one of the men went and did the same, and the others, and Herman. At last Ravenutzi, seeing no one hindered him, took up a stone and went up and down with them, carrying, until the mouth of the cave was quite full. Presently Ravenutzi’s wife, grown tired of waiting, crept back through the stone arch and stood watching them with red bitten lip, coiling and uncoiling the long strands of her hair.
XIV.
THE KING’S DESIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF IT
The party of us that came up from River Ward to Leaping Water turned aside from the meadow where the Meet had been, and settled in one of the galleries of that amphitheater looking down on its veiled cascades. The shouting of the falls came up to us mixed with the faint, incessant murmur given off by a great forest. From here the rim of the world sank westward into the thin blue ring of the sea.
We had come so slowly, being joined at times by families of Outliers, come out of safe hiding and already furnished with news. We were scarcely well settled in the place when word of the death of the Ward began to circulate among them in that mysterious way of news to travel in the open. Doubtless it came by way of runners stationed out toward Windy Covers, by which trail the seekers of the Ward returned. Rumor of it was rife in the camp a full hour before Mancha and Prassade came in. There was very little said about it, they were at all times as private in their griefs as wild creatures, but I think they felt better satisfied to learn that the natural progress of her betrayal had furnished its own punishment and spared them the necessity of putting Zirriloë to death.
Herman came and told me this, walking at dusk on an open hill where there was long grass blowing and shut-eyed heavy flowers among the grasses. But it was a long time before he would talk freely of that suggestion of excuse, put forth by Ravenutzi, which lay in the appeal to his craftsman’s soul of the girl’s bodily perfection. He had been no more able to resist taking into his hand that fair contrivance than any other jewel of gold and fine stones, and its turning to flesh and blood under his touch had been a bitter and unavoidable consequence. I think Herman’s inarticulateness grew out of feeling himself involved in the ruin of a lovely woman in the common culpability of men. She was a vase which they had pulled about among them in admiring, and dropped and shattered.
I say I think Herman felt this, though I do not now recall any words that passed between us on the subject. Yet I was at that time much nearer to understanding the beguilement of beauty, and the pain of its bafflement which drives men to create of words and paint and stone, forms of it by which no confusion can come. When I saw Ravenutzi sitting among the Far-Folk, with his knees drawn up under his hands and his delicate faun’s profile bent above them, looking out at me in the old way, at once wishful and compelling, the look I sent back to him was almost kind.
The whiteness of his hair had been cut away, the drawn look of his skin smoothed out. I saw how young he was, a little of what those two women had seen who had been drawn by it to death and killing. His wife sat with her head propped against his shoulder. And for so long as she sat there, assured, accepted, it was plain there was for her neither anxiety nor pained remembrance, nor any other thing.
One supposes death at all times so natural that the wound of it heals by its own processes. It was so with the Outliers. No later than the next morning much of the bitterness of loss had drained away with the dark. The business of the Ward being finished they turned without discursiveness to disposing of Ravenutzi, the Far-Folk and the King’s Desire. Though we had no inkling, Herman and I, what would be done to the smith, we felt it would be just; and whatever would be done to the Far-Folk, more than kind. Concerning the Treasure there must some command have circulated. Though we had seen it glinting in the camp at River Ward—there was scarcely a man who had not brought something away with him from the last fight—there was not so much as the red sparkle of a jewel to be seen at Leaping Water.
The Council met early on the second morning, going down toward Council Hollow before the dew was dried upon the fern. All the camp, scattered as it was in a great treeless tract, hung in the breathless quiet of suspense. There was scarcely any stir of talk or movement except now and then among the Far-Folk, who lay all together like cattle on a warm hill slope, turning toward the sun.