“As soon as may be; I have dawdled too long. Where is Herman?”
“With Persilope at Lower Fern. What do you want of him?”
“What you wished: to put an end to this business of the Ward.”
“Mancha, Mancha! That is not what I meant. You must put an end to your
loving!”
“Does loving end?”
Trastevera gave up.
“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?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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