Some of the dread with which Daria had met the obliteration of memory and identity, moved me to draw from Herman an assurance that nothing could quite wipe out from him all recollection of the fellowship and the good times we had had together. It began to appear an alarming contingency that I should be turned out at any moment in a strange country to find my way back to life in company with a man I did not know and whose disposition toward me was still to be learned. It would have become Herman to be very nice to me at this juncture, and while I sat feeling blankly for the communicating thread, he began to talk of the Ward.
“Some of the women should have gone with her,” he said; “somebody interested in her. It’s all stiff chaparral from here to the ridge. The girl will never stand it.”
“You don’t really know where they have gone,” I hinted, “and Daria doesn’t seem to have suffered.”
“Oh, Daria! But this girl needs looking after. You can see that it means a lot to her, losing—everything. She would have appreciated—things. That string of red berries now—she would have done justice to rubies.”
“The great necklace of red stones? Well, she probably knows where they are by this time.”
“A lot better use for them than keeping them in a hole in the ground,” Herman insisted, “especially when it costs the youth of a girl like that to keep them there.”
“I know at least one Outlier who will agree with you.”
“Did he say that? What makes you think so?”
I have often wondered why having gone so far I did not go further and tell Herman frankly what I thought I had discovered of Mancha’s state of mind. I have wondered oftener, if I had spoken then, if anything would have come of it different or less grievous than what did come. Whatever prevented me, I answered only that he seemed to me a man less bound by custom and superstition than his fellows, and Herman agreed with me.
“But I can tell you,” he said, “that Zirriloë wouldn’t hear of it. You can just see how her whole soul is bound up in the keeping of her vows. She could be true as death to—anybody.” He went on to say how he derived this assurance from the way the sun-touched color of her cheek spread into the whiteness of her neck, and from the blueness of the vein that ran along her wrist, and her springy walk. He ran on in this fashion taking my agreement very much for granted. What I really had thought was that in spite of her beauty and wraptness, the girl had rather a shallow face and would be as likely to be as much engrossed and as sure of herself in any other circumstances. And I was so much disappointed at Herman’s extraordinary failure of perception that I could not allow myself to say anything about it. I felt that a personal note must unreasonably attach to any woman’s attempt to show that a more beautiful one is not necessarily a woman of more personal fineness. I was so irritated with myself for being irritated that I was glad to hear Evarra calling down by the willows, and to leave Herman pitching pebbles into the shallows. Though it turned out that Evarra was asleep under a madroño and nobody had called me.