“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.
Whatever the girl had been to him, she was now the evidence of how much his wife had loved him; as much as _that_! It was a declaration which shamed him by its publicity but purchased him anew to passion and protecting tenderness. They stood so, she superbly conscious of her right to a place she had cleared for herself, and he still shielding her. Nobody spoke a word. Behind in the cavern Prassade put back the dead girl’s hair from her soiling blood and covered up her breast. Presently he called Mancha, and the others by one consent moved down the water-worn way, out of the sound of their sorrow. Ravenutzi’s arm was still about his wife. At the foot of the ascent he put her from him quietly.
“Go wait by the outer caves,” he said. “They will not wish to see you when they come out.” And she, lifting up her head from his breast, went quietly, all gentleness and submission, never seeing how the others looked at her, never taking her eyes from him till the boulders closed on her and hid her from their view.
“I should say to you,” said Ravenutzi, “what, perhaps, I may not have time to say again”—for he thought then and the others thought, that Prassade would kill him when he came out of the cave. It was to spare her that sight that he sent his wife away. “You may say to the others when they are able to hear it,” he went on, “that much you may have been thinking of that fair child is wrong. She never told me where the King’s Desire was hid.
“She never told,” he insisted, “not of her own consciousness”—looking about for some point of interest or attention to fix upon, and settling upon some small stones which he pushed together with his foot—“something I had from her without her knowing it ... but there were others”—here, his gaze rested an instant on Noche, and dropped to the stones again—“... several others ... in whose minds the facts lay like trout in a lake for him to make rise who was able.... Among my people there is great skill in this.... You yourselves gave me the opportunity ... all your minds ran full of it as a creek after the rain.”