"Mr. Armitage is up at Newton's!" Paul yelled to Michael, when he saw him at his back-door a few minutes after Sophie had given him the news.
"Not the old man?" Michael inquired.
"No, the young 'un."
Word was quickly bruited over the fields that the American, one of the best buyers who came to the Ridge, had arrived by the evening coach. He invariably had a good deal of money to spend, and gave a better price than most of the local buyers.
Dawe P. Armitage had visited Fallen Star Ridge from the first year of its existence as an opal field, and every year for years after that. But when he began to complain about aches and pains in his bones, which he refused to allow anybody to call rheumatism, and was assured he was well over seventy and that the long rail and sea journey from New York City to Fallen Star township were getting too much for him, he let his son, whom he had made a partner in his business, make the journey for him. John Lincoln Armitage had been going to the Ridge for two or three years, and although the men liked him well enough, he was not as popular with them as his father had been. And the old man, John Armitage said, although he was nearly crippled with rheumatism, still grudged him his yearly visit to the Ridge, and hated like poison letting anyone else do his opal-buying.
Dawe Armitage had bought some of the best black opal found on the Ridge. He had been a hard man to deal with, but the men had a grudging admiration for him, a sort of fellow feeling of affection because of his oneness with them in a passion for black opal. A grim, sturdy old beggar, there was a certain quality about him, a gruff humour, sheer doggedness, strength of purpose, and dead honesty within his point of view, which kept an appreciative and kindly feeling for him in their hearts. They knew he had preyed on them; but he had done it bluntly, broadly, and in such an off-with-the-gloves-lads-style, that, after a good fight over a stone and price, they had sometimes given in to him for sheer amusement, and to let him have the satisfaction of thinking he had gained his point.
Usually he set his price on a stone and would not budge from it. The gougers knew this, and if their price on a stone was not Dawe Armitage's, they did not waste breath on argument, except to draw the old boy and get some diversion from his way of playing them. If a man had a good stone and did not think anyone else was likely to give him his figure, sometimes he sold ten minutes before the coach Armitage was going down to town by, left Newton's. But, three or four times, when a stone had taken his fancy and a miner was obdurate, the old man, with his mind's eye full of the stone and the fires in its dazzling jet, had suddenly sent for it and its owner, paid his price, and pocketed the stone. He had wrapped up the gem, chuckling in defeat, and rejoicing to have it at any price. As a rule he made three or four times as much as he had given for opals he bought on the Ridge, but to Dawe Armitage the satisfaction of making money on a transaction was nothing like the joy of putting a coveted treasure into his wallet and driving off from Fallen Star with it.
A gem merchant of considerable standing in the United States, Dawe Armitage's collection of opals was world famous. He had put black opal on the market, and had been the first to extol the splendour of the stones found on Fallen Star Ridge. So different they were from the opal found on Chalk Cliffs, or in any other part of the world, with the fires in jetty potch rather than in the clear or milky medium people were accustomed to, that at first timid and conventional souls were disturbed and repelled by them. "They felt," they said, "that there was something occultly evil about black opal." They had a curious fear and dread of the stones as talismans of evil. Dawe Armitage scattered the quakers like chaff with his scorn. They could not, he said, accept the magnificent pessimism of black opal. They would not rejoice with pagan abandonment in the beauty of those fires in black opal, realising that, like the fires of life, they owed their brilliance, their transcendental glory, to the dark setting. But every day the opals made worshippers of sightseers. They mesmerised beholders who came to look at them.
When the coach rattled to a standstill outside the hotel, Peter Newton went to the door of the bar. He knew John Armitage by the size and shape of his dust-covered overalls. Armitage dismounted and pulled off his gloves. Peter Newton went to meet him.
Armitage gripped his hand.
"Mighty glad to see you, Newton," he said, "and glad to see the Ridge again. How are you all?"
Newton smiled, giving him greeting in downright Ridge style.
"Fine," he said. "Glad to see you, Mr. Armitage."
When he got indoors, Armitage threw off his coat. He and Peter had a drink together, and then he went to have a wash and brush up before dinner. Mrs. Newton came from the kitchen; she was pleased to see Mr. Armitage, she said, and he shook hands with her and made her feel that he was really quite delighted to see her. She spent a busy hour or so making the best of her preparations for the evening meal, so that he might repeat his usual little compliments about her cooking. Armitage had his dinner in a small private sitting-room, and strolled out afterwards to the veranda to smoke and yarn with the men.
He spent the evening with them there, and in the bar, hearing the news of the Ridge and gossiping genially. He had come all the way from Sydney the day before, spent the night in the train, and had no head for business that night, he said. When he yarned with them, Fallen Star men had a downright sense of liking John Armitage. He was a good sort, they told each other; they appreciated his way of talking, and laughed over the stories he told and the rare and racy Americanisms with which he flavoured his speech for their benefit.
When he exerted himself to entertain and amuse them, they were as pleased with him as a pack of women. And John Lincoln Armitage pleased women, men of the Ridge guessed, the women of his own kind as well as the women of Fallen Star who had talked to him now and then. His eyes had a mild caress when they rested on a woman; it was not in the least offensive, but carried challenge and appeal—a suggestion of sympathy. He had a thousand little courtesies for women, the deference which comes naturally to "a man of the world" for a member of "the fair sex." Mrs. Newton was always flattered and delighted after a talk with him. He asked her advice about opals he had bought or was going to buy, and, although he did not make use of it very often, she was always pleased by his manner of asking. Mrs. George Woods and Mrs. Archie Cross both confessed to a partiality for Mr. Armitage, and even Mrs. Watty agreed that he was "a real nice man"; and when he was in the township Mrs. Henty and one of the girls usually drove over from the station and took him back to Warria to stay a day or two before he went back to Sydney on his return journey to New York.
Armitage was very keen to know whether there had been any sensational finds on the Ridge during the year, and all about them. He wanted to know who had been getting good stuff, and said that he had bought Jun's stones in Sydney. The men exclaimed at that.
"I was surprised to hear," John Armitage said, "what happened to the other parcel. You don't mean to say you think Charley Heathfield——?"
"We ain't tried him yet," Watty remarked cautiously, "but the evidence is all against him."
Rouminof thrust himself forward, eager to tell his story. Realising the proud position he might have been in this night with the opal-buyer if he had had his opals, tears gathered in his eyes as he went over it all again.
Armitage listened intently.
"Well, of all the rotten luck!" he exclaimed, when Paul had finished. "Have another whisky, Rouminof? But what I can't make out," he added, "is why, if he had the stones, Charley didn't come to me with them.... I didn't buy anything but Jun's stuff before I came up here ... and he just said it was half the find he was showing me. Nice bit of pattern in that big black piece, eh? If Charley had the stones, you'd think he'd 've come along to me, or got Jun, or somebody to come along for him...."
"I don't know about that." George Woods felt for his reasons. "He wouldn't want you—or anybody else to know he'd got them."
"That's right," Watty agreed.
"He's got them all right," Ted Cross declared. "You see, I seen him taking Rummy home that night—and he cleared out next morning."
"I guess you boys know best." John Armitage sipped his whisky thoughtfully. "But I'm mad to get the rest of the stones. Tell you the truth, the old man hasn't been too pleased with my buying lately ... and it would put him in no end of a good humour if I could take home with me another packet of gems like the one I got from Jun. Jun knew I was keen to get the stones ... and I can't help thinking ... if he knew they were about, he'd put me in the way of getting them ... or them in my way—somehow. You don't think ... anybody else could have been on the job, and ... put it over on Charley, say...."
His eyes went over the faces of the men lounging against the bar, or standing in groups about him. Michael was lifting his glass to drink, and, for the fraction of a second the opal-buyer's glance wavered on his face before it passed on.
"Not likely," George Woods said dryly.
Recognising the disfavour his suggestion raised, Armitage brushed it aside.
"I don't think so, of course," he said.
And although he did not speak to him, or even look at him closely again, John Armitage was thinking all the evening of the quiver, slight as the tremor of a moth's wing, on Michael's face, when that inquiry had been thrown out.
Armitage was busy going over parcels of stone and bargaining with the men for the greater part of the next day. He was beginning to have more of Dawe Armitage's zest for the business; and, every time they met, Ridge men found him shrewder, keener. His manner was genial and easy-going with them; but there was a steel band in him somewhere, they were sure.
The old man had been bluff, and as hard as nails; but they understood him better than his son. John Armitage, they knew, was only perfunctorily interested opal-buying at first; he had gone into it to please the old man, but gradually the thing had taken hold of him. He was not yet, however, anything like as good a judge of opal, and his last buying on the Ridge had displeased his father considerably. John Armitage had bought several parcels of good-looking opal; but one stone, which had cost £50 in the rough, was not worth £5 when it was cut. A grain of sand, Dawe Armitage swore he could have seen a mile away, went through it, and it cracked on the wheel. A couple of parcels had brought double what had been paid for them; but several stones John had given a good price for were not worth half the amount, his father had said.
George Woods and Watty took John Armitage a couple of fine knobbies during the morning, and the Crosses had shown him a parcel containing two good green and blue stones with rippled lights; but they had more on the parcel than Armitage felt inclined to pay, remembering the stormy scene there had been with the old man over that last stone from Crosses' mine which had cracked in the cutter's hands. Towards the end of the day Mr. Armitage came to the conclusion, having gone over the stones the men brought him, and having bought all he fancied, that there was very little black opal of first quality about. He was meditating the fact, leaning back in his chair in the sitting-room Newton had reserved for him to see the gougers in, some pieces of opal, his scales and microscope on the table before him, when Michael knocked.
Absorbed in his reflections, realising there would be little to show for the trouble and pains of his long journey, and reviewing a slowly germinating scheme and dream for the better output of opal from Fallen Star, John Armitage did not at first pay any attention to the knock.
He had been thinking a good deal of Michael in connection with that scheme. Michael, he knew, would be his chief opponent, if ever he tried putting it into effect. When he had outlined his idea and vaguely formed plans to his father, Dawe Armitage would have nothing to do with them. He swept them aside uncompromisingly.
"You don't know what you're up against," he said. "There isn't a man on the Ridge wouldn't fight like a pole-cat if you tried it on 'em. Give 'em a word of it—and we quit partnership, see? They wouldn't stand for it—not for a second—and there'd be no more black opal for Armitage and Son, if they got any idea on the Ridge you'd that sort of notion at the back of your head."
But John Armitage refused to give up his idea. He went to it as a dog goes to a planted bone—gnawed and chewed over it, contemplatively.
He had made this trip to Fallen Star with little result, and he was sure a system of working the mines on scientific, up-to-date lines would ensure the production of more stone. He wanted to talk organisation and efficiency to men of the Ridge, to point out to them that organisation and efficiency were of first value in production, not realising Ridge men considered their methods both organised and efficient within their means and for their purposes.
Michael knocked again, and Armitage called:
"Come in!" When he saw who had come into the room, he rose and greeted Michael warmly.
"Oh, it's you, Michael!" he said, with a sense of guilt at the thoughts Michael had interrupted. "I wondered what on earth had become of you. The old man gave me no end of messages, and there are a couple of magazines for you in my grip."
"Thank you, Mr. Armitage," Michael replied.
"Well, I hope you've got some good stuff," Armitage said.
Michael took the chair opposite to him on the other side of the table. "I haven't got much," he said.
"I remember Newton told me you've been having rotten luck."
"It's looked up lately," Michael said, the flickering wisp of a smile in his eyes. "The boys say Rummy's a luck-bringer.... He's working with me now, and we've been getting some nice stone."
He took a small packet of opal from his pocket and put it on the table. It was wrapped in newspaper. He unfastened the string, turned back the cotton-wool in which the pieces of opal were packed, and spread them out for Armitage to look at.
Armitage went over the stones. He put them, one by one, under his microscope, and held them to and from the light.
"That's a nice bit of colour, Michael," he said, admiring a small piece of grey potch with a black strain which flashed needling rays of green and gold. "A little bit more of that, and you'd be all right, eh?"
Michael nodded. "We're on a streak now," he said. "It ought to work out all right."
"I hope it will." Armitage held the piece of opal to the light and moved it slowly. "Rouminof's working with you now—and Potch, they tell me?"
Michael nodded.
"Pretty hard on him, Charley's getting away with his stones like that!"
John Armitage probed the quiet eyes of the man before him with a swift glance.
"You're right there, Mr. Armitage," Michael said. "Harder on Paul than it would have been on anybody else. He's got the fever pretty bad."
Armitage laughed, handling a stone thoughtfully.
"I gave Jun a hundred pounds for his big stone. I'd give the same for the other—if I could lay my hands on it, though the boys say it wasn't quite as big, but better pattern."
"That's right," Michael said.
Silence lay between them for a moment.
"What have you got on the lot, Michael?" Armitage asked, picking up the stones before him and going over them absent-mindedly.
"A tenner," Michael said.
Usually a gouger asked several pounds more than he expected to get. John Armitage knew that; Michael knew he knew it. Armitage played with the stones, hesitated as though his mind were not made up. There was not much more than potch and colour in the bundle. He went over the stones with the glass again.
"Oh well, Michael," he said, "we're old friends. I won't haggle with you. Ten pounds—your own valuation."
He would get twice as much for the parcel, but the price was a good one. Michael was surprised he had conceded it so easily.
Armitage pulled out his cheque-book and pushed a box of cigars across the table. Michael took out his pipe.
"If you don't mind, Mr. Armitage," he said, "I'm more at home with this."
"Please yourself, Michael," Armitage murmured, writing his cheque.
When Michael had put the cheque in his pocket, Armitage took a cigar, nipped and lighted it, and leaned back in his chair again.
"Not much big stuff about, Michael," he remarked, conversationally.
"George Woods had some good stones," Michael said.
Armitage was not enthusiastic. "Pretty fair. But the old man will be better pleased with the stuff I got from Jun Johnson than anything else this trip.... I'd give a good deal to get the almond-shaped stone in that other parcel."
Michael realised Mr. Armitage had said the same thing to him before. He wondered why he had said it to him—what he was driving at.
"There were several good stones in Paul's parcel," he said.
His clear, quiet eyes met John Armitage's curious, inquiring gaze. He was vaguely discomfited by Armitage's gaze, although he did not flinch from it. He wondered what Mr. Armitage knew, that he should look like that.
"It's been hard on Rouminof," Armitage murmured again.
Michael agreed.
"After the boys making Jun shell out, too! It doesn't seem to have been much use, does it?"
"No," Michael said.
"And they say he was going to take that girl of his down to Sydney to have her trained as a singer. She can sing, too. But her mother, Michael—I heard her inDinorah... when I was a little chap." Enthusiasm lighted John Armitage's face. "She was wonderful.... The old man says people were mad about her when she was in New York.... It was said, you know, she belonged to some aristocratic Russian family, and ran away with a rascally violinist—Rouminof. Can you believe it? ... Went on the stage to keep him.... But she couldn't stand the life. Soon after she was lost sight of.... I've often wondered how she drifted to Fallen Star. But she liked being here, the old man says."
Michael nodded. There was silence between them a moment; then Michael rose to go. The opal-buyer got up too, and flung out his arms, stretching with relief to be done with his day's work.
"I've been cooped in here all day," he said. "I'll come along with you, Michael. I'd like to have a look at the Punti Rush. Can you walk over there with me?"
"'Course I can, Mr. Armitage," Michael said heartily.
They walked out of the hotel and through the town towards the rush, where half a dozen new claims had been pegged a few weeks before.
Snow-Shoes passed then going out of the town to his hut, swinging along the track and gazing before him with the eyes of a seer, his fine old face set in a dream, serene dignity in every line of his erect and slowly-moving figure.
Armitage looked after him.
"What a great old chap he is, Michael," he exclaimed. "You don't know anything about him ... who he is, or where he comes from, do you?"
"No," Michael said.
"How does he live?"
"Noodles."
"He's never brought me any stone."
"Trades it with the storekeepers—though the boys do say"—Michael looked with smiling eyes after Snow-Shoes—"he may be a bit of a miser, loves opal more than the money it brings."
Armitage's interest deepened. "There are chaps like that. I've heard the old man talk about a stone getting hold of a man sometimes—mesmerising him. I believe the old man's a bit like that himself, you know. There are two or three pieces of opal he's got from Fallen Star nothing on earth will induce him to part with. We wanted a stone for an Indian nabob's show tiara—something of that sort—not long ago. I fancied that big knobby we got from George Woods; do you remember? But the old man wouldn't part with it; not he! Said he'd see all the nabobs in the world in—Hades, before they got that opal out of him!"
Michael laughed. The thought of hard-shelled old Dawe Armitage hoarding opals tickled him immensely.
"Fact," Armitage continued. "He's got a couple of stones he's like a kid over—takes them out, rubs them, and plays with them. And you should hear him if I try to get them from him.... A packet of crackers isn't in it with the old man."
"The boys'd like to hear that," Michael said.
"There's no doubt about the fascination the stuff exercises," John Armitage went on. "You people say, once an opal-miner, always an opal-miner; but I say, once an opal-buyer, always an opal-buyer. I wasn't keen about this business when I came into it ... but it's got me all right. I can't see myself coming to this God-forsaken part of the world of yours for anything but black opal...."
That expression, whimsical and enigmatic, which was never very far from them, had grown in Michael's eyes. He began to sense a motive in Armitage's seemingly casual talk, and to understand why the opal-buyer was so friendly.
"The old man tells a story," Armitage continued, "of that robbery up at Blue Pigeon. You know the yarn I mean ... about sticking up a coach when there was a good parcel of opal on board. Somebody did the bush-ranging trick and got away with the opal.... The thief was caught, and the stuff put for safety in an iron safe at the post office. And sight of the opals corrupted one of the men in the post office.... He was caught ... and then a mounted trooper took charge of them. And the stuff bewitched him, too.... He tried to get away with it...."
"That's right," Michael murmured serenely.
Armitage eyed him keenly. He could scarcely believe the story he had got from Jun, that the second parcel of stones had been exchanged after Charley got them, or that they had been changed on Paul before Charley got them from him.
Michael guessed Armitage was sounding him by talking so much of Rouminof's stones and the robbery. He wondered what Armitage knew—whether he knew anything which would attach him, Michael, to knowledge of what had become of Paul's stones. There was always the chance that Charley had recognised some of the opal in the parcel substituted for Paul's, although none of the scraps were significant enough to be remembered, Michael thought, and Charley was never keen enough to have taken any notice of the sun-flash and fragments of coloured potch they had taken out of the mine during the year. The brown knobby, which Michael had kept for something of a sentimental reason, because it was the first stone he had found on Fallen Star, Charley had never seen.
But, probably, he remarked to himself, Armitage was only trying to get information from him because he thought that Michael Brady was the most likely man on the Ridge to know what had become of the stones, or to guess what might have become of them.
As they walked and talked, these thoughts were an undercurrent in Michael's mind. And the undercurrent of John Lincoln Armitage's mind, through all his amiable and seemingly inconsequential gossip, was not whether Michael had taken the stones, but why he had, and what had become of them.
Armitage could not, at first, bring himself to credit the half-formed suspicion which that quiver of Michael's face, when he had spoken of what Jun said, had given him. Yet they were all more or less mad, people who dealt with opal, he believed. It might not be for the sake of profit Michael had taken the stones, if he had taken them—there was still a shadow of doubt in his mind. John Armitage knew that any man on the Ridge would have knocked him down for harbouring such a thought. Michael was the little father, the knight without fear and without a stain, of the Ridge. He reflected that Michael had never brought him much stone. His father had often talked of Michael Brady and the way he had stuck to gouging opal with precious little luck for many years. The parcel he had sold that day was perhaps the best Michael had traded with Armitage and Son for a long time. John Armitage wondered if any man could work so long without having found good stuff, without having realised the hopes which had materialised for so many other men of the Ridge.
They went over the new rush, inspected "prospects," and yarned with Pony-Fence Inglewood and Bully Bryant, who had pegged out a claim there. But as Armitage and he walked back to the town discussing the outlook of the new field and the colour and potch some of the men already had to show, Michael found himself in the undertow of an uneasy imagination. He protested to himself that he was unnecessarily apprehensive, that all Armitage was trying to get from him was any information which would throw light on the disappearance of Paul's stones. And Armitage was wondering whether Michael might not be an opal miser—whether the mysterious fires of black opal might not have eaten into his brain as they had into the brains of good men before him.
If they had, and if he had found the flaw in Michael's armour, John Armitage realised that the way to fulfilment of his schemes for buying the mines and working them on up-to-date lines, was opened up. If Michael could be proved unfaithful to the law and ideals of Ridge, John Armitage believed the men's faith in the fabric of their common life would fall to pieces. He envisaged the eating of moths of doubt and disappointment into the philosophy of the Ridge, the disintegration of ideas which had held the men together, and made them stand together in matters of common interest and service, as one man. He had almost assured himself that if Michael was not the thief and hoarder of the lost opals, he at least knew something of them, when a ripple of laughter and gust of singing were flung into the air not far from them.
To Armitage it was as though some blithe spirit was mocking the discovery he thought he had made, and the fruition it promised those secret hopes of his.
"It's Sophie," Michael said.
They had come across the Ridge to the back of the huts. The light was failing; the sky, from the earth upwards where the sunset had been, the frail, limpid green of a shallow lagoon, deepening to blue, darker than indigo. The crescent of a moon, faintly gilded, swung in the sky above the dark shapes of the huts which stood by the track to the old Flash-in-the-pan rush. The smoke of sandal-wood fires burning in the huts was in the air. A goat bell tinkled....
Potch and Sophie were talking behind the hut somewhere; their exclamations, laughter, a phrase or two of the song Sophie was singing went through the quietness.
And it was all this he wanted to change! John Armitage caught the revelation of the moment as he stood to listen to Sophie singing. He understood as he had never done what the Ridge stood for—association of people with the earth, their attachment to the primary needs of life, the joyous flight of youthful spirits, this quiet happiness and peace at evening when the work of the day was done.
As he came from the dumps, having said good-night to Michael, he saw Sophie, a slight, girlish figure, on the track ahead of him. Her dress flickered and flashed through the trees beside the track; it was a wraithlike streak in the twilight. She was taking the milk down to Newton's, and singing to herself as she walked. John Armitage quickened his steps to overtake her.
The visit of an opal-buyer ruffled ever so slightly the still surface of life on the Ridge. When Armitage had gone, he was talked of for a few days; the stones he had bought, the prices he had given for them, were discussed. Some of his sayings, and the stories he had told, were laughed over. Tricks of speech he had used, tried at first half in fun, were adopted and dropped into the vernacular of the mines.
"Sure!" the men said as easily as an American; and sometimes, talking with each other: "You've got another think coming to you"; or, "See, you've got your nerve with you!"
For a night or two Michael went over the books and papers John Armitage had brought him. At first he just glanced here and there through them, and then he began to read systematically, and light glimmered in his windows far into the night. He soaked the contents of two or three reviews and several newspapers before giving himself to a book on international finance in which old Armitage had written his name.
Michael thrilled to the stimulus of the book, the intellectual excitement of the ideas it brought forth. He lived tumultuously within the four bare walls of his room, arguing with himself, the author, the world at large. Wrong and injustice enthroned, he saw in this book describing the complexities of national and international systems of finance, the subtle weaving and interweaving of webs of the money-makers.
This was not the effect Dawe Armitage had expected his book to have; he had expected to overawe and daze Michael with its impressive arraignment of figures and its subtle and bewildering generalisations on credit and foreign exchange. Michael's mind had cut through the fog raised by the financier's jargon to the few small facts beneath it all. Neither dazed nor dazzled, his brain had swung true to the magnetic meridian of his faith. Far from the book having shown him the folly and futility of any attempt against the Money Power, as Dawe Armitage, in a moment of freakish humour had imagined it might, it had filled him with such an intensity of fury that for a moment he believed he alone could accomplish the regeneration of the world; that like St. Michael of old he would go forth and slay the dragon, this chimera which was ravaging the world, drawing the blood, beauty, and joy of youth, the peace and wisdom of age; breaking manhood and womanhood with its merciless claws.
But falling back on a consciousness of self, as with broken wings he realised he was neither archangel, nor super-man, but Michael Brady, an ordinary, ill-educated man who read and dreamed a great deal, and gouged for black opal on Fallen Star Ridge. He was a little bitter, and more humble, for having entertained that radiant vision of himself.
John Armitage had been gone from the Ridge some weeks when Michael went over in his mind every phase and phrase of the talk they had had. His lips took a slight smile; it crept into his eyes, as he reviewed what he had said and what John Armitage had said, smoking unconsciously.
Absorbed in his reading, he had thought little of John Armitage and that walk to the new rush with him. Occasionally the memory of it had nickered and glanced through his mind; but he was so obsessed by the ideas this new reading had stirred, that he went about his everyday jobs in the mine and in the hut, absent-mindedly, automatically, because they were things he was in the habit of doing. Potch watched him anxiously; Rouminof growled to him; Sophie laughed and flitted and sang, before his eyes; but Michael had been only distantly conscious of what was going on about him. George Woods and Watty guessed what was the matter; they knew the symptoms of these reading and brooding bouts Michael was subject to. The moods wore off when they put questions likely to draw information and he began to talk out and discuss what he had been reading with them.
He had talked this one off, when suddenly he remembered how John Armitage's eyes had dived into his during that walk to the new rush. He could see Armitage's eyes again, keen grey eyes they were. And his hands. Michael remembered how Armitage's hands had played over the opals he had taken to show him. John Lincoln Armitage had the shrewd eyes of any man who lives by his wits—lawyer, pickpocket, politician, or financier—he decided; and the fine white hands of a woman. Only Michael did not know any woman whose hands were as finely shaped and as white as John Armitage's. Images of his clean-shaven, hot-house face of a city dweller, slightly burned by his long journey on land and sea, recurred to him; expressions, gestures, inflections of voice.
Michael smiled to himself in communion with his thoughts as he went over the substance of Armitage's conversation, dissecting and shredding it critically. The more he thought of what Armitage had said, the more he found himself believing John Armitage had some information which caused him to think that he, Michael, knew something of the whereabouts of the stones. He could not convince himself Armitage believed he actually held the stones, or that he had stolen them. Armitage had certainly given him an opportunity to sell on the quiet if he had the stones; but his manner was too tentative, mingled with a subtle respect, to carry the notion of an overt suggestion of the sort, or the possession of incriminating knowledge. Then there was the story of the old Cliffs robbery. Michael wondered why Mr. Armitage had gone over that. On general principles, doubting the truth of his long run of bad luck—or from curiosity merely, perhaps. But Michael did not deceive himself that Armitage might have told the story in order to discover whether there was something of the miser in him, and whether—if Michael had anything to do with the taking of Paul's opals—he might prefer to hold rather than sell them.
Michael was amused at the thought of himself as a miser. He went into the matter as honestly as he could. He knew the power opal had with him, the fascination of the search for it, which had brought him from the Cliffs to the Ridge, and which had held him to the place, although the life and ideas it had come to represent meant more to him now than black opal. Still, he was an opal miner, and through all his lean years on the Ridge he had been upheld by the thought of the stone he would find some day.
He had dreamed of that stone. It had haunted his idle thoughts for years. He had seen it in the dark of the mine, deep in the ruddy earth, a mirror of jet with fires swarming, red, green, and gold in it.
Dreams of the great opal he would one day discover had comforted him when storekeepers were asking for settlement of long-standing accounts. He did not altogether believe he would find it, that wonderful piece of black opal; but he dreamed, like a child, of finding it.
As he thought of it, and of John Armitage, the smile in his eyes broadened. If Armitage knew of that stone of his dreams, he would certainly think his surmise was correct and believe that Michael Brady was a miser. But he had held the dream in a dark and distant corner of his consciousness; had it out to mood and brood over only at rare and distant intervals; and no one was aware of its existence.
Black opal had no more passionate lover than himself, Michael knew. He trembled with instinctive eagerness, reverence, and delight, when he saw a piece of beautiful stone; his eyes devoured it. But there was nothing personal in his love. He might have been high priest of some mysterious divinity; when she revealed herself he was consumed with adoration. In a vague, whimsical way Michael realised this of himself, and yet, too, that if ever he held the stone of his dreams in his hands, he would be filled with a glorious and flooding sense of accomplishment; an ecstasy would transport him. It would be beyond all value in money, that stone; but he would not want to keep it to gaze on alone, he would want to give it to the world as a thing of consummate beauty, for everybody to enjoy the sight of and adore.
No, Michael assured himself, he was not a miser. And, he reflected, he had not even looked at Paul's stones. For all he knew, the stones Paul had been showing that night at Newton's might have been removed from the box before he left Newton's. Someone might have done to Paul what he, Michael, had done to Charley Heathfield, as Armitage had suggested. Paul's little tin box was well enough known. He had been opening and showing his stones at Newton's a long time before the night when Jun had been induced to divide spoils. It would be just as well, Michael decided, to see what the box did contain; and he promised himself that he would open it and look over the stones—some evening. But he was not inclined to hurry the engagement with himself to do so.
He had been glad enough to forget that he had anything to do with that box of Paul's: it still lay among the books where he had thrown it. The memory of the night on which he had seen Charley taking Paul home, and of all that had happened afterwards, was blurred in an ugly vision for him. It had become like the memory of a nightmare. He could scarcely believe he had done what he had done; yet he knew he had. He drew a deep breath of relief when he realised everything had worked out well so far.
Paul was working with him; they had won that little bit of luck to carry them on; Sophie was growing up healthily, happily, on the Ridge. She was growing so quickly, too. Within the last few months Michael had noticed a subtle change in her. There was an indefinable air of a flower approaching its bloom about her. People were beginning to talk of her looks. Michael had seen eyes following her admiringly. Sophie walked with a light, lithe grace; she was slight and straight, not tall really, but she looked tall in the black dress she still wore and which came to her ankles. There was less of the eager sprite about her, a suggestion of some sobering experience in her eyes—the shadow of her mother's death—which had banished her unthinking and careless childhood. But the eyes still had the purity and radiance of a child's. And she seemed happy—the happiest thing on the Ridge, Michael thought. The cadence of her laughter and a ripple of her singing were never long out of the air about her father's hut. Wherever she went, people said now: "Sing to us, Sophie!"
And she sang, whenever she was asked, without the slightest self-consciousness, and always those songs from old operas, or some of the folk-songs her mother had taught her, which were the only songs she knew.
Michael had seen a number of neighbours in the township and their wives and children sitting round in one or other of their homes while Sophie sang. He had seen a glow of pleasure transfuse people as they listened to her pure and ringing notes. Singing, Sophie seemed actually to diffuse happiness, her own joy in the melodies she flung into the air. Oh, yes, Sophie was happy singing, Michael could permit himself to believe now. She could make people happy by her singing. He had feared her singing as a will-o'-the-wisp which would lead her away from him and the Ridge. But when he heard her enthralling people in the huts with it, he was not afraid.
Paul sometimes moaned about the chances she was missing, and that she could be singing in theatres to great audiences. Sophie herself laughed at him. She was quite content with the Ridge, it seemed, and to sing to people on their verandas in the summer evenings or round the fires in the winter. She might have had greater and finer audiences, the Ridge folk said, but she could not have had more appreciative ones.
If she was singing in the town, Michael always went to bring her home, and he was as pleased as Sophie to hear people say:
"You're not taking her away yet, Michael? The night's a pup!" or, "Another ... just one more song, Sophie!"
And if she had been singing at Newton's, Michael liked to see the men come to the door of the bar, holding up their glasses, and to hear their call, as Sophie and he went down the road:
"Sophie! Sophie!"
"Skin off y'r nose!"
"All the luck!"
"Best respecks, Sophie!"
When Sophie did not know what to do with herself all the hours Michael and Potch and her father were away at the mines, Michael had showed her how to use her mother's cutting-wheel. He taught her all he knew of opals, and Sophie was delighted with the idea of learning to cut and polish gems as her mother had.
Michael gave her rough stones to practise on, and in no time she learnt to handle them skilfully. George, Watty, and the Crosses brought her some gems to face and polish for them, and they were so pleased with her work that they promised to give her most of their stones to cut and polish. She had two or three accidents, and was very crestfallen about them; but Michael declared they were part of the education of an opal-cutter and would teach her more about her work than anyone could tell her.
To Michael those days were of infinite blessedness. They proved again and again the right of what he had done. At first he was vaguely alarmed and uneasy when he saw younger men of the Ridge, Roy O'Mara or Bully Bryant, talking or walking with Sophie, or he saw her laughing and talking with them. There was something about Sophie's bearing with them which disturbed him—a subtle, unconscious witchery. Then he explained it to himself. He guessed that the woman in her was waking, or awake. On second thoughts he was not jealous or uneasy. It was natural enough the boys should like Sophie, that she should like them; he recognised the age-old call of sex in it all. And if Sophie loved and married a man of the Ridge, the future would be clear, Michael thought. He could give Paul the opals, and her husband could watch over Sophie and see no harm came to her if she left the Ridge.
The uneasiness stirred again, though, one afternoon when he found her walking from the tank paddock with Arthur Henty beside her. There was a startled consciousness about them both when Michael joined them and walked along the road with them. He had seen Sophie talking to Henty in and about the township before, but it had not occurred to him there was anything unusual about that. Sophie had gone about as she liked and talked to whom she liked since she was a child. She was on good terms with everyone in the countryside. No one knew where she went or what she did in the long day while the men were at the mines. Because the carillon of her laughter flew through those quiet days, Michael instinctively had put up a prayer of thanksgiving. Sophie was happy, he thought. He did not ask himself why; he was grateful; but a vague disquiet made itself felt when he remembered how he had found her walking with Arthur Henty, and the number of times he had seen her talking to Arthur Henty at Chassy Robb's store, or on the tracks near the town.
Fallen Star folk knew Arthur better than any of the Hentys. For years he had been coming through the township with cattle or sheep, and had put up at Newton's with stockmen on his way home, or when he was going to an out-station beyond the Ridge.
His father, James Henty, had taken up land in the back-country long before opal was found on Fallen Star Ridge. He had worked half a million square acres on an arm of the Darling in the days before runs were fenced, with only a few black shepherds and one white man, old Bill M'Gaffy, to help him for the first year or two. But, after an era of extraordinary prosperity, a series of droughts and misfortunes had overwhelmed the station and thrown it on the tender mercies of the banks.
The Hentys lived much as they had always done. They entertained as usual, and there was no hint of a wolf near the door in the hearty, good-natured, and liberal hospitality of the homestead. A constitutional optimism enabled James Henty to believe Warria would ultimately throw off its debts and the good old days return. Only at the end of a season, when year after year he found there was no likelihood of being able to meet even the yearly interest on mortgages, did he lose some of his sanguine belief in the station's ability to right itself, and become irritable beyond endurance, blaming any and everyone within hail for the unsatisfactory estimates.
But usually Arthur bore the brunt of these outbursts. Arthur Henty had gone from school to work on the station at the beginning of Warria's decline from the years of plenty, and had borne the burden and not a little of the blame for heavy losses during the droughts, without ever attempting to shift or deny the responsibilities his father put upon him.
"It does the old man good to have somebody to go off at," he explained indifferently to his sister, Elizabeth, when she called him all the fools under the sun for taking so much blackguarding sitting down.
Although James Henty's only son and manager of the station under his father's autocratic rule, Arthur Henty lived and worked among Warria stockmen as though he were one of them. His clothes were as worn and heavy with dust as theirs; his hat was as weathered, his hands as hard—sunburnt and broken with sores when barcoo was in the air. A quiet, unassuming man, he never came the "Boss" over them. He passed on the old man's orders, and, for the rest, worked as hard as any man on the station.
He had never done anything remarkable that anyone could remember; but the men he worked with liked him. Everybody rather liked Arthur Henty, although nobody enthused about him. He had done man's work ever since he was a boy, with no more than a couple of years' schooling; he had done it steadily and as well as any other young man in the back-country. But there was a curious, almost feminine weakness in him somewhere. The men did not understand it. They thought he was too supine with his father; that he ought to stand up to him more.
Arthur Henty preferred being out on the plains with them rather than in at the home station, the men said. He looked happier when he was with them; he whistled to them as they lay yarning round the camp-fire before turning in. They had never heard anything like his whistling. He seemed to be playing some small, fine, invisible flute as he gave them old-fashioned airs, ragtime tunes, songs from the comic operas, and miscellaneous melodies he had heard his sisters singing. No one had heard him whistling like that at the station. Out on the plains, or in the bar at Newton's, he was a different man. Once or twice when he had been drinking, and a glass or two of beer or whisky had got to his head, he had shown more the spirit that it was thought he possessed—as if, when the conscious will was relaxed, a submerged self had leapt forth.
Men who had known him a long time wondered whether time would not strengthen the fibres of that submerged self; but they had seen Arthur Henty lose the elastic, hopeful outlook of youth, and sink gradually into the place assigned him by his father, at first dutifully, then with an indifference which slowly became apathy.
Mrs. Henty and the girls exclaimed with dismay and disgust when they returned to the station after two years in town, and saw how rough and unkempt-looking Arthur had become. They insisted on his having his hair and beard cut at once, and that he should manicure his finger-nails. After he had dressed for dinner and was clipped and shaved, they said he looked more as if he belonged to them; but he was a shy, awkward boor, and they did not know what to make of him. In his mother's hands, Arthur was still a child, though, and she brought him back to the fold of the family, drew his resistance—an odd, sullen resentment he had acquired for the niceties of what she called "civilised society"—and made him amenable to its discipline.
Elizabeth was twice the man her brother was, James Henty was fond of declaring. She had all the vigour and dash he would have liked his son to possess. "My daughter Elizabeth," he said as frequently as possible, and was always talking of her feats with horses, and the clear-headed and clever way she went about doing things, and getting her own way on all and every occasion.
When the men rounded buck-jumpers into the yards on a Sunday morning, Elizabeth would ride any Chris Este, the head stockman, let her near; but Arthur never attempted to ride any of the warrigals. He steered clear of horse-breaking and rough horses whenever he could, although he broke and handled his own horses. In a curious way he shared a secret feeling of his mother's for horses. She had never been able to overcome an indefinable apprehension of the raw, half-broken horses of the back-country, although her nerve had carried her through years of acquaintance with them, innumerable accidents and misadventures, and hundreds of miles of journeys at their mercy; and Arthur, although he had lived and worked among horses as long as he could remember, had not been able to lose something of the same feeling. His sister, suspecting it, was frankly contemptuous; so was his father. It was the reason of Henty's low estimate of his son's character generally. And the rumour that Arthur Henty was shy of tough propositions in horses—"afraid of horses"—had a good deal to do with the never more than luke-warm respect men of the station and countryside had for him.
Sophie often met Arthur Henty on the road just out of the town. Usually it was going to or coming from the tank paddock, or in the paddock, on Friday afternoons, when he had been into Budda for the sales or to truck sheep or cattle. They did not arrange to meet, but Sophie expected to see Arthur when she went to the tank paddock, and she knew he expected to find her there. She did not know why she liked being with Arthur Henty so much, or why they were such golden occasions when she met him. They did not talk much when they were together. Their eyes met; they knew each other through their eyes—a something remote from themselves was always working through their eyes. It drew them together.
When she was with Arthur Henty, Sophie knew she was filled with an ineffable gaiety, a thing so delicate and ethereal that as she sang she seemed to be filling the air with it. And Henty looked at her sometimes as if he had discovered a new, strange, and beautiful creature, a butterfly, or gnat, with gauzy, resplendent wings, whose beauty he was bewildered and overcome by. The last time they had been together he had longed to draw her to him and kiss her so that the virgin innocence would leave her eyes; but fear or some conscientious scruple had restrained him. He had been reluctant to awaken her, to change the quality of her feeling towards him. He had let her go with a lingering handclasp. In all their tender intimacy there had been no more of the love-making of the flesh than the subtle interweavings of instincts and fibres which this handclasp gave. Ridge folk had seen them walking together. They had seen that subtle inclination of Sophie's and Arthur's figures towards each other as they walked—the magnetic, gentle, irresistible swaying towards each other—and the gossips began to whisper and nod smilingly when they came across Arthur and Sophie on the road. Sophie at first went her way unconscious of the whispers and smiles. Then words were dropped slyly—people teased her about Arthur. She realised they thought he was her sweetheart. Was he? She began to wonder and think about it. He must be; she came to the conclusion happily. Only sweethearts went for walks together as she and Arthur did.
"My mother says," Mirry Flail remarked one day, "she wouldn't be a bit surprised to see you marrying Arthur Henty, Sophie, and going over to live at Warria."
"Goodness!" Sophie exclaimed, surprised and delighted that anybody should think such a thing.
"Marry Arthur Henty and go over and live at Warria." Her mind, like a delighted little beaver, began to build on the idea. It did not alter her bearing with Arthur. She was less shy and thoughtful with him, perhaps; but he did not notice it, and she was carelessly and childishly content to have found the meaning of why she and Arthur liked meeting and talking together. People only felt as she and Arthur felt about each other if they were going to marry and live "happy ever after," she supposed.
When Michael was aware of what was being said, and of the foundation there was for gossip, he was considerably disturbed. He went to talk to Maggie Grant about it. She, he thought, would know more of what was in the wind than he did, and be better able to gauge what the consequences were likely to be to Sophie.
"I've been bothered about it myself, Michael," she said. "But neither you nor me can live Sophie's life for her.... I don't see we can do anything. His crowd'll do all the interfering, if I know anything about them."
"I suppose so," Michael agreed.
"And, as far as I can see, it won't do any good our butting in," Mrs. Grant continued. "You know Sophie's got a will of her own ... and she's always had a good deal her own way. I've talked round the thing to her ... and I think she understands."
"You've always been real good to her, Maggie," Michael said gratefully.
"As to that"—the lines of Maggie Grant's broad, plain face rucked to the strength of her feeling—"I've done what I could. But then, I'm fond of her—fond of her as you are, Michael. That's saying a lot. And you know what I thought of her mother. But it's no use us thinking we can buy Sophie's experience for her. She's got to live ... and she's got to suffer."
Busy with her opal-cutting, and happy with her thoughts, Sophie had no idea of the misgiving Michael and Maggie Grant had on her account, or that anyone was disturbed and unhappy because of her happiness. She sang as she worked. The whirr of her wheel, the chirr of sandstone and potch as they sheared away, made a small, busy noise, like the drone of an insect, in her house all day; and every day some of the men brought her stones to face and fix up. She had acquired such a reputation for making the most of stones committed to her care that men came from the Three Mile and from the Punti with opals for her to rough-out and polish.
Bully Bryant and Roy O'Mara were often at Rouminof's in the evening, and they heard about it when they looked in at Newton's later on, now and then.
"You must be striking it pretty good down at the Punti, Bull," Watty Frost ventured genially one night. "See you takin' stones for Sophie to fix up pretty near every evenin'."
"There's some as sees too much," Bully remarked significantly.
"What you say, you say y'rself, Bull." Watty pulled thoughtfully on his pipe, but his little blue eyes squinted over his fat, red-grained cheeks, not in the least abashed.
"I do," Bull affirmed. "And them as sees too much ... won't see much ... when I'm through with 'em."
"Mmm," Watty brooded. "That's a good thing to know, isn't it?"
He and the rest of the men continued to "sling off," as they said, at Bully and Roy O'Mara as they saw fit, nevertheless.
The summer had been a mild one; it passed almost without a ripple of excitement. There were several hot days, but cool changes blew over, and the rains came before people had given up dreading the heat. Several new prospects had been made, and there were expectations that holes sunk on claims to the north of the Punti Rush would mean the opening up of a new field.
Michael and Potch worked on in their old claim with very little to show for their pains. Paul had slackened and lost interest as soon as the fitful gleams of opal they were on had cut out. Michael was not the man to manage Rummy, the men said.
Potch and Michael, however, seemed satisfied enough to regard Paul more or less as a sleeping partner; to do the work of the mine and share with him for keeping out of the way.
"Shouldn't wonder if they wouldn't rather have his room than his company," Watty ventured, "and they just go shares with him so as things'll be all right for Sophie."
"That's right!" Pony-Fence agreed.
The year had made a great difference to Potch. Doing man's work, going about on equal terms with the men, the change of status from being a youth at anybody's beck and call to doing work which entitled him to the taken-for-granted dignity of being an independent individual, had made a man of him. His frame had thickened and hardened. He looked years older than he was really, and took being Michael's mate very seriously.
Michael had put up a shelter for himself and his mates, thinking that Potch and Paul might not be welcome in George and Watty's shelter; but George and Watty were loth to lose Michael's word from their councils. They called him over nearly every day, on one pretext or another. Sometimes his mates followed Michael. But Rouminof soon wearied of a discussion on anything except opal, and wandered off to the other shelters to discover whether anybody had struck anything good that morning. Potch threw himself on the ground beside Michael when Michael had invited him to go across to George and Watty's shelter with him, and after a while the men did not notice him there any more than Michael's shadow. He lay beside Michael, quite still, throwing crumbs to the birds which came round the shelter, and did not seem to be listening to what was said. But always when a man was heatedly and with some difficulty trying to disentangle his mind on a subject of argument, he found Potch's eyes on him, steady and absorbing, and knew from their intent expression that Potch was following all he had to say with quick, grave interest.
Some people were staying at Warria during the winter, and when there was going to be a dance at the station Mrs. Henty wrote to ask Rouminof to play for it. She could manage the piano music, she said, and if he would tune his violin for the occasion, they would have a splendid band for the young people. And, her letter had continued: "We should be so pleased if your daughter would come with you."
Sophie was wildly excited at the invitation. She had been to Ridge race balls for the last two or three years, but she had never even seen Warria. Her father had played at a Warria ball once, years before, when she was little; but she and her mother had not gone with him to the station. She remembered quite well when he came home, how he had told them of all the wonderful things there had been to eat at the ball—stuffed chickens and crystallised fruit, iced cakes, and all manner of sweets.
Sophie had heard of the Warria homestead since she was a child, of its orange garden and great, cool rooms. It had loomed like the enchanted castle of a legend through all her youthful imaginings. And now, as she remembered what Mirry Flail had said, she was filled with delight and excitement at the thought of seeing it.
She wondered whether Arthur had asked his mother to invite her to the dance. She thought he must have; and with naïve conceit imagined happily that Arthur's mother must want to know her because she knew that Arthur liked her. And Arthur's sisters—it would be nice to know them and to talk to them. She went over and over in her mind the talks she would have with Polly and Nina, and perhaps Elizabeth Henty, some day.
A few weeks before the ball she had seen Arthur riding through the township with his sisters and a girl who was staying at Warria. He had not seen her, and Sophie was glad, because suddenly she had felt shy and confused at the thought of talking to him before a lot of people. Besides, they all looked so jolly, and were having such a good time, that she would not have known what to say to Arthur, or to his sisters, just then.
When she told Mrs. Woods and Martha M'Cready about the invitation, they smiled and teased her.
"Oh, that tells a tale!" they said.
Sophie laughed. She felt silly, and she was blushing, they said. But she was very happy at having been asked to the ball. For weeks before she found herself singing "Caro Nome" as she sat at work, went about the house, or with Potch after the goats in the late afternoon.
Arthur liked that song better than any other, and its melody had become mingled and interwoven with all her thoughts of him.
The twilight was deepening, on the evening a few days before the dance, when Bully Bryant and Roy O'Mara came up to Rouminof's hut, calling Sophie. She was washing milk tins and tea dishes, and went to the door singing to herself, a candle throwing a fluttering light before her.
"Your father sent us along for you, Sophie," Bully explained. "There's a bit of a celebration on at Newton's to-night, and the boys want you to sing for them."
Sophie turned from them, going into the house to put down her candle.
"All right," she said, pleased at the idea.
Michael came into the hut through, the back door. From his own room he had heard Bully calling and then explaining why he and Roy O'Mara were there.
"Don't go, Sophie," Michael said.
"But why, Michael?" Disappointment clouded Sophie's first bright pleasure that the men had sent for her to sing to them, and her eagerness to do as they asked.
"It's not right ... not good for you to sing down there when the boys 've been drinking," Michael said, unable to express clearly his opposition to her singing at Newton's.
"Don't be a spoil-sport, Michael," the boys at the door called when they saw he was trying to dissuade Sophie.
"Come along, Sophie," Roy called.
She looked from Bully and Roy to Michael, hesitating. Theirs was the call of youth to youth, of youth to gaiety and adventure. She turned away from Michael.
"I'm going, Michael," she said quickly, and swung to the door. Michael heard her laughing as she went off along the track with Bully and Roy.
"Did you know Mr. Armitage is up?" Roy stopped to call back.
"No," Michael said.
"Came up by the coach this evening," Roy said, and ran after Bully and Sophie.
It was a rowdy night at Newton's. Shearing was just over at Warria sheds, and men with cheques to burn were crowding the bar and passages. Sophie was hailed with cheers as she neared the veranda. Her father staggered out towards her, waving his arms crazily. Sophie was surprised when she found the crowd waiting for her. There were so many strangers in it—rough men with heavy, inflamed faces—hardly one she knew among them. A murmur and boisterous clamour of voices came from the bar. The men on the veranda made way for her.
Her heart quailed when she looked into the big earthen-floored bar, and saw its crowd of rough-haired, sun-red men, still wearing the clothes they had been working in, grey flannel shirts and dungarees, blood-splashed, grimy, and greasy with the "yolk" of fleeces they had been handling. The smell of sheep and the sweat of long days of shearing and struggling with restless beasts were in the air, with fumes of rank tobacco and the flat, stale smell of beer. The hanging lamp over the bar threw only a dim light through the fog of smoke the men had put up, and which from the doorway completely obscured Peter Newton where he stood behind the bar.
Sophie hung back.
"I'm not going in there," she said.
"Did you know Mr. Armitage was up?" Roy asked.
"No," she said.
He explained how Mr. Armitage had come unexpectedly by the coach that evening. Sophie saw him among the men on the veranda.
"I'll sing here," she told Bully and Roy, leaning against a veranda post.
She was a little afraid. But she knew she had always pleased Ridge folk when she sang to them, so she put back her head and sang a song of youth and youthful happiness she had sung on the veranda at Newton's before. It did not matter that the words were in Italian, which nobody understood. The dancing joyousness and laughing music of her notes carried the men with them. The applause was noisy and enthusiastic. Sophie laughed, delighted, yet almost afraid of her success.
Big and broad-shouldered, Bully Bryant stood at a little distance from her, in front of everybody. Arthur Henty, leaning against the wall near the door of the bar, smiled softly, foolishly, when she glanced at him. He had been drinking, too, and was watching, and listening to her, with the same look in his eyes as Bully.
Sophie caught the excitement about her. An exhilaration of pleasure thrilled her. It was crude wine which went to her head, this admiration and applause of strangers and of the men she had known since she was a child. There was a wonderful elation in having them beg her to sing. They looked actually hungry to hear her. She found Arthur Henty's eyes resting on her with the expression she knew in them. An imp of recklessness entered her. Her father beat the air as if he were leading an orchestra, and she threw herself into the Shadow Song, singing with an abandonment that carried her beyond consciousness of her surroundings.
She sang again and again, and always in response to an eager tumult of cheers, thudding of feet, joggling of glasses, chorus of broken cries: "En-core, encore, Sophie!" An instinct of mischief and coquetry urging, she glanced sometimes at Arthur, sometimes at Bully. Then with a glance at Arthur, and for a last number, she began "Caro Nome," and gave to her singing all the glamour and tenderness, the wild sweetness, the aria had come to have for her, because she had sung it so often to Arthur when they met and were walking along the road together. She was so carried away by her singing, she did not realise what had happened until afterwards.
She only knew that suddenly, roughly, she was grasped and lifted. She saw Bully's face flaming before her own, gazed with terror and horror into his eyes. His face was thrown against hers—and obliterated.
"Are you all right?" someone asked after a moment.
Awaking from the daze and bewilderment, Sophie looked up.
John Armitage was standing beside her; Potch nearby. They were on the outskirts of the crowd on the veranda.
"Yes," she said.
The men on the veranda had broken into two parties; one was surging towards the bar door, the other moving off down the road out of the town. Michael came towards her.
"Thank you, Mr. Armitage," he said.
"Oh, Potch looked after her. I couldn't get near," John Armitage said.
An extraordinary quiet took possession of Sophie. When she was going down the road with Potch and Michael, she said:
"Did Bully kiss me, Michael?"
"Yes," he replied.
"I don't know what happened then?"
"Arthur Henty knocked him down," Michael said.
She looked at him with scared eyes.
"They want to fight it out ... but they're both drunk. The boys are trying to stop it."
"Oh, Michael!" Sophie cried on a little gasping breath; and looking into her eyes he read her contrition, asking forgiveness, understanding all that he had not been able to explain to her. She did not say, "I'll never sing there, like that, any more." Her feeling was too deep for words; but Michael knew she never would.