"That's right!" Watty called, and several men shouted after him.
Pony-Fence moved out from the crowd he was sitting with.
"I vote this meeting records a motion of confidence in Michael Brady," he said. "And when we call Michael in again we'd ought to make it clear to him ... that so far from its being a question of not having as much confidence in him as we had before—we've got more. Michael's stood by his mates if ever a man did.... He's come to us ... he's given himself up to us. He'll stand by what we say or do about him. And what are we goin' to do? Are we goin' to turn him down ... read him a bit of a lecture and tell him to go home and be a good boy and not do it another time ... or are we going to let him know once and for all what we think of him?"
Exclamations of agreement went up in a rabble of voices.
Bully Bryant rose from one of the back forms with a grin which illuminated the building.
"I'll second that motion," he said, pushing back the sleeve on his left arm. "And his own mother won't know the man who says a word against it—when I've done with him."
Watty was sent to bring Michael back to the meeting. They walked to the end of the hall together; and George Woods told Michael as quietly as he could for his own agitation, and the joy which, welling in him, impeded his speech, that men of the Ridge found nothing to censure in what he had done. His mates believed in him; they stood by him. They were prepared to stand by him as he had stood by the Ridge always. The meeting wished to record a vote of confidence....
Cheers roared to the roof. Michael, shaken by the storm of his emotion and gratitude, stood before the crowd in the hall with bowed head. When the storm was quieter in him, he lifted his head and looked out to the men, his eyes shining with tears.
He could not speak; old mates closed round to shake hands with him before the meeting broke up. Every man grasped and wrung his hand, saying:
"Good luck! Good luck to you, Michael!" Or just grasped his hand and smiled with that assurance of fellowship and goodwill which meant more to Michael than anything else in the world.
It was one of those clear days of late spring, the sky exquisitely blue, the cuckoos calling, the paper daisies in blossom, their fragrance in the air; they lay across the plains, through the herbage, white to the dim, circling horizon.
Horses and vehicles were tied up outside the grey palings of the cemetery on the Warria road. All the horses and shabby, or new and brightly-painted carts, sulkies, and buggies of Fallen Star and the Three Mile were there; and buggies from Warria, Langi-Eumina, and the river stations as well. Saddle horses, ranged along one side of the fence, reins over the stakes, whinnied and snapped at each other.
The crowd of people standing in the tall grass and herbage on the other side of the fence was just breaking up when Sophie and Potch appeared, coming over the plains from the direction of the tank paddock, Sophie riding the chestnut Arthur Henty had left behind her house, and Potch walking beside the horse's head. Sophie had been gathering Darling pea, and had a great sheaf in one hand. Potch was carrying some, too: he had picked up the flowers Sophie let fall, and had a little bunch of them. She was riding astride and gazing before her, her eyes wide with a vision beyond the distant horizon. The wind, a light breeze breathing now and then, blew her hair out in wisps from her bare head.
All the men of Warria were in the sombre crowd in the cemetery. Old Henty, red-eyed and broken by the end of his only son, whom he found he had cared for now that he was dead; the stockmen, boundary-riders, servants, fencers, shearers from Darrawingee sheds who, a few weeks before had been on the Warria board, and men from other stations near enough to have heard of Arthur Henty's death. None of the Henty women were there; but women of the Ridge, who were accustomed to pay last respects as their menfolk did, were with their husbands as usual. They would have thought it unnatural and unkind not to follow Arthur Henty to his resting-place; not to go as friends would to say good-bye to a friend who is making a long journey. And there was more than the ordinary reason for being present at Arthur Henty's funeral. He was leaving them under a cloud, circumstances which might be interpreted unkindly, and it was necessary to be present to express sympathy with him and sorrow at his going. That was the way they regarded it.
Martha had driven with Sam Nancarrow, as she always did to functions of the sort. No one remembered having seen Martha take a thing so to heart as she did Arthur Henty's death. She was utterly shaken by it, and could not restrain her tears. They coursed down her cheeks all the time she was in that quiet place on the plains; her great, motherly bosom rose and fell with the tide of her grief. She tried to subdue it, but every now and then the sound of her crying could be heard, and in the end Sam took her, sobbing uncontrollably, back to his buggy.
People knew she had seen further into the cause of Arthur Henty's death than they had, and they understood that was why she Was so upset. Besides, Martha had always confessed to a soft corner for Arthur Henty: she had been with his mother when he was born, had nursed him during a hot summer and through several slight illnesses since then. And Arthur had been fond of her too. He had always called her Mother M'Cready as the Ridge folk did. Old Mr. Henty had driven over to see Martha the night before, to hear all she knew of what had happened, and Ridge folk had gathered something of the story from her broken exclamations and the reproaches with which she covered herself.
She cried out over and over again that she could not have believed Arthur would shoot himself—that he was the sort of man to do such a thing—and blamed herself for not having foreseen what had occurred. She had never seen him like he was that night—so strong, so much a man, so full of life and love for Sophie. He had begged Sophie to go with him as though his life depended on it—and it had.
If she had been a woman, and Sophie, and had loved him, Martha said, she would have had to go with him. She could never have withstood his pleading.... But Sophie had been good to him; she had been gentle—only she wouldn't go. Neither Sophie nor she believed, of course, he would do as he said—but he had.
Martha could not forgive herself that she had done nothing to soothe or pacify Arthur; that she had said nothing, given him neither kindly word nor gesture. But she had been so upset, so carried away. She had not known what to do or say. She abused and blackguarded herself; but she had sensed enough of the utter loneliness and darkness of Henty's mind to realise that most likely she could have done nothing against it. He would have brushed her aside had she attempted to influence him; he would not have heard what, she said. She would have been as helpless as any other human consideration against the blinding, irresistibly engulfing forces of despair which had impelled him to put himself out of pain as he had put many a suffering animal. It was an act of self-defence, as Mother M'Cready saw it, Arthur Henty's end, and that was all there was to it.
As Sophie and Potch approached the cemetery, people exclaimed together in wonderment, awe—almost fear.
James Henty, when he saw them, turned away from the men he was talking to and walked to his buggy; Tom Henderson, his son-in-law, followed him. Although he would have been the last to forgive Sophie if she had done as Arthur wished, even to save his life, old Henty had to have a whipping-post, and he eased his own sense of responsibility for what had blighted his son's life, by blaming Sophie for it. He assured himself, his family and friends, that she, and she alone, was responsible for Arthur's death. She had played with Arthur; she had always played with him, old Henty said. She had driven him to distraction with her wiles—and this was the end of it all.
Sophie rode into the cemetery: she rode to where the broken earth was; but she did not dismount. The horse came to a standstill beside it, and she sat on him, her eyes closed. Potch stood bare-headed and bowed beside her. He put the flowers he had picked up as Sophie let them fall, on the grave. Sophie thrust the long, purple trails she was carrying into the saddle-bag where Arthur had put the flowers she gave him that first day their eyes met and drank the love potion of each others' being.
People were already on the road, horses and buggies, dark, ant-like trains on the flowering plains, moving slowly in the direction of Warria and of Fallen Star, when Sophie and Potch turned away from the cemetery.
The shadow of what had happened was heavy over everybody as they drove home. Arthur Henty had been well enough liked, and he had had much more to do with Fallen Star than most of the station people. He had gone about so much with his men they had almost ceased to think of him as not one of themselves. He was less the "Boss" than any man in the back-country. They recognised that, and yet he was the "Boss." He had lived like a half-caste, drifting between two races and belonging to neither. The people he had been born among cold-shouldered him because he had acquired the manners and habits of thought of men he lived and worked with; the men he had lived and worked with distrusted and disliked in him just those tag-ends of refinement, and odd graces which belonged to the crowd he had come to them from.
The station hands, his work-mates—if he had any—had had a slightly contemptuous feeling for him. They liked him—they were always saying they liked him—but it was clear they never had any great opinion of him. As a boy, when he began to work with them, to cover his shyness and nervousness, he had been silent and boorish; and he had never had the courage of his opinions—courage for anything, it was suspected. It had always been hinted that he shirked any jobs where danger was to be expected.
The stockmen told each other they would miss him, all the same. They would miss that wonderful whistling of his from the camp fires; and they were appalled at what he had done to himself. "The last man," Charley Este said, "the last man you'd ever 've thought would 've come to that!" Most of them believed they had misjudged Arthur Henty—that, after, all, he had had courage of a sort. A man must have courage to blow out his light, they said. And they were sorry. Every man in the crowd was heavy with sorrow.
Ridge people gossiped pitifully, sentimentally, to each other as they drove home. Most of the women believed in the strength and fidelity of the old love between Sophie and Arthur Henty. But straight-dealing and honest themselves, they had no conception of the tricks complex personalities play each other; they did not understand how two people who had really cared for each other could have gone so astray from the natural impulse of their lives.
They recalled the dance at Warria, and how they had teased Sophie when they thought she was going to marry Arthur Henty, and how happy and pleased she had looked about it. How different both their lives would have been if Sophie and Arthur had been true to that instinct of the mate for the mate, they reflected; and sighed at the futility of the thought. They realised in Arthur Henty's drinking and rough ways of late, all his unhappiness. They imagined that they knew why he had become the uncouth-looking man he had. They remembered him a slight, shy youth, with sun-bright, freckled eyes; then a man, lithe, graceful, and good to look at, with his face a clear, fine bronze, his hair taking a glint of copper in the sun. When he danced with them at the Ridge balls, that occasionally flashing, delightful way of his had made them realise why Sophie was in love with him. They remembered how he had looked at Sophie; how his eyes had followed her. They had heard of the Warria dance, and knew Arthur Henty had not behaved well to Sophie at it. They had been angry at the time. Then Sophie had gone away ... and a little later he had married.
His marriage had not been a success. Mrs. Arthur Henty had spent most of her time in Sydney; she was rarely seen on the Ridge now. So women of the Ridge, who had known Arthur Henty, went over all they knew of him until that night at the race ball when he and Sophie had met again. And then his end in the tank paddock brought them back to exclamations of dismay and grief at the mystery of it all.
As she left the cemetery, Sophie began to sing, listlessly, dreamily at first. No one had heard her sing since her return to the Ridge. But her voice flew out over the plains, through the wide, clear air now, with the pure melody it had when she was a girl:
"Caro nome che il mio cor festi primo palpitar,Le delizie dell' amor mi dei sempre rammentar!Col pensier il mio desir a te sempre volerà,E fin l'ultimo sospir, caro nome, tuo sarà!"
Ella Bryant, driving home beside Bully, knew Sophie was singing as she had sung to Arthur Henty years before, when they were coming home from the tank paddock together. She wondered why Sophie was riding the horse Arthur had brought for her; why she had ridden him to the funeral; and why she was singing that song.
Sophie sang on:
"Col pensier il mio desir a te sempre volerà,E fin l'ultimo sospir, caro nome, tuo sarà!"
Looking back, people saw Potch walking beside her as Joseph walked beside Mary when they went down to Nazareth.
"It's hard on Potch," somebody said.
"Yes," it was agreed; "it's hard on Potch."
The buggies, carts, sulkies, and horsemen moving in opposite directions on the long, curving road over the plains grew dim in the distance.
The notes of Sophie's singing, with its undying tenderness triumphing over life and death, flowed fainter and fainter.
When she and Potch came to the town again, the light was fading. Through the green, limpid veil of the sky, stars were glittering; huts of the township were darkening under the gathering shadow of night. A breath of sandal-wood burning on kitchen hearths came to Sophie and Potch like a greeting. The notes of a goat-bell clanking dully sounded from beyond the dumps. There were lights in a few of the huts; a warm, friendly murmur of voices went up from them. For weeks troubled and disturbed thinking, arguments, and conflicting ideas, had created a depressed and unrestful atmosphere in every home in Fallen Star. But to-night it was different. The temptations, allurements and debris of Armitage's scheme had been swept from the minds—even of those who had been ready to accept it. Hope and pride in the purpose of the Ridge had been restored by Michael's vindication and by reaffirmation of the principle he and all staunch men of the Ridge stood for as the mainstay of their life in common. Thought of Arthur Henty's death, which had oppressed people during the day, seemed to have been put aside now that they had seen him laid to rest, and had returned to their homes again.
Voices were heard exclaiming with the light cadence and rhythm of joy. The crisis which had come near to shattering the Ridge scheme of things, and all that it stood for, had ended by drawing dissenting factions of the community into closer sympathy and more intimate relationship. In everybody's mind were the hope and enthusiasm of a new endeavour. As they went through the town again, neither Sophie nor Potch were conscious of them for the sorrow which had soaked into their lives. But these things were in the air they breathed, and sooner or later would claim them from all personal suffering; faith and loving service fill all their future—the long twilight of their days.
Contents
PART ICHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XIICHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIVCHAPTER XVCHAPTER XVIPART IICHAPTER ICHAPTER IICHAPTER IIICHAPTER IVCHAPTER VCHAPTER VICHAPTER VIICHAPTER VIIICHAPTER IXCHAPTER XCHAPTER XICHAPTER XIICHAPTER XIIICHAPTER XIVCHAPTER XVCHAPTER XVICHAPTER XVIICHAPTER XVIIICHAPTER XIX