The Black Opal - Katharine Susannah Prichard (open ebook .TXT) 📗

used to the rough and simple existence of the back-country, are satisfied with the life which gives them a husband, home, and children. Those who sympathise with Mrs. Watty Frost regard the men’s attitude as more than half cussedness, sheer selfishness or stick-in-the-mudness; and the more worthy and respectable they are, the more they fret and fume at the earthen floors and open hearths of the bark and bagging huts they live in, and pine for all the kickshaws of suburban villas. The discontented women are a minority, nevertheless. Ridge folk as a whole have set their compass and steer the course of their lives with unconscious philosophy, and yet a profound conviction as to the rightness of what they are doing.

And the Ridge, which bears them, stands serenely under blue skies the year long, rising like a backbone from the plains that stretch for hundreds of miles on either side. A wide, dusty road crosses the plains. The huts of the Three Mile and Fallen Star crouch beside it, and everywhere on the rusty, shingle-strewn slopes of the Ridge, are the holes and thrown-up heaps of white and raddled clay or broken sandstone⁠—traces of the search for that “ecstasy in the heart of gloom,” black opal, which the Fallen Star earth holds.

IX

Darling pea was lying in purple and magenta patches through the long grass on the tank paddock when Sophie went with Ella and Mirry Flail to gather wild flowers there.

Wild flowers did not grow anywhere on Fallen Star as they did in the tank paddock. It was almost a place of faery to children of the Ridge. The little ones were not allowed to go there by themselves for fear they might fall into the waterhole which lay like a great square lake in the middle of it, its steep, well-set-up banks of yellow clay, ruled with the precision of a diagram in geometry. The water was almost as yellow as the banks, thick and muddy looking; but it was good water, nothing on earth the matter with it when you had boiled it and the sediment had been allowed to settle, everybody on Fallen Star Ridge was prepared to swear. It had to be drawn up by a pump which was worked by a donkey engine, Sam Nancarrow, and his old fat roan draught mare, and carted to the township when rainwater in the iron tanks beside the houses in Fallen Star gave out.

During a dry season, or a very hot summer, all hands turned out to roof the paddock tank with tarpaulins to prevent evaporation as far as possible and so conserve the township’s water supply. On a placard facing the roadway a “severe penalty” was promised to anyone using it without permission or making improper use of it.

Ella and Mirry were gathering sago flower⁠—“wild sweet Alice,” as they called candytuft⁠—yellow eye-bright, tiny pink starry flowers, bluebells, small lavender daisies, taller white ones, and yellow daisies, as well as Darling pea; but Sophie picked only long, trailing stalks of the pea. She had as many as she could hold when she sat down to arrange them into a tighter bunch.

Mirry and Ella Flail had always been good friends of Sophie’s. Potch and she had often gone on excursions with them, or to the swamp to cart water when it was scarce and very dear in the township. And since Potch had gone to work Sophie had no one to go about with but Mirry and Ella. She pleased their mother by trying to teach them to read and write, and they went noodling together, or gathering wild flowers. Sophie was three or four years older than Mirry, who was the elder of the two Flails; she felt much older since her mother’s death nearly a year ago, and in the black dress she had worn since then. She was just seventeen, and had put her hair up into a knot at the back of her head. That made her feel older, too. But she still liked to go for walks and wanderings with Ella and Mirry. They knew so much about the birds and flowers, the trees, and the ways of all the wild creatures: they were such wild creatures themselves.

They came running to her, crying excitedly, their hands filled with flowers, shedding them as they ran. Then, collapsing in the grass beside Sophie, Mirry rolled over on her back and gazed up into the sky. Ella, squatting on her thin, sunburnt little sticks of legs, was arranging her flowers and glancing every now and then at Sophie with shy, loving glances.

Sophie wondered why she had nothing of her old joyous zest in their enterprises together. She used to be as wild and happy as Mirry and Ella on an afternoon like this. But there was something of the shy, wild spirit of a primitive people about Mirry and Ella, she remembered, some of their blood, too. One of their mother’s people, it was said, had been a native of one of the river tribes.

Mirry had her mother’s beautiful dark eyes, almost green in the light, and freckled with hazel, and her pale, sallow skin. Ella, younger and shyer, was more like her father. Her skin was not any darker than Sophie’s, and her eyes blue-grey, her features delicate, her hair golden-brown that glinted in the sun.

“Sing to us, Sophie,” Mirry said.

Sophie often sang to them when she and Ella and Mirry were out like this. As she sat with them, dreaming in the sunshine, she sang almost without any conscious effort; she just put up her chin, and the melodies poured from her. Hearing her voice, as it ran in ripples and eddies through the clear, warm air, hung and quivered and danced again, delighted her.

Ella and Mirry listened in a trance of awe, reverence, and admiration. Sophie had a dim vision of them, wide-eyed and still, against the tall grass and flowers.

“My! You can sing, Sophie! Can’t she, Ella?”

Ella nodded,