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

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 outstation 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 campfire 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