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

“I’m glad, Bully,” she said. “Let’s forget all about it.”

So the matter ended. But it all came back to her as she saw the broken red line on Arthur Henty’s forehead.

She did not know that because of it she was an object of interest to the crowd on the veranda. News of Arthur Henty’s bout with Bully Bryant had been very soon noised over the whole countryside. Most of the men who came to the ball from Langi-Eumina and other stations had gleaned varied and highly-coloured versions, and Arthur had been chaffed and twitted until he was sore and ashamed of the whole incident. He could not understand himself⁠—the rush of rage, instinctive and unreasoning, which had overwhelmed him when he hit out at Bully.

His mother protested that it was a shame to give Arthur such a bad time for what was, after all, merely the chivalrous impulse of any decent young man when a girl was treated lightly in his presence; but the men and the girls who were staying at the station laughed and teased all the more for the explanation. They pretended he was a very heroic and quixotic young man, and asked about Sophie⁠—whether she was pretty, and whether it was true she sang well. They redoubled their efforts, and goaded him to a state of sulky silence, when they knew she was coming to the ball.

Arthur Henty had been conscious for some time of an undercurrent within him drawing him to Sophie. He was afraid of, and resented it. He had not thought of loving her, or marrying her. He had gone to the tank paddock in the afternoons he knew she would be there, or had looked for her on the Warria road when she had been to the cemetery, with a sensation of drifting pleasantly. He had never before felt as he did when he was with Sophie, that life was a clear and simple thing⁠—pleasant, too; that nothing could be better than walking over the plains through the limpid twilight. He had liked to see the fires of opal run in her eyes when she looked at him; to note the black lines on the outer rim of their coloured orbs; the black lashes set in silken skin of purest ivory; the curve of her chin and neck; the lines of her mouth, and the way she walked; all these things he had loved. But he did not want to have the responsibility of loving Sophie: he could not contemplate what wanting to marry her would mean in tempests and turmoil with his family.

He had thought sometimes of a medieval knight wandering through flowering fields with the girl on a horse beside him, in connection with Sophie and himself. A reproduction of the well-known picture of the knight and the girl hung in his mother’s sitting-room. She had cut it out of a magazine, and framed it, because it pleased her; and beneath the picture, in fine print, Arthur had often read:

“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful⁠—a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

“I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.”

As a small boy Arthur had been attracted by the picture, and his mother had told him its story, and had read him Keats’ poem. He had read it ever so many times since then himself, and after he met Sophie in the tank paddock that afternoon she had ridden home on his horse, some of the verses haunted him with the thought of her. One day when they were sitting by the track and she had been singing to him, he had made a daisy chain and thrown it over her, murmuring sheepishly, in a caprice of tenderness:

“I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love
And made sweet moan.”

Sophie had asked about the poem. She had wanted to hear more, and he had repeated as many verses as he could remember. When he had finished, she had looked at him “as she did love” indeed, with eyes of sweet confidence, yet withdrawing from him a little in shy and happy confusion that he should think of her as anyone like the lady of the meads, who was “full beautiful⁠—a fairy’s child.”

But Arthur did not want to love her; he did not want to marry her. He did not want to have rows with his father, differences with his mother. The affair at Newton’s had shown him where he was going.

Sophie was “a fairy’s child,” he decided. “Her hair as long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild”; but he did not want to be “a wretched wight, alone and palely loitering” on her account; he did not want to marry her. He would close her eyes with “kisses four,” he told himself, smiling at the precision of the knight of the chronicle; “kisses four”⁠—no more⁠—and be done with the business.

Meanwhile, he wished Sophie were not coming to the ball. He would have given anything to prevent her coming; but he could do nothing.

He had thought of escaping from the ball by going to the outstation with the men; but his mother, foreseeing something of his intention, had given him so much to do at the homestead for her, that he could not go away. When the buggy with Sophie and her father drove up to the veranda, there was a chorus of suppressed exclamations among the assembled guests.

“Here she is, Art!”

“Buck up, old chap! None but the brave, etc.”

Sophie did not hear the undertone of laughter and raillery which greeted her arrival. She was quite unconscious that the people on the veranda were interested in her at all, as she walked across the courtyard listening to Mr. Burton’s amiable commonplaces.

When Mr. Burton left her in a small room with chintz-covered chairs