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

to have left her body. She stood so with her hand out, her lips parted, her eyes wide.⁠ ⁠…

After a while she knew Potch was holding her, and that he was saying:

“It’s all right! It’s all right, Sophie!”

She could feel him, something to lean against, beside her. Michael lifted the candle. With strange intensity, as though she were dreaming, Sophie saw the men had fallen away from the table. All their faces were caricatures, distorted and ghastly; and they were looking at the floor near her. Sophie’s eyes went to the floor, too. She could see shattered stars⁠—red, green, gold, blue, and amethyst⁠—out across the earthen floor.

Michael put the candle on the floor. He and George Woods gathered them up. When Sophie looked up, the dark of the room swam with galaxies of those stars⁠—red, green, gold, blue, and amethyst.

She stood staring before her: she had lost the power to move or to think. After a while she knew that the men had gone from the room, and that Potch was still beside her, his eyes on her face. He had eyes only for her face: he had barely glanced at the floor, where infinitesimal specks of coloured light were still winking in the dust. He took her hands. Sophie heard him talking, although she did not know what he was saying.

When she began to understand what Potch was saying, Sophie was sitting on the sofa under the window, and Potch was kneeling beside her. At first she heard him talking as if he were a long way away. She tried to listen; tried to understand what he was saying.

“It’s all right, Sophie,” Potch kept saying, his voice breaking.

Sight of her suffering overwhelmed him; and he trembled as he knelt beside her. Sophie heard him crying distantly:

“It’s all right! It’s all right, Sophie!”

She shuddered. Her eyes went to him, consciousness in their blank gaze. Potch, realising that, murmured incoherently:

“Don’t think of it any more.⁠ ⁠… It was yours, Sophie. It was for you I was keeping it.⁠ ⁠… Michael knew that, too. He knew that was why I didn’t want to sell.⁠ ⁠… It was your opal⁠ ⁠… to do what you liked with, really. That was what I meant when I put it in your hand. But don’t let us think of it any more. I don’t want to think of it any more.”

“Oh!” Sophie cried, in a bitter wailing; “it’s true, I believe⁠ ⁠… somebody said once that I’m as unlucky as opal⁠—that I bring people bad luck like opal.⁠ ⁠…”

“You know what we say on the Ridge?” Potch said; “The only bad luck you get through opal is when you can’t get enough of it⁠—so the only bad luck you’re likely to bring to people is when they can’t get enough of you.”

“Potch!”

Sophie’s hands went to him in a flutter of breaking grief. The forgiveness she could not ask, the gratitude for his gentleness, which she could not express any other way, were in the gesture and exclamation.

On her hands, through his hot, clasped hands, the whole of Potch’s being throbbed.

“Don’t think of it any more,” he begged.

“But it was your luck⁠—your wonderful opal⁠—and⁠ ⁠… I broke it, Potch. I spoilt your luck.”

“No,” Potch said, borne away from himself on the flood of his desire to assuage her distress. “You make everything beautiful for me, Sophie. Since you came back I haven’t thought of the stone: I’d forgotten it.⁠ ⁠… This hasn’t been the same place. I’m so filled up with happiness because you’re here that I can’t think of anything else.”

Sophie looked into his face, her eyes swimming. She saw the deep passion of love in Potch’s eyes; but she turned away from the light it poured over her, her face overcast again, bitterness and grief in it. She hung so for a moment; then her hands went over her face and she was crying abstractedly, wearily.

There was something in her aloofness in that moment which chilled Potch. His instincts, sensitive as the antennae of an insect, wavered over her, trying to discover the cause of it. Conscious of a mood which excluded him, he withdrew his hand from her. Sophie groped for it. Then the sense of sex and of barriers swept from him, by the passion of his desire to comfort and console her. Potch put his arm round her and drew Sophie to him, murmuring with an utter tenderness, “Sophie! Sophie!”

Later she said:

“I can’t tell you⁠ ⁠… what happened⁠ ⁠… out there, Potch. Not yet⁠ ⁠… not now.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps some day I will. It hurt so much that it took all the singing out of me. My heart wouldn’t move⁠ ⁠… so my voice died. I thought if I came home, you and Michael wouldn’t mind⁠ ⁠… my being like I am. But you’ve all been so good to me, Potch⁠ ⁠… and it’s so restful here, I was beginning to think that life might go on from where I left it; that it might be just a quiet living together and loving, like it was before.⁠ ⁠…”

“It can, Sophie!” Potch said, his eyes on her face, wistful and eager to read her thought.

“But look what I’ve done,” she said.

Potch lifted her hand to his lips, a resurge of the virile male in him moving his restraint.

“I’ve told you,” he said, “what you’ve done. You’ve put joy into all our hearts⁠—just to see you again. Michael’s told you that, too, and George and the rest of them.”

“Yes, but, Potch⁠ ⁠…” Sophie paused, and he saw the shadow of dark thoughts in her eyes again. “I’m not what you think I am. I’m not like any of you think.”

Potch’s grip on her hand tightened.

“You’re you⁠—and you’re here. That’s enough for us!” he said.

Sophie sighed. “I never dreamt everybody would be so good. You and Michael I knew would⁠—but the others⁠ ⁠… I thought they’d remember⁠ ⁠… and disapprove of me, Potch.⁠ ⁠… Mrs. Watty”⁠—a smile showed faintly in her eyes⁠—“I thought she’d see to that.”

“I daresay she’s done her best,” Potch said, with a memory of Watty’s valiant bearing and angry, bright eyes when he