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

a moment. It gave her a welling tenderness and gratitude to have Sophie concerned for her tiredness, and fuss about her like this. Martha was so accustomed to caring for everybody on the Ridge, and she was so strong, good-natured, and vigorous, very few people thought of her ever being weary or dispirited. But as she bustled into the kitchen, blocking out the light, Sophie saw that Martha’s fat, jolly face under the shadow of her sunhat, was not as happy-looking as usual. Sophie guessed the weariness which had overtaken her, and that she was “poorly” or “out-of-sorts,” as Martha would have said herself, if she could have been made to admit such a thing.

“It’s all very well to give folks a helping hand,” Martha continued, “but I’m not going to have you doin’ their washin’ while I’m about.”

Sophie put a cup of tea and slice of bread and syrup down beside her.

“There! You drink that cup of tea, and tell me what you think of it,” she said.

“But, Sophie,” Martha protested. “It’s stone silly for you to be doing things like Cross’s washing. You’re not strong enough, and I won’t have it.”

“Won’t you?”

Sophie put her arms around Martha’s neck from behind her chair. She pressed her face against the creases of Martha’s sunburnt neck and kissed it.

Martha gurgled happily under the pressure of Sophie’s young arms, the childish impulse of that hugging. She turned her face back and kissed Sophie.

“Oh, my lamb! My dearie lamb!” she murmured.

She recognised Sophie’s need for common and kindly service to the people of the Ridge. She knew what that service had meant to her at one time, and was willing to let Sophie share her ministry so long as her health was equal to it.

Mrs. Watty, and the women who took their views from her, thought that Sophie was giving herself a great deal of unnecessary and laborious work as a sort of penance. They had withdrawn all countenance from her after the disaster of the ball, although they regarded her marriage to Potch as an endeavour to reinstate herself in their good graces. Mrs. Watty had been scandalised by the dress she had worn at the ball, by the way she had danced, and her behaviour generally. But Sophie was quite unconcerned as to what Mrs. Watty and her friends thought: she did not go out of her way either to avoid or placate them.

When she went to the Crosses’ to take charge of the children and look after the house while Mrs. Cross was ill, the gossips had exclaimed together. And when it was known that Sophie had taken on herself odds and ends of sewing for other women of the township who had large families and rather more to do than they knew how to get through, they declared that they did not know what to make of it, or of Sophie and her moods and misdemeanours.

Potch heard of what Sophie was doing from the people she helped. When he came home in the evening she was nearly always in the kitchen getting tea for him; but if she was not, she came in soon after he got home, and he knew that one of these little tasks she had undertaken for people in the town had kept her longer than she expected. Usually he hung in the doorway, waiting for her to come and meet him, to hold up her face to be kissed, eyes sweet with affection and the tender familiarity of their association. Those offered kisses of hers were the treasure of these dreamlike days to Potch.

He had always loved Sophie. He had thought that his love had reached the limit of loving a long time before, but since they had been married and were living, day after day, together, he had become no more than a loving of her. He went about his work as usual, performed all the other functions of his life mechanically, scrupulously, but it was always with a subconscious knowledge of Sophie and of their life together.

“You’re tired,” he said one night when Sophie lifted her face to his, his eyes strained on her with infinite concern.

“Dear Potch,” she said; and she had put back the hair from his forehead with a gesture tender and pitiful.

Her glance and gesture were always tender and pitiful. Potch realised it. He knew that he worshipped and she accepted his worship. He was content⁠—not quite content, perhaps⁠—but he assured himself it was enough for him that it should be so.

He had never taken Sophie in his arms without an overwhelming sense of reverence and worship. There was no passionate need, no spontaneity, no leaping flame in the caresses she had given him, in that kiss of the evening, and the slight, girlish gestures of affection and tenderness she gave as she passed him at meals, or when they were reading or walking together.

As they lay on the plains this evening they had been thinking of their life together. They had talked of it in low, brooding murmurs. The immensity of the silence soaked into them. They had taken into themselves the faint, musky fragrance of the withered herbage and the paper daisies. They had gazed among the stars for hours. When it was time to go home, Sophie sat up.

“I love to lie against the earth like this,” she said.

“We seem to get back to the beginning of things. You and I are no more than specks of dust on the plains⁠ ⁠… under the skies, Potch⁠ ⁠… and yet the whole world is within us.⁠ ⁠…”

“Yes,” Potch said, and the silence streamed between them again.

“I’ll never forget,” Sophie continued dreamily, “hearing a negro talk once about what they call ‘the negro problem’ in America. He was an ordinary thickset, curly-haired, coarse-featured negro to look at⁠—Booker Washington⁠—but he talked some of the clearest, straightest stuff I’ve ever heard.

“One thing he said has always stayed in my mind: ‘Keep close to the earth.’ It was not good, he said, to walk on asphalted paths