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

Desolation overwhelmed him because he could not find Sophie; because she was in none of the places they had spent so much time in together. It was significant that she should not be in any of them, he felt. He could not bear to think she was eluding him, and yet that was what she had done all her life. She had been with him, smiling, elfish and tender one moment, and gone the next. She had always been elusive. For a long time a presentiment of desolation and disaster had overshadowed him. Again and again he had been able to draw breath of relief and assure himself that the indefinable dread which was always with him was a chimera of his too absorbing, too anxious love. But the fear, instinctive, prophetic, begotten by consciousness of the slight grasp he had of her, had remained.

That morning even, before he had gone off to work, she had taken his face in her hands. He had seen tenderness and an infinite gentleness in her eyes.

“Dear Potch,” she had said, and kissed him.

She had withdrawn from him before the faint chill which her words and the light pressure of her lips diffused, had left him. And now he was wandering over the plains looking for her, calling her.⁠ ⁠… He had done so before.⁠ ⁠… Sophie liked to wander off like this by herself. Sometimes he had found her in a place where they often sat together; sometimes she had been in the hut before him; sometimes she had come in a long time after him, wearily, a strange, remote expression on her face, as if long gazing at the stars or into the darkness which overhung the plains had deprived her of some earthliness.

He did not know how long he walked over the plains and along the Ridge, looking for her, his soul in that cry:

“Sophie! Sophie!”

He wandered for hours before he went back to the hut, and saw Michael coming out to meet him.

“She knows, Potch,” Michael said.

Potch waited for him to continue.

“Says nobody told her.⁠ ⁠… She heard the shot⁠ ⁠… and knew,” Michael said.

Potch exclaimed brokenly. He asked how Sophie was. Michael said she had come in and had lain down on the sofa as though she were very tired. She had been lying there ever since, so still that Michael was alarmed. He had called Paul and sent him to find Martha. Sophie had not cried at all, Michael said.

She was lying on the sofa under the window, her hair thrown back from her face when Potch went into the hut. He closed his eyes against the sight of her face; he could not see Sophie in the grip of such pain. He knelt beside her.

“Sophie! Sophie!” he murmured, the inarticulate prayer of his love and anguish in those words.

XVIII

The men met to talk about Michael next evening. The meeting was informal, but every man on the fields had come to Fallen Star for it. The hall was filled to the doors as it had been the night before, but the crowd had none of the elastic excitement and fighting spirit, the antagonisms and enthusiasms, which had gone off from it in wavelike vibrations the night before. News of Arthur Henty’s death had left everybody aghast, and awakened realisation of the abysses which even a life that seemed to move easily could contain. The shock of it was on everybody; the solemnity it had created in the air.

George Woods, elected spokesman for the men, and Roy O’Mara deputed to take notes of the meeting because he was reckoned to be a good penman, sat at a table on the platform. Michael took a chair just below the platform, facing the men. He was there to answer questions. No one had asked him to be present, but it was the custom when men of the Ridge were holding an inquiry of the sort for the man or men concerned to have seats in front of the platform, and Michael had gone to sit there as soon as the men were in their places.

“This isn’t like any other inquiry we’ve had on the Ridge,” George Woods said. “You chaps know how I feel about it⁠—I told you last night. But Michael was for it, and I take it he’s come here to answer any questions⁠ ⁠… and to clear this thing up once and for all.⁠ ⁠… He’s put his case to you. He says he’ll stand by what you say⁠—the judgment of his mates.”

Anxious to spare Michael another recital of what had happened, he went on:

“There’s no need for Michael to repeat what he said last night. If there’s any man here wasn’t in the hall, these are the facts.”

He repeated the story Michael had told, steadily, clearly, and impartially.

“If there’s any man wants to ask a question on those facts, he can do it now.”

George sat down, and M’Ginnis was on his feet the same instant; his bat-like ears twitching, his shoulders hunched, his whole tall, thin frame strung to the pitch of nervous animosity.

“I want to know,” he said, “what reason there is for believing a word of it. Michael Brady’s as good as admitted he’s been fooling you for goodness knows how long, and I don’t see⁠—”

“Y’ soon will, y’r bleedin’, blasted, flyblown fool,” Bully Bryant roared, rising and pushing back his sleeves.

“Sit down, Bull,” George Woods called.

“The question is,” he added, “what reason is there for believing what Michael says?”

“His word’s enough,” somebody called.

“Some of us think so,” George said. “But there’s some don’t. Is there anyone else can say, Michael?”

Michael shook his head. He thought of Snowshoes, but the old man had refused to be present at the inquiry or to have anything to do with it. He had pretended to be deaf when he was asked anything about Paul’s opals. And Michael, who could only surmise that Snowshoes’ reasons for having taken the stones in a measure resembled his own when he took them