Henty said that he was going into the New Town and would walk along part of the way with her. He tucked the flowers Sophie had given him into his saddle-bag, and she and the children turned down the track. Ella, having found her tongue, chattered eagerly. Arthur Henty strolled beside them, smoking, his reins over his arm. Mirry wanted to ride his horse.
"Nobody rides this horse but me," Henty said. "She'd throw you into the middle of next week."
"I can ride," Mirry said; "ride like a flea, the boys say."
She was used to straddling any pony or horse her brothers had in the yard, and they had a name as the best horse-breakers in the district.
Henty laughed. "But you couldn't ride Beeswing," he said. "She doesn't let anybody but me ride her. You can sit on, if you like; she won't mind that so long as I've got hold of her."
The stirrup was too high for Mirry to reach, so he picked her up and put her across the saddle. The mare shivered and shrank under the light shock of Mirry's landing upon her, but Arthur Henty talked to her and rubbed her head soothingly.
"It's all right ... all right, old girl," he muttered. "Think it was one of those stinging flies? But it isn't, you see. It's only Mirry Flail.
She says she's a flea of a rider. But you'd learn her, wouldn't you, if you got off with her by yourself?"
Ella giggled softly, peering at Mirry and Henty and at the beautiful golden-red chestnut he was leading. Ed. Ventry had put Sophie on his coach horses sometimes. He had let her go for a scamper with Potch on an old horse or a likely colt now and then; but she knew she did not ride well--not as Mirry rode.
They walked along the dusty road together when they had left the tank paddock, Mirry chattering from Beeswing's back, Sophie, with Ella clinging to one hand, on the other side of Henty. But Mirry soon tired of riding a led horse at a snail's pace. When a sulphur-coloured butterfly fluttered for a few minutes over a wild tobacco plant, she slid from the saddle, on the far side, and was off over the plains to have another look at the butterfly.
Ella was too shy or too frightened to get on the chestnut, even with Henty holding her bridle.
"How about you, Sophie?" Arthur Henty asked.
Sophie nodded, but before he could help her she had put her foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle herself. Beeswing shivered again to the new, strange weight on her back. Henty held her, muttering soothingly. They went on again.
After a while, with a shy glance, and as if to please him, Sophie began to sing, softly at first, so as not to startle the mare, and then letting her voice out so that it rippled as easily and naturally as a bird's. Henty, walking with a hand on the horse's bridle beside her, heard again the song she had been singing in the tank paddock.
Ella was supposed to be carrying Sophie's flowers. She did not know she had dropped nearly half of them, and that they were lying in a trail all along the dusty road.
Henty did not speak when Sophie had finished. His pipe had gone out, and he put it in his pocket. The stillness of her audience of two was so intense that to escape it Sophie went on singing, and the chestnut did not flinch. She went quietly to the pace of the song, as though she, too, were enjoying its rapture and tenderness.
Then through the clear air came a rattle of wheels and jingle of harness. Mirry, running towards them from the other side of the road, called eagerly:
"It's the coach.... Mr. Ventry's got six horses in, and a man with him!"
Six horses indicated that a person of some importance was on board the coach. Henty drew the chestnut to one side as the coach approached. Mr.
Ventry jerked his head in Henty's direction when he passed and saw Arthur Henty with the Flail children and Sophie. The stranger beside him eyed, with a faint smile of amusement, the cavalcade, the girl in the black dress on the fine chestnut horse, the children with the flowers, and the young man standing beside them. The man on the coach was a clean-shaved, well-groomed, rather good-looking man of forty, or thereabouts, and his clothes and appearance proclaimed him a man of the world beyond the Ridge. His smile and stare annoyed Henty.
"It's Mr. Armitage," Mirry said. "The young one. He's not as nice as the old man, my father says--and he doesn't know opal as well--but he gives a good price."
They had reached the curve of the road where one arm turns to the town and the other goes over the plains to Warria. Sophie slipped from the horse.
"We'll take the short cut here," she said.
She stood looking at Arthur Henty for a moment, and in that moment Henty knew that she had sensed his thought. She had guessed he was afraid of having looked ridiculous trailing along the road with these children.
Sophie turned away. The young Flails bounded after her. Henty could hear their laughter when he had ridden out some distance along the road.
From the slope of a dump Sophie saw him--the chestnut and her rider loping into the sunset, and, looking after him, she finished her song.
"Caro nome che il mio cor festi primo palpitar, Le delizie dell' amor mi dei sempre rammentar!
Col pensier il mio desir a te sempre volera, A fin l'ultimo sospir, caro nome, tuo sara!"
Dear name forever nursed in my memory thou shalt be, For my heart first stirred to the delight of love for thee!
My thoughts and my desire will always be, dear name, toward thee, And my last breath will be for thee, dear name.
The long, sweet notes and rippled melody followed Arthur Henty over the plains in the quiet air of late afternoon. But the afternoon had been spoilt for him. He was self-conscious and ill at ease about it all.
CHAPTER X
"Mr. Armitage is up at Newton's!" Paul yelled to Michael, when he saw him at his back-door a few minutes after Sophie had given him the news.
"Not the old man?" Michael inquired.
"No, the young 'un."
Word was quickly bruited over the fields that the American, one of the best buyers who came to the Ridge, had arrived by the evening coach. He invariably had a good deal of money to spend, and gave a better price than most of the local buyers.
Dawe P. Armitage had visited Fallen Star Ridge from the first year of its existence as an opal field, and every year for years after that. But when he began to complain about aches and pains in his bones, which he refused to allow anybody to call rheumatism, and was assured he was well over seventy and that the long rail and sea journey from New York City to Fallen Star township were getting too much for him, he let his son, whom he had made a partner in his business, make the journey for him.
John Lincoln Armitage had been going to the Ridge for two or three years, and although the men liked him well enough, he was not as popular with them as his father had been. And the old man, John Armitage said, although he was nearly crippled with rheumatism, still grudged him his yearly visit to the Ridge, and hated like poison letting anyone else do his opal-buying.
Dawe Armitage had bought some of the best black opal found on the Ridge.
He had been a hard man to deal with, but the men had a grudging admiration for him, a sort of fellow feeling of affection because of his oneness with them in a passion for black opal. A grim, sturdy old beggar, there was a certain quality about him, a gruff humour, sheer doggedness, strength of purpose, and dead honesty within his point of view, which kept an appreciative and kindly feeling for him in their hearts. They knew he had preyed on them; but he had done it bluntly, broadly, and in such an off-with-the-gloves-lads-style, that, after a good fight over a stone and price, they had sometimes given in to him for sheer amusement, and to let him have the satisfaction of thinking he had gained his point.
Usually he set his price on a stone and would not budge from it. The gougers knew this, and if their price on a stone was not Dawe Armitage's, they did not waste breath on argument, except to draw the old boy and get some diversion from his way of playing them. If a man had a good stone and did not think anyone else was likely to give him his figure, sometimes he sold ten minutes before the coach Armitage was going down to town by, left Newton's. But, three or four times, when a stone had taken his fancy and a miner was obdurate, the old man, with his mind's eye full of the stone and the fires in its dazzling jet, had suddenly sent for it and its owner, paid his price, and pocketed the stone. He had wrapped up the gem, chuckling in defeat, and rejoicing to have it at any price. As a rule he made three or four times as much as he had given for opals he bought on the Ridge, but to Dawe Armitage the satisfaction of making money on a transaction was nothing like the joy of putting a coveted treasure into his wallet and driving off from Fallen Star with it.
A gem merchant of considerable standing in the United States, Dawe Armitage's collection of opals was world famous. He had put black opal on the market, and had been the first to extol the splendour of the stones found on Fallen Star Ridge. So different they were from the opal found on Chalk Cliffs, or in any other part of the world, with the fires in jetty potch rather than in the clear or milky medium people were accustomed to, that at first timid and conventional souls were disturbed and repelled by them. "They felt," they said, "that there was something occultly evil about black opal." They had a curious fear and dread of the stones as talismans of evil. Dawe Armitage scattered the quakers like chaff with his scorn. They could not, he said, accept the magnificent pessimism of black opal. They would not rejoice with pagan abandonment in the beauty of those fires in black opal, realising that, like the fires of life, they owed their brilliance, their transcendental glory, to the dark setting. But every day the opals made worshippers of sightseers. They mesmerised beholders who came to look at them.
When the coach rattled to a standstill outside the hotel, Peter Newton went to the door of the bar. He knew John Armitage by the size and shape of his dust-covered overalls. Armitage dismounted and pulled off his gloves. Peter Newton went to meet him.
Armitage gripped his hand.
"Mighty glad to see you, Newton," he said, "and glad to see the Ridge again. How are you all?"
Newton smiled, giving him greeting in downright Ridge style.
"Fine," he said. "Glad to see you, Mr. Armitage."
When he got indoors, Armitage threw off his coat. He and Peter had a drink together, and then he went to have a wash and brush up before dinner. Mrs. Newton came from the kitchen; she was pleased to see Mr.
Armitage, she said, and he shook hands with her and made her feel that he was really quite delighted to see her. She spent a busy hour or so making the best of her preparations for the evening meal, so that he might repeat his usual little compliments about her cooking. Armitage had his dinner in a small private sitting-room, and strolled out afterwards to the veranda to smoke and yarn with the men.
He spent the evening with them there, and in the bar, hearing the news of the Ridge and gossiping genially. He had come all the way from Sydney the day before, spent the night in the train, and had no head for business that night, he said. When he yarned with them, Fallen Star men had a downright sense of liking John Armitage. He was a good sort, they told each other; they appreciated his way of talking, and laughed over the stories he told and the rare and racy Americanisms with which he flavoured his speech for their benefit.
When he exerted himself to entertain and amuse them, they were as pleased with him as a pack of women. And John Lincoln Armitage pleased women, men of the Ridge guessed, the women of his own kind as well as the women of Fallen Star who had talked to him now and then. His eyes had a mild caress when they rested on a woman; it was not in the least offensive, but carried challenge and appeal--a suggestion of sympathy.
He had a thousand little courtesies for women, the deference which comes naturally to "a man of the world" for a member of "the fair sex." Mrs.
Newton was always flattered and delighted after a talk with him. He asked her advice about opals he had bought or was going to buy, and, although he did not make use of it very often, she was always pleased by his manner of asking. Mrs. George Woods and Mrs. Archie Cross both confessed to a partiality for Mr. Armitage, and even Mrs. Watty agreed that he was "a real nice man"; and when he was in the township Mrs.
Henty and one of the girls usually drove over from the station and took him back to Warria to stay a day or two before he went back to Sydney on his return journey to New York.