To Armitage it was as though some blithe spirit was mocking the discovery he thought he had made, and the fruition it promised those secret hopes of his.
"It's Sophie," Michael said.
They had come across the Ridge to the back of the huts. The light was failing; the sky, from the earth upwards where the sunset had been, the frail, limpid green of a shallow lagoon, deepening to blue, darker than indigo. The crescent of a moon, faintly gilded, swung in the sky above the dark shapes of the huts which stood by the track to the old Flash-in-the-pan rush. The smoke of sandal-wood fires burning in the huts was in the air. A goat bell tinkled....
Potch and Sophie were talking behind the hut somewhere; their exclamations, laughter, a phrase or two of the song Sophie was singing went through the quietness.
And it was all this he wanted to change! John Armitage caught the revelation of the moment as he stood to listen to Sophie singing. He understood as he had never done what the Ridge stood for--association of people with the earth, their attachment to the primary needs of life, the joyous flight of youthful spirits, this quiet happiness and peace at evening when the work of the day was done.
As he came from the dumps, having said good-night to Michael, he saw Sophie, a slight, girlish figure, on the track ahead of him. Her dress flickered and flashed through the trees beside the track; it was a wraithlike streak in the twilight. She was taking the milk down to Newton's, and singing to herself as she walked. John Armitage quickened his steps to overtake her.
CHAPTER XII
The visit of an opal-buyer ruffled ever so slightly the still surface of life on the Ridge. When Armitage had gone, he was talked of for a few days; the stones he had bought, the prices he had given for them, were discussed. Some of his sayings, and the stories he had told, were laughed over. Tricks of speech he had used, tried at first half in fun, were adopted and dropped into the vernacular of the mines.
"Sure!" the men said as easily as an American; and sometimes, talking with each other: "You've got another think coming to you"; or, "See, you've got your nerve with you!"
For a night or two Michael went over the books and papers John Armitage had brought him. At first he just glanced here and there through them, and then he began to read systematically, and light glimmered in his windows far into the night. He soaked the contents of two or three reviews and several newspapers before giving himself to a book on international finance in which old Armitage had written his name.
Michael thrilled to the stimulus of the book, the intellectual excitement of the ideas it brought forth. He lived tumultuously within the four bare walls of his room, arguing with himself, the author, the world at large. Wrong and injustice enthroned, he saw in this book describing the complexities of national and international systems of finance, the subtle weaving and interweaving of webs of the money-makers.
This was not the effect Dawe Armitage had expected his book to have; he had expected to overawe and daze Michael with its impressive arraignment of figures and its subtle and bewildering generalisations on credit and foreign exchange. Michael's mind had cut through the fog raised by the financier's jargon to the few small facts beneath it all. Neither dazed nor dazzled, his brain had swung true to the magnetic meridian of his faith. Far from the book having shown him the folly and futility of any attempt against the Money Power, as Dawe Armitage, in a moment of freakish humour had imagined it might, it had filled him with such an intensity of fury that for a moment he believed he alone could accomplish the regeneration of the world; that like St. Michael of old he would go forth and slay the dragon, this chimera which was ravaging the world, drawing the blood, beauty, and joy of youth, the peace and wisdom of age; breaking manhood and womanhood with its merciless claws.
But falling back on a consciousness of self, as with broken wings he realised he was neither archangel, nor super-man, but Michael Brady, an ordinary, ill-educated man who read and dreamed a great deal, and gouged for black opal on Fallen Star Ridge. He was a little bitter, and more humble, for having entertained that radiant vision of himself.
John Armitage had been gone from the Ridge some weeks when Michael went over in his mind every phase and phrase of the talk they had had. His lips took a slight smile; it crept into his eyes, as he reviewed what he had said and what John Armitage had said, smoking unconsciously.
Absorbed in his reading, he had thought little of John Armitage and that walk to the new rush with him. Occasionally the memory of it had nickered and glanced through his mind; but he was so obsessed by the ideas this new reading had stirred, that he went about his everyday jobs in the mine and in the hut, absent-mindedly, automatically, because they were things he was in the habit of doing. Potch watched him anxiously; Rouminof growled to him; Sophie laughed and flitted and sang, before his eyes; but Michael had been only distantly conscious of what was going on about him. George Woods and Watty guessed what was the matter; they knew the symptoms of these reading and brooding bouts Michael was subject to.
The moods wore off when they put questions likely to draw information and he began to talk out and discuss what he had been reading with them.
He had talked this one off, when suddenly he remembered how John Armitage's eyes had dived into his during that walk to the new rush. He could see Armitage's eyes again, keen grey eyes they were. And his hands. Michael remembered how Armitage's hands had played over the opals he had taken to show him. John Lincoln Armitage had the shrewd eyes of any man who lives by his wits--lawyer, pickpocket, politician, or financier--he decided; and the fine white hands of a woman. Only Michael did not know any woman whose hands were as finely shaped and as white as John Armitage's. Images of his clean-shaven, hot-house face of a city dweller, slightly burned by his long journey on land and sea, recurred to him; expressions, gestures, inflections of voice.
Michael smiled to himself in communion with his thoughts as he went over the substance of Armitage's conversation, dissecting and shredding it critically. The more he thought of what Armitage had said, the more he found himself believing John Armitage had some information which caused him to think that he, Michael, knew something of the whereabouts of the stones. He could not convince himself Armitage believed he actually held the stones, or that he had stolen them. Armitage had certainly given him an opportunity to sell on the quiet if he had the stones; but his manner was too tentative, mingled with a subtle respect, to carry the notion of an overt suggestion of the sort, or the possession of incriminating knowledge. Then there was the story of the old Cliffs robbery. Michael wondered why Mr. Armitage had gone over that. On general principles, doubting the truth of his long run of bad luck--or from curiosity merely, perhaps. But Michael did not deceive himself that Armitage might have told the story in order to discover whether there was something of the miser in him, and whether--if Michael had anything to do with the taking of Paul's opals--he might prefer to hold rather than sell them.
Michael was amused at the thought of himself as a miser. He went into the matter as honestly as he could. He knew the power opal had with him, the fascination of the search for it, which had brought him from the Cliffs to the Ridge, and which had held him to the place, although the life and ideas it had come to represent meant more to him now than black opal. Still, he was an opal miner, and through all his lean years on the Ridge he had been upheld by the thought of the stone he would find some day.
He had dreamed of that stone. It had haunted his idle thoughts for years. He had seen it in the dark of the mine, deep in the ruddy earth, a mirror of jet with fires swarming, red, green, and gold in it.
Dreams of the great opal he would one day discover had comforted him when storekeepers were asking for settlement of long-standing accounts.
He did not altogether believe he would find it, that wonderful piece of black opal; but he dreamed, like a child, of finding it.
As he thought of it, and of John Armitage, the smile in his eyes broadened. If Armitage knew of that stone of his dreams, he would certainly think his surmise was correct and believe that Michael Brady was a miser. But he had held the dream in a dark and distant corner of his consciousness; had it out to mood and brood over only at rare and distant intervals; and no one was aware of its existence.
Black opal had no more passionate lover than himself, Michael knew. He trembled with instinctive eagerness, reverence, and delight, when he saw a piece of beautiful stone; his eyes devoured it. But there was nothing personal in his love. He might have been high priest of some mysterious divinity; when she revealed herself he was consumed with adoration. In a vague, whimsical way Michael realised this of himself, and yet, too, that if ever he held the stone of his dreams in his hands, he would be filled with a glorious and flooding sense of accomplishment; an ecstasy would transport him. It would be beyond all value in money, that stone; but he would not want to keep it to gaze on alone, he would want to give it to the world as a thing of consummate beauty, for everybody to enjoy the sight of and adore.
No, Michael assured himself, he was not a miser. And, he reflected, he had not even looked at Paul's stones. For all he knew, the stones Paul had been showing that night at Newton's might have been removed from the box before he left Newton's. Someone might have done to Paul what he, Michael, had done to Charley Heathfield, as Armitage had suggested.
Paul's little tin box was well enough known. He had been opening and showing his stones at Newton's a long time before the night when Jun had been induced to divide spoils. It would be just as well, Michael decided, to see what the box did contain; and he promised himself that he would open it and look over the stones--some evening. But he was not inclined to hurry the engagement with himself to do so.
He had been glad enough to forget that he had anything to do with that box of Paul's: it still lay among the books where he had thrown it. The memory of the night on which he had seen Charley taking Paul home, and of all that had happened afterwards, was blurred in an ugly vision for him. It had become like the memory of a nightmare. He could scarcely believe he had done what he had done; yet he knew he had. He drew a deep breath of relief when he realised everything had worked out well so far.
Paul was working with him; they had won that little bit of luck to carry them on; Sophie was growing up healthily, happily, on the Ridge. She was growing so quickly, too. Within the last few months Michael had noticed a subtle change in her. There was an indefinable air of a flower approaching its bloom about her. People were beginning to talk of her looks. Michael had seen eyes following her admiringly. Sophie walked with a light, lithe grace; she was slight and straight, not tall really, but she looked tall in the black dress she still wore and which came to her ankles. There was less of the eager sprite about her, a suggestion of some sobering experience in her eyes--the shadow of her mother's death--which had banished her unthinking and careless childhood. But the eyes still had the purity and radiance of a child's. And she seemed happy--the happiest thing on the Ridge, Michael thought. The cadence of her laughter and a ripple of her singing were never long out of the air about her father's hut. Wherever she went, people said now: "Sing to us, Sophie!"
And she sang, whenever she was asked, without the slightest self-consciousness, and always those songs from old operas, or some of the folk-songs her mother had taught her, which were the only songs she knew.
Michael had seen a number of neighbours in the township and their wives and children sitting round in one or other of their homes while Sophie sang. He had seen a glow of pleasure transfuse people as they listened to her pure and ringing notes. Singing, Sophie seemed actually to diffuse happiness, her own joy in the melodies she flung into the air.
Oh, yes, Sophie was happy singing, Michael could permit himself to believe now. She could make people happy by her singing. He had feared her singing as a will-o'-the-wisp which would lead her away from him and the Ridge. But when he heard her enthralling people in the huts with it, he was not afraid.
Paul sometimes moaned about the chances she was missing, and that she could be singing in theatres to great audiences. Sophie herself laughed at him. She was quite content with the Ridge, it seemed, and to sing to people on their verandas in the summer evenings or round the fires in the winter. She might have had greater and finer audiences, the Ridge folk said, but she could not have had more appreciative ones.
If she was singing in the town, Michael always went to bring her home, and he was as pleased as Sophie to hear people say:
"You're not taking her away yet, Michael? The night's a pup!" or, "Another ... just one more song, Sophie!"
And if she had been singing at Newton's, Michael liked to see the men come to the door of the bar, holding up their glasses, and to hear their call, as Sophie and he went down the road:
"Sophie! Sophie!"
"Skin off y'r nose!"
"All the luck!"
"Best respecks, Sophie!"
When Sophie did not know what to do with herself all the hours Michael and Potch and her father were away at the mines, Michael had showed her how to use her mother's cutting-wheel. He taught her all he knew of opals, and Sophie was delighted with the idea of learning to cut and polish gems as her mother had.
Michael gave her rough stones to practise on, and in no time she learnt to handle them skilfully. George, Watty, and the Crosses brought her some gems to face and polish for them, and they were so pleased with her work that they promised to give her most of their stones to cut and polish. She had two or three accidents, and was very crestfallen about them; but Michael declared they were part of the education of an opal-cutter and would teach her more about her work than anyone could tell her.
To Michael those days were of infinite blessedness. They proved again and again the right of what he had done. At first he was vaguely alarmed and uneasy when he saw younger men of the Ridge, Roy O'Mara or Bully Bryant, talking or walking with Sophie, or he saw her laughing and talking with them. There was something about Sophie's bearing with them which disturbed him--a subtle, unconscious witchery. Then he explained it to himself. He guessed that the woman in her was waking, or awake. On second thoughts he was not jealous or uneasy. It was natural enough the boys should like Sophie, that she should like them; he recognised the age-old call of sex in it all. And if Sophie loved and married a man of the Ridge, the future would be clear, Michael thought. He could give Paul the opals, and her husband could watch over Sophie and see no harm came to her if she left the Ridge.
The uneasiness stirred again, though, one afternoon when he found her walking from the tank paddock with Arthur Henty beside her. There was a startled consciousness about them both when Michael joined them and walked along the road with them. He had seen Sophie talking to Henty in and about the township before, but it had not occurred to him there was anything unusual about that. Sophie had gone about as she liked and talked to whom she liked since she was a child. She was on good terms with everyone in the countryside. No one knew where she went or what she did in the long day while the men were at the mines. Because the carillon of her laughter flew through those quiet days, Michael instinctively had put up a prayer of thanksgiving. Sophie was happy, he thought. He did not ask himself why; he was grateful; but a vague disquiet made itself felt when he remembered how he had found her walking with Arthur Henty, and the number of times he had seen her talking to Arthur Henty at Chassy Robb's store, or on the tracks near the town.
Fallen Star folk knew Arthur better than any of the Hentys. For years he had been coming through the township with cattle or sheep, and had put up at Newton's with stockmen on his way home, or when he was going to an out-station beyond the Ridge.
His father, James Henty, had taken up land in the back-country long before opal was found on Fallen Star Ridge. He had worked half a million square acres on an arm of the Darling in the days before runs were fenced, with only a few black shepherds and one white man, old Bill M'Gaffy, to help him for the first year or two. But, after an era of extraordinary prosperity, a series of droughts and misfortunes had overwhelmed the station and thrown it on the tender mercies of the banks.
The Hentys lived much as they had always done. They entertained as usual, and there was no hint of a wolf near the door in the hearty, good-natured, and liberal hospitality of the homestead. A constitutional optimism enabled James Henty to believe Warria would ultimately throw off its debts and the good old days return. Only at the end of a season, when year after year he found there was no likelihood of being able to meet even the yearly interest on mortgages, did he lose some of his sanguine belief in the station's ability to right itself, and become irritable beyond endurance, blaming any and everyone within hail for the unsatisfactory estimates.
But usually Arthur bore the brunt of these outbursts. Arthur Henty had gone from school to work on the station at the beginning of Warria's decline from the years of plenty, and had borne the burden and not a little of the blame for heavy losses during the droughts, without ever attempting to shift or deny the responsibilities his father put upon him.
"It does the old man good to have somebody to go off at," he explained indifferently to his sister, Elizabeth, when she called him all the fools under the sun for taking so much blackguarding sitting down.
Although James Henty's only son and manager of the station under his father's autocratic rule, Arthur Henty lived and worked among Warria stockmen as though he were one of them. His clothes were as worn and heavy with dust as theirs; his hat was as weathered, his hands as hard--sunburnt and broken with sores when barcoo was in the air. A quiet, unassuming man, he never came the "Boss" over them. He passed on the old man's orders, and, for the rest, worked as hard as any man on the station.
He had never done anything remarkable that anyone could remember; but the men he worked with liked him. Everybody rather liked Arthur Henty, although nobody enthused about him. He had done man's work ever since he was a boy, with no more than a couple of years' schooling; he had done it steadily and as well as any other young man in the back-country. But there was a curious, almost feminine weakness in him somewhere. The men did not understand it. They thought he was too supine with his father; that he ought to stand up to him more.