Michael and Potch were there. They stared at her. But her radiant face, the shining eyes, and the little smile which hovered on her mouth, held their gaze more than the new white dress standing out in slight, stiff folds all round her. The vision of her--incomparable youth and loveliness she was to Michael--gripped him so that a moisture of love and reverence dimmed his eyes.... And Potch just stared and stared at her.
Paul was bawling from the buggy outside:
"Are you ready, Sophie? Sophie, are you ready?"
Mrs. Woods held the dust-coat. Very carefully Sophie edged herself into it, and wrapped its nondescript buff-coloured folds over her dress. Then she put the pink woollen scarf Martha had brought over her head, and went out to the buggy. Her father was sitting aloft on the front seat, driving Sam Nancarrow's old roan mare, and looking spruce and well turned out in a new baggy suit which Michael had arranged for him to get in order to look more of a credit to Sophie at the ball.
"See you take good care of her, Paul," Mrs. Grant called after him as they drove off.
CHAPTER XV
The drive across the plains seemed interminable to Sophie.
Paul hummed and talked of the music he was going to play as they went along. He called to Sam Nancarrow's old nag, quite pleased to be having a horse to drive as though it belonged to him, and gossiped genially about this and other balls he had been to.
Sophie kept remembering what Mrs. Grant and Mrs. George Woods had said, and how she had looked in those glimpses of herself in the mirror. "I do look nice! I do look nice!" she assured herself.
It was wonderful to be going to a ball at Warria. She had never thought she could look as she did in this new frock, with her necklace, and Mrs.
Woods' ear-rings, and that old sash of her mother's. She was a little anxious, but very happy and excited.
She remembered how Arthur had looked at her when she met him on the road or in the paddock sometimes, She only had on her old black dress then.
He must like her in this new dress, she thought. Her mind had a subtle recoil from the too great joy of thinking how much more he must like her in this pretty, new, white frock; she sat in a delicious trance of happiness. Her father hummed and gossiped. All the stars came out. The sky was a wonderful blue where it met the horizon, and darkened to indigo as it climbed to the zenith.
When they drove from the shadow of the coolebahs which formed an avenue from the gate of the home paddock to the veranda of the homestead, Ted Burton, the station book-keeper, a porky, good-natured little man, with light, twinkling eyes, whose face looked as if it had been sand-papered, came out to meet them.
"There you are, Rouminof!" he said. "Glad to see you. We were beginning to be afraid you weren't coming!"
Sophie got down from the buggy, and her father drove off to the stables.
Passing the veranda steps with Mr. Burton, she glanced up. Several men were on the steps. Her eyes went instinctively to Arthur Henty, who was standing at the foot of them, a yellow puppy fawning at his feet. He did not look up as Sophie passed, pretending to be occupied with the pup.
But in that fleeting glance her brain had photographed the bruise on his forehead where it had caught a veranda post when Bully Bryant, having regained his feet, hit out blindly.
Potch had told Sophie what happened--she had made him find out in order to tell her. Arthur and Bully had wanted to fight, but after the first exchange of blows the men had held them back. Bully was mad drunk, they said, and would have hammered Henty to pulp. And the next evening Bully came to Sophie, heavy with shame, and ready to cry for what he had done.
"If anybody'd 've told me I'd treat you like that, Sophie, I'd 've killed him," he said. "I'd 've killed him.... You know how I feel about you--you know how we all feel about you--and for me to have served you like that--me that'd do anything in the world for you.... But it's no good trying to say any more. It's no good tryin' to explain. It's got me down...."
He sat with his head in his hands for a while, so ashamed and miserable, that Sophie could not retain her wrath and resentment against him. It was like having a brother in trouble and doing nothing to help him, to see Bully like this.
"It's all right, Bully," she said. "I know ... you weren't yourself ...
and you didn't mean it."
He started to his feet and came to stand beside her. Sophie put her hand in his; he gripped it hard, unable to say anything. Then, when he could control his voice, he said:
"I went over to see Mr. Henty this morning ... and told him if anybody else 'd done what I did, I'd 've done what he did."
Potch had said the men expected Bully would want to fight the thing out when he was sober, and it was a big thing for him to have done what he had. The punishing power of Bully's fists was well known, and he had taken this way of punishing himself. Sophie understood that, She was grateful and reconciled to him.
"I'm glad, Bully," she said. "Let's forget all about it."
So the matter ended. But it all came back to her as she saw the broken red line on Arthur Henty's forehead.
She did not know that because of it she was an object of interest to the crowd on the veranda. News of Arthur Henty's bout with Bully Bryant had been very soon noised over the whole countryside. Most of the men who came to the ball from Langi-Eumina and other stations had gleaned varied and highly-coloured versions, and Arthur had been chaffed and twitted until he was sore and ashamed of the whole incident. He could not understand himself--the rush of rage, instinctive and unreasoning, which had overwhelmed him when he hit out at Bully.
His mother protested that it was a shame to give Arthur such a bad time for what was, after all, merely the chivalrous impulse of any decent young man when a girl was treated lightly in his presence; but the men and the girls who were staying at the station laughed and teased all the more for the explanation. They pretended he was a very heroic and quixotic young man, and asked about Sophie--whether she was pretty, and whether it was true she sang well. They redoubled their efforts, and goaded him to a state of sulky silence, when they knew she was coming to the ball.
Arthur Henty had been conscious for some time of an undercurrent within him drawing him to Sophie. He was afraid of, and resented it. He had not thought of loving her, or marrying her. He had gone to the tank paddock in the afternoons he knew she would be there, or had looked for her on the Warria road when she had been to the cemetery, with a sensation of drifting pleasantly. He had never before felt as he did when he was with Sophie, that life was a clear and simple thing--pleasant, too; that nothing could be better than walking over the plains through the limpid twilight. He had liked to see the fires of opal run in her eyes when she looked at him; to note the black lines on the outer rim of their coloured orbs; the black lashes set in silken skin of purest ivory; the curve of her chin and neck; the lines of her mouth, and the way she walked; all these things he had loved. But he did not want to have the responsibility of loving Sophie: he could not contemplate what wanting to marry her would mean in tempests and turmoil with his family.
He had thought sometimes of a mediaeval knight wandering through flowering fields with the girl on a horse beside him, in connection with Sophie and himself. A reproduction of the well-known picture of the knight and the girl hung in his mother's sitting-room. She had cut it out of a magazine, and framed it, because it pleased her; and beneath the picture, in fine print, Arthur had often read:
"I met a lady in the meads, Full beautiful--a fairy's child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.
"I set her on my pacing steed, And nothing else saw all day long; For sideways would she lean, and sing A faery's song."
As a small boy Arthur had been attracted by the picture, and his mother had told him its story, and had read him Keats' poem. He had read it ever so many times since then himself, and after he met Sophie in the tank paddock that afternoon she had ridden home on his horse, some of the verses haunted him with the thought of her. One day when they were sitting by the track and she had been singing to him, he had made a daisy chain and thrown it over her, murmuring sheepishly, in a caprice of tenderness:
"I made a garland for her head, And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; She looked at me as she did love And made sweet moan."
Sophie had asked about the poem. She had wanted to hear more, and he had repeated as many verses as he could remember. When he had finished, she had looked at him "as she did love" indeed, with eyes of sweet confidence, yet withdrawing from him a little in shy and happy confusion that he should think of her as anyone like the lady of the meads, who was "full beautiful--a fairy's child."
But Arthur did not want to love her; he did not want to marry her. He did not want to have rows with his father, differences with his mother.
The affair at Newton's had shown him where he was going.
Sophie was "a fairy's child," he decided. "Her hair as long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild"; but he did not want to be "a wretched wight, alone and palely loitering" on her account; he did not want to marry her. He would close her eyes with "kisses four," he told himself, smiling at the precision of the knight of the chronicle; "kisses four"--no more--and be done with the business.
Meanwhile, he wished Sophie were not coming to the ball. He would have given anything to prevent her coming; but he could do nothing.
He had thought of escaping from the ball by going to the out-station with the men; but his mother, foreseeing something of his intention, had given him so much to do at the homestead for her, that he could not go away. When the buggy with Sophie and her father drove up to the veranda, there was a chorus of suppressed exclamations among the assembled guests.
"Here she is, Art!"
"Buck up, old chap! None but the brave, etc."
Sophie did not hear the undertone of laughter and raillery which greeted her arrival. She was quite unconscious that the people on the veranda were interested in her at all, as she walked across the courtyard listening to Mr. Burton's amiable commonplaces.
When Mr. Burton left her in a small room with chintz-covered chairs and dressing-table, Sophie took off her old dust-coat and the pink scarf she had tied over her hair. The mirror was longer than Mrs. Woods'. Her dress looked very crushed when she saw it reflected. She tried to shake out the creases. Her hair, too, was flat, and had blown into stringy ends. A shade of disappointment dimmed the brightness of her mood as she realised she was not looking nearly as nice as she had when she left the Ridge.
Someone said: "May I come in?" and Polly Henty and another girl entered the room.
Polly Henty had just left school. She was a round-faced, jolly-looking girl of about Sophie's own age, and the girl with her was not much older, pretty and sprightly, an inch or so taller than Polly, and slight. She had grey eyes, and a fluff of dry-grass coloured hair about a small, sharp-featured, fresh-complexioned face, neatly powdered.
Sophie knew something was wrong with her clothes the moment she encountered the girls' curious and patronising glances as they came into the room. Their appearance, too, took the skin from her vanity. Polly had on a frock of silky white crepe, with no lace or decoration of any kind, except a small gold locket and chain which she was wearing. But her dress fell round her in graceful folds, showing her small, well-rounded bust and hips, and she had on silk stockings and white satin slippers. The other girl's frock was of pale pink, misty material, so thin that her shoulders and arms showed through it as though there were nothing on them. She had pinned a pink rose in her hair, too, so that its petals just lay against the nape of her neck. Sophie thought she had never seen anyone look so nice. She had never dreamed of such a dress.
"Oh, Miss Rouminof," Polly said; "mother sent me to look for you. We're just ready to start, and your father wants you to turn over his music for him."
Sophie stood up, conscious that her dress was nothing like as pretty as she had thought it. It stood out stiffly about her: the starched petticoat crackled as she moved. She knew the lace should not have been on her sleeves; that her shoes were of canvas, and creaked as she walked; that her cotton gloves, and even the heavy, old-fashioned fan she was carrying, were not what they ought to have been.