His instincts, sensitive as the antennae of an insect, wavered over her, trying to discover the cause of it. Conscious of a mood which excluded him, he withdrew his hand from her. Sophie groped for it. Then the sense of sex and of barriers swept from him, by the passion of his desire to comfort and console her. Potch put his arm round her and drew Sophie to him, murmuring With an utter tenderness, "Sophie! Sophie!"
Later she said:
"I can't tell you ... what happened ... out there, Potch. Not yet ...
not now.... Perhaps some day I will. It hurt so much that it took all the singing out of me. My heart wouldn't move ... so my voice died. I thought if I came home, you and Michael wouldn't mind ... my being like I am. But you've all been so good to me, Potch ... and it's so restful here, I was beginning to think that life might go on from where I left it; that it might be just a quiet living together and loving, like it was before...."
"It can, Sophie!" Potch said, his eyes on her face, wistful and eager to read her thought.
"But look what I've done," she said.
Potch lifted her hand to his lips, a resurge of the virile male in him moving his restraint.
"I've told you," he said, "what you've done. You've put joy into all our hearts--just to see you again. Michael's told you that, too, and George and the rest of them."
"Yes, but, Potch ..." Sophie paused, and he saw the shadow of dark thoughts in her eyes again. "I'm not what you think I am. I'm not like any of you think."
Potch's grip on her hand tightened.
"You're you--and you're here. That's enough for us!" he said.
Sophie sighed. "I never dreamt everybody would be so good. You and Michael I knew would--but the others ... I thought they'd remember ...
and disapprove of me, Potch.... Mrs. Watty"--a smile showed faintly in her eyes--"I thought she'd see to that."
"I daresay she's done her best" Potch said, with a memory of Watty's valiant bearing and angry, bright eyes when he came into the hut. "Watty was vexed ... she wouldn't come with him to-night."
"Was he?"
Potch nodded. "What you didn't reck'n on," he said, "was that all of us here ... we--we love you, Sophie, and we're glad you're back again."
Her eyes met him in a straight, clear glance.
"You and Michael," she said, "I knew you loved me, Potch...."
"You know how it's always been with me," Potch said, grateful that he might talk of his love, although he had been afraid to since she had cried, fearing thought of it stirred that unknown source of distress.
"But I won't get in your way here, Sophie, because of that. I won't bother you ... I want just to stand by--and help you all I know how."
"I love you, too, Potch," Sophie said; "but there are so many ways of loving. I love you because you love me; because your love is the one sure thing in the world for me.... I've thought of it when I've been hurt and lonely.... I came back because it was here ... and you were here."
Potch's eyes were illumined; his face blazed as though a fire had been engendered in the depths of his body. He remained so a moment, curbed and overcome with emotion. The shadow deepened in Sophie's eyes as she looked at him; her face was grave and still.
"I do love you, Potch," she said again; "not as I loved someone else, once. That was different. But you're so good to me ... and I'm so tired."
CHAPTER VIII
The days which followed that night when Sophie had dropped the great opal were the happiest Potch had ever known. They were days in which Sophie turned to smile at him when he went into Rouminof's hut; when her eyes lay in his serenely; when he could go to her, and stand near her, inhaling her being, before he stooped to kiss her hair; when she would put back her head so that he might find her lips and take her breath from them in the lingering kiss she gave.
When she had laid her head back on his shoulder sometimes, closing her eyes, an expression of infinite rest coming over her face, Potch had gazed at it, wondering what world of thought lay beneath that still, sleep-like mask as, it rested on his shoulder; what thought or emotion set a nerve quivering beneath her skin, as the water of some still pool quivers when an insect stirs beneath it.
Sophie had no tricks of sex with Potch. She went to him sometimes when ghosts of her mind were driving her before them. She went to him because she was sure that she could go to him, whatever her reasons for going.
With Potch there was no need for explanations.
His quiet strength of body and mind had something to do with the rest and assurance which his very presence gave her. It was like being a baby and lying in a cradle again to have his arm about her; no harm or ill could reach her behind the barrier they raised, Sophie thought. She knew Potch loved her with all the passion of a virile man as well as with a love like the ocean into which all her misdeeds of commission and omission might be dropped. And she had as intimate and sympathetic a knowledge of Potch as he had of her. Sophie thought that nothing he might do could make her care less, or be less appreciative of him. She loved him, she said, with a love of the tenderest affection. If it lacked an irresistible impulse, she thought it was because she had lost the power to love in that way; but she hoped some day she would love Potch as he loved her--without reservations. For the time being she loved him gratefully; her gratitude was as immense as his love.
Potch divined as much; Sophie had not tried to tell him how she felt about him, but he understood, perhaps better than she could tell him.
His humility was equal to any demand she could make of him. He had not sufficient belief in himself or his worth to believe that Sophie could ever love him as he loved her: he did not expect it. The only way for him to take with his love was the way of faith and service. "To love is to be all made of faith and service." He had taken that for his text for life, and for Sophie. He could be happy holding to it.
Sophie's need of him made Potch happier than he had ever hoped to be; but he could not help believing that the life with her which had etched itself on the horizon of his future would mist away, as the mirages which quiver on the long edges of the plains do, as you approach them.
The days were blessed and peaceful to Sophie, too; but she, also, was afraid that something might happen to disturb them. She wanted to marry Potch in order to secure them, and to live and work with him on the Ridge. She wanted to live the life of any other woman on the Ridge with her mate. Life looked so straight and simple that way. She could see it stretching before her into the years. Her hands would be full of real things. She would be living a life of service and usefulness, in accordance with the ideal the Ridge had set itself, and which Michael had preached with the zeal of a latter-day saint. She believed her life would shape itself to this future; but sometimes a wraith in the back-country of her mind rose shrieking: "Never! Never!"
It threw her into the outer darkness of despair, that cry, but she had learned to exorcise its influence by going to Potch and lifting her lips for him to kiss.
"What is it?" he asked one day, vaguely aware of the meaning of the movement.
Before the reverence and worship of his eyes the wraith fled. Sophie took his face between her hands.
"Oh, my dear," she murmured, her eyes straining on his face, "I do love you ... and I will love you, more and more."
"You don't have to worry about that," Potch said. "I love you enough for both of us.... Just think of me"--he lifted her hand and kissed the back of it gently--"like this--your hand--a sort of third hand."
When he came back from the mine in the afternoon Potch went to see Sophie, cut wood for her, and do any odd jobs she might need done.
Sometimes he had tea with her, and they read the reviews and books Michael passed on to them. In the evening they went for a walk, usually towards the Old Town, and sat on a long slope of the Ridge overlooking the Rouminofs' first home--near where they had played when they were children, and had watched the goats feeding on green patches between the dumps.
They had awed talks there; and now and then the darkness, shutting off sight of each other, had made something like disembodied spirits of them, and their spirits communicated dumbly as well as on the frail wind of their voices.
They yarned and gossiped sometimes, too, about the things that had happened, and what Potch had done while Sophie was away. She asked a good deal about the ratting, and about Jun and Maud. Potch tried to avoid talking of it and of them. He had evaded her questions, and Sophie returned to them, perplexed by his reticence.
"I don't understand, Potch," she said on one occasion. "You found out that Maud and Jun had something to do with the ratting, and you went over to Jun's ... and told them you were going to tell the boys.... They must have known you would tell. Maud----"
Potch's expression, a queer, sombre and shamed heaviness of his face, arrested her thought.
"Maud----" she murmured again. "I see," she added, "it was just Maud----"
"Yes," Potch said.
"That explains a good deal." Sophie's eyes were on the distant horizon of the plains; her fingers played idly with quartz pebbles, pink-stained like rose coral, lying on the earth about her.
"What does it explain?" Potch asked.
"Why," Sophie said, "for one thing--how you grew up. You've changed since I went away, Potch, you know...."
His smile showed a moment.
"I'm older."