And her mother had said:
"Don't let him take her away, Michael."
Michael believed that Marya Rouminof intended Sophie to choose for herself whether she would stay on the Ridge or not, when she was old enough. But now she was little more than a child, sixteen, nearly seventeen, young for her years in some ways and old in others. Michael knew her mother had wanted Sophie to grow up on the Ridge and to realise that all the potentialities of real and deep happiness were there.
"They say there's got to be a scapegoat in every family, Michael," she had said once. "Someone has to pay for the happiness of the others. If all that led to my coming here will mean happiness for Sophie, it will not have been in vain."
"That's where you're wrong," Michael had told her.
"Looking for justice--poetic justice, isn't it, they call it?--in the working out of things. There isn't any of this poetic justice except by accident. The natural laws just go rolling on--laying us out under them.
All we can do is set our lives as far as possible in accordance with them and stand by the consequences as well as we know how."
"Of course, you're right," she had sighed, "but----"
It was for that "but" Michael was fighting now. He knew what lay beyond it--a yearning for her child to fare a little better in the battle of life than she had. Striding almost unconsciously over the loose, shingly ground, Michael was not aware what direction his steps were taking until he saw glimmering white shapes above the grass and herbage of the plains, and realised that he had walked to the gates of the cemetery.
With an uncomfortable sense of broken faith, he turned away from the gate, unable to go in and sit under the tree there, to smoke and think, as he sometimes did. He had used every argument with Paul to prevent his taking Sophie away, he knew; but for the first time since Michael and he had been acquainted with each other, Paul had shown a steady will. He made up his mind he was "going to shake the dust of the Ridge off his feet," he said. And that was the end of it. Michael almost wished the men had let Jun clear out with his stones. That would have settled the business. But, his instinct of an opal-miner asserting itself, he was unable to wish Paul the loss of his luck, and Jun what he would have to be to deprive Paul of it. He walked on chewing the cud of bitter and troubled reflections.
"Don't let him take her away!" a voice seemed to cry suddenly after him.
Michael stopped; he snatched the hat from his head.
"No!" he said, "he shan't take her away!"
Startled by the sound of his own voice, the intensity of thinking which had wrung it from him, dazed by the sudden strength of resolution which had come over him, he stood, his face turned to the sky. The stars rained their soft light over him. As he looked up to them, his soul went from him by force of will. How long he stood like that, he did not know; but when his eyes found the earth again he looked about him wonderingly.
After a little while he put on his hat and turned away. All the pain and trouble were taken from his thinking; he was strangely soothed and comforted. He went back along the road to the town, and, skirting the trees and the houses on the far side, came again to the track below Newton's.
Lights were still shining in the hotel although it was well after midnight. Michael could hear voices in the clear air. A man was singing one of Jun's choruses as he went down the road towards the Punti Rush.
Michael kept on his way. He was still wondering what he could do to prevent Paul taking Sophie away; but he was no longer worried about it--his brain was calm and clear; his step lighter than it had been for a long time.
He heard the voices laughing and calling to each other as he walked on.
"Old Ted!" he commented to himself, recognising Ted Cross's voice. "He's blithered!"
When he came to a fork in the tracks where one went off in the direction of his, Charley's, and Rouminof's huts, and the other towards the Crosses', Michael saw Ted Cross lumbering along in the direction of his own hut.
"Must 've been saying good-night to Charley and Paul," he thought. A little farther along the path he saw Charley and Paul, unsteady shadows ahead of him in the moonlight, and Charley had his arm under Paul's, helping him home.
"Good old Charley!" Michael thought, quickly appreciative of the man he loved.
He could hear them talking, Rouminof's voice thick and expostulatory, Charley's even and clear.
"Charley's all right. He's not showin', anyhow," Michael told himself.
He wondered at that. Charley was not often more sober than his company, and he had been drinking a good deal, earlier in the evening.
Michael was a few yards behind them and was just going to quicken his steps and hail Charley, when he saw the flash of white in Charley's hand--something small, rather longer than square, a cigarette box wrapped in newspaper, it might have been--and Michael saw Charley drop it into the pocket of his coat.
Paul wandered on, talking stupidly, drowsily. He wanted to go to sleep there on the roadside; but Charley led him on.
"You'll be better at home and in bed," he said. "You're nearly there now."
Instinctively, with that flash of white, Michael had drawn into the shadow of the trees which fringed the track. Charley, glancing back along it, had not seen him. Several moments passed before Michael moved.
He knew what had happened, but the revelation was such a shock that his brain would not react to it. Charley, his mate, Charley Heathfield had stolen Paul's opals. The thing no man on the Ridge had attempted, notwithstanding its easiness, Charley had done. Although he had seen, Michael could scarcely believe that what he had seen, had happened.
The two men before him staggered and swayed together. Their huts stood only a few yards from each other, a little farther along the track.
Charley took Paul to the door of his hut, opened it and pushed him in.
He stood beside the door, listening and looking down the track for a second longer. Michael imagined he would want to know whether Paul would discover his loss or just pitch forward and sleep where he lay. Then Charley went on to his own hut and disappeared.
When the light glowed in his window, Michael went on up the track, keeping well to the cover of the trees. Opposite the hut he took off his boots. He put his feet down carefully, pressing the loose pebbles beneath him, as he crossed the road. It seemed almost impossible to move on that shingly ground without making a sound, and yet when he stood beside the bark wall of Charley's room and could see through the smeared pane of its small window, Charley had not heard a pebble slip. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, the stub of a lighted candle in a saucer on the bed beside him, and the box containing the opals lying near it as if he were just going to cut the string and have a look at them. The wall creaked as Michael leaned against it.
"Who's there?" Charley cried sharply.
He threw a blanket over the box on the bed and started to the door.
Michael moved round the corner of the house. He heard Potch call sleepily:
"That you?"
Charley growled;
"Oh, go to sleep, can't you? Aren't you asleep yet?"
Potch murmured, and there was silence again.
Michael heard Charley go to the door, look out along the road, and turn back into the hut. Then Michael moved along the wall to the window.
Charley was taking down some clothes hanging from nails along the inner wall. He changed from the clothes he had on into them, picked up his hat, lying where he had thrown it on the floor beside the bed when he came in, rolled it up, straightened the brim and dinged the crown to his liking. Then he picked up the packet of opal, put it in his coat pocket, and went into the other room. Michael followed to the window which gave on it. He saw Charley glance at the sofa as though he were contemplating a stretch, but, thinking better of it, he settled into an easy, bag-bottomed old chair by the table, pulled a newspaper to him, and began to read by the guttering light of his candle.
Michael guessed why Charley had dressed, and why he had chosen to sit and read rather than go to sleep. It was nearly morning, the first chill of dawn in the air. The coach left at seven o'clock, and Charley meant to catch the coach. He had no intention of going to Warria. Michael began to get a bird's-eye view of the situation. He wondered whether Charley had ever intended going to Warria. He realised Charley would go off with the five pound note he had made him, Michael, get from Watty Frost, as well as with Paul's opals. He began, to see clearly what that would mean, too--Charley's getting away with Paul's opals. Paul would not be able to take Sophie away....
In the branches of a shrub nearby, a white-tail was crying plaintively: "Sweet pretty creature! Sweet pretty creature!" Michael remembered how it had cried like that on the day of Mrs. Rouminof s funeral.
Whether to go into the hut, tell Charley he knew what he had done, and demand the return of the opals, or let him get away with them, Michael had not decided, when Charley's hand went to his pocket, and, as it closed over the package of opals, a smile of infantile satisfaction flitted across his face. That smile, criminal in its treachery, enraged Michael more than the deed itself. The candle Charley had been reading by guttered out. He stumbled about the room looking for another. After a while, as if he could not find one, he went back to his chair and settled into it. The room fell into darkness, lit only by the dim pane of the window by which Michael was standing.
Michael's mind seethed with resentment and anger. The thing he had prayed for, that his brain had ached over, had been arranged. Rouminof would not be able to take Sophie away. But Michael was too good a Ridge man not to detest Charley's breach of the good faith of the Ridge.
Charley had been accepted by men of the Ridge as one of themselves--at least, Michael believed he had.
George, Watty, the Crosses, and most of the other men would have confessed to reservations where Charley Heathfield was concerned. But as long as he had lived as a mate among them, they had been mates to him.
Michael did not want Rouminof to have his stones if having them meant taking Sophie away, but he did not want him to lose them. He could not allow Charley to get away with them, with that smile of infantile satisfaction. If the men knew what he had done there would be little of that smile left on his face when they had finished with him. Their methods of dealing with rats were short and severe. And although he deserved all he got from them, Michael was not able to decide to hand Charley over to the justice of the men of the Ridge.
As he hesitated, wondering what to do, the sound of heavy, regular breathing came to him, and, looking through the window, he saw that Charley had done the last thing he intended to do--he had fallen asleep in his chair.
In a vivid, circling flash, Michael's inspiration came to him. He went across to his hut, lighted a candle when he got indoors, and took the black pannikin he kept odd pieces of opal in, from the top of a bookshelf. There was nothing of any great value in the pannikin--a few pieces of coloured potch which would have made a packet for an opal-buyer when he came along, and a rather good piece of stone in the rough he had kept as a mascot for a number of years--that was all.
Michael turned them over. He went to the corner shelf and returned to the table with a cigarette box the same size as the one Rouminof had kept his opals in. Michael took a piece of soiled wadding from a drawer in the table, rolled the stones in it, and fitted them into the box. He wrapped the tin in a piece of newspaper and tied it with string. Then he blew out his candle and went out of doors again.
He made his way carefully over the shingles to Charley's hut. When he reached it, he leaned against the wall, listening to hear whether Charley was still asleep. The sound of heavy breathing came slowly and regularly. Michael went to the back of the hut. There was no door to it.
He went in, and slowly approached the chair in which Charley was sleeping.