Prev Next

"Sit down!"

Men cried out all over the hall.

"That's all, I think, Michael," George said, looking down to where Michael sat before the platform; and Michael, pulling his hat further over his eyes, went out of the hall.

It was the custom for men of the Ridge to talk over the subject of their inquiry together after the man or men with whom the meeting was concerned had left the hall, before giving their verdict.

When Michael had gone, George Woods said:

"The boys would like to hear what you've got to say, I think, Archie."

He looked at Archie Cross. "You and Michael haven't been seein' eye to eye lately, and if there's any other side in this business, it's the side that lost confidence in Michael when we were fed-up with all that whispering. You know Michael, and you're a good Ridge man, though you were ready to take on Armitage's scheme. The boys'd like to hear what you've got to say, I'm sure."

Archie Cross stood up; he rolled his hat in his hands. His face, hacked out of a piece of dull flesh, sun-reddened, moved convulsively; his hair was roughed-up from it; his small, sombre eyes went with straight lightnings to the men in the hall about him.

"It's true--what George says," he said after a pause, as if it were difficult for him to express his thought. "I haven't been seein' eye to eye with Michael lately ... and I listened to all the dirty gossip that mob"--he glanced towards M'Ginnis and the men with him--"put round about him. It was part that ... and part listening to their talk about money invested here making all the difference to Fallen Star ... and the children growing up ... and gettin' scared and worried about seein' them through ... made me go agin you boys lately, and let that lot get hold of me.... But this business about Michael's shown me where I am.

Michael's stood for one thing all through--the Ridge and the hanging on to the mines for us.... He's been a better Ridge man than I have.... And I want to say ... as far as I'm concerned, Michael's proved himself....

I don't reck'n hanging on to opals was anything ... no more does Ted.

It's the sort of thing a chap like Michael'd do absent-minded ... not noticin' what he was doin'; but when he did notice--and got scared thinkin' where he was gettin' to, and what it might look like, he couldn't get rid of 'em quick, enough. That's what I think, and that's what Ted thinks, too. He hasn't got the gift of the gab, Ted, or he'd say so himself.... If there's goin' to be opposition to Michael, it's not comin' from us.... And we've made up our minds we stand by the Ridge."

"Good old Archie!" somebody shouted.

"What have you got to say, Roy?" George Woods faced his secretary who had been scratching diligently throughout the meeting. "You've been more with the M'Ginnis lot, too, than with us, lately."

Roy flushed and sprang to his feet.

"I'm in the same boat with Archie and Ted," he said. "Except about the family ... mine isn't so big yet as it might be. But it's a fact, I funked, not having had much luck lately.... But if ever I go back on the Ridge again ... may the lot of you go back on me."

Exclamations of approbation and goodwill reverberated as Roy subsided into his chair again.

"That's all there is to be said on the subject, I think," George Woods remarked.

"Michael wanted his mates to know what he had done--and why he had done it. He's asked for judgment from his mates.... If he'd wanted to go back on us he could have done it; he could have done it quite easy. Armitage would have shut up on his suspicions about the stones. Charley could have been bought. Michael need never 've faced all this as far as I can see ... but he decided to face it rather than give up all we've been fightin' for here. He'd rather take all the dirt we care to sling at him than anything they could give him ... and that's why M'Ginnis has been up against him like he has. Michael has queered his pitch, and most of us have a notion that M'Ginnis has been here to do Armitage's work ...

work up discontent and ill-feeling amongst us, and split our ranks; and he came very near doing it. If Michael hadn't 've stood by us, like he's always done, we'd have the Armitage Syndicate on our backs by now."

"To tell you the truth, boys," George went on, after a moment's hesitation, and then as if the impulse to speak a secret thought were too strong for him, "I've always thought Michael was too good. And if those stones did get hold of him for a couple of weeks, like he says, all it proves, as far as I can see, is that Michael isn't any plaster saint, but a man like the rest of us."

"That's right!" Watty called, and several men shouted after him.

Pony-Fence moved out from the crowd he was sitting with.

"I vote this meeting records a motion of confidence in Michael Brady,"

he said. "And when we call Michael in again we'd ought to make it clear to him ... that so far from its being a question of not having as much confidence in him as we had before--we've got more. Michael's stood by his mates if ever a man did.... He's come to us ... he's given himself up to us. He'll stand by what we say or do about him. And what are we goin' to do? Are we goin' to turn him down ... read him a bit of a lecture and tell him to go home and be a good boy and not do it another time ... or are we going to let him know once and for all what we think of him?"

Exclamations of agreement went up in a rabble of voices.

Bully Bryant rose from one of the back forms with a grin which illuminated the building.

"I'll second that motion," he said, pushing back the sleeve on his left arm. "And his own mother won't know the man who says a word against it--when I've done with him."

Watty was sent to bring Michael back to the meeting. They walked to the end of the hall together; and George Woods told Michael as quietly as he could for his own agitation, and the joy which, welling in him, impeded his speech, that men of the Ridge found nothing to censure in what he had done. His mates believed in him; they stood by him. They were prepared to stand by him as he had stood by the Ridge always. The meeting wished to record a vote of confidence....

Cheers roared to the roof. Michael, shaken by the storm of his emotion and gratitude, stood before the crowd in the hall with bowed head. When the storm was quieter in him, he lifted his head and looked out to the men, his eyes shining with tears.

He could not speak; old mates closed round to shake hands with him before the meeting broke up. Every man grasped and wrung his hand, saying:

"Good luck! Good luck to you, Michael!" Or just grasped his hand and smiled with that assurance of fellowship and goodwill which meant more to Michael than anything else in the world.

CHAPTER XIX

It was one of those clear days of late spring, the sky exquisitely blue, the cuckoos calling, the paper daisies in blossom, their fragrance in the air; they lay across the plains, through the herbage, white to the dim, circling horizon.

Horses and vehicles were tied up outside the grey palings of the cemetery on the Warria road. All the horses and shabby, or new and brightly-painted carts, sulkies, and buggies of Fallen Star and the Three Mile were there; and buggies from Warria, Langi-Eumina, and the river stations as well. Saddle horses, ranged along one side of the fence, reins over the stakes, whinnied and snapped at each other.

The crowd of people standing in the tall grass and herbage on the other side of the fence was just breaking up when Sophie and Potch appeared, coming over the plains from the direction of the tank paddock, Sophie riding the chestnut Arthur Henty had left behind her house, and Potch walking beside the horse's head. Sophie had been gathering Darling pea, and had a great sheaf in one hand. Potch was carrying some, too: he had picked up the flowers Sophie let fall, and had a little bunch of them.

She was riding astride and gazing before her, her eyes wide with a vision beyond the distant horizon. The wind, a light breeze breathing now and then, blew her hair out in wisps from her bare head.

All the men of Warria were in the sombre crowd in the cemetery. Old Henty, red-eyed and broken by the end of his only son, whom he found he had cared for now that he was dead; the stockmen, boundary-riders, servants, fencers, shearers from Darrawingee sheds who, a few weeks before had been on the Warria board, and men from other stations near enough to have heard of Arthur Henty's death. None of the Henty women were there; but women of the Ridge, who were accustomed to pay last respects as their menfolk did, were with their husbands as usual. They would have thought it unnatural and unkind not to follow Arthur Henty to his resting-place; not to go as friends would to say good-bye to a friend who is making a long journey. And there was more than the ordinary reason for being present at Arthur Henty's funeral. He was leaving them under a cloud, circumstances which might be interpreted unkindly, and it was necessary to be present to express sympathy with him and sorrow at his going. That was the way they regarded it.

Martha had driven with Sam Nancarrow, as she always did to functions of the sort. No one remembered having seen Martha take a thing so to heart as she did Arthur Henty's death. She was utterly shaken by it, and could not restrain her tears. They coursed down her cheeks all the time she was in that quiet place on the plains; her great, motherly bosom rose and fell with the tide of her grief. She tried to subdue it, but every now and then the sound of her crying could be heard, and in the end Sam took her, sobbing uncontrollably, back to his buggy.

People knew she had seen further into the cause of Arthur Henty's death than they had, and they understood that was why she Was so upset.

Besides, Martha had always confessed to a soft corner for Arthur Henty: she had been with his mother when he was born, had nursed him during a hot summer and through several slight illnesses since then. And Arthur had been fond of her too. He had always called her Mother M'Cready as the Ridge folk did. Old Mr. Henty had driven over to see Martha the night before, to hear all she knew of what had happened, and Ridge folk had gathered something of the story from her broken exclamations and the reproaches with which she covered herself.

She cried out over and over again that she could not have believed Arthur would shoot himself--that he was the sort of man to do such a thing--and blamed herself for not having foreseen what had occurred. She had never seen him like he was that night--so strong, so much a man, so full of life and love for Sophie. He had begged Sophie to go with him as though his life depended on it--and it had.

If she had been a woman, and Sophie, and had loved him, Martha said, she would have had to go with him. She could never have withstood his pleading.... But Sophie had been good to him; she had been gentle--only she wouldn't go. Neither Sophie nor she believed, of course, he would do as he said--but he had.

Martha could not forgive herself that she had done nothing to soothe or pacify Arthur; that she had said nothing, given him neither kindly word nor gesture. But she had been so upset, so carried away. She had not known what to do or say. She abused and blackguarded herself; but she had sensed enough of the utter loneliness and darkness of Henty's mind to realise that most likely she could have done nothing against it. He would have brushed her aside had she attempted to influence him; he would not have heard what, she said. She would have been as helpless as any other human consideration against the blinding, irresistibly engulfing forces of despair which had impelled him to put himself out of pain as he had put many a suffering animal. It was an act of self-defence, as Mother M'Cready saw it, Arthur Henty's end, and that was all there was to it.

As Sophie and Potch approached the cemetery, people exclaimed together in wonderment, awe--almost fear.

James Henty, when he saw them, turned away from the men he was talking to and walked to his buggy; Tom Henderson, his son-in-law, followed him.

Although he would have been the last to forgive Sophie if she had done as Arthur wished, even to save his life, old Henty had to have a whipping-post, and he eased his own sense of responsibility for what had blighted his son's life, by blaming Sophie for it. He assured himself, his family and friends, that she, and she alone, was responsible for Arthur's death. She had played with Arthur; she had always played with him, old Henty said. She had driven him to distraction with her wiles--and this was the end of it all.

Sophie rode into the cemetery: she rode to where the broken earth was; but she did not dismount. The horse came to a standstill beside it, and she sat on him, her eyes closed. Potch stood bare-headed and bowed beside her. He put the flowers he had picked up as Sophie let them fall, on the grave. Sophie thrust the long, purple trails she was carrying into the saddle-bag where Arthur had put the flowers she gave him that first day their eyes met and drank the love potion of each others'

being.

People were already on the road, horses and buggies, dark, ant-like trains on the flowering plains, moving slowly in the direction of Warria and of Fallen Star, when Sophie and Potch turned away from the cemetery.

The shadow of what had happened was heavy over everybody as they drove home. Arthur Henty had been well enough liked, and he had had much more to do with Fallen Star than most of the station people. He had gone about so much with his men they had almost ceased to think of him as not one of themselves. He was less the "Boss" than any man in the back-country. They recognised that, and yet he was the "Boss." He had lived like a half-caste, drifting between two races and belonging to neither. The people he had been born among cold-shouldered him because he had acquired the manners and habits of thought of men he lived and worked with; the men he had lived and worked with distrusted and disliked in him just those tag-ends of refinement, and odd graces which belonged to the crowd he had come to them from.

The station hands, his work-mates--if he had any--had had a slightly contemptuous feeling for him. They liked him--they were always saying they liked him--but it was clear they never had any great opinion of him. As a boy, when he began to work with them, to cover his shyness and nervousness, he had been silent and boorish; and he had never had the courage of his opinions--courage for anything, it was suspected. It had always been hinted that he shirked any jobs where danger was to be expected.

Report error

If you found broken links, wrong episode or any other problems in a anime/cartoon, please tell us. We will try to solve them the first time.

Email:

SubmitCancel

Share