The sunset was fading, a persimmon glow failing from behind the trees,
its light merging with the blue of the sky, creating the faint, luminous
green which holds the first stars with such brilliance, when Sophie went
out of the hut to meet Potch.
The smell of sandal-wood burning on the fireplace in the kitchen she had
just left, was in the air. Such soothing its fragrance had for her! And
on the shingly soil, between the old dumps cast up a little distance
from the huts, in every direction, the paper daisies were lying, white
as driven snow in the wan light. Sophie went to the goat-pen, strung
round with a light, crooked fence, a few yards from the back of the
house.
As she leaned against the fence she could hear the tinkling of a
goat-bell in the distance. The fragrances, the twilight, and the quiet
were balm to her bruised senses. The note of a bell sounded nearer.
Potch was bringing the goats in.
Sophie went to the shed and stood near it, so that she might see him
before he saw her. A kid in the shed bleated as the note of the bell
became harsher and nearer. Sophie heard the answering cry of the nanny
among the three or four goats coming down to the yard along a narrow
track from a fringe of trees beyond the dumps. Then she saw Potch's
figure emerge from the trees.
He drove the goats into the yard where two sticks of the fence were
down, put up the rails, and went to the shed for a milking bucket. He
came back into the yard, pulled a little tan-and-white nanny beside a
low box on which he sat to milk, and the squirt and song of milk in the
pail began. Sophie wondered what Potch was thinking of as he sat there
milking. She remembered the night--Potch had been sitting just like
that--when she told him her mother was dead. As she remembered, she saw
again every flicker and gesture of his, the play of light on his broad,
heavy face and head, with its shock of fairish hair; how his face had
puckered up and looked ugly and childish as he began to cry; how, after
a while, he had wiped his eyes and nose on his shirt-sleeve, and gone on
with the milking again, crying and sniffling in a subdued way.
There was a deep note of loving them in his voice, rough and burred
though it was, as Potch spoke to the goats. Two of them came when he
called.
When he had nearly finished milking, Sophie moved away from the screen
of the shed. She went along to the fence and stood where he could see
her when he looked up.
The light had faded, and stars were glimmering in the luminous green of
the sky when Potch, as he released the last goat, pushed back the box he
had been sitting on, got up, took his bucket by the handle, and, looking
towards the fence, saw Sophie standing there. At first he seemed to
think she was a figure of his imagination, he stood so still gazing at
her. He had often thought of her, leaning against the rails there,
smiling at him like that. Then he remembered Sophie had come home; that
it was really Sophie herself by the fence as he had dreamed of seeing
her. But her face was wan and ethereal in the half-light; it floated
before him as if it were a drowned face in the still, thin air.
"She's very like my old white nanny, Potch," Sophie said, her eyes
glancing from Potch to the goat he had just let go and which had
followed him across the yard.
"Yes," Potch said.
"She might almost be Annie Laurie's daughter," Sophie said.
"She's her grand-daughter," Potch replied.
He put the bucket down at the rails and stooped to get through them.
Before he took up the bucket again he stood looking at her as though to
assure himself that it was really Sophie in the flesh who was waiting
for him by the fence. Then he took up the bucket, and they walked across
to Michael's hut together.
Potch dared scarcely glance at her when he realised that Sophie was
really walking beside him--Sophie herself--although her eyes and her
voice were not the eyes and voice of the Sophie he had known. And he had
so often dreamed of her walking beside him that the dream seemed almost
more real than the thing which had come to pass.
Sophie went with him to the lean-to, where the milk-dishes stood on a
bench under the window outside Michael's hut. She watched Potch while he
strained the milk and poured it into big, flat dishes on a bench under
the window.
Paul came to the door of their own hut. He called her. Sophie could hear
voices exclaiming and talking to Paul and Michael. She supposed that the
people her father had said were coming from New Town to see her had
arrived. She dreaded going into the room where they all were, although
she knew that she must go.
"Are you coming, Potch?" she asked.
His eyes went from her to his hands.
"I'll get cleaned up a bit first," he said, "then I'll come."
The content in his eyes as they rested on her was transferred to Sophie.
It completed what the fragrances, those first minutes in the quiet and
twilight had done for her. It gave her a sense of having come to haven
after a tempestuous journey on the high seas beyond the reef of the
Ridge, and of having cast anchor in the lee of a kindly and sheltering
land.