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."
"Older, graver, harder ... and kinder, though you always had a genius
for kindness, Potch.... But Maud----"
Potch turned his head from her. Sophie regarded his averted profile
thoughtfully.
"I understand," she said.
Potch took her gaze steadily, but with troubled eyes.
"I wish ... somehow ... I needn't 've done what I did," he said.
"You'd have hated her, if you had gone back on the men--because of her."
"That's right," Potch agreed.
"And--you don't now?"
"No."
"I saw her--Maud--in New York ... before I came away," Sophie said
slowly. "She was selling opal...."
"Did she show you the stones?"
"That's just what Michael asked me," Sophie said.
"Michael?" Potch's face clouded.
"She didn't show them to me, but I know who saw them all--he bought
them--Mr. Armitage."
"The old man?"
"No, John."
After a minute Sophie said:
"Why are you so keen about those stones Maud had, Potch? Michael is,
too.... Most of them were taken from the claims, I suppose--but was
there anything more than that?"
"It's hard to say." Potch spoke reluctantly. "There's nothing more than
a bit of guesswork in my mind ... and I suppose it's the same with
Michael. I haven't said anything to Michael about it, and he hasn't to
me, so it's better not to mention it."
"There's a good deal changed on the Ridge since I went away," Sophie
remarked musingly.
"The new rush, and the school, the Bush Brothers' church, and Mrs.
Watty's veranda?"
"I don't mean that," Sophie said. "It's the people and things ... you,
for instance, and Michael----"
"Michael?" Potch exclaimed. "He's wearing the same old clothes, the same
old hat."
Sophie was too much in earnest to respond to the whimsey.
"He's different somehow ... I don't quite know how," she said. "There's
a look about him--his eyes--a disappointed look, Potch.... It hurt him
when I went away, I know. But now--it's not that...."
As Potch did not reply, Sophie's eyes questioned him earnestly.
"Has anything happened," she asked, "to make Michael look like that?"
"I ... don't know," Potch replied.
Answered by the slow and doubtful tone of his denial, Sophie exclaimed:
"There is something, Potch! I don't want to know what it is if you can't
tell me. I'm only worried about Michael.... I'd always thought he had
the secret of that inside peace, and now he looks----Oh, I can't bear to
see him look as he does.... And he seems to have lost interest in
things--the life here--everything."
"Yes," Potch admitted.
"Only tell me," Sophie urged, "is this that's bothering Michael likely
to clear, and has it been hanging over him for long?"
Potch was silent so long that she wondered whether he was going to
answer the question. Then he said slowly:
"I ... don't know. I really don't know anything, Sophie. I happened to
find out--by accident--that Michael's pretty worried about something. I
don't rightly know what, or why. That's all."
The even pace of those days gave Sophie the quiet mind she had come to
the Ridge for. There was healing for her in the fragrant air, the
sunshiny days, the blue-dark nights, with their unclouded, starry skies.
She went into the shed one morning and threw the bags from the
cutting-wheel which had been her mother's, cleared and cleaned up the
room, rearranged the boxes, put out her working gear, and cut and
polished one or two stones which were lying on a saucer beside the
wheel, to discover whether her hand had still its old deftness. Michael
was delighted with the work she showed him in the evening, and gave her
several small stones to face and polish for him.
Every day then Sophie worked at her wheel for a while. George and Watty,
Bill Grant and the Crosses brought stuff for her to cut and polish, and
in a little while her life was going in the even way it had done before
she left the Ridge, but it was a long time before Sophie went about as
she used to. After a while, however, she got into the way of walking
over to see Maggie Grant or Martha M'Cready in the afternoon,
occasionally; but she never talked to them of her life away from the
Ridge; they never spoke of it to her.
Only one thing had disturbed her slightly--seeing Arthur Henty one
evening as she and Martha were coming from the Three Mile.
He had come towards them, with a couple of stockmen, driving a mob of
cattle. Dust rose at the heels of the cattle and horses; the cattle
moved slowly; and the sun was setting in the faces of the men behind the
cattle. Sophie did not know who they were until a man on a chestnut
horse stared at her. His face was almost hidden by his beard; but after
the first glance she recognised Arthur Henty. They passed as people do
in a dream, Sophie and Martha back from the road, the men riding off the
cattle, Arthur with the stockmen and cattle which a cloud of dust
enveloped immediately. The dark trees by the roadside swayed, dipped in
the gold of the sunset, when they had passed. The image of Arthur Henty
riding like that in the dust behind the cattle, his face gilded by the
light of the setting sun, came to Sophie again and again. She was a
little disturbed by it; but it was only natural that she should be, she
thought. She had not seen Arthur since the night of the ball, and so
much had happened to both their lives since then.
She saw him once or twice in the township afterwards. He had stared at
her; Sophie had bowed and smiled, but they had not spoken. Later, she
had seen him lounging on the veranda at Newton's, or hanging his bridle
over the pegs outside Ezra Smith's billiard saloon, and neither her
brain nor pulse had quickened at the sight of him. She was pleased and
reassured. She did not think of him after that, and went on her way
quietly, happily, more deeply content in her life with Michael and
Potch.
As her natural vigour returned, she grew to a fuller appreciation of
that life; health and a normal poise of body and soul brought the faint
light of happiness to her eyes. Michael heard her laughing as she teased
Paul sometimes, and Potch thrilled to the rippled cadenza of Sophie's
laughter.
"It's good to hear that again," Michael said to him one day, hearing it
fly from Rouminof's hut.
Potch's glance, as his head moved in assent, was eloquent beyond words.
Sophie had a sensation of hunger satisfied in the life she was leading.
Some indefinable hunger of her soul was satisfied by breathing the pure,
calm air of the Ridge again, and by feeling her life was going the way
the lives of other women on the Ridge were going. She expected
her life would go on like this, days and years fall behind her
unnoticed; that she and Potch would work together, have children, be
splendid friends always, live out their days in the simple, sturdy
fashion of Ridge folk, and grow old together.