XV
The drive across the plains seemed interminable to Sophie.
Paul hummed and talked of the music he was going to play as they went along. He called to Sam Nancarrow’s old nag, quite pleased to be having a horse to drive as though it belonged to him, and gossiped genially about this and other balls he had been to.
Sophie kept remembering what Mrs. Grant and Mrs. George Woods had said, and how she had looked in those glimpses of herself in the mirror. “I do look nice! I do look nice!” she assured herself.
It was wonderful to be going to a ball at Warria. She had never thought she could look as she did in this new frock, with her necklace, and Mrs. Woods’ earrings, and that old sash of her mother’s. She was a little anxious, but very happy and excited.
She remembered how Arthur had looked at her when she met him on the road or in the paddock sometimes. She only had on her old black dress then. He must like her in this new dress, she thought. Her mind had a subtle recoil from the too great joy of thinking how much more he must like her in this pretty, new, white frock; she sat in a delicious trance of happiness. Her father hummed and gossiped. All the stars came out. The sky was a wonderful blue where it met the horizon, and darkened to indigo as it climbed to the zenith.
When they drove from the shadow of the coolebahs which formed an avenue from the gate of the home paddock to the veranda of the homestead, Ted Burton, the station bookkeeper, a porky, good-natured little man, with light, twinkling eyes, whose face looked as if it had been sandpapered, came out to meet them.
“There you are, Rouminof!” he said. “Glad to see you. We were beginning to be afraid you weren’t coming!”
Sophie got down from the buggy, and her father drove off to the stables. Passing the veranda steps with Mr. Burton, she glanced up. Several men were on the steps. Her eyes went instinctively to Arthur Henty, who was standing at the foot of them, a yellow puppy fawning at his feet. He did not look up as Sophie passed, pretending to be occupied with the pup. But in that fleeting glance her brain had photographed the bruise on his forehead where it had caught a veranda post when Bully Bryant, having regained his feet, hit out blindly.
Potch had told Sophie what happened—she had made him find out in order to tell her. Arthur and Bully had wanted to fight, but after the first exchange of blows the men had held them back. Bully was mad drunk, they said, and would have hammered Henty to pulp. And the next evening Bully came to Sophie, heavy with shame, and ready to cry for what he had done.
“If anybody’d ’ve told me I’d treat you like that, Sophie, I’d ’ve killed him,” he said. “I’d ’ve killed him. … You know how I feel about you—you know how we all feel about you—and for me to have served you like that—me that’d do anything in the world for you. … But it’s no good trying to say any more. It’s no good tryin’ to explain. It’s got me down. …”
He sat with his head in his hands for a while, so ashamed and miserable, that Sophie could not retain her wrath and resentment against him. It was like having a brother in trouble and doing nothing to help him, to see Bully like this.
“It’s all right, Bully,” she said. “I know … you weren’t yourself … and you didn’t mean it.”
He started to his feet and came to stand beside her. Sophie put her hand in his; he gripped it hard, unable to say anything. Then, when he could control his voice, he said:
“I went over to see Mr. Henty this morning … and told him if anybody else ’d done what I did, I’d ’ve done what he did.”
Potch had said the men expected Bully would want to fight the thing out when he was sober, and it was a big thing for him to have done what he had. The punishing power of Bully’s fists was well known, and he had taken this way of punishing himself. Sophie understood that. She was grateful and reconciled to him.
“I’m glad, Bully,” she said. “Let’s forget all about it.”
So the matter ended. But it all came back to her as she saw the broken red line on Arthur Henty’s forehead.
She did not know that because of it she was an object of interest to the crowd on the veranda. News of Arthur Henty’s bout with Bully Bryant had been very soon noised over the whole countryside. Most of the men who came to the ball from Langi-Eumina and other stations had gleaned varied and highly-coloured versions, and Arthur had been chaffed and twitted until he was sore and ashamed of the whole incident. He could not understand himself—the rush of rage, instinctive and unreasoning, which had overwhelmed him when he hit out at Bully.
His mother protested that it was a shame to give Arthur such a bad time for what was, after all, merely the chivalrous impulse of any decent young man when a girl was treated lightly in his presence; but the men and the girls who were staying at the station laughed and teased all the more for the explanation. They pretended he was a very heroic and quixotic young man, and asked about Sophie—whether she was pretty, and whether it was true she sang well. They redoubled their efforts, and goaded him to a state of sulky silence, when they knew she was coming to the ball.
Arthur Henty had been conscious for some time of an undercurrent within him drawing him to Sophie. He was afraid of, and resented it. He had not thought of loving her, or marrying her. He had gone to the tank paddock in the afternoons he knew she would be there, or had looked for her on the Warria road when she had been to the cemetery, with a sensation of drifting pleasantly. He had never before felt as he did when he was with Sophie, that life was a clear and simple thing—pleasant, too; that nothing could be better than walking over the plains through the limpid twilight. He had liked to see the fires of opal run in her eyes when she looked at him; to note the black lines on the outer rim of their coloured orbs; the black lashes set in silken skin of purest ivory; the curve of her chin and neck; the lines of her mouth, and the way she walked; all these things he had loved. But he did not want to have the responsibility of loving Sophie: he could not contemplate what wanting to marry her would mean in tempests and turmoil with his family.
He had thought sometimes of a medieval knight wandering through flowering fields with the girl on a horse beside him, in connection with Sophie and himself. A reproduction of the well-known picture of the knight and the girl hung in his mother’s sitting-room. She had cut it out of a magazine, and framed it, because it pleased her; and beneath the picture, in fine print, Arthur had often read:
“I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.“I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.”
As a small boy Arthur had been attracted by the picture, and his mother had told him its story, and had read him Keats’ poem. He had read it ever so many times since then himself, and after he met Sophie in the tank paddock that afternoon she had ridden home on his horse, some of the verses haunted him with the thought of her. One day when they were sitting by the track and she had been singing to him, he had made a daisy chain and thrown it over her, murmuring sheepishly, in a caprice of tenderness:
“I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love
And made sweet moan.”
Sophie had asked about the poem. She had wanted to hear more, and he had repeated as many verses as he could remember. When he had finished, she had looked at him “as she did love” indeed, with eyes of sweet confidence, yet withdrawing from him a little in shy and happy confusion that he should think of her as anyone like the lady of the meads, who was “full beautiful—a fairy’s child.”
But Arthur did not want to love her; he did not want to marry her. He did not want to have rows with his father, differences with his mother. The affair at Newton’s had shown him where he was going.
Sophie was “a fairy’s child,” he decided. “Her hair as long, her foot was light, and her eyes were wild”; but he did not want to be “a wretched wight, alone and palely loitering” on her account; he did not want to marry her. He would close her eyes with “kisses four,” he told himself, smiling at the precision of the knight of the chronicle; “kisses four”—no more—and be done with the business.
Meanwhile, he wished Sophie were not coming to the ball. He would have given anything to prevent her coming; but he could do nothing.
He had thought of escaping from the ball by going to the outstation with the men; but his mother, foreseeing something of his intention, had given him so much to do at the homestead for her, that he could not go away. When the buggy with Sophie and her father drove up to the veranda, there was a chorus of suppressed exclamations among the assembled guests.
“Here she is, Art!”
“Buck up, old chap! None but the brave, etc.”
Sophie did not hear the undertone of laughter and raillery which greeted her arrival. She was quite unconscious that the people on the veranda were interested in her at all, as she walked across the courtyard listening to Mr. Burton’s amiable commonplaces.
When Mr. Burton left her in a small room with chintz-covered chairs and dressing-table, Sophie took off her old dust-coat and the pink scarf she had tied over her hair. The mirror was longer than Mrs. Woods’. Her dress looked very crushed when she saw it reflected. She tried to shake out the creases. Her hair, too, was flat, and had blown into stringy ends. A shade of disappointment dimmed the brightness of her mood as she realised she was not looking nearly as nice as she had when she left the Ridge.
Someone said: “May I come in?” and Polly Henty and another girl entered the room.
Polly Henty had just left school. She was a round-faced, jolly-looking girl of about Sophie’s own age, and the girl with her was not much older, pretty and sprightly, an inch or so taller than Polly, and slight. She had grey eyes, and a fluff of dry-grass coloured hair about a small, sharp-featured, fresh-complexioned face, neatly powdered.
Sophie knew something was wrong with her clothes the moment she encountered the girls’ curious and patronising glances as they came into the room. Their appearance, too, took the skin from her vanity. Polly had on a frock of silky white crêpe, with no lace or decoration of any kind, except a small gold locket and chain which she was wearing. But her dress fell round her in graceful folds, showing her small, well-rounded bust and hips, and she had on silk stockings and white satin slippers. The other girl’s frock was of pale pink, misty material, so thin that her shoulders and arms showed through it as though there were nothing on them. She had pinned a pink rose in her hair, too, so that its petals just lay against the nape of her neck. Sophie thought she had never seen anyone look so nice. She had never dreamed of such a dress.
“Oh, Miss Rouminof,” Polly said; “mother sent me to look for you. We’re just ready to start, and your father wants you to turn over his music for him.”
Sophie stood up, conscious that her dress was nothing like as pretty as she had thought it. It stood out stiffly about her: the starched petticoat crackled as she moved. She knew the lace should not have been on her sleeves; that her shoes were of canvas, and creaked as she walked; that her cotton gloves, and even the heavy, old-fashioned fan she was carrying, were not what they ought to have been.
“Miss Chelmsford—Miss Rouminof,” Polly said, looking from Sophie to the girl in the pink dress.
Sophie said: “How do you do?” gravely, and put out her hand.
“Oh! … How do you do?” Miss Chelmsford responded hurriedly, and as if just remembering she, too, had a hand.
Sophie went with Polly and her friend to the veranda, which was screened in on one side with hessian to form a ballroom. Behind the hessian the walls were draped with flags, sheaves of paper daisies, and bundles of Darling pea. Red paper lanterns swung from the roof, threw a rosy glare over the floor which had been polished until it shone like burnished metal.
Polly Henty took Sophie to the piano where Mrs. Henty was playing the opening bars of a waltz. Paul beside her, his violin under his arm, stood looking with eager interest over the room where men and girls were chatting in little groups.
Mrs. Henty nodded and smiled to Sophie. Her father signalled to her, and she went to a seat near him.
Holding her hands over the piano, Mrs. Henty looked to Paul to see if he were ready. He lifted his violin, tucked it under his chin, drew his bow, and the piano and violin broke gaily, irregularly, uncertainly, at first, into a measure which set and kept the couples swaying round the edge of the ballroom.
Sophie watched them at first, dazed and interested. Under the glow of the lanterns, the figures of the dancers looked strange and solemn. Some of the dancers were moving without any conscious effort, just skimming the floor like swallows; others were working hard as they danced. Tom Henderson held Elizabeth Henty as if he never intended to let go of her, and worked her arm up and down as if it were a semaphore.
Sophie had always admired Arthur’s eldest sister, and she thought Elizabeth the most beautiful-looking person she had ever seen this evening. And that pink dress—how pretty it was! What had Polly said her name was—the girl who wore it? Phyllis … Phyllis Chelmsford. … Sophie watched the dress flutter among the dancers some time before she noticed Miss Chelmsford was dancing with Arthur Henty.
She watched the couples revolving, dazed, and thinking vaguely about them, noticing how pretty feet looked in satin slippers with high, curved heels, wondering why some men danced with stiff knees and others as if their knees had funny-bones like their elbows. The red light from the lanterns made the whole scene look unreal; she felt as if she were dreaming.
“Sophie!” her father cried sharply.
She turned his page. Her eyes wandered to Mrs. Henty, who sat with her back to her. Sophie contemplated the bow of her back in its black frock with Spanish lace scarf across it, the outline of the black lace on the wrinkled skin of Mrs. Henty’s neck, the loose, upward wave of her crisp white hair, glinting silverly where the light caught it. Her face was cobwebbed with wrinkles, but her features remained delicate and fine as sculpturings in ancient ivory. Her eyes were bright: the sparkle of youth still leapt in them. Her eyes had a slight smile of secret sympathy and amusement as they flew over the roomful of people dancing.
Sophie watched dance after dance, while the music jingled and jangled.
Presently John Armitage appeared in the doorway with Nina Henty. Sophie heard him apologising to Mrs. Henty for being late, and explaining that he had stayed in the back-country a few days longer than usual for the express purpose of coming to the ball.
Mrs. Henty replied that it was “better late than never,” and a pleasure to see Mr. Armitage at any time; and then he and Nina joined the throng of the dancers.
Sophie drew her chair further back so that the piano screened her. The disappointment and stillness which had descended upon her since she came into the room tightened and settled. She had thought Arthur would surely come to ask her for this dance; but when the waltz began she saw he was dancing again with Phyllis Chelmsford. She sat very still, holding herself so that she should not feel a pain which was hovering in the background of her consciousness and waiting to grip her.
It was different, this sitting on a chair by herself and watching other people dance, to anything that had ever happened to her. She had always been the centre of Ridge balls, courted and made a lot of from the moment she came into the hall. Even Arthur Henty had had to shoulder his way if he wanted a waltz with her.
As the crowd brushed and swirled round the room, it became all blurred to Sophie. The last rag of that mood of tremulous joyousness which had invested her as she drove over the plains to the ball with her father, left her. She sat very still; she could not see for a moment. The waltz broke because she did not hear her father when he called her to turn the page of his music; he knocked over his stand trying to turn the page himself, and exclaimed angrily when Sophie did not jump to pick it up for him.
After that she watched his book of music with an odd calm. She scarcely looked at the dancers, praying for the time to come when the ball would end and she could go home. The hours were heavy and dead; she thought it would never be midnight or morning again. She was conscious of her crushed dress and cotton gloves, and Mrs. Watty’s big, old-fashioned fan; but after the first shock of disappointment she was not ashamed of them. She sat very straight and still in the midst of her finery; but she put the fan on the chair behind her, and took off her gloves in order to turn over the pages of her father’s music more expertly.
She knew now she was not going to dance. She understood she had not been invited as a guest like everybody else; but as the fiddler’s little girl to turn over his music for him. And when she was not watching the music, she sat down in her chair beyond the piano, hoping no one would see or speak to her.
Mrs. Henty spoke to her occasionally. Once she called pleasantly:
“Come here and let me look at your opals, child.”
Sophie went to her, and Mrs. Henty lifted the necklace.
“What splendid stones!” she said.
Sophie looked into those bright eyes, very like Arthur’s, with the same shifting sands in them, but alien to her, she thought.
“Yes,” she said quietly. She did not feel inclined to tell Mrs. Henty about the stones.
Mrs. Henty admired the earrings, and looked appreciatively at the big flat stone in Mrs. Grant’s brooch. Sophie coloured under her attention. She wished she had not worn the opals that did not belong to her.
Looking into Sophie’s face, Mrs. Henty became aware of its sensitive, unformed beauty, a beauty of expression rather than features, and of a something indefinable which cast a glamour over the girl. She had been considerably disturbed by Arthur’s share in the brawl at Newton’s. It was so unlike Arthur to show fight of any sort. If it had not happened after she had sent the invitation, Mrs. Henty would not have spoken of Sophie when she asked Rouminof to play at the ball. As it was, she was not sorry to see what manner of girl she was.
But as Sophie held a small, quiet face before her, with chin slightly uplifted, and eyes steady and measuring, a little disdainful despite their pain and surprise, Mrs. Henty realised it was a shame to have brought this girl to the ball, in order to inspect her; to discover what Arthur thought of her, and not in order that she might have a good time like other girls. After all, she was young and used to having a good time. Mrs. Henty heard enough of Ridge gossip to know any man on the mines thought the world of Sophie Rouminof. She had seen them eager to dance with her at race balls. It was not fair to have sidetracked her about Arthur, Mrs. Henty confessed to herself. The fine, clear innocence which looked from Sophie’s eyes accused her. It made her feel mean and cruel. She was disturbed by a sensation of guilt.
Paul was fidgeting at the first bars of the next dance, and, knowing the long programme to go through, Mrs. Henty’s hand fell from Sophie’s necklace, and Sophie went back to her chair.
But Mrs. Henty’s thoughts wandered on the themes she had raised. She played absentmindedly, her fingers skipping and skirling on the notes. She was realising what she had done. She had not meant to be cruel, she protested: she had just wished to know how Arthur felt about the girl. If he had wanted to dance with her, there was nothing to prevent him.
Arthur was dancing again with Phyllis, she noticed. She was a little annoyed. He was overdoing the thing. And Phyllis was a minx! That was the fourth time she had slipped and Arthur had held her up, the rose in her hair brushing his cheek.
“Mother!” Polly called. “For goodness’ sake … what are you dreaming of?”
The music had gone to the pace of Mrs. Henty’s reverie until Polly called. Then Mrs. Henty splashed out her chords and marked her rhythm more briskly.
After all, Mrs. Henty concluded, if Arthur and Phyllis had taken a fancy to each, other—at last—and were getting on, she could not afford to espouse the other girl’s cause. What good would it do? She wanted Arthur to marry Phyllis. His father did. Phyllis was the only daughter of old Chelmsford, of Yuina Yuina, whose cattle sales were the envy of pastoralists on both sides of the Queensland border. Phyllis’s inheritance and the knowledge that the interests of Warria were allied to those of Andrew Chelmsford of Yuina, would ensure a new lease of hope and opportunity for Warria. … Whereas it would be worse than awful if Arthur contemplated anything like marriage with this girl from the Ridge.
Mrs. Henty’s conscience was uneasy all the same. When the dance was ended, she called Arthur to her.
“For goodness’ sake, dear, ask that child to dance with you,” she said when he came to her. “She’s been sitting here all the evening by herself.”
“I was just going to,” Sophie heard Arthur say.
He came towards her.
“Will you have the next dance with me, Sophie?” he asked.
She did not look at him.
“No,” she said.
“Oh, I say—” He sat down beside her. “I’ve had to dance with these people who are staying with us,” he added awkwardly.
Her eyes turned to him, all the stormy fires of opal running in them.
“You don’t have to dance with me,” she said.
He got up and stood indecisively a moment.
“Of course not,” he said, “but I want to.”
“I don’t want to dance with you,” Sophie said.
He turned away from her, went down the ballroom, and out through the doorway in the hessian wall. Everyone had gone to supper. Mrs. Henty had left the piano. Paul himself had gone to have some refreshment which was being served in the dining-room across the courtyard. From the square, washed with the silver radiance of moonlight which she could see through the open space in the hessian, came a tinkle of glasses and spoons, fragments of talking and laughter. Sophie heard a clear, girlish voice cry: “Oh, Arthur!”
She clenched her hands; she thought that she was going to cry; but stiffening against the inclination, she sat fighting down the pain which was gripping her, and longed for the time to come when she could go home and be out in the dark, alone.
John Armitage entered the ballroom as if looking for someone. Glancing in the direction of the piano, he saw Sophie.
“There you are, Sophie!” he exclaimed heartily. “And, would you believe it, I’ve only just discovered you were here.”
He sat down beside her, and talked lightly, kindly, for a moment. But Sophie was in no mood for talking. John Armitage had guessed something of her crisis when he came into the room and found her sitting by herself. He had seen the affair at Newton’s, and knew enough of Fallen Star gossip to understand how Sophie would resent Arthur Henty’s treatment of her. He could see she was a sorely hurt little creature, holding herself together, but throbbing with pain and anger. She could not talk; she could only think of Arthur Henty, whose voice they heard occasionally out of doors. He was more than jolly after supper. Armitage had seen him swallow nearly a glassful of raw whisky. His face had gone a ghastly white after it. Rouminof had been drinking too. He came into the room unsteadily when Mrs. Henty took her seat at the piano again; but he played better.
Armitage’s eyes went to her necklace.
“What lovely stones, Sophie!” he said.
Sophie looked up. “Yes, aren’t they? The men gave them to me—there’s a stone for everyone. This is Michael’s!”—she touched each stone as she named it—“Potch gave me that, and Bully Bryant that.”
Her eyes caught Armitage’s with a little smile.
“It’s easy to see where good stones go on the Ridge,” he said. “And here am I—come hundreds of miles … can’t get anything like that piece of stuff in your brooch.”
“That’s Mrs. Grant’s,” Sophie confessed.
“And your earrings, Sophie!” Armitage said. “ ‘Clare to goodness,’ as my old nurse used to say, I didn’t think you could look such a witch. But I always have said black opal earrings would make a witch of a New England spinster.”
Sophie laughed. It was impossible not to respond to Mr. Armitage when he looked and smiled like that. His manner was so friendly and appreciative, Sophie was thawed and insensibly exhilarated by it.
Armitage sat talking to her. Sophie had always interested him. There was an unusual quality about her; it was like the odour some flowers have, of indescribable attraction for certain insects, to him. And it was so extraordinary, to find anyone singing arias from old-fashioned operas in this out-of-the-way part of the world.
John Lincoln Armitage had a man of the world’s contempt for churlish treatment of a woman, and he was indignant that the Hentys should have permitted a girl to be so humiliated in their house. He had been paying Nina Henty some mild attention during the evening, but Sophie in distress enlisted the instinct of that famous ancestor of his in her defence. He determined to make amends as far as possible for her disappointment of the earlier part of the evening.
“May I have the next dance, Sophie?” he inquired.
Sophie glanced up at him.
“I’m not dancing,” she said.
Her averted face, the quiver of her lips, confirmed him in his resolution. He took in her dress, the black opals in her earrings swinging against her black hair and white neck. She had never looked more attractive, he thought, than in this unlovely dress and with the opals in her ears. The music was beginning for another dance. Across the room Henty was hovering with a bevy of girls.
“Why aren’t you dancing, Sophie?” John Armitage asked.
His quiet, friendly tone brought the glitter of tears to her eyes.
“No one asked me to, until the dance before supper—then I didn’t want to,” she said.
The dance was already in motion.
“You’ll have this one with me, won’t you?”
John Armitage put the question as if he were asking a favour. “Please!” he insisted.
Putting her arm on his, Armitage led Sophie among the dancers. He held her so gently and firmly that she felt as if she were dancing by a will not her own. She and he glided and flew together; they did not talk, and when the music stopped, Mr. Armitage took her through the doorway into the moonlight with the other couples. They walked to the garden where, the orange trees were in blossom.
“Oh!” Sophie breathed, her arm still on his, and a little giddy.
The earth was steeped in purest radiance; the orange blossoms swam like stars on the dark bushes; their fragrance filled the air.
Sophie held up her face as if to drink. “Isn’t it lovely?” she murmured.
A black butterfly with white etchings on his wings hovered over an orange bush they were standing near, as if bewildered by the moonlight and mistaking it for the light of a strange day.
Armitage spread his handkerchief on a wooden seat.
“I thought you’d like it,” he said. “Let’s sit here—I’ve put down my handkerchief because there’s a dew, although the air seems so dry.”
When the music began again Sophie got up.
“Don’t let us go in yet,” he begged.
“But—” she demurred.
“We’ll stay here for this, and have the next dance,” Armitage said.
Sophie hesitated. She wondered why Mr. Armitage was being so nice to her, understanding a little. She smiled into his eyes, dallying with the temptation. John Armitage had seen women’s eyes like that before; then fall to the appeal of his own. But in Sophie’s eyes he found something he had not seen very often—a will-o’the-wisp of infinite wispishness which incited him to pursue and to insist, while it eluded and flew from him.
When she danced with John Armitage again, Sophie looked up, laughed, and played her eyes and smiles for him as she had seen Phyllis Chelmsford do for Arthur. At first, shyly, she had exerted herself to please him, and Armitage had responded to her tentative efforts; but presently she found herself enjoying the game. And Armitage was so surprised at the charm she revealed as she exerted herself to please him, that he responded with an enthusiasm he had not contemplated. But their mutual success at this oldest diversion in the world, while it surprised and delighted them, did not delight their hosts. Mr. and Mrs. Henty were surprised; then frankly scandalised. Several young men asked Sophie to dance with them after she had danced with John Armitage. She thanked them, but refused, saying she did not wish to dance very much. She sat in her chair by the piano except when she was dancing with Mr. Armitage, or was in the garden with him.