IX
Darling pea was lying in purple and magenta patches through the long grass on the tank paddock when Sophie went with Ella and Mirry Flail to gather wild flowers there.
Wild flowers did not grow anywhere on Fallen Star as they did in the tank paddock. It was almost a place of faery to children of the Ridge. The little ones were not allowed to go there by themselves for fear they might fall into the waterhole which lay like a great square lake in the middle of it, its steep, well-set-up banks of yellow clay, ruled with the precision of a diagram in geometry. The water was almost as yellow as the banks, thick and muddy looking; but it was good water, nothing on earth the matter with it when you had boiled it and the sediment had been allowed to settle, everybody on Fallen Star Ridge was prepared to swear. It had to be drawn up by a pump which was worked by a donkey engine, Sam Nancarrow, and his old fat roan draught mare, and carted to the township when rainwater in the iron tanks beside the houses in Fallen Star gave out.
During a dry season, or a very hot summer, all hands turned out to roof the paddock tank with tarpaulins to prevent evaporation as far as possible and so conserve the township’s water supply. On a placard facing the roadway a “severe penalty” was promised to anyone using it without permission or making improper use of it.
Ella and Mirry were gathering sago flower—“wild sweet Alice,” as they called candytuft—yellow eye-bright, tiny pink starry flowers, bluebells, small lavender daisies, taller white ones, and yellow daisies, as well as Darling pea; but Sophie picked only long, trailing stalks of the pea. She had as many as she could hold when she sat down to arrange them into a tighter bunch.
Mirry and Ella Flail had always been good friends of Sophie’s. Potch and she had often gone on excursions with them, or to the swamp to cart water when it was scarce and very dear in the township. And since Potch had gone to work Sophie had no one to go about with but Mirry and Ella. She pleased their mother by trying to teach them to read and write, and they went noodling together, or gathering wild flowers. Sophie was three or four years older than Mirry, who was the elder of the two Flails; she felt much older since her mother’s death nearly a year ago, and in the black dress she had worn since then. She was just seventeen, and had put her hair up into a knot at the back of her head. That made her feel older, too. But she still liked to go for walks and wanderings with Ella and Mirry. They knew so much about the birds and flowers, the trees, and the ways of all the wild creatures: they were such wild creatures themselves.
They came running to her, crying excitedly, their hands filled with flowers, shedding them as they ran. Then, collapsing in the grass beside Sophie, Mirry rolled over on her back and gazed up into the sky. Ella, squatting on her thin, sunburnt little sticks of legs, was arranging her flowers and glancing every now and then at Sophie with shy, loving glances.
Sophie wondered why she had nothing of her old joyous zest in their enterprises together. She used to be as wild and happy as Mirry and Ella on an afternoon like this. But there was something of the shy, wild spirit of a primitive people about Mirry and Ella, she remembered, some of their blood, too. One of their mother’s people, it was said, had been a native of one of the river tribes.
Mirry had her mother’s beautiful dark eyes, almost green in the light, and freckled with hazel, and her pale, sallow skin. Ella, younger and shyer, was more like her father. Her skin was not any darker than Sophie’s, and her eyes blue-grey, her features delicate, her hair golden-brown that glinted in the sun.
“Sing to us, Sophie,” Mirry said.
Sophie often sang to them when she and Ella and Mirry were out like this. As she sat with them, dreaming in the sunshine, she sang almost without any conscious effort; she just put up her chin, and the melodies poured from her. Hearing her voice, as it ran in ripples and eddies through the clear, warm air, hung and quivered and danced again, delighted her.
Ella and Mirry listened in a trance of awe, reverence, and admiration. Sophie had a dim vision of them, wide-eyed and still, against the tall grass and flowers.
“My! You can sing, Sophie! Can’t she, Ella?”
Ella nodded, gazing at Sophie with eyes of worshipping love.
“They say you’re going away with your father … and you’re going to be a great singer, Sophie,” Mirry said.
“Yes,” Sophie murmured tranquilly, “I am.”
A bevy of black and brown birds flashed past them, flew in a wide half-circle across the paddock, and alighted on a dead tree beyond the fence.
“Look, look!” Mirry started to her feet. “A happy family! I wonder, are the whole twelve there?”
She counted the birds, which were calling to each other with little shrill cries.
“They’re all there!” she announced. “Twelve of them. Mother says in some parts they call them the twelve apostles. Sing again, Sophie,” she begged.
Ella smiled at Sophie. Her lips parted as though she would like to have said that, too; but only her eyes entreated, and she went on putting her flowers together.
As she sang, Sophie watched a pair of butterflies, white with black lines and splashes of yellow and scarlet on their wings, hovering over the flowered field of the paddock. She was so lost in her singing and watching the butterflies, and the children were so intent listening to her, that they did not hear a horseman coming slowly towards them along the track. As he came up to them, Sophie’s rippling notes broke and fell to earth. Ella saw him first, and was on her feet in an instant. Mirry and she, their wild instinct asserting itself, darted away and took cover behind the trunks of the nearest trees.
Sophie looked after them, wondering whether she would follow them as she used to; but she felt older and more staid now than she had a year ago. She stood her ground, as the man, who was leading his horse, came to a standstill before her.
She knew him well enough, Arthur Henty, the only son of old Henty of Warria Station. She had seen him riding behind cattle or sheep on the roads across the plains for years. Sometimes when Potch and she had met him riding across the Ridge, or at the swamp, he had stopped to talk to them. He had been at her mother’s funeral, too; but as he stood before her this afternoon, Sophie seemed to be seeing him for the first time.
A tall, slightly-built young man, in riding breeches and leggings, a worn coat, and as weathered a felt hat as any man on the Ridge wore, his clothes the colour of dust on the roads, he stood before her, smiling slightly. His face was dark in the shadow of his hat, but the whole of him, cut against the sunshine, had gilded outlines. And he seemed to be seeing Sophie for the first time, too. She had jumped up and drawn back from the track when the Flails ran away. He could not believe that this tall girl in the black dress was the queer, elfish-like girl he had seen running about the Ridge, barelegged, with feet in goatskin sandals, and in the cemetery on the Warria road, not much more than a year ago. Her elfish gaiety had deserted her. It was the black dress gave her face the warm pallor of ivory, he thought, made her look staider, and as if the sadness of all it symbolised had not left her. But her eyes, strange, beautiful eyes, the green and blue of opal, with black rings on the irises and great black pupils, had still the clear, unconscious gaze of youth; her lips the sweet, sucking curves of a child’s.
They stood so, smiling and staring at each other, a spell of silence on each.
Sophie had dropped half her flowers as she sprang up at the sound of someone approaching. She had clutched a few in one hand; the rest lay on the grass about her, her hat beside them. Henty’s eyes went to the trees round which Mirry and Ella were peeping.
“They’re wild birds, aren’t they?” he said.
Sophie smiled. She liked the way his eyes narrowed to slits of sunshine as he smiled.
“Are you going to sing, again?” he asked hesitatingly.
Sophie shook her head.
“My mother’s awfully fond of that stuff,” Henty said, looking at the Darling pea Sophie had in her hand. “We haven’t got any near the homestead. I came into the paddock to get some for her.”
Sophie held out her bunch.
“Not all of it,” he said.
“I can get more,” she said.
He took the flowers, and his vague smile changed to one of shy and subtle understanding. Ella and Mirry found courage to join Sophie.
“Where’s Potch?” Henty asked.
“He’s working with Michael,” Sophie said.
“Oh!” he exclaimed, and stood before her awkwardly, not knowing what to talk about.
He was still thinking how different she was to the little girl he had seen chasing goats on the Ridge no time before, and wondering what had changed her so quickly, when Sophie stooped to pick up her hat. Then he saw her short, dark hair twisted up into a knot at the back of her head. Feeling intuitively that he was looking at the knot she was so proud of, Sophie put on her hat quickly. A delicate colour moved on her neck and cheeks. Arthur Henty found himself looking into her suffused eyes and smiling at her smile of confusion.
“Well, we must be going now,” Sophie said, a little breathlessly.
Henty said that he was going into the New Town and would walk along part of the way with her. He tucked the flowers Sophie had given him into his saddlebag, and she and the children turned down the track. Ella, having found her tongue, chattered eagerly. Arthur Henty strolled beside them, smoking, his reins over his arm. Mirry wanted to ride his horse.
“Nobody rides this horse but me,” Henty said. “She’d throw you into the middle of next week.”
“I can ride,” Mirry said; “ride like a flea, the boys say.”
She was used to straddling any pony or horse her brothers had in the yard, and they had a name as the best horse-breakers in the district.
Henty laughed. “But you couldn’t ride Beeswing,” he said. “She doesn’t let anybody but me ride her. You can sit on, if you like; she won’t mind that so long as I’ve got hold of her.”
The stirrup was too high for Mirry to reach, so he picked her up and put her across the saddle. The mare shivered and shrank under the light shock of Mirry’s landing upon her, but Arthur Henty talked to her and rubbed her head soothingly.
“It’s all right … all right, old girl,” he muttered. “Think it was one of those stinging flies? But it isn’t, you see. It’s only Mirry Flail. She says she’s a flea of a rider. But you’d learn her, wouldn’t you, if you got off with her by yourself?”
Ella giggled softly, peering at Mirry and Henty and at the beautiful golden-red chestnut he was leading. Ed Ventry had put Sophie on his coach horses sometimes. He had let her go for a scamper with Potch on an old horse or a likely colt now and then; but she knew she did not ride well—not as Mirry rode.
They walked along the dusty road together when they had left the tank paddock, Mirry chattering from Beeswing’s back, Sophie, with Ella clinging to one hand, on the other side of Henty. But Mirry soon tired of riding a led horse at a snail’s pace. When a sulphur-coloured butterfly fluttered for a few minutes over a wild tobacco plant, she slid from the saddle, on the far side, and was off over the plains to have another look at the butterfly.
Ella was too shy or too frightened to get on the chestnut, even with Henty holding her bridle.
“How about you, Sophie?” Arthur Henty asked.
Sophie nodded, but before he could help her she had put her foot into the stirrup and swung into the saddle herself. Beeswing shivered again to the new, strange weight on her back. Henty held her, muttering soothingly. They went on again.
After a while, with a shy glance, and as if to please him, Sophie began to sing, softly at first, so as not to startle the mare, and then letting her voice out so that it rippled as easily and naturally as a bird’s. Henty, walking with a hand on the horse’s bridle beside her, heard again the song she had been singing in the tank paddock.
Ella was supposed to be carrying Sophie’s flowers. She did not know she had dropped nearly half of them, and that they were lying in a trail all along the dusty road.
Henty did not speak when Sophie had finished. His pipe had gone out, and he put it in his pocket. The stillness of her audience of two was so intense that to escape it Sophie went on singing, and the chestnut did not flinch. She went quietly to the pace of the song, as though she, too, were enjoying its rapture and tenderness.
Then through the clear air came a rattle of wheels and jingle of harness. Mirry, running towards them from the other side of the road, called eagerly:
“It’s the coach. … Mr. Ventry’s got six horses in, and a man with him!”
Six horses indicated that a person of some importance was on board the coach. Henty drew the chestnut to one side as the coach approached. Mr. Ventry jerked his head in Henty’s direction when he passed and saw Arthur Henty with the Flail children and Sophie. The stranger beside him eyed, with a faint smile of amusement, the cavalcade, the girl in the black dress on the fine chestnut horse, the children with the flowers, and the young man standing beside them. The man on the coach was a clean-shaved, well-groomed, rather good-looking man of forty, or thereabouts, and his clothes and appearance proclaimed him a man of the world beyond the Ridge. His smile and stare annoyed Henty.
“It’s Mr. Armitage,” Mirry said. “The young one. He’s not as nice as the old man, my father says—and he doesn’t know opal as well—but he gives a good price.”
They had reached the curve of the road where one arm turns to the town and the other goes over the plains to Warria. Sophie slipped from the horse.
“We’ll take the shortcut here,” she said.
She stood looking at Arthur Henty for a moment, and in that moment Henty knew that she had sensed his thought. She had guessed he was afraid of having looked ridiculous trailing along the road with these children. Sophie turned away. The young Flails bounded after her. Henty could hear their laughter when he had ridden out some distance along the road.
From the slope of a dump Sophie saw him—the chestnut and her rider loping into the sunset, and, looking after him, she finished her song.
“Caro nome che il mio cor festi primo palpitar,
Le delizie dell’ amor mi dei sempre rammentar!
Col pensier il mio desir a te sempre volerà,
A fin l’ultimo sospir, caro nome, tuo sarà!”1
The long, sweet notes and rippled melody followed Arthur Henty over the plains in the quiet air of late afternoon. But the afternoon had been spoilt for him. He was self-conscious and ill at ease about it all.