VIII
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.