The Black Opal, Katharine Susannah Prichard [i have read the book a hundred times txt] 📗

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.

X

“Mr. Armitage is up at Newton’s!” Paul yelled to Michael, when he saw him at his back door a few minutes after Sophie had given him the news.

“Not the old man?” Michael inquired.

“No, the young ’un.”

Word was quickly bruited over the fields that the American, one of the best buyers who came to the Ridge, had arrived by the evening coach. He invariably had a good deal of money to spend, and gave a better price than most of the local buyers.

Dawe P. Armitage had visited Fallen Star Ridge from the first year of its existence as an opal field, and every year for years after that. But when he began to complain about aches and pains in his bones, which he refused to allow anybody to call rheumatism, and was assured he was well over