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

and there was the opal! And when I got home in the evening she was gone. My poor Marya! And I’d brought some of the stones to show her.”

He broke down and wept. “Do you think she knows about the opal, Michael?”

Michael did not reply. Sophie looked up at him. The pain of his face, a sudden passionate grieving that wrung it, translated to her what this dying of her mother meant. She huddled against Michael; in all her trouble and bewilderment there seemed nothing to do but to keep close to Michael.

And so they came to the gate of a fenced plot which was like a quiet garden on the plains. Several young coolebahs, and two or three older trees standing in it, scattered light shade; and a few headstones and wooden crosses, painted white or bleached by the weather, showed above the waving grass and wild flowers.

Sophie held the reins when Michael got down to open the gate. Then he took his seat again and they drove in through the gateway. Other people tied their horses and buggies to the fence outside.

When all the people who had been driving, riding, or walking on the road went towards an old coolebah under which the earth had been thrown up and a grave had been dug, Michael told Sophie to go with her father and stand beside them. She did so, and dull, grieving eyes were turned to her; glances of pitiful sympathy. But Snowshoes came towards the little crowd beside the tree, singing.

He was the last person to come into the cemetery, and everybody stared at him. An old man in worn white moleskins and cotton shirt, an old white felt hat on his head, the wrappings of bag and leather, which gave him his name, on his feet⁠—although snow never fell on the Ridge⁠—he swung towards them. The flowers he had gathered as he came along, not otilypaper daisies, but the blue flowers of crowsfoot, gold buttons, and creamy and lavender, sweet-scented budda blossoms, were done up in a tight little bunch in his hand. He drew nearer still singing under his breath, and Sophie realised he was going over and over the fragment of a song that her mother had loved and used often to sing herself.

There was a curious smile in his eyes as he came to a standstill beside her. The leaves of the coolebah were bronze and gold in the sunshine, a whitetail in its branches reiterating plaintively: “Sweet pretty creature! Sweet pretty creature!” Michael, George Woods, Archie Cross, and Cash Wilson, came towards the tree, their shoulders bowed beneath the burden they were carrying; but Snowshoes smiled at everybody as though this were really a joyous occasion, and they did not understand. Only he understood, and smiled because of his secret knowledge.

II

In a week or two Mrs. Rouminof’s name had dropped out of Ridge life almost as if she had never been part of it.

At first people talked of her, of Paul, of Sophie, and of Michael. They gossiped of her looks and manner, of her strange air of serenity and content, although her life on the Ridge was, they surmised, a hard one, and different from the life she had come from. But her death caused no more disturbance than a stone thrown into quiet water, falling to the bottom, does. No one was surprised, when it was known Paul and Sophie had gone to live with Michael. Everyone expected Michael would try to look after them for a while, although they could not imagine where he was going to find room for them in his small house filled with books.

It was natural enough that Michael should have taken charge of Sophie and Rouminof, and that he should have made all arrangements for Mrs. Rouminof’s funeral. If it had been left to Paul to bury his wife, people agreed, she would not have been buried at all; or, at least, not until the community insisted. And Michael would have done as much for any shiftless man. He was next-of-kin to all lonely and helpless men and women on the Ridge, Michael Brady.

Every man, woman, or child on the Ridge knew Michael. His lean figure in shabby blue dungarees, faded shirt, and weathered felt hat, with no more than a few threads of its band left, was as familiar as any tree, shed, or dump on the fields. He walked with a slight stoop, a pipe in his mouth always, his head bent as though he were thinking hard; but there was no hard thought in his eyes, only meditativeness, and a faint smile if he were stopped and spoken to unexpectedly.

“You’re a regular ’cyclopaedia, Michael,” the men said sometimes when he, had given information on a subject they were discussing.

“Not me,” Michael would reply as often as not. “I just came across that in a book I was reading the other day.”

Ridge folk were proud of Michael’s books, and strangers who saw his miscellaneous collection⁠—mostly of cheap editions, old school books, and shilling, sixpenny, and penny publications of literary masterpieces, poetry, and works on industrial and religious subjects⁠—did not wonder that it impressed Ridge folk, or that Michael’s knowledge of the world and affairs was what it was. He had tracts, leaflets, and small books on almost every subject under the sun. Books were regarded as his weakness, and, remembering it, some of the men, when they had struck opal and left the town, occasionally sent a box of any old books they happened to come across to Michael, knowing that a printed page was a printed page to him in the long evenings when he lay on the sofa under his window. Michael himself had spent all the money he could, after satisfying the needs of his everyday life, on those tracts, pamphlets, and cheap books he hoarded in his hut on shelves made from wooden boxes and old fruit-cases.

But there was nothing of the schoolmaster about him.