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

read long before in each other’s eyes was still there, after all the years and the dark and troubled times they had been through.

Sophie wondered whether Arthur was thinking of those times when they had walked together on the Ridge tracks. She wondered whether he was remembering little things he had said⁠ ⁠… she had said⁠ ⁠… the afternoon he had recited:

“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.”

Sophie wished she had not begun to think back. She wished she had not danced with Arthur. People looking after her wondered why she was not laughing; why suddenly her good spirits had died down. She was tired and wanted to cry.⁠ ⁠… She hoped she would not cry; but she did not like dancing with Arthur Henty before all these people. It was like dancing on a grave.

Henty’s grip tightened. Sophie’s face had become childish and pitiful, working with the distress which she could not suppress. His hand on hers comforted her. Their hands loved and clung; they comforted each other, every fibre finding its mate, twined and entwined; all the little nests of nerves were throbbing and crooning to each other.

Were they dancing, or drifting through space as they would drift when they were dead, as perhaps they had drifted through time? Sophie wondered. The noises of the ballroom broke in on her wondering⁠—voices, shouting, and laughter; the little cries of girls and the heavy exclamations of men, the music enwrapping them.⁠ ⁠…

Sophie longed for the deep, straight glance of his eyes; yet she dared not look up. Arthur’s will, working against hers, demanded the surrender. Through all her body, imperiously, his demand communicated itself. Her gaze went to him, and flew off again.

As they danced, Arthur seemed to be taking her into deep water. She was afraid of getting out of her depth⁠ ⁠… but he held her carefully. His grasp, was strong and his eyes hungry. Sophie could not escape that hungry look of his eyes. She told herself that she would not look up; she would not see it. They moved unsteadily; his breath, hot and smelling of whisky, fanned her. She sickened under it, loathing the smell of whisky and the rank tobacco he had been smoking. His grasp tightened. She was afraid of him⁠—afraid of all the long, old dreams he might revive. Her step faltered, his arm trembled against her. And those hungry, hungry eyes.⁠ ⁠… She could not see them; she would not.

A clamour of tiny voices rose within her and dinned in her ears. She could hear the clamour of tiny voices going on in Henty, too; his voices were drowning her voices. She looked up to him begging him to silence them⁠ ⁠… begging, but unable to beg, terrified and quailing to the implacable in him⁠—the stark passion and tragedy which were in his face. She was helpless before them.

Arthur had given her his arm before the open door; they had moved a little distance from the door. Darkness was about them. There was no hesitancy, no moment of consideration. As two waves meeting in mid-ocean fall to each other, they met, and were lost in the oblivion of a close embrace. The first violence of their movement, failing, brought consciousness of time and place. They were standing in the slight shadow of some trees just beyond the light of the hall. A purring of music came to them in faraway murmurs, and strange, distant ejaculations, and laughter.

Sophie tried to withdraw from the arms which held her.

“No, no,” she breathed; but Henty drew her to him again.

He murmured into her hair, and then from her lips again took a full draught of her being, lingeringly, as though he would drain its last essence.

A shadow loomed heavy and shapeless over them. It fell on them. Sophie was thrown back. Dazed, and as if she were falling through space, for a moment she did not realise what had happened. Then, there in the dark, she knew men were grappling silently. The intensity of the struggle paralysed her; she could see nothing but heavy, rolling shapes; hear nothing but stertorous breathing and the snorting grunts as of enraged animals. A cry, as if someone were hurt, broke the fear which had stupefied her.

She called Michael.

Two or three men came running from the hall. The struggling figures were on their feet again; they swung from the shadow. Sophie had an instant’s vision of a hideous, distorted face she scarcely recognised as Potch’s⁠ ⁠… she saw Henty on the ground and Potch crouched over him. Then the surrounding darkness swallowed her. She knew she was dragged away from where she had been standing; she seemed to have been dragged through darkness for hours. When she wakened she could see only those heavy, quiet figures, struggling and grappling through the darkness.

XI

Sophie went into the shed where her cutting-wheel was soon after eight o’clock next morning. She took up a packet of small stones George Woods had left with her and set to work on them.

The wheel was in a line with the window, and she sat on the wooden chair before it, so that the light fell over her left shoulder. On the bench which ran out from the wheel were a spirit lamp and the trays of rough opal; on the other side of the bench the polishing buffers were arranged one against the other. A hand-basin, the water in it raddled with rouge, stood on the table behind her, and a white china jug of fresh water beside it.

Sophie lighted the spirit lamp, gathered up a handful of the slender sticks about the size of pen-holders which Potch had prepared for her, melted her sealing-wax over the flame of the lamp, drew the saucer of George’s opals to her, and fastened a score of small stones to the heated wax on the ends of the sticks. She blew out the lamp.

She