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

her mind to the stone. She was pleased after a while. “That’s all right,” she told herself. “If only you don’t think.⁠ ⁠… If only you keep working like this and don’t think of Arthur.”

It was Arthur she did not want to think of. “Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!” the wheel mocked. “Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!”

Her head went into her hands. She was moaning and crying again. “Don’t let me think of him any more⁠ ⁠… if only I needn’t think of him any more.⁠ ⁠…”

She began to work again. There was nothing to do but persist in trying to work, she thought. If she kept to it, perhaps in the end the routine would take her; she would become absorbed in the mechanism of what she was doing.

A shadow was thrown before her. In the mirror Sophie saw that John Armitage was standing in the doorway. Her feet ceased to work the treadles of the cutting-wheel; her hands fell to her lap; she waited for him to come into the room. He walked past her to the window, and stood with his back to it, facing her. Her eyes went to him. She let him take what impression he might from her face, her defences were down; vaguely, perhaps, she hoped he would read something of her mind in her face, that he would need no explanation of what she had no words to express.

There had been a smile of faint cynicism in his eyes as he looked towards her; it evaporated as she surrendered to the inquisition of his gaze.

“Well?” he inquired gravely.

“Well?” she replied as gravely.

They studied each other quietly.

John Armitage had changed very little since she had first seen him. His clean-shaven face was harder, a little more firmly set perhaps; the indecision had gone from it; it had lost some of its amiable mobility. He looked much more a man of the world he was living in⁠—a business man, whose intelligence and energies had been trained in its service⁠—but his eyes still had their subtle knowledge and sympathy, his individuality the attraction it had first had for her.

He was wearing the loose, well-cut tweeds he travelled in, and had taken off his hat. It lay on the windowsill beside him, and Sophie saw that there was more silver in his hair where it was brushed back from his ears than there used to be. His eyes surveyed her as if she were written in an argot or dialect which puzzled him; his hands drifted and moved before her as he smoked a cigarette. His hands emphasised the difference between John Lincoln Armitage and men of the Ridge. Sophie thought of Potch’s hands, and of Michael’s, and the smile Michael might have had for Armitage’s hands curved her lips.

Armitage, taking that smile for a lessening of the tension of her mood, said:

“You’d much better put on your bonnet and shawl, and come home with me, Sophie. We can be married en route, or in Sydney if you like.⁠ ⁠… You know how pleased the old man’ll be. And, as for me⁠—”

Sophie’s gaze swept past him, fretted lines deepening on her forehead.

Armitage threw away his cigarette, abandoning his assumption of familiar friendliness with the action, and went to her side. Sophie rose to meet him.

“Look here, Sophie,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes, “let’s have done with all this neurotic rot.⁠ ⁠… You’re the only woman in the world for me. I don’t know why you left me. I don’t care.⁠ ⁠… Come home⁠ ⁠… let’s get married⁠ ⁠… and see whether we can’t make a better thing of it.⁠ ⁠…”

Sophie had turned her eyes from his.

“When I’ve said that before, you wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” he continued. “You had a notion I was saying it because I ought⁠—thought I had to, or the old man had talked me into it.⁠ ⁠… It wasn’t true even then. I came here to say it⁠ ⁠… so that you would believe I⁠—want it, and I want you⁠—more than anything on earth, Sophie.”

There was no response, only an overshadowing of troubled thought in Sophie’s face.

“Is there anything love or money can give you, girl, that I’m not eager to give you?” Armitage demanded. “What is it you want?⁠ ⁠… Do you know what you want?”

Sophie did not reply, and her silence exasperated him.

Taking her face in his hands, Armitage scrutinised it as though he must read there what her silence held from him.

He realised how wan and weary-looking it was. Shadows beneath her eyes fell far down her cheeks, her lips lay together with a new, strange sternness. But he could not think of that yet. His male egoism could only consider its own situation, fight imperiously in its own defence.

“You want something I can’t give you?”

His eyes held her for the fraction of a second; then, the pain of knowledge gripping him, his hands fell from her face. He turned away.

“Which is it⁠ ⁠… Potch or⁠—the other?” He spoke with cruel bitterness. “It’s always a case of ‘which’ with you⁠—isn’t it?”

“That’s just it,” Sophie said.

He glanced at her, surprised to hear a note of the same bitterness in her voice.

“I didn’t mean that, Sophie,” he said. “You know I didn’t.”

She smiled.

“It’s true all the same.”

“Tell me”⁠—he turned to her⁠—“I wish you would. You never have⁠—why you left New York⁠ ⁠… and gave up singing⁠ ⁠… everything there, and came here.”

Sophie dropped into her chair again.

“But you know.”

“Who could know anything of you, Sophie?”

She moved the stones on the bench absentmindedly. At length she said:

“You remember our big row about Adler, when I was going to the supper on his yacht?”

Armitage exclaimed with a gesture of protest.

“I know,” Sophie said, “you were angry⁠ ⁠… you didn’t mean what you said. But you were right all the same. You said I had let the life I was leading go to my head⁠—that I was utterly demoralised by it.⁠ ⁠… I was angry; but it was true. You know the people I was going about with.⁠ ⁠…”

“I did my best to get you away