“But Charley Heathfield was never one of us really,” Ted Cross said. “He was always an outsider.”
“That’s right, Ted,” George Woods replied. “We only stuck him on Michael’s account.”
Paul told George, Watty, and Cash the story he had been going over all the morning—how he had gone home with Charley, how he remembered going along the road with him, and then how he had wakened on the floor of his own hut in the morning. Sophie was there. She was singing. He had thought it was her mother. He had called her … but Sophie had come to him. And she had abused him. She had called him “a dirty, fat pig,” and told him to get out of the way because she wanted to sweep the floor.
He sobbed uncontrollably. The men sympathised with him. They knew the loss of opal came harder on Rouminof than it would have on the rest of them, because he was so mad about the stuff. They condoned the abandonment of his grief as natural enough in a foreigner, too; but after a while it irked them.
“Take a pull at y’rself, Rummy, can’t you?” George Woods said irritably. “What did Michael say?”
“Michael?” Paul looked at him, his eyes streaming.
George nodded.
“He did not say,” Paul replied. “He threw down his pick. He would not work any more … and then he went down to Newton’s to ask about Charley.”
Two or three of the men exchanged glances. That was the way they had expected Michael to take the news. He would not have believed Paul’s story at first. They did not see Michael again that day. In the evening Peter Newton told them how Michael had come to him, asking if it was true Charley had gone on the coach with Jun Johnson and the girls. Peter told Michael, he said, that Charley had gone on the coach, and that he thought Rouminof’s story looked black against Charley.
“Michael didn’t say much,” Peter explained, “but I don’t think he could help seeing what I said was true—however much he didn’t want to.”
Everybody knew Michael believed in Charley Heathfield. He had thought the worst that could be said of Charley was that he was a good-natured, rather shiftless fellow. All the men had responded to an odd attractive faculty Charley exercised occasionally. He had played it like a woman for Michael, and Michael had taken him on as a mate and worked with him when no one else would. And now, the men guessed, that Michael, who had done more than any of them to make the life of the Ridge what it was, would feel more deeply and bitterly than any of them that Charley had gone back on him and on what the Ridge stood for.
All they imagined Michael was suffering in the grief and bitterness of spirit which come of misplaced faith, he was suffering. But they could not imagine the other considerations which had overshadowed grief and bitterness, the realisation that Sophie’s life had been saved from what looked like early wreckage, and the consciousness that the consequences of what Charley had done, had fallen, not on Charley, but on himself. Michael had lived like a child, with an open heart at the disposal of his mates always; and the sense of Charley’s guilt descending on him, had created a subtle ostracism, a remote alienation from them.
He could not go to Newton’s in the evening and talk things over with the men as he ordinarily would have. He wandered over the dumps of deserted rushes at the Old Town, his eyes on the ground or on the distant horizons. He could still only believe he had done the best thing possible under the circumstances. If he had let Charlie go away with the stones, Sophie would have been saved, but Paul would have lost his stones. As it was, Sophie was saved, and Paul had not lost his stones. And Michael could not have given Charley away. Charley had been his mate; they had worked together. The men might suspect, but they could not convict him of being what he was unless they knew what Michael knew. Charley had played on the affection, the simplicity of Michael’s belief in him. He had used them, but Michael had still a lingering tenderness and sympathy for him. It was that which had made him put the one decent piece of opal he possessed into the parcel he had made up for Charley to take instead of Paul’s stones. It was the first piece of good stuff he had found on the Ridge, and he had kept it as a mascot—something of a nest egg.
Michael wondered at the fate which had sent him along the track just when Charley had taken Paul’s stones. He was perplexed and impatient of it. There would have been no complication, no conflict and turmoil if only he had gone along the track a little later, or a little earlier. But there was no altering what had happened. He had to bear the
