She told him what Mrs. Grant had said about her mother, and he stopped milking. They had gazed at each other with inquiry and bewilderment in their eyes; then Potch turned his face away as he sat on the milking-stool, and Sophie knew he was crying. She wondered why other people had cried so much and she had not cried at all.
When Potch was taking the bucket of milk across the yard, her father had come round the corner of the house. His heavy figure with its broad, stooping shoulders was outlined against the twilight sky. He made for the door, shouting incoherently. Sophie and Potch stood still as they saw him.
Catching sight of them, he had turned and come towards them.
“We’re on opal,” he cried; “on opal!”
There was a feverish light in his eyes; he was trembling with excitement.
He had pulled a small, washed oatmeal bag from his pocket, untied the string, tumbled some stones on to the outstretched palm of his hand, and held them for Potch to look at.
“Not a bad bit in the lot. … Look at the fire, there in the black potch! … And there’s green and gold for you. A lovely bit of pattern! And look at this … and this!” he cried eagerly, going over the two or three small knobbies in his hand.
Potch looked at him dazedly.
“Didn’t they tell you—?” he began.
Her father had closed his hands over the stones and opal dirt.
“I’m going in now,” he said, thrusting the opals into the bag.
He had gone towards the house again, shouting: “We’re on opal! On opal!”
Sophie followed him indoors. Mrs. Grant had met her father on the threshold of the room where her mother was.
“Why didn’t you come when I sent for you?” she asked.
“I didn’t think it could be as bad as you made out—that she was really dying,” Sophie could hear her father saying again. “And we’d just struck opal, me and Jun, struck it rich. Got two or three stones already—great stuff, lovely pattern, green and orange, and fire all through the black potch. And there’s more of it! Heaps more where it came from, Jun says. We’re next Watty and George Woods—and no end of good stuff’s come out of that claim.”
Mrs. Grant stared at him as Potch had done. Then she stood back from the doorway of the room behind her.
Every gesture of her father’s, of Mrs. Grant’s, and of Michael’s, was photographed on Sophie’s brain. She could see that room again—the quiet figure on the bed, light golden-brown hair, threaded with silver, lying in thin plaits beside the face of yellow ivory; bare, thin arms and hands lying over grey blankets and a counterpane of faded red twill; the window still framing a square of twilight sky on which stars were glittering. Mrs. Grant had brought a candle and put it on the box near the bed, and the candle light had flared on Mrs. Grant’s figure, showing it, gaunt and accusing, against the shadows of the room. It had showed Sophie her father, also, between Michael and Mrs. Grant, looking from one to the other of them, and to the still figure on the bed, with a dazed, penitent expression. …
The horses jogged slowly on the long, winding road. Sophie was conscious of the sunshine, warm and bright, over the plains, the fragrance of paper daisies in the air; the cuckoos calling in the distance. Her father snuffled and wiped his eyes and nose with his new handkerchief as he sat beside her.
“She was so good, Michael,” he said, “too good for this world.”
Michael did not reply.
“Too good for this world!” Paul murmured again.
He had said that at least a score of times this morning. Sophie had heard him say it to people down at the house before they started. She had never heard him talk of her mother like that before. She looked at him, sensing vaguely, and resenting the banality. She thought of him as he had always been with her mother and with her, querulous and complaining, or noisy and rough when he had been drinking. They had spent the night in a shed at the back of the house sometimes when he was like that. …
And her mother had said:
“You’ll take care of Sophie, Michael?”
Sophie remembered how she had stood in the doorway of her mother’s room, that afternoon—How long ago was it? Not only a day surely? She had stood there until her mother had seen her, awed without knowing why, reluctant to move, afraid almost. Michael had nodded without speaking.
“As though she were your own child?”
“So help me, God,” Michael said.
Her-mother’s eyes had rested on Michael’s face. She had smiled at him. Sophie did not think she had ever seen her smile like that before, although her smile had always been like a light on her face.
“Don’t let him take her away,” her mother had said after a moment. “I want her to grow up in this place … in the quiet … never to know the treacherous … whirlpool … of life beyond the Ridge.”
Then her mother had seen and called to her.
Sophie glanced back at the slowly-moving train of vehicles. They had a dreary, dreamlike aspect. She felt as if she were moving in a dream. Everything she saw, and heard, and did, was invested with unreality; she had a vague, unfeeling curiosity about everything.
“You see, Michael,” her father was saying when she heard him talking again, “we’d just got out that big bit when Potch came and said that Marya … that Marya. … I couldn’t believe it was true …
