The Black Opal

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

But he had only put off telling Potch, Michael assured himself; he had only put off giving the stones back to Paul. There was no motive in this putting off. It was mental indolence, procrastination, reluctance to face a difficult and delicate situation: that was all. Having the opals had worried him to death. It had preyed on his mind so that he was ready to imagine himself capable of any folly or crime in connection with them.... He mocked his fears of himself.

Michael went over all he had done, all that had happened in connection with the opals, seeking out motives, endeavouring to fathom his own consciousness and to be honest with himself.

As if answering an evocation, the opals passed before him in a vision. He followed their sprayed fires reverently. Then, as if one starry ray had shed illumination in its passing, a daze of horror and amazement seized him. He had taken his own rectitude so for granted that he could not believe he might be guilty of what the light had shown lurking in a dark corner of his mind.

Had Paul's stones done that to him? Michael asked himself. Had their witch fires eaten into his brain? He had heard it said men who were misers, who hoarded opal, were mesmerised by the lights and colour of the stuff; they did not want to part with it. Was that what Paul's stones had done to him? Had they mesmerised him, so that he did not want to part with them? Michael was aghast at the idea. He could not believe he had become so besotted in his admiration of black opal that he was ready to steal—steal from a mate. The opal had never been found, he assured himself, which could put a spell over his brain to make him do that. And yet, he realised, the stones themselves had had something to do with his reluctance to talk of them to Potch, and with the deferring of his resolution to give them to Paul and let the men know what he had done. Whenever he had attempted to bring his resolution to talk of them to the striking-point, he remembered, the opals had swarmed before his dreaming eyes; his will had weakened as he gazed on them, and he had put off going to Paul and to Watty and George.

Stung to action by realisation of what he had been on the brink of, Michael went to the box of books in his room. He determined to take the packet of opals to Paul immediately, and go on to tell George and Watty its history. As he plunged an arm down among the books for the cigarette tin the opals were packed in, he made up his mind not to look at them for fear some reason or excuse might hinder the carrying out of his project. His fingers groped eagerly for the package; he threw out a few books.

He had put the tin in a corner of the box, under an old Statesman's year-book and a couple of paper-covered novels. But it was not there; it must have slipped, or he had piled books over it, at some time or another, he thought. He threw out all the books in the box and raked them over—but he could not find the tin with Paul's opals in.

He sat back on his haunches, his face lean and ghastly by the candle-fight.

"They're gone," he told himself.

He wondered whether he could have imagined replacing the package in the box—if there was anywhere else he could have put it, absent-mindedly; but his eyes returned to the box. He knew he had put the opals there.

Who could have found them? Potch? His mind turned from the idea.