"Thought you'd like to see these pictures of Sophie, Rouminof," he said. "She's well, and doing well. The magazine will tell you about that. And I brought along this." He held out a photograph. "She wouldn't give me a photograph for you, Michael—said you'd never know her—so I prigged this from her sitting-room last time I was there."
Michael glanced at the photographer's card of heavy grey paper, which Mr. Armitage was holding. He would know Sophie, anyhow and anywhere, he thought; but he agreed that she was right when, the card in his hands, he gazed at the elegant, bizarre-looking girl in the photograph. She was so unlike the Sophie he had known that he closed his eyes on the picture, pain, and again a dogging sense of failure and defeat filtering through all his consciousness.
CHAPTER V
Potch had gone to the mine on the morning when Michael went into Paul's hut, intending to rouse him out and make him go down to the claim and start work again. It was nearly five years since he had got the sun-stroke which had given him an excuse for loafing, and Michael and Potch had come to the conclusion that even if it were only to keep him out of mischief, Paul had to be put to work again.
Since old Armitage's visit he had been restless and dissatisfied. He was getting old, and had less energy, even by fits and starts, than he used to have, they realised, but otherwise he was much the same as he had been before Sophie went away. For months after Armitage's visit he spent the greater part of his time on the form in the shade of Newton's veranda, or in the bar, smoking and yarning to anybody who would yarn with him about Sophie. His imagination gilded and wove freakish fancies over what Mr. Armitage had said of her, while he wailed about Sophie's neglect of him—how she had gone away and left him, her old father, to do the best he could for himself. His reproaches led him to rambling reminiscences of his life before he came to the Ridge, and of Sophie's mother. He brought out his violin, tuned it, and practised Sometimes, talking of how he would play for Sophie in New York.
He was rarely sober, and Michael and Potch were afraid of the effect of so much drinking on his never very steady brain.
For months they had been trying to induce him to go down to the claim and start work again; but Paul would not.
"What's the good," he had said, "Sophie'll be sending for me soon, and I'll be going to live with her in New York, and she won't want people to be saying her father is an old miner."
Michael had too deep a sense of what he owed to Paul to allow him ever to want. He had provided for him ever since Sophie had left the Ridge; he was satisfied to go on providing for him; but he was anxious to steer Paul back to more or less regular ways of living.