The Black Opal

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

Martha could not forgive herself that she had done nothing to soothe or pacify Arthur; that she had said nothing, given him neither kindly word nor gesture. But she had been so upset, so carried away. She had not known what to do or say. She abused and blackguarded herself; but she had sensed enough of the utter loneliness and darkness of Henty's mind to realise that most likely she could have done nothing against it. He would have brushed her aside had she attempted to influence him; he would not have heard what, she said. She would have been as helpless as any other human consideration against the blinding, irresistibly engulfing forces of despair which had impelled him to put himself out of pain as he had put many a suffering animal. It was an act of self-defence, as Mother M'Cready saw it, Arthur Henty's end, and that was all there was to it.

As Sophie and Potch approached the cemetery, people exclaimed together in wonderment, awe—almost fear.

James Henty, when he saw them, turned away from the men he was talking to and walked to his buggy; Tom Henderson, his son-in-law, followed him. Although he would have been the last to forgive Sophie if she had done as Arthur wished, even to save his life, old Henty had to have a whipping-post, and he eased his own sense of responsibility for what had blighted his son's life, by blaming Sophie for it. He assured himself, his family and friends, that she, and she alone, was responsible for Arthur's death. She had played with Arthur; she had always played with him, old Henty said. She had driven him to distraction with her wiles—and this was the end of it all.

Sophie rode into the cemetery: she rode to where the broken earth was; but she did not dismount. The horse came to a standstill beside it, and she sat on him, her eyes closed. Potch stood bare-headed and bowed beside her. He put the flowers he had picked up as Sophie let them fall, on the grave. Sophie thrust the long, purple trails she was carrying into the saddle-bag where Arthur had put the flowers she gave him that first day their eyes met and drank the love potion of each others' being.

People were already on the road, horses and buggies, dark, ant-like trains on the flowering plains, moving slowly in the direction of Warria and of Fallen Star, when Sophie and Potch turned away from the cemetery.

The shadow of what had happened was heavy over everybody as they drove home. Arthur Henty had been well enough liked, and he had had much more to do with Fallen Star than most of the station people. He had gone about so much with his men they had almost ceased to think of him as not one of themselves. He was less the "Boss" than any man in the back-country. They recognised that, and yet he was the "Boss." He had lived like a half-caste, drifting between two races and belonging to neither. The people he had been born among cold-shouldered him because he had acquired the manners and habits of thought of men he lived and worked with; the men he had lived and worked with distrusted and disliked in him just those tag-ends of refinement, and odd graces which belonged to the crowd he had come to them from.

The station hands, his work-mates—if he had any—had had a slightly contemptuous feeling for him. They liked him—they were always saying they liked him—but it was clear they never had any great opinion of him. As a boy, when he began to work with them, to cover his shyness and nervousness, he had been silent and boorish; and he had never had the courage of his opinions—courage for anything, it was suspected. It had always been hinted that he shirked any jobs where danger was to be expected.

The stockmen told each other they would miss him, all the same. They would miss that wonderful whistling of his from the camp fires; and they were appalled at what he had done to himself. "The last man," Charley Este said, "the last man you'd ever 've thought would 've come to that!" Most of them believed they had misjudged Arthur Henty—that, after, all, he had had courage of a sort. A man must have courage to blow out his light, they said. And they were sorry. Every man in the crowd was heavy with sorrow.

Ridge people gossiped pitifully, sentimentally, to each other as they drove home. Most of the women believed in the strength and fidelity of the old love between Sophie and Arthur Henty. But straight-dealing and honest themselves, they had no conception of the tricks complex personalities play each other; they did not understand how two people who had really cared for each other could have gone so astray from the natural impulse of their lives.

They recalled the dance at Warria, and how they had teased Sophie when they thought she was going to marry Arthur Henty, and how happy and pleased she had looked about it. How different both their lives would have been if Sophie and Arthur had been true to that instinct of the mate for the mate, they reflected; and sighed at the futility of the thought. They realised in Arthur Henty's drinking and rough ways of late, all his unhappiness. They imagined that they knew why he had become the uncouth-looking man he had. They remembered him a slight, shy youth, with sun-bright, freckled eyes; then a man, lithe, graceful, and good to look at, with his face a clear, fine bronze, his hair taking a glint of copper in the sun. When he danced with them at the Ridge balls, that occasionally flashing, delightful way of his had made them realise why Sophie was in love with him. They remembered how he had looked at Sophie; how his eyes had followed her. They had heard of the Warria dance, and knew Arthur Henty had not behaved well to Sophie at it. They had been angry at the time. Then Sophie had gone away ... and a little later he had married.