The Black Opal

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

The blood was booming in his ears when he turned to the door. A sense of triumph unnerved him more than the execution of his inspiration. Charley muttered and called out in his sleep as Michael passed through the doorway.

Then the stars were over him. Michael drew a deep breath of the night air and crossed to his own hut, the package of opal under his coat. Just as he was entering he drew back, vaguely alarmed. A movement light as thistledown seemed to have caught his ear. He thought he had detected a faint shifting of the shingle nearby. He glanced about with quick apprehension, went back to Charley's hut, listened, and looked around; but Charley was still sleeping. Michael walked back to his own hut. There was no sight or sound of a living thing in the wan, misty moonlight of the dawn, except the white-tail which was still crying from a wilga near Charley's hut.

The package under his coat felt very heavy and alive when he returned to his own hut. Michael was disturbed by that faint sound he had heard, or thought he had heard. He persuaded himself he had imagined it, that in the overwrought state of his sensibilities the sound of his own breath, and his step on the stones, had surprised and alarmed him. The tin of opals burned against his body, seeming to scar the skin where it pressed. Michael sickened at the thought of how what he had done might look to anyone who had seen him. But he put the thought from him. It was absurd. He had looked; there was no one about—nothing. He was allowing his mind to play tricks with him. The success of what he had done made him seem like a thief. But he was not a thief. The stones were Rouminof's. He had taken them from Charley for him, and he would not even look at them. He would keep them for Paul.

If Charley got away without discovering the change of the packets, as he probably would, in the early morning and in his excitement to catch the coach, he would be considered the thief. Rouminof would accuse him; Charley would know his own guilt. He would not dare to confess what he had done, even when he found that his package of opal had been changed. He would not know when it had been changed. He would not know whether it had been changed, perhaps, before he took it from Rouminof.

Charley might recognise the stones in that packet he had done up, Michael realised; but he did not think so. Charley was not much of a judge of opal. Michael did not think he would remember the few scraps of sun-flash they had come on together, and Charley had never seen the mascot he had put into the packet, with a remnant of feeling for the memory of their working days together.

Michael did not light the candle when he went into his hut again. He threw himself down on the bed in his clothes; he knew that he would not sleep as he lay there. His brain burned and whirled, turning over the happenings of the night and their consequences, likely and unlikely. The package of opal lay heavy in his pocket. He took it out and dropped it into a box of books at the end of the room.

He did not like what he had done, and yet he was glad he had done it. When he could see more clearly, he was glad, too, that he had grasped this opportunity to control circumstances. A reader and dreamer all his days, he had begun to be doubtful of his own capacity for action. He could think and plan, but he doubted whether he had strength of will to carry out purposes he had dreamed a long time over. He was pleased, in an odd, fierce way, that he had been able to do what he thought should be done.

"But I don't want them.... I don't want the cursed stones," he argued with himself. "I'll give them to him—to Paul, as soon as I know what ought to be done about Sophie. She's not old enough to go yet—to know her own mind—what she wants to do. When she's older she can decide for herself. That's what her mother meant. She didn't mean for always ... only while she's a little girl. By and by, when she's a woman, Sophie can decide for herself. Now, she's got to stay here ... that's what I promised."

"And Charley," he brooded. "He deserves all that's coming to him ... but I couldn't give him away. The boys would half kill him if they got their hands on to him. When will he find out? In the train, perhaps—or not till he gets to Sydney.... He'll have my fiver, and the stones to go on with—though they won't bring much. Still, they'll do to go on with.... Paul'll be a raving lunatic when he knows ... but he can't go—he can't take Sophie away."

His brain surged over and over every phrase: his state of mind since he had seen Charley and Paul on the road together; every argument he had used with himself. He could not get away from the double sense of disquiet and satisfaction.