A few months later Mary Cameron's voice, as she sang lullabies to her
baby, mingled with the forest murmur and the sounds that came from the
clearing--the lowing of the cow, the clucking and cackle of fowls, the
clang of Donald's axe as he ring-barked trees near the house.
A one-roomed hut, built of long, rough-barked saplings, ranged one above
the other, and thatched with coarse reddish-brown bark, laid on in
slabs, it stood on the brow of the hill not far from the wagon's first
resting place. Its two doors, set opposite each other, opened, one
towards the back hills and the other towards the creek and the cleared
land on which a stubble of stumps still stood. The walls of the hut,
inside, were plastered with the clayey hill soil which Mary had rammed
into crevices between the saplings when daylight had at first showed in
thin shining streaks, and the mountain breezes had crept chilly through
them in the early mornings. She had made the floor of beaten clay too,
and had gathered from the creek bed the grey and brown stones which
Donald had built into the hearth and chimney with seams of lime and fine
white sand that he had brought from the Port.
A window space had been left in the wall fronting the clearing; but
there was no glass in it. At night, or when it rained, Mary hung a piece
of hessian over the window. Two chairs were the only ready-made
furniture of the room. The boxes and bales brought in the wagon were
piled in a corner. A table, made of box-covers with sapling legs driven
into the floor, was under the window, and a bed, on a wooden foundation
strapped with green-hide, stood against the back wall. A few pieces of
delft and white crockery glimmered on a shelf near the open fireplace,
and below them, on another shelf, were stone jars and two or three pots
and pans.
Donald's harness, saddle, stirrup-leathers and stock-whip hung on pegs
near the back door. Among the bales and boxes, under a dingy muffling
cloth, stood a spinning wheel, and, tied together with lengths of dusty
yarn, the parts of a weaver's hand loom which Mary had brought from the
old country. On Sundays, when a bright fire sparkled on the hearth, the
mats of frayed hessian were spread on the floor, and she had put a jar
filled with wild flowers on the table, her eyes brimmed with joy and
tenderness as she gazed about her.
She had toiled all the summer out of doors with her husband to make
their home, timber-cutting with him, grubbing stumps from the land,
laying twigs and leaves in the stumps and lighting them so that the slow
fires eating the wood left only charred shells to clear away. She had
driven Lassie, the grey, backwards and forwards, drawing logs and tree
trunks from the slope to the stack behind the house, and when the frames
of the wagon shed, cow sheds and stable were up, had laced the brushwood
to them. The weedy, brown nag that was Lassie's trace mate, during those
first weeks in the hills had come down and got himself rather badly
staked, and Donald had had to shoot him. It cost him a good deal to fire
that shot, but he had worked the harder for it.
Mary watched the cow while she browsed on the edge of the forest before
a paddock on the top of the hill was fenced. She milked, fed the calf
and the fowls, and carried water from the creek to the house. When she
was not doing any of these things, or baking, brushing or furbishing
indoors, during those first few months, her fingers were busy with
little garments--shirts and gowns and overalls--cut from her own clothes
of homespun tweed and unbleached calico.
It was at the end of a long golden day that a cry from her brought
Donald from the far edge of the clearing. He was turning the land for
his first crop, and when he heard that cry, left the mare in her tracks,
the rope lines trailing beside her.
Later, his hands trembling, he took Lassie from the plough, and led her
to the creek for water. Then, although the sun had not set, he hobbled
her for the night, went into the house and shut the door.
Usually, all was silent within its walls when the darkness fell; but
this night a garish light flickered under the door. There were sounds of
hushed movement, faint moaning, the crackling of fire on the hearth, all
night. The dog lying on the mat by the door did not know what to make of
it. He growled, low and warningly now and then. Towards morning while
stars still sparkled over the dark wave of the forest, a faintly wailing
cry came from the hut. The dog's ears twitched; his yelping had an eerie
note.
Sunlight was flooding the hills, illumining the forest greenery, making
crimson and gold of the shoots on the saplings, banishing the mists
among the trees, splashing in long shafts on the sward, wet with dew,
when Donald Cameron opened the door. His arms were folded round a
shawled bundle. He stood for a moment in the doorway, the sunlight
beating past him into the hut.
Then he lifted the small body in his arms, kissed it, and held it out to
the dawn, his face wrung with emotion.
"All this, yours--your world, my son!" he said.
They were quiet days that followed, days spun off in lengths of sunshine
from the looms of Time, with the sleepy warmth of the end of the summer
and the musky odours of the forest in them. Mary worked less out of
doors when she was about again; her hands were full, cooking, washing
and sewing, and looking after the animals and the baby. She sang to him
as she worked. All her joy and tenderness were centred in him now.
Donald did not understand the love songs she sang to little Davey. They
were always in her own Welsh tongue.
"It's queer talk to make to a bairn," he said one day, smiling grimly,
as he listened to her.
"He understands it, I'm sure," she said, smiling too.
Cameron sang himself sometimes when he was at the far end of the
clearing. It was always the same thing--the gathering song of the Clan
of Donald the Black. While he was ploughing one morning, Mary first
heard him singing:
Pibroch o' Donuil Dhu,
Pibroch o' Donuil,
Wake thy wild voice anew,
Summon Clan Conuil.
The words of the grand old slogan echoed among the hills.
When next she heard it, Mary lifted Davey out of his cradle and ran to
the door with him, crying happily:
"Listen, now, Davey dear, to thy father singing!"
Cameron had interrupted himself to call to the mare as she turned a
furrow: "Whoa, Lass! Whoa now!"
He had gone on with his song as he bent the share to the slope of the
hill again.
A hidden root checked his progress; but when he had got it out of the
way, and the plough settled again, he swung down hill, giving his voice
to the wind heartily:
Leave untended the herd,
The flock without shelter;
Leave the corpse uninterred,
The bride at the altar.
Leave the deer, leave the steer,
Leave nets and barges;
Come in your fighting gear,
Broad swords and t--a--r--ges.
His voice had not much music, but Mary loved the way he sang, with the
fierceness and burr, the rumble on the last word, of a chieftain calling
his men to battle. It was almost as if he were calling his tribesmen to
help him in the battle he had on hand. But he was as shamefaced as a
schoolboy about his singing, and it was only when he was some distance
from the house, and had forgotten himself in his work, that he gave
expression to the deep-seated joy and satisfaction with life that were
in him.
Davey was four months old, and the paddock his father had been ploughing
the day he was born was green with the blades of its first crop, when
Mary asked:
"When will you be going back to the Port, Donald?"
She had taken Cameron's tea to him where he was working among the trees
a little way from the clearing. He was resting for a few minutes,
sitting on a log with his axe beside him.
She spoke quietly as if it were an ordinary enough question she had
asked. Her eyes sought his.
"There's very little flour left, and only a small piece of corned meat."
"I'd made up my mind to go, day after to-morrow," he said.