In the morning the tall man's eyes followed Mary as she went about the
work of her house.
As though he were dreaming, he watched her break dry branches and sticks
for the fire across her knee. Then it occurred to him to offer to break
them for her, and he fetched an armful of wood from the stack in the
yard. He gazed as if it were strange and wonderful to see a woman
washing dishes, sweeping, and cooking at her own hearth. He saw her
leg-rope and bail the cow, lead the cow and calf to the fenced paddock
on the top of the hill after the milking, and carry buckets of water
from the creek to the house, the sunlight touching her bare head and
flashing from the water in her pails.
Mary did everything in a serene, methodical way, going from one task to
another as though she were happy in each, and in no hurry to be done
with it. He heard her calling to the fowls as she threw a handful of
crumbs to them; and, seeing that he was watching, she told him, smiling
a little, that the matronly, buff hen. Mother Bunch, was a very good hen
indeed, laying every day, except Sunday, in the summer and spring time;
and that the smart, speckled-backed pullet was no good at all for
laying.
"She gives us a little brown egg now and then," Mary said, "and makes
such a fuss about it! That's why I call her Fanny. She is so like Miss
Fanny at home who could not sew at all well, but when she made a dress
that a woman could wear all the countryside knew about it. He"--she
indicated the lordly rooster--"is called the Meester--that is the Master
in English."
A smile showed in the man's sombre eyes.
Early in the morning she had given him a bowl of porridge and had eaten
some herself. A bowl containing porridge for Steve when he wakened was
set by the hearth.
The house was in order, Davey bathed, and put in his basket in the sun,
and Mary was making bread of the little flour and meal left in the bags,
when Steve awoke.
He sat up on the bed and looked uneasily about the room. He was a frail,
sickly-looking creature. The fever had left him, but there were
apprehension and desperate fear in his eyes, as with a quickened light
they rested on her.
"He's awake!" Mary called softly to the man out of doors.
He sprang across the threshold.
"It's all right, Steve," he said. "This woman's a friend."
She had stooped to the hearth and lifted the bowl of porridge.
Steve ate like a hungry dog, tearing at the bread, and thrusting large
spoonfuls of porridge into his mouth. Mary gave him a cup of hot milk.
He swallowed it at once, and coughed and swore as it scalded his throat.
"If you could see what you can do for us in the way of clothes, ma'am,"
his companion said, "we'll be moving on."
Her eyes were troubled.
"If harm came of my helping you," she began, "if--"
"Innocent blood were shed," he said.
There was bitterness in his voice.
"You're like the rest of them. Good, bad or indifferent, you herd us all
together--convicts. If you mean," his eyes sought hers, "if you mean
you're afraid that instead of helping to give a man another chance for
his life you may be helping a wolf to harry the lambs, you're making a
mistake, ma'am. I swear by all I hold sacred, you'll not repent of what
you have done for me."
Mary smiled, her tension of spirit relieved.
"I believe you," she said simply.
She took Donald's working clothes from the pegs where they hung behind
the door. They were worn, but whole. From the heavy sea-chest that stood
in the far corner of the room she took a grey flannel shirt, also one of
unbleached calico, and a pair of dingy black trousers; then she brought
a pair of broken boots and a torn felt hat from the shed where the
plough and tools were kept.
"There's only one hat, and I'll have to stitch it for you," she said,
"but he"--with a glance at Steve who had fallen asleep again on the
bed--"he won't have need of a hat for awhile with that bandage on his
head, and when the cut is healed, you had better give him this one to
wear, and you will be able to say you have lost yours."
The tall man glanced from Donald's heavy boots to Steve's bruised and
blackened feet.
"You had better put on those yourself," Mary said, following his glance,
"perhaps he could wear mine."
She sat down and took off her shoes.
While he measured her shoe against Steve's foot, she slipped her feet
into a broken pair of green-hide covers clamped with nails that Donald
had made.
"They will be right for him," he said. "I'll waken him now and we'll get
on our way."
She took the bread that had been browning on the hearth stones and put
it on the table. The hut was filled with the warm, sweet smell of the
newly-baked loaves.
"You can change in here while I put Davey to sleep outside," she said.
"And there's a pail of water and soap there by the doorway; it will do
you no harm to dowse with it."
The tall man laughed. It was a boyish burst, that laugh of his. The
piece of advice, womanly in its essence, and delivered with an air of
maternal solicitude, touched a forgotten well-spring of merriment.
Mary lifted Davey into her arms, and sang to him softly as she walked up
and down in the sunshine.
A long, straggling figure came to her a few moments later, clad in
Donald's clothes. She smiled to see the way they hung short of his
ankles, hitched over the long, thin legs. But the dowsing of creek water
had done more than cleanse his body; in an indefinable way it had
purified and stimulated the inner man. He had found Donald's shears,
too, and had clipped the shaggy growth about his chin to a modest beard,
and shorn his head of some of its shock of hair.
"You have the air of a daffy young Englishman just arrived in the
Colonies to make your fortune," she said.
"Ma'am, isn't that what I am?"
There was a blithe recklessness in his voice. He swept her the bow that
was considered gallant in the old country.
Steve appeared in the doorway.
"Are you going now?" she asked.
He nodded.
"But I must give you some bread and milk to take with you," she said.
"It will be a long time before you strike Middleton's. It was there I
was thinking you might make for at first. It's across the ranges to the
east. If you follow the track across the clearing, you will find a stock
route. You've only to keep along that and it will bring you to the
station. It's four or five days' journey from here, I think, and maybe
there'll be a job with cattle there. Drovers are being wanted
everywhere--they were when we came up from the Port nearly a year ago."
"Yes," he said, "we heard in the Island that every man in the country's
wanting to be gold-hunting, and that the cattle-owners can't get beasts
to the market. They're running off wild, where the stockmen have left
them. We want any job that'll bring food and money to begin with, and
they say men with cattle are not making too particular inquiries as to
whose doing their drovin' so long as it's done."
She put Davey in his basket, and went back to the hut. When she
reappeared, it was with some bread and a bottle of milk wrapped in a
piece of bagging.
"You'll have no trouble about water, because there are creeks all
through the hills," she said, as she put the bundle into his hand.
Steve had gone off without speaking to her. He was slouching towards the
trees.
The tall man took the food from her. Their eyes met.
"Have I ever seen you before? I seem to know you," she asked, distress
on her face.
"Pray God not, ma'am," he said.
"What is your name?"
"You'd better not know."
For a moment, in a storm of gratitude and emotion, his mind trembled on
the verge of self-revelation. His face worked uncertainly.
"I cannot say what I want to," he said at last, as if restraint denied
him almost any expression at all. "This is a debt, ma'am. If ever, in
any way, I can repay, I will. But there's no way of letting you know
what you have done for me."
For a moment his eyes held hers. Then he turned away, and she watched
him stride across the clearing and disappear among the trees.