In ten years, Cameron's had become the biggest clearing in the hills, as
it was the oldest. Many others had been made and were scattered
throughout the lower ranges overlooking the Wirree plains, though at
great distances apart; ten, twelve and sometimes twenty miles lying
between neighbouring homesteads.
The hut that had been Donald and Mary Cameron's first home had been
broadened by the addition of several extra rooms. Floors had been put
down and a wide verandah spread out from them. Every room had a window
with four small glass panes. The window-sills, verandah posts and doors
had been painted green, and the whole of the house whitewashed. Its bark
roof had given place to a covering of plum-coloured slates; there was
even a coin or two of grey and golden lichen on them, and the autumn and
spring rains drummed merrily on the iron roof of the verandah. Creepers
climbed around the stone chimney and the verandah; clematis showered
starry white blossom over the roof and about the verandah post.
A little garden, marked-off from the long green fields of spring wheat
by a fence of sharp-toothed palings, was filled with bright
flowers--English marigolds, scarlet geraniums, pink, yellow and blue
larkspurs--and all manner of sweet-smelling herbs--sage, mint, marjoram
and lemon thyme. The narrow, beaten paths that ran from the verandah to
the gate and round the house were bordered with rosemary. And in the
summer a long line of hollyhocks, pink, white and red, and red and
white, waved, tall and straight, at one side of the house. The edge of
the forest had been distanced so far on every side of the clearing,
except one, that the trunks of the trees showed in dim outlines against
it, the misty, drifting leafage swaying over and across them. Only on
the side on which the track climbed uphill from the road, the trees
still pressed against the paddock railings. A long white gate in the
fence where the road stopped bore the name Donald Cameron had given his
place--"Ayrmuir." It was the name of the estate he had worked on in
Scotland when he was a lad. It gave him no end of satisfaction to
realise that he was the master of "Ayrmuir," and that his acres were
broader than those of the "Ayrmuir" in the old country; not only
broader, but his to do what he liked with--his property, unencumbered by
mortgage or entail.
On the cleared hillsides about the house, crops of wheat, barley and rye
had been sown. An orchard climbed the slope on the left. Behind the old
barn and the stables were a row of haystacks. The cowsheds and milking
yards were a little further away. Round the haystacks and about the barn
a score of the buff and buttermilk-coloured progeny of Mother Bunch, a
few speckled chickens, black and white pullets, and miscellaneous breeds
of red-feathered, and long-legged, yellow fowls, scratched and pecked
industriously.
Donald Cameron farmed his land in the careful fashion of the Lowland
Scots. There was perhaps here and there a crooked line in his fields and
a rick awry behind the barns. But all was neatness and order, from the
beehives which stood with their pointed straw bonnets beneath the apple
trees, to the cowsheds, where newly-cut bracken was laid down every day
or two for the cows to stand in when they were milked. There was no
filth or squelching morass in his cow-yards. The pigs wandered over the
hills rooting under the tender grass. Scarcely a straw was allowed to
stray between the back of the house and barns. In the feed-room, the
harness-room, in every shed and yard, the meticulous precision and
passion for order which characterised all that Donald Cameron did, was
maintained.
There were changes indoors as well as out. A long straight kitchen, with
a bricked floor and small window looking out on to the yard, had been
added to the original home. On the east side, two rooms had been built,
and a small limewashed shed behind the kitchen served for a dairy. In
it, on broad low shelves against the wall, the rows of milk pans, with
milk setting in them, were ranged; a small window in the back wall
framed a square of blue sky. When Mrs. Cameron was making butter, the
sound of the milk in the churn, the rumble and splash of the curded
cream, could be heard in the yard. The sweet smell of the new butter and
buttermilk hung about the kitchen door.
Ten years of indefatigable energy, of clearing land, breaking soil,
raising crops and rearing cattle, doing battle with the wilderness,
overcoming all the hardships and odds that a pioneer has to struggle
against, had left their mark on Donald Cameron. Every line in his face
was ploughed deep.
His expression, gloomy and taciturn as of old, masked an internal
concentration, the bending of all faculties to the one end that occupied
him. Always a man of few words, as the farm grew and its operations
increased, he became more and more silent, talking only when it was
necessary and seldom for the sake of companionship or mere social
intercourse. His mind was always busy with the movements of cattle,
branding, mustering, breeding, buying and selling prices, possibilities
of the market. He worked insatiably.
He was reminded of the flight of time only by the growth of his son--a
gawky, long-limbed boy.
As soon as he could walk Davey had taken his share in the work of the
homestead, rounding up cows in the early morning, feeding fowls, hunting
for eggs in the ripening crops, scaring birds from the ploughed land
when seed was in, and cutting ferns for the cowsheds and stables. His
father was little more than a dour taskmaster to the boy. Davey had no
memory of hearing him sing the gathering song of the Clan of Donald the
Black.
His mother had taught him to read and count as she sat with her spinning
wheel in the little garden in front of the house, or stitching by the
fire indoors on winter evenings. Davey had to sit near her and spell out
the words slowly from the Bible or the only other book she had, a shabby
little red history. Sometimes when he was tired of reading, or the click
and purr of her wheel set her mind wandering, she told him stories of
the country over the sea where she was born. Davey knew that the song
she sang sometimes when she was spinning was a song a fairy had taught a
Welshwoman long ago so that her spinning would go well and quickly. She
told him stories of the tylwyth teg--the little brown Welsh fairies.
There was one he was never tired of hearing.
"Tell me about the farmer's boy who married the fairy, mother," he would
say eagerly.
And she would tell him the story she had heard when she was a child.
"Once upon a time," she would say, "ever so long ago, there was a
farmer's boy who minded his father's sheep on a wild, lonely mountain
side. Not a mountain side like any we see in this country, Davey dear,
but bare and dark, with great rocks on it. And one day, when he was all
alone up there, he saw a girl looking at him from round a rock. Her hair
was so dark that it seemed part of the rock, and her face was like one
of the little flowers that grow on the mountain side. But he knew that
it was not a flower's face, because there were eyes in it, bright, dark
eyes--and a mouth on it ... a little, red mouth with tiny, white teeth
behind it. They played on the mountain together for a long time and
sometimes she helped him to drive his sheep. After a while they got so
fond of each other that the boy asked her to go home with him to his
father's house, and he told his father that he wanted to marry her.
"That night a lot of little men, riding on grey horses, came down from
the mountain on a path of moonlight and clattered into the farmyard of
the farmer of Ystrad. The smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat
... they all wore red coats, and rode grey horses. Did I say that they
all rode grey horses, Davey?"
"Yes, mother," Davey breathed.
She had this irritating little way of going back a word or two on her
story if a thread caught on her wheel.
"Well--" she began again, and, as likely as not, her mind taken up with
the tangled thread, would add: "Where was I, Davey?"
And Davey, all impatience for her to go on with the story, though he
could have almost told it himself, would say: "And the smallest and
fattest of the men, in a red coat--"
"Oh, yes!" Mary started again: "Strode into the kitchen and pinched the
farmer's ear, and said that he was Penelop's father ... the girl's name
was Penelop ... and that he would let her marry the farmer's son, and
give her a dowry of health, wealth and happiness, on condition that
nobody ever touched her with a piece of iron. If anybody put a piece of
iron on her. Penelop's father said, she would fly back to the mountain
and her own people, and never more sit by her husband's hearth and churn
or spin for him. So the farmer's boy married Penelop and very happily
they lived together. Everything on the farm prospered because of the
fairy wife, though she wore a red petticoat and was like any other woman
to look at, only more beautiful, and always busy and merry. She made
fine soup and cheese, and her spinning was always good, and everybody
was very fond of her. Then one day when her husband wanted to go to a
fair, she ran into the fields to help him to catch his pony. And while
he was throwing the bridle, the iron struck her arm--and that minute she
vanished into the air before his eyes."
She paused for Davey's exclamation of wonderment; and then continued:
"Though he wandered all over the mountain calling her, Penelop never
came back to her husband or the two little children she had left with
him. But one very cold night in the winter, he wakened out of his sleep
to hear her saying outside in the wind and rain:
"Lest my son should find it cold,
Place on him his father's coat.
Lest the fair one find it cold,
Place on her my petticoat."
Mary sang the words to a quaint little air of her own making, while
Davey listened, big-eyed and awe-stricken.
"When the children grew up they had dark hair and bright, sparkling eyes
like their mother," she would conclude, smiling at him. "And when they
had children they were like them, too, so that people who came from the
valley where the farmer's boy had married the fairy were always known by
their looks, and they were called Pellings, or the children of Penelop,
because it was said they had fairy blood in their veins."
Davey had always a thousand questions to ask. He liked to brood over the
story; but he learnt more than fairy tales from his mother's memories of
the old land. Her mind was beginning to be occupied with thoughts of his
future. She and her husband were simple folk. Cameron could barely read
and write, and what little knowledge Mary possessed she had already
passed on to Davey. She knew what Donald Cameron's ambitions were, and
after ten years of life with him had little doubt as to their
achievement. The position that it would put Davey in had begun to be a
matter of concern to her.
She was turning over in her mind her plans for his getting a good
education, as she sat spinning beside the fireplace in the kitchen one
evening, when her husband said suddenly:
"I wish to goodness you'd put that clacking thing away--have done with
it now!"
"My wheel?" she asked, mild surprise in her eyes.
"Aye," he said impatiently. He was sitting in his chair on the other
side of the hearth. "Don't you realise, woman, it's not the thing for
Mrs. Cameron of Ayrmuir to be doing. Don't you realise y're a person of
importance now. The lady of the countryside, if it comes to that, and
for you to sit there, tapping and clacking that thing, is as good as
telling everybody y' were a wench had to twist up wool for a living a
few years ago."
She stared at him. He shifted his seat uneasily.
"I've been thinking," he continued, "it's no good having made the name
and the money unless we live up to it. You must get a girl to help y'
with the work of the house, and we'll not sit in here any more in the
evening, but in the front room, and have our meals there."
"But the new carpet that's laid down ... and the new furniture, Donald,"
she exclaimed.
"They're not there to be looked at, are they?" he asked. "Last spring
sales they were calling me 'Laird of Ayrmuir.' I cleared near on a
thousand pounds.
"I'm not wanting to be flash and throw away money," he added hastily.
"But that's to show you, we can, and are going to live, something the
way they did at Ayrmuir in the old country."
She rose and lifted the spinning wheel from its place by the fire. It
was like putting an old and tried friend from her. But when she sat down
on her chair opposite Donald Cameron again there was a new steady light
in her eyes.
"You'll be a rich man indeed, Donald, if you go on as you are doing,"
she said.
"Aye." He gazed before him, smoking thoughtfully.
"And your son will be a rich man after you?"
"Aye."
"Well, you must have him properly educated for the position he is going
to have." She came steadily to her point. "All your money won't be any
use to him, it will only make him ashamed to go where the money could
take him unless he has got the education to hold his own."
Her eyes drew his from their contemplation of the fireplace and the
falling embers.
"You've the book learning, why can't you give it to him?" he said.
"I have given him as much as I can," she sighed, "but it's little
enough. I'm not such a fine scholar as you think, Donald. There are
things in those books that you brought from the Port--in the sale lot
with the arm-chair and the fire-irons--that I cannot make head nor tail
of, though the fore-bits I've read say that: 'A knowledge of the
contents is essential to a liberal education.'"
She pronounced the words slowly and carefully; Donald Cameron frowned.
He did not exactly know what she was driving at, but those words sounded
important.
"I've been thinking," Mary went on quickly, "there's a good many people
about here now, and they ought to be getting their children educated
too. There's the Morrisons, Mackays, Rosses and O'Brians. And there's a
child at the new shanty on the top of the track, Mrs. Ross was telling
me, last time she was here. Between the lot of us we ought to be able to
put up a school and get a teacher. A barn on the road would do for a
school. In other parts of the country the people are getting up schools.
The newspaper you brought from Port Southern last sales said that. Why
should not we?"
"And where will you get y'r teacher," Cameron asked grimly.
Her colour rose.
"I know what you mean," she said. "The only sort of men who could and
would think it worth while giving school to children are the convicts
and ticket-of-leave men; but there are decent men among them. They seem
to be doing very well in other places. I see that mothers are going to
the school-room and sitting there, doing their sewing, so that they can
be sure the children are learning no harm with their lessons. We could
not do that every day here, but now and then one of us mothers could go
to see that the school was going on well. Anyway, the children must be
taught and we've got to make the best bargain we can."
"I'll think of what you say," her husband replied.
"You'll be going to the Clearwater River to-morrow, and be away a day or
two, won't you?" she asked. "I might take the cart and Lass and go and
see what Mrs. Ross and Martha Morrison and Mrs. Mackay think of getting
a school."
"If people about are willing," Donald Cameron said, brooding over his
pipe, "it'd be a good thing for all of us--a school. The difficulty I
can see will be the teacher. Can we get one? There's high wages for
stockmen and drovers. But maybe there'll be just some stranded young
fool glad of the job and the chance of makin' a little money without
soiling his hands. You could pick them up by the score in Melbourne, but
here--"
He shook his head.
"You might ask a few questions in the Port when you're there, if there
is any likely young man," she said.
"Aye, I might," he replied. There was an amused gleam in his eyes as he
looked up at her. "You seem to have thought a good deal on this matter
before using y're tongue."
"Is it not a good way?" she asked, the smile in her eyes, too.
"Aye," he admitted grudgingly, "a very good way. And you do not mean the
grass to grow under y're feet, Mary?"
"No, indeed!"
She put her work-basket away, took the lighted candle from the table and
went to her room. The loose star of the candle flickered a moment in the
gloom and then was extinguished. But Donald Cameron, left alone before
the fire, realised that the subject of Davey's schooling had been
disposed of.