For months Davey and Deirdre went together along the winding tracks,
from the school to Cameron's and from Cameron's to school, sometimes in
the spring-cart, but more often on Lass's broad back.
Deirdre had to hang on to Davey when the old horse took it into her head
to step out jauntily, but for the most part they rode her lightly
enough, Davey with one hand on her mane and Deirdre swinging behind him.
Sometimes Davey dug his heels into her fat sides and put her at a trot
that set them bumping up and down like peas in a box, and laughing till
the hills echoed. And sometimes in the middle of the fun they found
themselves shot on the roadside, as Lass shied and propped, pretending
to be startled by a wallaby or a dead tree. These comfortable,
middle-aged shies and proppings were regarded as her little joke, her
way of indicating that she did not like being dug in the sides. They
shrieked with laughter as she stood blinking at them, her white-lashed
eyes, on which a chalky whiteness was growing, bland and innocent.
"As if she were so surprised--and hadn't done it all of a purpose," they
explained to each other.
Deirdre quickly outgrew the dresses that Mrs. Cameron had first made for
her. The Schoolmaster thought that Davey was growing too. Although Lass
was up to the weight of the two, and they ran beside her up the
hillsides as often as not, and rode her only one at a time as they grew
older, with keen eyes for a fair thing where a horse was concerned, the
Schoolmaster bought a little wilding of a white-stockinged chestnut for
Deirdre to ride. A stockman had traded the colt for a bottle of rum when
his mare foaled at Steve's. She was a fine animal with a strain of Arab
in her, and when the Schoolmaster had mouthed and gentled White Socks,
as Deirdre christened the colt, she straddled him bareback and Davey had
his old Lass to himself.
There was nothing for him to do but watch Deirdre as she went off down
the track clinging lightly to the little horse whose legs spread out
like the wings of a bird. Davey's heart sickened with envy every time
Deirdre dashed past him. He urged Lass to the limit of her heavy,
clompering gait; but even then she did not keep the chestnut in sight,
and all but broke a blood vessel in the attempt. When Davey came up to
her, Deirdre was invariably twisted round, waiting for him,
brilliant-eyed, a wind-whipped colour in her cheeks, and her hair flying
about her.
"You'll break your neck some day, riding like that," he told her,
sombrely.
But he was eating his heart out at not having a horse to put against
hers, at not being able to send flying the pebbles on the hill tracks as
she did. He had asked his father over and over again for a horse of his
own, but Donald Cameron would not give him one.
"No, my lad," he said shrewdly. "I'm not going to have you racing horses
of mine on these roads with the Schoolmaster's girl--breaking their
knees and windin' them. I haven't money to throw away, if the
Schoolmaster has. By and by, when you're working with me, you'll have a
good steady-going stock horse of y're own--maybe."
Davey's school days were numbered, Mrs. Cameron knew. He was shooting up
into a long, straggling youth. His father was talking of breaking him
into the work of the place, and Davey was beginning to be restive at
school, wanting to do man's work and get a horse of his own.
Deirdre learnt womanly ways about a house quickly enough when she had
made up her mind to. Although since the new order of things at Ayrmuir,
Mrs. Cameron had Jenny, a big, raw-boned, brown-eyed girl from the
Wirree, to help her, and the family had meals in the parlour, and sat on
the best shiny, black horse-hair furniture every day, Deirdre made beds,
dusted and swept with Mrs. Cameron. She fed the fowls and learnt to cook
and sew. Davey had seen her churning, sleeves rolled up from her long,
thin arms; he had watched her and his mother working-up shapeless masses
of butter in the cool dark of the dairy. When they washed clothes in
tubs on the hillside, he carried buckets of water for them and had
helped to hang the clean, heavy, wet things on lines between the trees;
or to spread them on the grass to sun-bleach. Mrs. Cameron had taught
Deirdre to knit, and when her husband was not at home had even taken her
spinning wheel from under its covers, set it up in the garden and showed
her how to use it. She had sat quite a long time at it, spinning, and
delighting in its old friendly purr and clatter.
At such times she would sing softly to herself, Davey and Deirdre
crouched on the grass beside her, and, when they begged for them, she
would tell some of the fairy tales they loved to hear.
Mrs. Cameron scarcely ever saw the Schoolmaster, and it was rarely then
that she spoke to him. Sometimes she discovered him in the background of
a gathering of hill folk who met in the school-room on Sundays for
hymns, prayers and a reading of the Scriptures, and sometimes she heard
him singing in the distance as he rode along the hill roads. Deirdre had
sensed a reserve in Mrs. Cameron's manner and attitude towards her
father, and could not forgive her for it, though she had a shy,
half-grateful affection for her.
Davey was not sure that he liked the Deirdre who had learnt to brush her
hair and wear woman's clothes as well as the old Deirdre. There was
something more subdued about her; her laughter was rarer, though it had
still the catch and ripple of a wild bird's song. She was not quite
tamed, however, for all that she did, deftly and quickly though it was
done, had a certain wild grace.
It was one evening when she was knitting--making a pair of socks for the
Schoolmaster--and muttering to herself; "Knit one, slip one, knit one,
two together, slip one," that he realised Deirdre was going a woman's
way and that he had to go a man's.
"It'll be moonlight early to-night, and there'll be dozens of 'possums
in the white gums near the creek, Deirdre," he said, coming to her
eagerly.
The proposition of a 'possum hunt had always been irresistible. Deirdre
had loved to crouch in the bushes with him on moonlight nights and watch
the little creatures at play on the high branches of trees near the edge
of the clearing. They had flung knobby pieces of wood at them, or
catapulted them, and were rejoiced beyond measure when a shot told,
there was a startled scream among the 'possums and a little grey body
tumbled from a bough in the moonlight to the dark earth.
But this night Deirdre shook her head, and went on with her murmuring
of: "Knit one, slip one, knit one, two together, slip one."
"No, I can't go 'possuming to-night, Davey," she said. "I want to finish
turning this heel."