Davey was on his way to Steve's when he saw that the wooden church with
a zinc roof, which had just been built in Wirreeford, was lighted, and
that people were going into it.
It was early evening, the sky clear above the sharp outlines of the
building, a few stars quivering in the limpid twilight.
Davey pulled up his horse to stare at the church. The place had been
building a long while. This was the first time he had seen it up and
finished.
In the paddock beside it was his father's carry-all, and the grey horse
beside it was Bessie, old Lass's daughter. A vague heart pain caught his
breath. The wind brought the strain of a plaintive hymn. They must be
inside, his mother and father, he told himself. He got off his horse and
led her into the deep shadow the paling fence threw. A longing to see
them seized him. He stood there trying to hear their voices.
After a moment he thought he could hear his mother's voice, frail and
sweet, in the singing. He remembered how she had sung to him once, how
she had sung over her spinning wheel and the quaint little song it was.
The tune of it went flying through his brain with the tap-tap of the
spinning wheel. How gay and dear her voice had been. He remembered how
he used to love as a child to sit clutching at her dress when she sang
like that. And the old man! In that moment of loneliness he forgot the
hard speaking and bitterness there had been between him and his father.
A wave of tenderness overwhelmed him. Pride and a longing for their love
struggled in him with a physical hurt beyond endurance.
He determined to stand there and wait to see them come out of church.
Friday night services after the cattle sales were an institution as new
as the church. They had been organised so that christenings, marriages,
and some soul-saving into the bargain, might be done while the hill folk
were down for the sales. McNab had done his best to move the parson who
had accepted the Wirree as his cure of souls, but the young man stuck
like a limpet, and there was no telling, the gossips said, how moral and
church-going he might not make Wirreeford before he was done with it.
Davey waited and watched.
When the people came filing out of the doorway, he edged along the fence
so that he could see their faces as they passed under the flare of an
oil-can over the door.
There were not many of them, two or three women and children, and an old
man or two. They gathered and were talking about the gateway when Mary
Cameron came out.
Davey saw her face under the light for a moment. There was a shine of
tears on her cheeks. Her figure, in the grey dress he knew so well,
seemed thinner than it used to be. Her little straw bonnet was pressed
down close on her head, her shawl drawn over her shoulders. She hurried
from the church door without speaking to anyone. He saw her hand flutter
out to the post by the door as she felt for the step.
"She's been crying and saying her prayers for me," he told himself with
pain and self-reproach.
He waited to see Donald Cameron come from the church and join her.
A girl--a fair-haired girl--detached herself from the little gathering
about the gate and went towards her.
"Oh, there you are, Mrs. Cameron, dear," she said. "I was waiting to
help you put Bess in!"
Davey knew her voice. It was Jessie Ross. His heart gave a throb of
gratitude.
The young parson came out and slammed the church door behind him.
Davey's glance flew to the paddock. He could see his mother's grey-clad
figure moving about among the vehicles and the horses.
"The old man's not with her. She's harnessing up herself," he thought.
"Where is he, I wonder? She wouldn't have come down alone."
He saw the heavy buggy, his mother sitting erect in it, go out along the
road. He followed at a little distance.
The buggy halted before the Black Bull.
A dozen horses, dogs lying limp and silent at their heels, were tethered
to the posts before it. The bar was open and noisy with men drinking.
They were gathered about its narrow benches like flies. From the gaping
doors a garish light fell. But it was out of range of the light that
Mary Cameron had drawn up her horse. She sat very still. The outlines of
the vehicle were ruled black against the starlight which rested wanly on
her figure and on the sturdy, grey horse.
"What on earth is she waiting for?" Davey asked himself.
He was going to her when the side-door of the Black Bull--the door of
McNab's parlour, as he knew--opened. Donald Cameron stood in it for a
moment. Davey saw McNab behind him, his crooked figure and twisted face
with the withered fringe of hair about it.
Cameron staggered across the stretch of gravel to the buggy in which his
wife sat waiting. He climbed into it.
"Will you not let me drive, Donald?"
The clear sweetness of his mother's voice came to the boy's ears.
"No," Donald Cameron said unsteadily. "There's no woman living will
drive me while I can lay hands on the reins."
The four-wheeler moved away over the long winding road to the hills.
Davey was stupefied.
"So McNab's got him," he muttered, glancing at the ramshackle shanty.
The sign-board of the Black Bull, with red eyes on its dingy white
ground, was just visible. The glare from the bar lighted it.
"That's why she goes to church alone. The old man's drinking," he
thought.
He turned to look after the buggy. It was bumping and jolting over the
ruts and barking the roadside. Davey held his breath; he saw the mare
buck and then take the log culvert over the creek two or three hundred
yards from McNab's.
"He's not fit to drive," he told himself, and swinging into his saddle,
set off down the road. "He'll turn the wheel on a log, or drive off the
road. She knows. That's why she wanted to drive."
He followed at a little distance all the way through the hills.
Sometimes he heard his mother's voice, patient and yet edged with a
weariness and despair, exclaiming: "Mind there's a bad rut to the left!"
or "You're driving too near the edge of the road, Donald!"
But steadily, without reference to either of them, the little horse kept
to the track. Davey followed them all the way home, to the very gates of
the house in which he was born. Then he turned back into the shade of
the trees again. Once his mother had looked round and seen the watchful
horseman. She had not been near enough to see his face. He rode in the
shadows. But he had seen her face and it was a revelation to him.
A woman must have a good deal of courage to drive beside a drunken man
in the hills at night, he knew. The look on her face hurt him. There
were death gaps at a dozen places on the road; and Donald Cameron was as
stubborn as a mule. Neither the mare, nor his wife, could have saved him
if he had taken it into his head to drive in any given direction. Davey
wondered how often his mother had driven like this before. He vowed that
she would never do it again--if he could help it.