"There's bad news from Cameron's, Deirdre."
Steve came in from the road.
A bullock wagon had just passed from the Wirree. Deirdre had seen it
halt up. She had seen the bullocks standing with dumb, dull patience
under the yoke, swinging their tails to keep the flies off. Some of them
had gone down on their knees by the roadside, while the teamster had a
drink and yarned with Steve. Then she had heard the cracking of the
teamster's whip, his oaths and calls to the beasts, and the creaking of
the heavy, blue-washed cart as it went on again.
"What is it?" she asked breathlessly, thinking of Davey.
"Old Cameron," Steve said. "Johnny Watson says he was found dead on the
road by Long Gully--a tree fallen on him--this morning."
"Steve!"
There was horror, and yet a vague relief, in her exclamation.
"Johnny says, Cameron went down to the Black Bull yesterday evening, and
there was trouble between him and McNab--McNab having let him in for
this cattle stealin' case, knowing Davey was in it," Steve went on. "But
Thad got round him somehow, telling him that he didn't know Davey was in
it, and he'd get off, anyhow, bein' Cameron's son. Buttered the old man
up that way. Conal and the Schoolmaster'd be nabbed for sure, he made
out. They were good enough friends when they parted only he'd had more'n
a jugful, and a couple of the boys had to give him a leg-up to his
horse. The brute must've shied at the dead tree near the gully, the
ground was cut up round it. It fell on them both. Mrs. Cameron found 'm
this morning."
"I'll go and see if there's anything I can do for her."
Deirdre took her hat down from behind the door.
Steve went on talking of Donald Cameron, muttering in his vague,
childish fashion.
"However he came to get in with McNab I can't make out," he said. "There
weren't no two greater enemies a while back. Oh, he was as mean as you
make them, D.C., but he made his mark in the country."
Deirdre had on her hat.
"I'm going, Steve," she said. "I won't stay unless Mrs. Cameron's got no
one with her; but the Rosses and Mrs. Morrison are sure to be there."
"Right, Deirdre!" he replied.
She took her bridle from its nail by the door, and went into the paddock
beyond the stable, calling the chestnut. He heard her cry: "Coup lad!
coup laddie!" and saw the white-stocking, at her call, come galloping
across the newly-green grass, gilded with sunshine. She slipped the
bridle over his head, brought him into the yard, saddled him and turned
out to the road.
With thoughts of the tragedy that had befallen Mrs. Cameron, as she went
along the winding track under the trees, were woven wonderings as to how
Donald Cameron's sudden death would affect Davey and the Schoolmaster.
It was on the roadside by the Long Gully that Mr. Cameron had died. The
old tree by the gully had fallen at last, and on Donald Cameron. At
Rane, while Dan and she were living there, a man had been killed by a
falling tree, but it was strange that Davey's father should have died in
this way, she thought, he who had been the first settler in the hills.
She wondered if he had ring-barked the tree--score its living green
wood--if he had killed it, and in turn it had killed him, pinning him to
the earth with its great bulk of dead and rotting timber. She could see
Davey's father, heavy, squarely-built, in shabby, dark clothes, lying
beneath it, his grey hair blood-dabbled, his face bruised and blackened.
The man who had conquered the wilderness had lain there, on the very
road he had made, broken, cast aside--a thing that life had done with.
It was as if the wilderness had taken its revenge.
She slipped from the chestnut's back in a sunny clearing and gathered a
handful of freckled and golden-eyed, white honey-flowers, twisted some
tendrils of creepers and blades of ferns among them, and tied them
together with a long piece of grass.
When she came in sight of the weatherboard house crouching against the
purple wall of the hills, Deirdre realised again what Donald Cameron had
done. The cleared paddocks spread round it on every side. An orchard
climbing the slope to the left showed in dark leafage against the grey
and green of the forest. Cattle dappled the furthest hillside. The barns
and sheds and stables behind the house formed a small village. He had
made it, cleared the forest for it. He had done all this, she realised,
and so much besides, and now he was dead, the man of iron will and
indefatigable energy.
There were two or three of the neighbours' carts in Cameron's yard.
Deirdre opened the gate and shut it when she and White Socks had passed
through. She hung the chestnut's bridle over a post by the barn, and
lifted his saddle.
Speckled fowls and handsome buff and yellow pullets stalked about the
yard, pecking industriously even under the legs of the Ross's and
Morrison's horses, which, with harness looped back on them, their noses
deep in fodder bags, stood beside the carts. In the brilliant sunshine,
on a wood-stack, struck against the clear blue sky, a black rooster
crowed at intervals.
Mrs. Cameron's sitting-room was in semi-darkness. Deirdre heard the
hushed talking, exclamations and sound of weeping as she went into it.
"It's you, Deirdre!" Mrs. Cameron said when she saw the girl. Her voice
was flat and tired; she seemed to have scarcely strength enough to
speak.
Deirdre kissed her with quivering lips, and eyes welling.
The room was full of people. She did not see who they were at first in
the half dark.
"If only Davey were here!" Mrs. Cameron cried.
Deirdre knelt beside her.
"Perhaps he'll come," she whispered.
"Did you gather the flowers for his father?"
Mrs. Cameron's eyes had fallen on the little bouquet in Deirdre's hands.
"I brought them for Davey," Deirdre said.
Mrs. Cameron's hands quivered in hers.
"We must keep her cheerful, not let her spirits get down," one of the
visitors said in Deirdre's ear.
Jessie Ross brought in tea, and some newly-made scones.
"You must eat this now, dear, to keep up your strength," Mrs. Ross said
to Mrs. Cameron, taking a chair beside her.
Mrs. Ross talked of her milking, and the calves she had poddied during
the wet weather; and the other women, gathering round, talked in serious
and melancholy fashion of their milking and the calves they had had
trouble with during the winter. They gave each other recipes for cream
cheese, and jam, and cakes to be made without eggs.
"And I've discovered a sure way of making hens lay in the winter," said
Mrs. Ross.
"Have you?" replied Mrs. Cameron, listlessly.
"Yes, indeed, and I'll tell you just what it is, Mary!"
"Oh, it's of no interest to me now, with Davey away and his father
gone," Mrs. Cameron cried.
She kept her hold of Deirdre's hand.
"To think of him--Davey's father--in there, Deirdre --lying so still and
cold, he that was so strong and nobody could break, or turn," she said.
"You haven't seen him yet. You must come with me."
"Presently, dearie, but you must drink your tea and eat this little bit
of scone first," Mrs. Ross said.
The neighbours talked again nervously, cheerfully, in subdued tones, of
the weather, the sales, and what the men of their households were saying
about things in general.
"We mustn't let her brood," they said anxiously to each other.
Mrs. Cameron did not seem to hear or notice them. When she stood in the
silent room with Deirdre looking down on the white-sheeted figure of
Davey's father, she turned to the girl with a sharp cry.
"It's a sad, sad thing to be parting from your life's mate, Deirdre,"
she said. "To think that he should have died like that ... after all
that he's done--he that made this hill country. To have gone without a
word from anyone, or a clearing-up of the misunderstandings between us.
And Davey not to see him again!"
She broke down and sobbed utterly.
Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Morrison took her, each by an arm, and led her back
to the sitting-room. The hum of strained, subdued and cheerful
conversation began again.
Mrs. Cameron went to the door with Deirdre.
"If only they'd let me be, child!" she cried, kissing her. "If only
they'd let me be. It's very good of them all to bother, but if only
they'd let me be!"
As the chestnut padded softly along the track home to Steve's, Deirdre
wondered again what effect Donald Cameron's death would have on Davey
and Dan. It would make Davey a rich man, she knew. Donald Cameron had
been reputed wealthy when she and the Schoolmaster first came to the
hills, and he had not been drinking long enough to have squandered much
money. "It would take more than a gallon of rum to make old Cameron
loosen his purse strings," she remembered having heard Conal say.
To Dan and to her it would make very little difference in the end. There
would still be McNab. The train of her thought snapped. For a moment,
with all her passionate youth, she envied Donald Cameron his stillness.
A night and a day remained before she would have to tell McNab that she
had made her choice. Every beat of the chestnut's hoofs on the soft
roadside drove what he had said into her brain. She knew no more now
than she did a week ago what was going to happen to Davey and the
Schoolmaster, or how the case was going. Perhaps less, since Donald
Cameron's death. But her mind was made up as to what McNab's answer
would be. She had never really had any doubt as to what it must be, and
had asked for time as one asks to have the window open before settling
down to passing the day in a dark and airless room.
Deep in her mind there was still, however, a vagrant hope, a fairy,
child-like thing, a phantom assurance of the impossibility of what was
demanded of her, a belief, like thistle-down, as faint and fragile, that
something unheard of, miraculous, would happen to help her, and at the
same time save Dan and Steve and Davey.