Fifteen Years After
A boy pushed the bracken and ferny grey and green wattle sprays from
before a lichen-grown wooden cross. He was a sturdy youngster, with an
eager, sensitive face, and dropped on one knee beside the mound the
parted ferns and branches revealed, to read the inscription on the
cross.
The path that wound uphill through the trees behind him was an old one,
overgrown with mosses. Scraps of bark and sear leaves were matted across
it. The weathered, rambling homestead of Ayrmuir was just visible
through the trees, and a cornfield waving down the slope of the hill
showed golden through a gap in the waving leafage. Donald Cameron had
marked the place long before, and said that there, where the wagon had
come to a standstill, he must be laid to rest. And it was within memory
of the boy that his grandmother, Mary Cameron, had been laid beside him.
A voice floating down the hillside from the house called:
"Dan! Dan!"
Deirdre came down the path towards him, an older, graver Deirdre, with
peace in her deep-welled eyes, though an undefinable shadow rested on
her face.
"Here you are, dear!" she said. "It'll be time to be getting ready soon.
Mick has the horses in--and your father won't like to be kept waiting.
There was so much I wanted to say to you, too, before you go up to this
big school. It won't be a bit like going to the school down here or
doing Latin with me--going to the Grammar School, Dan."
"No, of course, mother."
"I wonder sometimes if I've been wrong to keep you so much with me," she
said wistfully. "You had to be told all the terrible old story. I told
you myself, because I wanted you to understand."
"Mother!" There were reverence and adoration in his eyes as they rested
on her.
"You're sure--sure, you don't feel strange about your mother, Dan?" she
asked. "A jury acquitted me, but I know I was right myself. There was
nothing else to do."
She was quivering to the shock of startled memories.
"I can't feel that I could have done anything else than I did," she
cried passionately, "but I can't forget, Dan. The horror of it all
shadows me still--it always will."
The boy slipped his arms through hers and pressed against her.
"Whenever I read in history or a story of people who had to do terrible
things for those they loved, I think: 'Like my mother!' But no one I've
ever read, or heard of, was like you," he said shyly.
"Dan!"
A smile of melting, eager tenderness suffused her eyes.
As they turned away he looked back at the grave under the trees.
"I thought I'd like to say good-bye to them," he said. "They were
pioneers, weren't they, grandfather and grandmother? Makes me feel like
being a bit of history myself, to think that my grandfather and
grandmother were pioneers. I was saying to myself just now: 'They did so
much against such big odds, what a lot I ought to be able to do with
everything made easy for me."
"I wish your father and mother were down here, too," he added.
"I never knew my mother, Dan," Deirdre said dreamily. "You know, I've
told you all about that. She died when I was born--and it was because I
was such a wailing baby, that my father called me Deirdre--Deirdre of
the griefs. And he--lies over there in the Island."
"I remember him," the boy said eagerly, his voice hushed. "When I was a
little kid, we went, you, and I, and father, to see him, didn't we? And
I sort of remember a tall, thin man who had white hair--quite white
hair, and was blind; he was always singing, so as you could scarcely
hear him, and once he said suddenly when I was on his knee, don't you
remember: 'He's got her eyes, Deirdre?'"
"Yes." Deirdre murmured, the pain in her eyes deepening.
"I've wondered ... I've often wondered what he meant, mother. How could
he know what my eyes were like. He was blind."
"He meant your grandmother--Mary Cameron, Dan. He used to say she had
twilight eyes; and that the light of them pierced his darkness," Deirdre
said.
The boy puzzled over that.
"I remember, she said to me once," he said, thoughtfully. "'You ought to
be a great man, Dan, because four great nations have gone to the making
of you.' I didn't know what she meant at first. Then she told me that my
four grandparents were English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. 'They have
quarrelled and fought among themselves, but you are a gathering of them
in a new country, Dan,' she said. 'There will be a great future for the
nation that comes of you and the boys and girls like you. It will be a
nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men
and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness. You belong
to the hunted too, and suffering has taught you.'
"Then she told me about prisons here in the early days, mother, and
terrible stories of how people lived in the old country. 'They may talk
about your birthstain by and by, Dan,' she said, 'but that will not
trouble you, because it was not this country made the stain. This
country has been the redeemer and blotted out all those old stains.'"
Deirdre gazing into the eager, wistful face of her son realised that he
was unfolding a dream to her. She smiled into his eyes and he back to
her with a consciousness of the serene understanding and sympathy
between them.
"'You will be a pioneer too, Dan,' grandmother said," the boy continued
with a shy reverence, "'a pioneer of paths that will make the world a
better, happier place for everybody to live in. You will, because you
won't be able to help it. There's the blood of pioneers in you.'"