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.
After the sales on the following Friday, when the dust of the yards was heavy in the air, and the stock horses stood in irregular, drooping lines outside the Black Bull and Mrs. Mary Ann Hegarty's, Davey made his way to where on an open space of land the church had been built. Wirreeford had out its lights—garish oil flares and rush candles—and the little fires lighted before the doors of the houses to keep off sand flies and mosquitoes, smouldered in the dusk, sending up wreaths of blue smoke.
He had made up his mind as to what he was going to do. During the week Conal had been mustering and branding the cows and calves drafted from the scrub mob. Davey had worked with him, and many of the calves he had scarred with Maitland's double M. were the progeny of his father's cattle. Half a dozen cows bore the D.C. brand under their thick hair. Conal had wanted to pay him off. He had told Davey that there was no need for him to burn his fingers with this business, and that he could run the mob to the border, or to Melbourne, across the swamp, if the south-eastern rivers were down; but he was short-handed, Davey knew; a sense of obligation urged him to stick to Conal until the whole of the mob they had moonlighted together was disposed of.
Conal had insisted on getting the cows and calves into a half-timbered paddock below Steve's, the day before, and had run a hundred of Maitland's fattened beasts with them. He meant to make a start and have the mob on the roads early next morning.
There was a race-meeting in the long paddock behind McNab's that Friday.
Conal and he had come into the Wirree to show themselves before starting off on their overland journey. Almost every man in the countryside was there.
Davey wondered why the Schoolmaster had not come down to the township with Conal and himself. He had been a different man since their return, very silent, scarcely stirring from his chair in the back room, while Deirdre hovered, never very far from him, anxious and protective as a mother-bird.
She had not told him what had happened while Conal and he were away—how the Schoolmaster had said to her one day, suddenly:
"It's very dark, Deirdre. Is there going to be a storm?"
The sunshine was blank and golden out of doors.
"No," she had said, laughing. "There's not a sign of one."
"Where are you?" he asked, his voice strange and strained.
"Why, I'm here just beside you," she replied.
He put out his hands.
"I can't see you," he said. "It's the dark, Deirdre! My God ... it's the dark."
For a long time he had sat staring while she knelt beside him, crying, murmuring eagerly and tenderly, trying to soothe and to comfort him. But from that time the dimming and obliterating of the whole world had begun for him.
The heavy darkness had passed. It was not all night yet, but a misty twilight. He had forbidden her to speak of it, so that Davey did not know. Conal and Steve had guessed, but Davey's mind, busy with its own problems, was slower to realise what was going on about him. It had roused every loyal and fighting instinct in him to see his mother with that look of suffering on her face; his father in the way of becoming McNab's prey—losing all that he had gained through years of toil and harsh integrity by falling into the pigs' trough McNab had set for him.
It was that stern righteousness of his, his sober, stolid virtue, which had given Cameron the place in the respect and grudging homage of the countryside that his wealth and property alone would not have won for him; they had cloaked even his meanness with a sombre dignity and brought him the half-jesting title of the Laird of Ayrmuir.
Davey led his horse into the paddock beside the church where the vehicles which had brought the hill folk to the township were standing. The horses out of the shafts, their heavy harness still on their backs, were feeding, tethered to the fence, or to the wheels of the carts and buggies.
He stood beside the high, old-fashioned buggy that had brought Mary and Donald Cameron to Wirreeford. He rubbed his hand along Bessie's long coffin-box of a nose, and told her on a drifting stream of thought that he had decided to go home, to ask his father to forgive him, and that he meant to try to get on with him again. Her attitude of attention and affection comforted him.
The people began to come from the church. They stood in groups by the doorway talking to each other. One or two men came into the paddock to harness-up for the home journey. Davey put the mare into her shafts. He was fastening the traces when Mary Cameron came round the back of the buggy. A catch of her breath told that she had seen him.
"Davey!" she cried.
He saw her face, the light of her eyes.
"Mother!" he sobbed.
His arms went round her, and his face with the rough beard—such a man's face it had become since it last brushed her's—was crushed against her cheek.
"I'm coming home," he said, his voice breaking. "Not now, not to-night, but in a little while. I'll ask the old man to forgive me and see if we can't get along better."
"Davey! Davey!" she cried softly, looking into his face, a new joy in her own. "Oh, but they are sad days, these! Have you heard what they are saying of your father? They tell me that you have been over the ranges."
"Yes," Davey said. She scarcely recognised his voice. "It's because of father—because of what they're saying—I'm coming home. I won't have them say it ... after all he's done ... do you think I'm going to let him lose it, if I can help it."
There was a passionate vibration in his voice.
"How did it happen? I saw you on Friday and followed you home."
"Oh, my boy!" Her hand trembled on his shoulders. "It was you then? What's come to your father I don't know at all. He's not the same man he used to be. It's that man at the Black Bull. He's got hold of him—I don't know how ... but he's been drinking there often now, and he never used to be a drinking man—your father. I think it was his disappointment with you at first ... I'm not blaming you, Davey. It wasn't to be expected you'd do anything but what you did. I'm not blaming you. But there were the long evenings by ourselves, after you'd gone. He sat eating his heart out about it before the fire, and I couldn't say a word. He was thinking of you all the time—but his pride wouldn't let him speak. He was seeing the ruin of his hopes for you. He meant you to be a great man in the district. Then McNab began talking to him. Your father thinks McNab's doing him a good turn in some way, but I feel it's nothing but evil will come to us from him. The sight of the man makes me shiver and I wonder what harm it is he is planning for us."
Her voice went to Davey's heart.
"I know, mother," he said. "But it'll be all right soon. The old man'll pull up when I come home. I'll tell him I mean to be all he wants me to be. I was a fool before, though I don't think I could go on in the old way even now. But he'll be reasonable if I go the right way about asking him. I've a deal more sense than I had. I've sobered down a lot ... can see things straighter. I won't be having any dealings with McNab again—and I'll get father to cut him. The pair of us'll be more than equal to him. But I've got to finish my job with Conal first ... it wouldn't be playing the game to leave him just now."
"Is it Conal you've been working with, Davey?" her eyes went up to his anxiously.
"Yes," he said.
"Your father's been talking a lot about this work of Conal's," she went on, a troubled line in her forehead. "He says the Schoolmaster's in it too. McNab's been talking to him about it, and they mean to interfere in some way. He's talked a good deal about it when he didn't know he was talking, driving home in the evenings. But McNab's making a fool of him for his own purposes, and to do harm to Mr. Farrel, I think. I was trying to tell your father that, but he wouldn't hear me. Oh, why have you got yourself mixed up with duffing and crooked ways, Davey?"
"What did he say?" Davey asked.
"I don't remember all of it." She swept her brow with a little weary gesture. "It was all mumbling and muttering, and I couldn't hear half what he said—but it was to do with cattle. And to-day McNab came over to the yards as soon as we arrived and I heard him say: 'I've got word where there's a mob with brands won't bear lookin' into, to-night. I'll tell M'Laughlin, and he'll get a couple of men to work with him. If you'll come round to the parlour we can fix up what's to be done.'"
Davey jerked his horse's bridle, pulling him round to mount.
"I meant to take you home myself to-night, mother," he said. "But I'll have to find Conal and tell him this. There's no time to lose."
"I'll be all right, Davey," she said tremulously; "I'll go and wait for your father at McNab's. He's there now. And we're quite safe with Bess taking us home. She knows every inch of the way."
Davey kissed her hurriedly.
He turned out of the church paddock towards Hegarty's. There was a dance in full swing, and he thought that Conal might be there. But although a new fiddler was in his element and most of the young people in the district jigging, Conal was not. He went back along the road to McNab's.
Outside, in the buggy, Mary Cameron was sitting. She turned and smiled when he rode up to her. Her face had a shy happiness, but the patience and humility of her waiting attitude infuriated him.
He swung off his horse and opened the door of McNab's side parlour.
Cameron was sitting at the small, uneven table, a bottle of rum and glasses before him. McNab on the other side of the table, leaning across it was talking to him, his voice running glibly. The light of an oil lamp on the table between them showed his yellow, eager eyes, the scheming intensity of the brain behind them, the lurking half-smile of triumph about his writhing, colourless lips. M'Laughlin, leaning lazily back in his chair, his long legs stretched under the table, sat watching and listening to him.
McNab sprang to his feet with an oath when he saw Davey in the doorway.
"Mother's waiting for you outside," he said, lifting Donald Cameron by the elbows and leading him to the door.
He turned on McNab with his back to it.
"I'll be looking after my father's affairs from this out," he said. "And you remember what I promised you if you interfered with me again ... you'll get it sure as I live."
He slammed the door.
Donald Cameron, stupid with McNab's heavy spirits, was unprepared for this masterful young man whose rage was burning to a white heat. He went with him as quietly as as a child.
Davey helped him into the buggy.
"Keep him away from McNab," he said to his mother, "and I'll be home as soon as I can."
She smiled, the shy, happy smile of a girl, nodded to him, and they drove off.
Davey went back into the bar of the Black Bull, with its crowd of stockmen, drovers, shop-keepers and sale-yard loungers.
"Where's Conal?" he asked. "Does anybody know if he's left the town yet?"
There was a roar of laughter.
"He was looking for you an hour ago, Davey," a drunken youngster yelled gaily. "Was in here, 'n McNab gave him a turn about the Schoolmaster's girl—"
"McNab was tellin' him you'd made-up to marry her. You should have heard Conal go off," somebody shouted.
"Where is he?" There was a sharpness about Young Davey's question that nobody liked.
"Who? McNab?"
"No, Conal!"
McNab had come into the bar and was standing watching him, his face livid.
"Round somewhere lookin' for your blood," the same jovial youngster, who had first spoken, cried.
"Seen him go up towards the store a while ago, Davey," Salt Watson said slowly.
No one smelt mischief brewing quicker than he. He had seen McNab's face. He knew Young Davey's temper and the sort of man he was growing. He knew Conal, too, and that no love was lost between them. It was an urgent matter would send Davey looking through the town for Conal that way, he guessed, and knowing something of the business they had in hand, as an old roadster always does, imagined the cause of the urgency.
McNab looked as if Davey's anxiety to find Conal had taught him something too.
Davey flung out of the bar. He straddled his horse again and went flying off down the road to the store.
Conal was not there. Someone said he had been, and set out for the hills an hour earlier. Davey made off down the road again, doubling on his track, past the Black Bull. He thought that he would catch up to Conal on the road, and that they would be back at Steve's before M'Laughlin and his men were out of Wirreeford.
The culvert over the creek that he had watched Bess shy at and take in her own leisurely fashion a week before, was not half a mile from the outskirts of the township. The creek banks on either side were fringed I with wattles and light-woods. As the mare rattled across it there was a whistling crack in the air. Davey pitched on her neck. Terrified, she leapt forward. He clung to her, swaying for a while, yet never losing his grip.
He knew that someone had shot him from the trees by the culvert. There was a sharp pain in his breast; blood welled from it.
The little red horse's pace was as swift as a swallow's. Sure-footed, she flashed on over the long winding roads, up the steep hillsides and down them, slipping and sliding on the loose shingles, but keeping her knees in the cunning way that only the mountain horses know. Davey heard the beat of her hoofs until the sound became mechanical. Though she was moving, she seemed to get no further—to throw no distance behind her, forging ahead through the darkness.
Fear and a suffocating weakness began to dull his brain, he could not see. The sagging pain in his breast ate up his strength. With a desperate effort he pulled the handkerchief from his throat and thrust it inside his shirt against the wound. He dug his heels into Red's side, urging her on.
A diffused glow of lights loomed before him. As if wakening from a nightmare in which he had been struggling to get forward and was held back by mysterious, unknown forces, he realised that they were the lights of the shanty.
The mare carried him on into the stable yard. The welcome yelp of dogs greeted his ears. He flung off her, staggered across the yard and burst open the back door. He was conscious of Farrel and Deirdre springing towards him, of Steve behind them. Then surging darkness, the swirling tides of dreamless darkness that had been pressing close to him all the way, closed over him. For a moment he struggled against them, trying to speak. A few muttered, incoherent words were all Deirdre and the Schoolmaster caught.
He pitched forward.
Deirdre ran to him. The Schoolmaster helped her to lift Davey over on his back. She moistened his lips with the spirit that Steve brought quickly.
"There's blood on him, father," she cried. There was no tremor in her voice, only a tense anxiety.
Farrel told her what to do, to cut away Davey's shirt where the blood oozed on it. Steve went for water and rags as she did so. The flickering light of the candle the Schoolmaster held, showed the broken and blackened flesh.
"He's been shot ... it's a slug made that mark," Steve gasped when he saw it.
When he had put a basin of cold water beside her, she laid soaked rags on the wound. The shock brought Davey a moment of consciousness. He moaned, stirring with pain. His eyes opened. He saw Deirdre's face above his and the Schoolmaster bending over him.
He stared at them unseeingly. Then the mists cleared from his brain. "I'm all right," he muttered, "all right...."
He lay quite still.
"Have you got the calves out of the paddock?" he asked a moment later, his voice stronger. "M'Laughlin and a couple of men'll be here presently. McNab's got wind of their being in the paddock, here. Get them out to the valley quick, or let them go."
"Where's Conal?" Steve asked eagerly; "he ought to be in by now."
There was a crooked furrow of pain on Davey's face.
"I looked for him before I came out," he said. "Couldn't find him—thought he must have gone on ahead. I got this," his hand went to his breast, "crossing the culvert over the creek. They said at McNab's, Conal had been swearing—to do for me—but I didn't believe it...."
His body sagged and his head went back; but Deirdre was behind him; she rested his head on her knees.
Her eyes flew to the Schoolmaster.
"It was Conal," she breathed. "He said he would do it."
Farrel's face whitened. He put no man before Long Conal.
Deirdre put a pack of wet rags over the wound again, and bound it on with a piece of unbleached linen.
Her eyes went anxiously to Steve.
"He's not going to die, is he?" she asked.
"No," Steve muttered, cheerfully. His eyes travelled the length of the boy's sturdy frame. "It's not much more than a surface wound, though it's cut up the flesh a good deal. He'd look different if he was goin' to kick the bucket."
"If we could lift him into the other room it would be better," she suggested. "The men from the Wirree may be coming."
"Yes," the Schoolmaster said.
As they tried to move him, Davey regained consciousness.
"Have you got those beasts out?" he asked querulously. "There's no time to lose. I'm all right."
Deirdre on one side, the Schoolmaster on the other, they led him to the room in which Farrel slept. He sank wearily on the bunk against the wall.
The Schoolmaster went back to the kitchen for a moment.
Deirdre bent over the bunk, gazing at Davey's still face anxiously, intently. It was no time for weeping or exclamation. She realised the danger that threatened. If M'Laughlin and the men from the Wirree came and found the cattle in the paddock below Steve's, not only Davey, but also the Schoolmaster would have to pay the penalty.
She went back to the kitchen.
"He's sleeping," she said.
The Schoolmaster and Steve were standing by the door arguing in an undertone together.
The Schoolmaster turned to go out.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Let those animals out," he said briefly. "It's no good, Teddy won't go with them alone. He's as afraid of the dark as they are. And if M'Laughlin's coming we've got to get them out of the way."
"He's going to try and take them himself to the valley; and it's madness—he can't see," cried Steve.
"Conal was a fool to bring them near the place. I told him this morning, but he'll take his own way and nobody else's," the Schoolmaster replied. "If he were here now—"
"I'm going to take them, father," Deirdre said. "They're easy enough to drive at night and Teddy'll work with me. You watch Davey. He'll be right now, but in case—Besides the place has got to look peaceable and ordinary if M'Laughlin comes."
"I can't let you do it, Deirdre."
The Schoolmaster's voice was harsh and peremptory.
"I'm going to!"
He recognised his own spirit in her.
"There's no time to lose," she said, "and I know the track to the Valley. Conal showed it to me—I helped him to bring in the calves yesterday, and I haven't been on the roads with you both for the last year without knowing how to manage a handful of old cows."
"I tell you, I'll not have it," the Schoolmaster interrupted passionately.
"It means as much to me as to any of you," she said, a little breathless sob in her voice. "You don't know how much. You can't have these beasts with the new brands running the hills now. Conal ought to be responsible for them, but that won't help us much if they're found here. Davey's known to have been working with him—and you were suspected of being with him even when you weren't!"
The door slammed behind her.
Steve followed her out of doors.
He pulled the chestnut's girths when she had thrown a saddle across his back.
"You can manage the calves, of course, Deirdre," he said. "Keep 'm quiet as you can. No shouting, mind. The dogs know night work with cattle's mostly quiet work—keep 'm back. You'll not be raising a whip yourself. I'll tell Teddy, the less crackin' the better. These beasts'll go quiet enough."
He and the Schoolmaster watched her flying out across the faintly moonlit paddocks. The dogs were soon working round the mob in a far corner where the fence panels were down. Deirdre drove them through the opening. The black boy was on the road waiting to keep the beasts' noses northwards with an adroit flick of his whip. It was with an occasional lowing and rattling of horns, the brush and rattle of hoofs on the dry timber that they passed out into the shadows of the road.
The Schoolmaster had no fear that Deirdre could not manage this handful of yearlings and old cows. She had chased calves from paddock to paddock when she was big enough to straddle a pot-bellied pony, and had cracked a light whip which Conal had made for her, with a fall a couple of inches shorter than his own, round many a restless herd when Conal and he were droving and she was on the roads with them. It was the bitterness of not being able to drive himself that plagued Farrel: the consciousness of having to stand by and let her do what there was danger in doing, incensed him. Steve watched the road for sound or sign of men and horses from Wirreeford. Then he chased his own two milkers up from the cow paddock and ran them backwards and forwards along the road where the mob had passed, to obliterate its tracks.
A weight was off the Schoolmaster's mind when Steve said that Deirdre and the black were out of sight. He knew that by taking the cattle along the narrow tracks on the ledges of the hills, she would save them. Narrow Valley scrubs would screen them from curious eyes. If M'Laughlin came, the road would tell no tales. Steve's cows had made it look as if a mob had passed in the opposite direction beyond the shanty, and he and the Schoolmaster had a story to fit the tracks. They did not think that anybody but themselves knew the way under the trees on the Valley hillsides. Only if M'Laughlin brought a tracker would he be able to follow Deirdre.
Farrel wondered how word had reached McNab, and what foolhardiness had led Conal to bring these branded calves to the paddock below Steve's. For a moment the idea that Conal, baited and maddened with drink, might have given some hint at McNab's of the beasts being in Steve's paddock, occurred to him. And then there was Davey. For a while his mind brooded over what had happened to him.
"It was only mad with drink, Conal could have shot at a man in the dark," he told himself. "The open fight is his way." Conal and he had been friends a good many years, and there was something in his estimate of the man which defied the idea that he had shot Davey. And yet it looked as if he had. Why was he not in? He had left Wirreeford an hour before Davey. Conal was on the road before Davey. And he had been drinking at McNab's. He had been taunted with Deirdre's name.
"It was only mad with drink he could have done it," the Schoolmaster told himself again. And even then a fierce contempt and condemnation surged within him. The memory of Deirdre's fired young womanhood; of the look in her face, of the glow in her eyes, told him what this hurt to Davey meant to her.
Steve watched in the room beside Davey.
His shrunken, crippled limbs ached. His head sank on his breast. He drooped and slept forgetfully. The Schoolmaster strode the length of the kitchen. The fire smouldered low. He threw some wood on it. The crackling flames flashed and played freakishly across the room. He wondered if Conal would come—where he was. The hours passed. There was no sound or sign of late riders from the Wirree. He opened the door of the hut. The night was very still. Only a mopoke called plaintively in the distance.
There was a stir in the room in which Davey was sleeping. Farrel heard Steve's voice in startled and sleepy protest. The door opened, Davey stood on the threshold his eyes with a delirious brightness in them.
"What have you done about those calves?" he asked, his voice quick and clear.
"We are going to let 'em go," Steve gasped. "You go back and lie down now, Davey."
"You can't do that with the new brands on them," Davey brushed him aside, irritably. "I'm all right now. I can take them to the Valley. It's a bit of luck M'Laughlin hasn't turned up yet. P'raps I upset his calculations—his and McNab's. He's not so fond of gettin' a move on, Johnny Mac. Might've guessed I'd got a notion he was going to be busy when I went round asking for Conal. Thought we'd give him the slip anyway and he'd save himself the trouble of coming!" He laughed a little unsteadily. "Think I'll get the calves along to the Valley, all the same."
The Schoolmaster took his arm.
"Go and lie down, Davey," he said. "If you go wandering about like this, you'll bring on the bleeding again. Besides, Deirdre—"
"Where is she?" His eyes flew searching the room for her.
"She"—it seemed difficult to say—"She has gone down to the Valley, so it'll be all right," he said.
Davey turned towards the door.
"Don't be a fool, Davey!" The Schoolmaster intercepted him.
Davey pushed him aside.
He strode into the stable yard as though nothing had happened to disable him. A moment later the Schoolmaster heard the rattle of hoofs on the road.
Every fibre of him shivered at the boy's contempt, the blazing amazement of his eyes. He sank into a chair, covering his face with his hands.
Deirdre and the black boy drove their straggling herd into the stockyard in the narrow bush clearing, walled by trees, an hour or two before dawn.
The stock-yards which Conal had put up at the end of Narrow Valley were invisible to any but those who knew the winding track that led over the brow of the hill and through the heavy timber on the spur, to the old hut at the foot of it. Teddy was pulling the rails of the outer-yard into place and Deirdre was going towards the hut. Socks at her heels, his bridle over her arm, when a horseman rode out of the opening into the valley, by which they had come.
She recognised the red horse, but did not know that it was Davey riding till he was almost level, and dropped to his feet. He swayed against the horse's side, clutching his reins.
"It's a shame ... no one to bring the brutes but you," he said weakly. "I came—soon as I knew."
Deirdre put her arm out to him. They walked slowly towards the hut. Davey became weaker. She drew the horses by their reins behind them, keeping her eyes on him. The ground rocked under his feet.
"We're just there—another minute and it'll be all right," she said, and called Teddy.
He had seen Davey Cameron's red horse coming into the clearing, and ran up to her, chattering with fright at the sight of Davey's limp figure.
"Put the horses up in the shed—leave the saddles on," she said quickly. "You go back, tell boss—cows all right—Davey very sick man, here."
Although an hour earlier nothing would have induced the boy to brave the darkness alone, it was not many moments before he was up on his weedy, half-wild nag and streaking away towards the cover of the trees and the threadlike track which wound uphill along the spur.
Deirdre opened the door of the hut. Davey took a step or two into it and fell forward. She set the brushwood on the hearth alight, and threw some broken branches over it to make a blaze. There was no stir in Davey when she knelt beside him, and a pool of blood lay on the floor where he had fallen.
She ran out of doors for water. In the semi-darkness of the hut it was difficult to find anything to put water in, but there was a pannikin near the water barrel and she filled that and tore pieces of calico from her petticoat to bathe his wound.
Groping along the shelves near the fireplace she found the end of a thick rush and tallow candle. She did not light it at first because the fire had sprung up and was lighting the room, showing its meagre equipment, the branding irons and a saddle flung down in a corner, a bunk against the wall with a couple of sheepskins over it, a table with two or three pannikins and a black bottle on it. There was a drain of some spirit in the bottle. She poured it carefully into a pannikin and held it to Davey's lips.
His immobility frightened her. She lit the candle and held it close to his face. Under the leaping yellow flames it had the mask-like stillness and pallor of death.
"Davey! Davey!" she screamed with terror, creeping up beside his heavy, still body.
"Oh, you mustn't die, Davey—you mustn't!" Even as she sobbed she thought he was dead.
She put the spirit on his lips again.
"Oh, I've done all that I can—all that I know to do. Won't you look at me, Davey? My heart's breaking. You've not gone, Davey? You wouldn't leave me. It's me, Deirdre, your sweetheart, that's with you! Won't you look at me?... Won't you open your eyes? I can't bear it—if you don't speak to me."
"Davey!" She caught him by the shoulder, shaking him roughly. "I won't let you go! I won't let you die!" she cried.
He fell back from her hands.
She threw herself across him sobbing brokenly. Pressing her face close to his, she leant over him, murmuring and trying to revive him with a breathless agony of grief and tenderness.
"Oh, come back to me! Oh, you will not die. You will not die and leave me," she moaned. "Deirdre, that loves you. Your sweetheart, Davey!"
The cry died away.
In her frenzy she had not heard the door open. Spent with anguish she laid her head against Davey's still one. She felt rather than saw that someone was there in the hut behind her. She turned. Conal was standing in the doorway.
She stared at him. He might have been an aparition, so strange he looked, there in the doorway, with the glimmering night behind him. There was something stricken, aghast, about him. He gazed at her as if the tragic woe of her face were a revelation to him.
"He's dead—and it's you that have killed him, Conal," she said, at length.
"You—love—him, Deirdre?" Conal asked.
So slow and dreary their voices were that they seemed to be talking in their sleep.
"Yes," she said, "and it's my heart that's dead with him."
"I didn't know you felt like that—about him, Deirdre," Conal said, a humble, awkward air about him.
That it was Davey lay there dead did not seem to trouble him. It was of Deirdre he was thinking in a mazed, dazed way, and the thing she had said to him.
"You've done what no woman could forgive you, Conal." A vibrating passion had come to her voice. "I never want to see you again as long as I live."
Conal stared at her a moment; then he swung heavily out of the hut into the yard. He had the gait of a drunken man. She heard him stumble over something in the yard, strike his head against a post. Then the sound of his horse's hoof-beats in the clearing died away.
Deirdre looked down at the still figure beside her. In spite of what she had said she could not believe that Davey was dead—that all that young, strong body would not move again, that Davey's eyes would not open and look at her with the eager, questioning glance she had known. Something of the horror of his stillness had passed; she moistened his lips with the spirit. Putting her arms round him she gathered him up against her, put his head on her bosom and leaned over him, crooning softly, as though he were asleep. She beguiled herself by saying that he was only asleep and would waken presently.
"What a long time it is," she murmured. "Do you remember, Davey dear, the night before father and I went away, and I ran over the paddock to the corner of the road to see you? I was angry you had gone away without wanting to see me, yourself.... You kissed me and I kissed you, and I promised to come back and be your sweetheart and we'd be married some day.... And the birds laughed. And the red-runners were out by the road. There was a beautiful sunset, and it got dark soon. You said it was me you loved and not Jessie. Then I went away ... and it has never been the same since. But it will be ... when you are well and I can tell you how much I want you to love me again—"
She laughed softly.
"Do you remember how we used to go home in the cart from school together, and how we used to trot Lass up the hillsides to make her poor old sides go like bellows, and you showed me how to blow birds' eggs, and Jess said I wasn't a little lady to blow birds' eggs."
Her voice ran on with a brooklike tenderness.
"If you'd come back, we could have all those times again, Davey," she whispered, looking down into his face beneath hers.
Just when there was the faintest shimmer of dawn in the dim windows, a fluttering breath caught her face. She put the spirit to his lips again. So, chafing his hands and calling him, with tearful and eager little cries, she led him as a mother leads a child just learning to walk, from the valley of the shadows.
Davey opened his eyes. They dwelt on her with a deep, serene gaze. She smiled and went on crooning to him, half singing, half sighing that beguiling little melody of tenderness and entreaty. Warmth came back to him. His breath fell regularly and sweetly. Deirdre took the sheepskins out of the bunk and put them under him on the floor.
He slept. A faint smile on his mouth, his hand sought hers, the fingers curled round it. She sat watching him, a mist of awe and joy and thankfulness gathering in her eyes, because it seemed to her that a miracle had been accomplished that night in Narrow Valley hut.
When the broad glare of the morning sun broke through the dingy windows of the hut, Deirdre started from the cramped position in which she had fallen, her head leaning wearily against a box.
She was aghast to find that she had been asleep. As she woke with a startled exclamation, a hand went out to her. Her eyes met Davey's.
It was as if that encounter in the valley of shadows had brushed all misunderstandings from the love that was like the sun between them. Deirdre had wrestled with death for possession of him. Her eyes still bore the shadow of the conflict. Davey was wan and vanquished. He knew that she had wrested his spirit from the darkness on which it had been drifting, and the knowledge made a serene joyousness in him.
Speech deserted them; they had no voices to talk with. Just this gazing of eyes on eyes told all that there was to tell.
Later on she went from his side and began to move about the hut, gathering the brushwood into the hearth, raking over the ashes and making the fire again. His eyes followed her.
The hut was shabby and disorderly by daylight. Conal had used it when he was mustering, and there was a heap of rusty irons in the corner, a few hoarded tins and half-empty jars of grease on the shelves, some old clothes, worn-out boots and green-hide thongs behind the door. The bunk, with its sheepskins, and a table made of a rough hewn plank on three poles set in the floor, were the only furniture. Deirdre found a bundle of rags on the shelf near the hearth, and searched for the bottle of liniment which she knew was kept for use if any of the men got a broken hand or a kick from a beast in the stock-yards.
Davey knew where Conal had stowed these things while they were working there together. He tried to help Deirdre to find them. She was at his side in an instant.
"You mustn't move," she said, a compelling tenderness in her voice.
He fell back.
The touch of her hands was a shock of joy. His face turned up to her, wan with weakness, radiant at her near presence. His eyes went through hers.
"Deirdre!"
The cry was a prayer also.
She bent over him; her arms encircled him. From that first kiss of conscious lovers she withdrew a little tremulously.
"Oh, you must be still," she cried. "If the bleeding begins again you'll never be strong. You must lie quiet now, and I'll see if I can find some food. There's sure to be flour and some oatmeal about."
"On the shelf in the corner by the hearth," Davey said. "And there was tea in a tin there a day or two ago."
She found them and they breakfasted on a weak gruel and tea without milk. She had helped Davey on to the bunk against the wall and spread the sheepskins under him when the Schoolmaster and Teddy came into the yard. Farrel carried a bag of food and a couple of blankets strapped to his saddle.
Deirdre met him out of doors. The sight of her reassured him. She told him what had happened during the night—of Davey's long stillness and insensibility, and of Conal's coming a few hours before the dawn.
The Schoolmaster went into the hut.
"Father says "—Deirdre went straight to Davey—"he doesn't believe it was Conal fired that shot at you."
Her eyes went out to him troubled and beseeching.
"I can't help thinking it was, myself, though I'd be glad not to. He's been such a big brotherly sort of man to me always, Conal, and it hurts to think he could do a thing like that."
She continued after a moment.
"Father says, Conal came in after you'd gone last night. He'd been drinking, but his voice told him that he didn't do it. As soon as he knew you'd come after me, the way you were, he rode out after you for fear you mightn't have been able to reach here. Do—do you think it was Conal, Davey?"
Davey turned his face to the wall. He could not bear to hear her defence of Conal—her solicitude and desire to think well of him in spite of everything. He had no doubt in his own mind. The memory of that whistling shot from the dark trees, the agony of his long ride through the hills, came back to him.
"All I know," he said bitterly, "is that I was looking for him before I left the town to tell him what mother had told me about the raid McNab and the old man and M'Laughlin were getting up. At the Black Bull they said they'd been baiting Conal—about me—and he'd gone out looking for me—promising to do for me. Some one said he'd gone to the store. I went there and Joe Wilson told me he'd seen Conal riding out an hour earlier. I thought I'd catch him up on the road. It was from the trees by the creek the shot came, and Red took fright."
"There's nobody else got a grudge against you, Davey?"
"Not that I know who'd want to settle me that way. McNab, of course, hasn't got any love for me."
"You went up to the store and straight out along the road past the Bull?" the Schoolmaster asked.
"Yes, but I'd seen McNab in the bar a couple of minutes before. It couldn't have been him."
Farrel threw out his hand with a gesture of doubt and disappointment.
"Deirdre says she's heard Conal say that he'd do for you, Davey," he said, "but she didn't think he meant it. Just his hot-headed way of talking! McNab must have maddened him, filled him up with drink. I can't tell you how it goes against the grain to believe he could have done a thing like this, and yet—it looks like it."
"Was he back when you came away this morning?" Deirdre asked.
"No," the Schoolmaster replied.
"Ask him when he comes in, whether he did, or did not fire at Davey," she said. "I'll take his word. Will you, Davey?"
"Yes." Davey's tone was a little uncertain.
The Schoolmaster went to the door again.
Davey called him back with a restless movement.
"What are you going to do about those beasts?" he asked querulously. "They're better here than at Steve's, but of course if M'Laughlin gets a tracker it wouldn't take him long to find them. Teddy's got them in the four-mile paddock this morning, but they ought to be moving."
"Perhaps Conal"—the Schoolmaster began.
"Oh, yes, I forgot, Conal—he'll take them."
Davey fell back.
"Why can't you take them yourself?" he inquired.
The Schoolmaster met his eyes for a moment.
"Lost my nerve," he said, with a little grating laugh, and turned out of doors.
Deirdre's eyes sparkled with anger.
"Oh," she gasped, breathlessly, "how dare you, Davey? How dare you?"
Davey, morose anger in his eyes, stared at her.
"You're angry because he let me go out last night," she said. "Don't you know he's almost helpless, that he can just see dimly in the broad daylight. All the world's going dark to him, and it's breaking his heart—eating the strength and the soul and the courage out of him, to stand by and let others do things for him."
Consciousness of what he had done came slowly to Davey.
"Oh, it was mean and cruel and cowardly to hurt him like that!" Deirdre cried passionately, and ran out into the sunshine after her father.
When she came back into the hut Davey, with a tense white face, was standing near the door.
"I ought to be flayed alive—but I didn't know, I didn't understand," he said.
There was no quieting or comforting him.
"Will he ever forgive me? Do you think he will, Deirdre?" His face was clammy with the sweat of weakness. "It was more than Conal did—that. Conal wouldn't have done it."
Deirdre went for the Schoolmaster. He came into the hut again. He and Davey gripped hands. Then the Schoolmaster led him to the bunk again and stretched him out on it.
"It's all right, my boy! All right!" he said, brokenly. "You lie still now and let Deirdre look after you."
Davey's vigorous youth rebelled at the days of idleness which followed. The wound knitted quickly; his weakness vanished as it mended.
Conal had disappeared. No one had seen or heard of him since the night of the Wirree races. The Schoolmaster and Deirdre had accepted his disappearance as silent proof of his having fired the shot that had almost cost Davey his life.
When they went back to the shanty Steve talked incessantly about Conal. Although no more had been heard of M'Laughlin and the threatened raid had never been made, he was not easy about that half hundred head of newly-branded beasts in the Narrow Valley paddock.
At the end of the week Davey took the bit between his teeth.
"I'm going to take that mob to the Melbourne yards," he said. "We can't run them any longer in the Valley."
"It's too risky, Davey," the Schoolmaster said. "McNab's too quiet to be harmless, and there's only one man could run the mob with safety."
"And that's Conal?" Davey asked.
"There's not a man in the country like Conal with cattle. He knows every by-path and siding on the ranges. Then he's hail-fellow-well-met with the men on the roads. There's not one of them would give him away," the Schoolmaster said.
"I could run them." The line on Davey's mouth tightened. "And safer than Conal, I've been thinking. Some of the cows have father's brand on them. Most of the calves ought to have the D.C. by rights, I suppose. They've got the cut of our Ayrshires, though Conal's done the double M's pretty neatly on them.
"What's the old man's will be mine some day, and so they're in a sort of way my cattle too. I can say, I don't think Ayrmuir had any right—not much anyway—to them, if we couldn't get them. The old man wouldn't risk a couple of horses on the off-chance. Rosses and Morrisons lost three horses when they had a go for 'em, besides there isn't a man on our place could have yarded them. Conal got them. We were with him. You can hold his share for this batch when I bring it to you. But I'm going to drive, saying they are Donald Cameron's cattle. So they are, most of them. I'll be driving my own cattle as a matter of fact, though it may be realising on the estate, a forced loan from the old man, you may say. My name will carry me through and when the deal's over I can make it right with father. I'm going home."
"Can't think what Conal means, leavin' 'em so long," Steve muttered irritably.
"We can't have them on our hands any longer!"
Davey's voice was short and irritable too.
"You're right, Davey." The Schoolmaster spoke slowly, thoughtfully. "What you say makes the getting rid of them sound easy, but I hardly like the idea of—"
"Taking your share, after the way I've put it?" Davey interrupted. "But as far as I'm concerned they're Conal's beasts, and your's—and mine—because we got them. Nobody else could, and they weren't any good to anybody eating their heads off in the hills. But for all the world it's as if I had contracted with you to do it on behalf of the estate. Ayrmuir gets a third of the profits. I'll hand it over to the old man—and as likely as not he'll be glad enough to see it, for a couple of dozen breakaways and scrubbers he never expected to make a penny out of again."
The Schoolmaster's gesture of impatience was one of resignation also.
"It's a specious argument, Davey," he said, "but I wish to heaven you'd kept clear of the whole business."
That evening Davey called Deirdre and they wandered down the hillside, watching the sun set on the distant edge of the plains that stretched, northwards and inland, from the rise beyond Steve's.
"I'm going to-morrow," he said, and told her of the promise he had made his mother. "I feel it's up to me to carry this job through, but when it's over I'm coming back—going home. When I come back will you marry me, Deirdre?"
"Yes," she said simply. "But if you'd only give up going, Davey!"
Davey's face had a look of his father for the moment, a sombre obstinacy.
"There's something in the game," he said. "You're on your mettle to carry it through when you've begun. But you needn't worry. I'll be all right. My story'll be good enough if there is any trouble."
Deirdre sighed.
"But I can't bear the thought of your going," she said. "If only you wouldn't!"
Deirdre watched Davey going out of Narrow Valley in the dim starlight of the early spring morning, the mob, hustled by Teddy and the dogs, a stream of red and brown and dappled hides before him. The cows lifted their heads, bellowing protestingly; their breath steamed before them in the chill air. The horses and dogs, heeling and wheeling them, and the trampling hoofs of the herd, beat a wraith-like mist from the cold, and still sleeping earth.
Davey was to steer by the stars till he came to a point on the road that would give him a clear and easy descent to the sale yards on the outskirts of Melbourne. It was too late in the year to try the usual route. He was to take a winding track on the edge of the swamp that lay between the southern hills and Port Phillip. Only the blacks knew the paths through the brown-feathered reeds and dense ti-tree scrubs. Conal had tried to cross it once in the summer and got bogged there, losing a score of fine beasts. If Conal could not find his way across it, the Schoolmaster did not think that Davey could. It was only in case of untoward happenings that he advised trusting to the black boy's knowledge of the tracks through the swamp, and taking to the cover of the moss-dark, almost impenetrable, scrub that covered it.
Davey had given his word to the Schoolmaster that if he met Conal he would give the cattle over to him and return to the hills.
"I'd give everything I've got in the world if you'd never been brought into this business," he had said, deeply moved, just before Davey rode out.
"Father's blaming himself, Davey," Deirdre said.
Davey wrung the Schoolmaster's hand.
"I wouldn't have been in it, if I hadn't broken my word to you," he said. "I promised you when I brought up that first mob for Conal, I'd clear out after, didn't I? But Conal offered me the job, and—you bet I wouldn't 've been out of a moonlighting either, if I could 've helped it."
"But this business—I never meant you to be in it," Farrel said bitterly. "I never meant to be in it myself, Davey. Circumstances were too strong for me. A drowning man clutches a straw, they say."
Deirdre had ridden to the valley. She had watched the mob go out across the plains, watched until men, cattle, horses and dogs, a moving blur in the mists, disappeared altogether, and the faint lowing of the beasts came to her no longer.
She waited impatiently for news of Davey, though she knew none could come for weeks. There were few travellers on this overland track. Conal and one or two others had used it, with Teddy to guide them if they wanted to take the short cut across the scrubs of the swamp. There were well-defined northern paths into New South Wales: but it was a long and roundabout journey to Port Phillip from the southern ranges.
"Father," Deirdre said impulsively, one morning soon after Davey had gone. "I'm going to see Mrs. Cameron. I've been thinking she must be anxious about Davey and wanting news of him."
"She'll be glad to see you, no doubt," he said.
"There's one subject you won't speak to her of, though, Deirdre," he added after a moment's hesitation.
She knew what he meant. He did not want Mrs. Cameron to know that his sight was almost gone.
"Yes, I understand," Deirdre said.
Socks, as sensitive to the keen air, the sunshine, the fluty ripplings and joy-callings of the birds as Deirdre was, rollicked gaily down the track to Cameron's. His white stockings flashed as he thudded along; his unshod hoofs fell with a soft beat on the grassy waysides. Deirdre sang softly to herself as they passed under the arching trees. Her thoughts went drifting away dreamily to the time when Davey would come back and she would call going to Ayrmuir, "going home."
It was an eager, tremulous greeting that Mrs. Cameron gave her.
"It's you, dearie," she said. "I am glad to see you, indeed! What can you tell me of Davey? He was to have come home to us and I haven't seen him for weeks."
There was much to tell and yet much that the girl, in her tender solicitude for Davey's mother, could not tell. It would terrify her to know that someone had shot at and nearly killed him, that Davey had an enemy who would go to these lengths. When he was back with her, he might tell her himself what had kept him away; but it would stretch her soul to the limit of anguish, Deirdre knew, to tell her now.
"Yes, Davey told me he was coming home," Deirdre said, smiling.
Her eyes met Davey's mother's with their secret no secret; but Mary Cameron was thinking only of her boy, and in her anxiety, although she realised that Davey and Deirdre understood each other, she did not ask any questions, and Deirdre said nothing, thinking it was for Davey to tell his mother.
"I knew you'd be anxious about him," the girl said with a sigh, "and that's why I came. He's gone overland with some of Maitland's cattle; but he ought to be back in a week now, and then he'll be coming straight here."
"Ah, dear!" Tears welled in Mrs. Cameron's eyes. "How glad I'll be."
Deirdre went with her into the well-known parlour, and they sat down and talked together awhile. There was a new and tender understanding between them. Mrs. Cameron talked of her loneliness and the joy Davey's home-coming would be to her.
"Oh, I have prayed so, Deirdre," she said, "It has nearly broken my heart being without him ... what with the long nights here, and the sorrow that has come upon us...."
That was all she said of the other trouble, yet it had almost broken her, and had taken all her fortitude and patient wifeliness to endure. An instinct of blind fidelity was part of Mary Cameron.
When Deirdre was going she kissed her. There was lingering affection in the pressure of her lips.
"My heart goes out to you, dear," she said. "It's almost as if you were my own child. I love you like that, Deirdre. It was good of you to come to-day. Now I will get Davey's room ready for him ... and the little room you used to sleep in. You'll be coming to stay with us again when he comes home, won't you? Oh, I could laugh and cry with happiness to think the old times will come again."
Deirdre laughed, a little laugh of shy joyousness. She could not tell Mrs. Cameron that she would be coming to stay with her altogether soon.
"Davey will be able to get on better with his father now," Mrs. Cameron continued, giving expression to her dreams. "He will be able to get Donald to do what he wants, without angering him. His father has lost many of the ways he had, and you wouldn't believe how he loves the boy, in spite of everything. It's a strange, dour way a man has of loving sometimes, dear—hard to bear. It's love all the same—not love the way women love—that tries to make life easy for the dear one. It's all tenderness and sacrifice a woman's love, Deirdre...."
"Sometimes a man loves that way too," Deirdre said.
She had swung into her saddle and was looking away before her, over the mist-wreathed hills. For a moment her eyes lay on Mrs. Cameron's face with its grey-green eyes, delicate contour, exquisite line of lips, loving and lovable. Her face had lost its youthful freshness, but its beauty was unimpaired, so tender its expression, so compelling and pure the light of her eyes, though a lonely soul looked out of them, pained and wondering.
Deirdre pressed her heels into the chestnut: she and the horse disappeared among the trees.
She talked of Mrs. Cameron to her father.
"It would break your heart to see the change in her," she said.
"But I can't see her any more," he said brusquely.
Deirdre realised the wound that she had opened. She had never quite forgiven Davey's mother for the fact that Dan had lost his sight on her account. Mrs. Cameron never seemed to realise it and that had angered the girl. Perhaps Mrs. Cameron did not know what the Schoolmaster had done for her, Deirdre told herself sometimes. But Davey knew and she could hardly believe that Mrs. Cameron was ignorant, though she never seemed to take the Schoolmaster's injury as a personal matter.
Deirdre looked down on his face, dark and sombre now. Scarcely anything of its old reckless gaiety was left. Lines had been carved on it by bitter thought and brooding on the utter night he was travelling into.
She rubbed her soft cheek against his.
"Tell me," he said, with an effort, "how she looks, Deirdre."
"She looks," the girl said hesitatingly. "She looks—I can't explain how—as if something that burned inside of her had gone out."
"But she's beautiful—like she used to be," he begged. "She used to have a way of looking at you that I never saw with anybody else—"
His voice was trembling.
"Yes," Deirdre said slowly. "She's beautiful like she used to be, though her hair's got grey in it ... and the colour of the pink orchids has gone out of her skin. And she looks at you that way—I know what you mean—as if she were seeing ... not only the outside you.... It's her eyes ... and the way her lips lie together tell you about her real self and make you love her—even when you don't want to!"
The Schoolmaster threw himself back in his chair.
Deirdre gazed at him, then she turned away with a little sigh.
His face was almost a mirror to her now that he was blind. She could see his thoughts in it. It was sacred to her, that thin, lined face, all its reverence and emotion; but she could not bear to look at it and feel that she was stealing his secrets when his eyes could not guard them from her.
She went to the seat under the window and sat there thinking, idly, aimlessly, for awhile. Recollections of Mrs. Cameron were always those of a woman occupied with her home, her husband and son. Deirdre wondered how her father came to be in Mrs. Cameron's debt, as he had said he was, how it was he owed her anything at all. She seemed to owe him so much.
The cows had gathered up to the fence near the bails for the milking. They were lowing quietly, the sunshine making a luminous mist behind them; the birds were laughing and hooting among the trees.
Deirdre rose to go and do the milking, but Steve burst open the door from the tap-room.
A moment before there had been a clatter of hoofs on the shingle. Steve stood on the threshold, the muscles of his face twitching.
"It's Pete M'Coll from the Wirree," he gasped. "He says—they've got Davey at Port Phillip for duffing!"