Read Ebook: The Pioneers by Prichard Katharine Susannah

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Ebook has 1561 lines and 50923 words, and 32 pages

r man a stranger might get glimpse of, afraid to let any one else see in his eyes the secrets of that sly, spying soul of his.

Now that Farrel had only one eye, McNab feared him less, although when the concentrated light of the Schoolmaster's spirit poured from it in a single beam, he fidgeted, showed craven and was glad to escape.

No one had the knack that Dan Farrel had of showing McNab to the Wirree for what he was. The Schoolmaster could string McNab up before the eyes of the men in the bar on the thread of one of his whimsical humours and show him dangling, all his crooked limbs writhing, his twisted face simmering with wrath. He could pin McNab with a few, lightly-flung words and make a butt of him, where he stood before his rows of short-necked, black and muddied bottles. He would have him quivering with wrath, impotent against that bitter, blithe wit and the laughter it raised. He laughed too--McNab. He was wise, as cunning as a dingo. Though his eyes were baleful, and his hands shook as he poured the raw spirits from his bottle into a mug beside him, he laughed.

"It's a mad game y're on with McNab," Salt Watson, one of the oldest of the Wirreeford men, said to the Schoolmaster one evening on his way home. "Give it up, Dan! It's good enough to make the boys laugh, but you've only to look at Thad's face when he smiles to know what he is promising himself of it all."

The Schoolmaster had watched McNab's face when he smiled. He had learnt all he wanted to. He knew what Salt meant.

For awhile he dropped out of the circle round Thad's bar. When he made one of it, his laughter was less frequent, and he missed McNab when his lightly-flung arrows of wit whistled in the assembly. His spirits had suffered a depression. Some of the men thought the trouble with his eyes was on his mind. He avoided encounters with McNab, though none of them had any idea he was afraid of Thad. His one eye was more than a match for Thad's two any day, they knew.

There was no open quarrel between them. The Schoolmaster's duelling with McNab had never been more than a laughing matter, a pricking, rapier fashion, in the intervals of card-playing and drinks. It had an air of good-fellowship. His humour had a quality of amiability, though nobody was deceived by it, least of all Thad himself. There was always contempt and an underlying bitterness in it.

"What's the matter with Davey?" Farrel asked his daughter a few days later. "I've asked him to come up here and have tea with us, but he won't come. He'll barely speak to me when we meet, gets out of my way if he sees me coming."

Deirdre was kneeling by the hearth waiting for the kettle to boil. Their table was spread with cups and saucers and a little pile of toast smoked beside the teapot. She said nothing, only bent her head lower to avoid his glance.

"Have you got anything to do with it?" he asked.

The firelight played on her face. For a moment she thought she would tell him of the meeting under the trees and the promises she and Davey had made to each other when they said good-bye. But there was so much to tell, and he would be hurt that she had not told him about it long ago. They never had any secrets. She had shared all her thoughts with Dan. At first, that she and Davey were sweethearts, had just been something to smile about and gossip over with herself.

The Schoolmaster had wondered while they were away why she was always restless and wanting to get back to the hills. And now there was shame and grief in her heart--a smarting sense of anger and disappointment that had come of seeing Davey dancing with Jess, and of hearing what people were saying about them. It was all fixed up between Ross's Jess and Davey Cameron, someone had told her, and remarked what a fine couple they would make, and how satisfied their parents were about it--even Donald Cameron, who was not an easy man to please. She could not explain all that.

Dan read in her face something of what was in her mind. He took her hand and looked into her face. It was quivering and downcast.

"Then you have had something to do with it, Deirdre," he said.

"No."

Her voice broke.

"It was the night of the dance, at Mrs. Mary Ann's the night we came, I remember," he said; "Conal was there, and Davey went away angry."

"I've tried to speak to him a dozen times, since," she cried.

"Well, I can't quite make it out," the Schoolmaster said, after a few moments, "but they tell me in the town that since his father's been ill and Davey's had charge of things, he's been drinking a good deal and playing the fool at McNab's generally. We've got to try and get him out of that, if it's only for his mother's sake, Deirdre. We owe her a bigger debt, you and I--you because you love me--than we can ever repay."

"She owes you something, too," the girl said quickly, "that night of the fires if you hadn't tried to prevent it--"

She knew that he was displeased.

"You mustn't say that again," he said.

"Oh, I hate her! I hate her!" Deirdre cried, passionately.

"What do you mean?"

The Schoolmaster's voice was very quiet.

Deirdre clung to him sobbing.

"I didn't mean that I hate her really," she said, "I like her too. But she's the only one who has ever come between you and me, Dan, and I can't bear it."

He drew her to his knees and looked down gravely into her face. Her body was stiff against his; it shuddered and a storm of tears shook her. Tragic dark eyes were lifted to his when her weeping had spent itself.

"When she came and you looked at her, my heart died," she said. "Don't you remember when we used to gather the wild flowers to put on the table at school, you used to say we could never find a flower that was like her eyes. When we made a Mrs. Cameron bouquet, we used to put in it white honey-flowers and the pink giraffe orchids that grow on a long stem, for the colour of her cheeks, scarlet-runners for her mouth, and fly-catchers for her hair. Don't you remember? At first we couldn't find anything for her hair, but then I found the climbing fly-catchers with the little pink buds on the end of them. The down on the leaves, all browny gold and glistening in the sun, was a little bit like her hair, wasn't it, Dan?"

"Yes," he said, his mind going back to all their gay gatherings of wild flowers for Mrs. Cameron. It awed and surprised him that she should even then have discovered what his most secret heart was scarcely aware of.

"It was the little blue flowers, don't you remember, we put in for her eyes?" Deirdre went on, "Though you said that they weren't a bit like her eyes. 'Dew on the grass' is what some would call her eyes, but it is a poor colour, that--dew on the grass--no colour at all,' you said. 'Grass with the dew on it, or dew with a scrap of heaven, or the twilight shining in it, would have been better. That's what she has, Deirdre,' you used to say; 'eyes with the twilight in them--twilight eyes--you can see her thoughts gathering in them, brooding and dark, or glimmering like the light of the day, dying,' Do you remember saying all that to me? I do; because I've said it over to myself so often."

He understood the apprehensive, shy and shamed confession of her eyes.

"Do you mean," he asked, "that Deirdre thinks anybody could be to me what she is?"

Deirdre nodded, her contrite gaze melting into his.

"That one," his head turned in the direction of the hills, "is like the Mother of God to me. She was very good to me when I was a desperate man, long ago."

Deirdre gazed at him, her lips quivering.

"That's why you must always love her--Mrs. Cameron--my darling black head," he said.

"Sing it to me," Deirdre cried, thirsting for the tenderness of the old song.

He gathered her up in his arms and crooned in the Gaelic as he used to when she was a baby:

"Put your black head, darling, darling, darling. Your darling black head my heart above. O mouth of honey, with thyme for fragrance. Who, with heart in breast, could deny you love?"

Deirdre, pressing to him, tasted the satisfaction that all young creatures have in being close to those they love. His arms were warm and tender. An invasion of peace drove the sorrowful ache from her heart.

"My own mother," she asked suddenly. "Was she like Mrs. Cameron?"

"No."

There was the mingling of grief and troubled thinking in his face that she had always seen there when he spoke of her mother.

"She had a little brown bird, an English bird that sang in a cage," he said. "She was like that; but she never sang herself. She was one of those people life has broken, Deirdre."

"You married her ... and looked after her, Dan!"

His head dropped; he avoided her eyes.

"Then you came ... and she died," he said.

"Such a sorrowful mite you were!" he went on. "Such a lonely baby, wailing night and day, that there was only one name to give you, Deirdre--Deirdre of the griefs."

His eyes were lifted to hers. The black shield covered one of them; the other was shining with his tenderness for her, the strength of the tide behind it.

"It was a sorrowful name to give you, darling, you that have been the sunshine, and have banished the sorrows of my life," he cried. "May they never come any more or grief touch us again!"

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