Read Ebook: St. Paul the Hero by Jones Rufus M Rufus Matthew

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Ebook has 949 lines and 35499 words, and 19 pages

A window space had been left in the wall fronting the clearing; but there was no glass in it. At night, or when it rained, Mary hung a piece of hessian over the window. Two chairs were the only ready-made furniture of the room. The boxes and bales brought in the wagon were piled in a corner. A table, made of box-covers with sapling legs driven into the floor, was under the window, and a bed, on a wooden foundation strapped with green-hide, stood against the back wall. A few pieces of delft and white crockery glimmered on a shelf near the open fireplace, and below them, on another shelf, were stone jars and two or three pots and pans.

Donald's harness, saddle, stirrup-leathers and stock-whip hung on pegs near the back door. Among the bales and boxes, under a dingy muffling cloth, stood a spinning wheel, and, tied together with lengths of dusty yarn, the parts of a weaver's hand loom which Mary had brought from the old country. On Sundays, when a bright fire sparkled on the hearth, the mats of frayed hessian were spread on the floor, and she had put a jar filled with wild flowers on the table, her eyes brimmed with joy and tenderness as she gazed about her.

She had toiled all the summer out of doors with her husband to make their home, timber-cutting with him, grubbing stumps from the land, laying twigs and leaves in the stumps and lighting them so that the slow fires eating the wood left only charred shells to clear away. She had driven Lassie, the grey, backwards and forwards, drawing logs and tree trunks from the slope to the stack behind the house, and when the frames of the wagon shed, cow sheds and stable were up, had laced the brushwood to them. The weedy, brown nag that was Lassie's trace mate, during those first weeks in the hills had come down and got himself rather badly staked, and Donald had had to shoot him. It cost him a good deal to fire that shot, but he had worked the harder for it.

Mary watched the cow while she browsed on the edge of the forest before a paddock on the top of the hill was fenced. She milked, fed the calf and the fowls, and carried water from the creek to the house. When she was not doing any of these things, or baking, brushing or furbishing indoors, during those first few months, her fingers were busy with little garments--shirts and gowns and overalls--cut from her own clothes of homespun tweed and unbleached calico.

It was at the end of a long golden day that a cry from her brought Donald from the far edge of the clearing. He was turning the land for his first crop, and when he heard that cry, left the mare in her tracks, the rope lines trailing beside her.

Later, his hands trembling, he took Lassie from the plough, and led her to the creek for water. Then, although the sun had not set, he hobbled her for the night, went into the house and shut the door.

Usually, all was silent within its walls when the darkness fell; but this night a garish light flickered under the door. There were sounds of hushed movement, faint moaning, the crackling of fire on the hearth, all night. The dog lying on the mat by the door did not know what to make of it. He growled, low and warningly now and then. Towards morning while stars still sparkled over the dark wave of the forest, a faintly wailing cry came from the hut. The dog's ears twitched; his yelping had an eerie note.

Sunlight was flooding the hills, illumining the forest greenery, making crimson and gold of the shoots on the saplings, banishing the mists among the trees, splashing in long shafts on the sward, wet with dew, when Donald Cameron opened the door. His arms were folded round a shawled bundle. He stood for a moment in the doorway, the sunlight beating past him into the hut.

Then he lifted the small body in his arms, kissed it, and held it out to the dawn, his face wrung with emotion.

"All this, yours--your world, my son!" he said.

They were quiet days that followed, days spun off in lengths of sunshine from the looms of Time, with the sleepy warmth of the end of the summer and the musky odours of the forest in them. Mary worked less out of doors when she was about again; her hands were full, cooking, washing and sewing, and looking after the animals and the baby. She sang to him as she worked. All her joy and tenderness were centred in him now.

Donald did not understand the love songs she sang to little Davey. They were always in her own Welsh tongue.

"It's queer talk to make to a bairn," he said one day, smiling grimly, as he listened to her.

"He understands it, I'm sure," she said, smiling too.

Cameron sang himself sometimes when he was at the far end of the clearing. It was always the same thing--the gathering song of the Clan of Donald the Black. While he was ploughing one morning, Mary first heard him singing:

Pibroch o' Donuil Dhu, Pibroch o' Donuil, Wake thy wild voice anew, Summon Clan Conuil.

The words of the grand old slogan echoed among the hills.

When next she heard it, Mary lifted Davey out of his cradle and ran to the door with him, crying happily:

"Listen, now, Davey dear, to thy father singing!"

Cameron had interrupted himself to call to the mare as she turned a furrow: "Whoa, Lass! Whoa now!"

He had gone on with his song as he bent the share to the slope of the hill again.

A hidden root checked his progress; but when he had got it out of the way, and the plough settled again, he swung down hill, giving his voice to the wind heartily:

Leave untended the herd, The flock without shelter; Leave the corpse uninterred, The bride at the altar.

Leave the deer, leave the steer, Leave nets and barges; Come in your fighting gear, Broad swords and t--a--r--ges.

His voice had not much music, but Mary loved the way he sang, with the fierceness and burr, the rumble on the last word, of a chieftain calling his men to battle. It was almost as if he were calling his tribesmen to help him in the battle he had on hand. But he was as shamefaced as a schoolboy about his singing, and it was only when he was some distance from the house, and had forgotten himself in his work, that he gave expression to the deep-seated joy and satisfaction with life that were in him.

Davey was four months old, and the paddock his father had been ploughing the day he was born was green with the blades of its first crop, when Mary asked:

"When will you be going back to the Port, Donald?"

She had taken Cameron's tea to him where he was working among the trees a little way from the clearing. He was resting for a few minutes, sitting on a log with his axe beside him.

She spoke quietly as if it were an ordinary enough question she had asked. Her eyes sought his.

"There's very little flour left, and only a small piece of corned meat."

"I'd made up my mind to go, day after to-morrow," he said.

This journey to Port Southern for stores meant that Mary would have to remain alone in the hills until her husband returned. The cow and calf had to be fed and looked after. They were valuable possessions, and could not be left for fear they might wander away from the clearing and get lost in the scrub. Besides, there were the fowls to feed, and the crop to guard from the shy, bright-eyed, wild creatures, that already, lopping out of the forest at dawn, had nibbled it down in places.

Cameron's eyes lingered on his wife as he answered her question. She stood bareheaded before him, the afternoon sunlight outlining her figure and setting threads of gold in her hair. The coming of the child had made her vaguely dearer to him. This journey had not been mentioned between them since Davey's birth. He had tried to put off making it, ekeing out their dwindling supply of corned meat by shooting the brown wallabys which came out of the trees on the edge of the clearing, surprised at the sight of strange, two-legged and four-legged creatures.

They, and the little grey furry animals that scurried high on the branches of the trees on moonlight nights, made very good food. Donald Cameron had been told that no man need starve in the hills while he had a gun, and there were 'possums in the trees. But neither he nor Mary liked the strong flavour of 'possum flesh, tasting as it did, of the pungent eucalyptus buds and leaves the little creatures lived on. He shot the 'possums for the sake of their skins though, spread and tacked the grey pelts against the wall of the house, and when the sun had dried them, Mary stitched them into a rug. She had lined Davey's cradle with them, too.

Donald made ready for his journey next day. During the morning he took his gun down from the shelf above the door, cleaned it, and called his wife out of doors. He showed her how to use it and made her take aim at a tall tree at the end of the clearing.

"You must have no fires or light in the place after sundown," he said, "and let the grub fires in the stumps die out. Bar the doors at night. And if blacks, or a white man sets foot in the hut y've the gun. And must use it! Don't hesitate. It's the law in this country--self-defence. Every man for himself and a woman is doubly justified. You understand."

"Yes, of course," she answered.

"And I'll leave you the dog," he went on. "He's a good watch and'll give warning if there's any danger about."

"Yes," she said.

When the morning came she went to the track in the wagon with him, carrying Davey. She got down when they reached the track; he kissed her and the child, and turned his back on them silently.

She stood watching the wagon go along the path they had come by from the Port, until its roof dipped out of sight over the crest of the hill; then she went slowly back along the threadlike path among the trees.

A white-winged bird flapped across her path; already fear of the stillness was upon her. When she reached the break in the trees and the clearing was visible, the hut on the brow of the hill had an alien aspect. The air was empty without the sound of Donald's axe clanging in the distance, or of his voice calling Lassie.

She was glad when Davey began to cry fretfully. But she could not sing to him. She tried, and her voice wavered and broke. Every other murmur in the stillness was subdued to listen to it.

The day seemed endless. At last night came. She closed and barred the door of the hut at sunset, glancing towards the shelf where Donald had put his gun. The firelight flickered and gleamed on its polished barrel.

Kneeling by the hearth she tried to pray. But her thoughts were flying in an incoherent flight like scattered birds. Davey slept peacefully on the bed among the grey 'possum furs she had wrapped round him. She watched him sleeping for awhile, and then undressing noiselessly, lay down beside him.

She did not sleep, but lay listening to every sound. The creak of the wood of the house, the panting of the wind about it, far-away sounds among the trees, the shrill cry of a night creature, every stir and rustle, until the pale light of early dawn crept under the door, and she knew that it was day again.

While she was busy in the morning she was unconscious of the world about her, or the flight of the day, but when her work was done and she stood in the doorway at noon, the silence struck her again.

All the long day there was a faint busy hum of insects in the air. It came from the grass, from the trees--the long tasselled branches of downy honey-sweet, white blossoms that hung from them. Yet this ceaseless chirring of insects, the leafy murmuring of the trees, twittering of birds in the brushwood, the murmuring of the wind in distant valleys, the intermittent crooning and drone of the creek--all the faint, sweet, earth voices dropped into the great quiet that brooded over the place as they might have into a mysterious ocean that absorbed and obliterated all sounds. The bright hours were rent by the momentary screeching and chatter of parroquets, as they flew, spreading the red, green and yellow of their breasts against the blue sky. At sunset and dawn there were merry melodious flutings, long, sweet, mating-calls, carollings and bursts of husky, gnomish laughter. Yet the silence remained, hovering and swallowing insatiably every sound.

She gazed at the wilderness of the trees about her. From the hill on which the cow paddock was she could see only the clearing and trees--trees standing in a green and undulating sea in every direction, clothing the hills so that they seemed no more than a dark moss clinging close to their sides. In the distance they took on all the misty shades of grey and blue, or stood purple, steeped in shadows, under a rain cloud. She remembered how she had wondered what their mystery contained for her when she had first seen them on the edge of the plains, and she and Donald had set their faces towards them.

She looked down on the child in her arms, and realised that they had brought him to her; from him, her eyes went to the brown roof of the hut with its back to the hillside, a thread of smoke curling from its brown and grey chimney, and to the stretches of dark, upturned earth before it. They had brought her this too, all the dear homeness of it, and a sense of peace and consolation filled her heart.

To throw off the spell of the silence she decided that she must work again. But what to do? Donald had said no fires were to be lit in the stumps because the smoke might attract wayfarers on the road, or wandering natives to the clearing. She sang to the child, fitfully, softly. Then, remembering the spinning wheel which stood in its muffling cloths against the wall in the hut, she brought it into the sunshine and laid Davey down on a shawl at her feet.

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