Читать книгу The Pioneers - Katharine Susannah Prichard - Страница 4

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A few months later Mary Cameron's voice, as she sang lullabies to her baby, mingled with the forest murmur and the sounds that came from the clearing—the lowing of the cow, the clucking and cackle of fowls, the clang of Donald's axe as he ring-barked trees near the house.

A one-roomed hut, built of long, rough-barked saplings, ranged one above the other, and thatched with coarse reddish-brown bark, laid on in slabs, it stood on the brow of the hill not far from the wagon's first resting place. Its two doors, set opposite each other, opened, one towards the back hills and the other towards the creek and the cleared land on which a stubble of stumps still stood. The walls of the hut, inside, were plastered with the clayey hill soil which Mary had rammed into crevices between the saplings when daylight had at first showed in thin shining streaks, and the mountain breezes had crept chilly through them in the early mornings. She had made the floor of beaten clay too, and had gathered from the creek bed the grey and brown stones which Donald had built into the hearth and chimney with seams of lime and fine white sand that he had brought from the Port.

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.