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<h2>CHAPTER XXXIX</h2> 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!" <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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