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Pioneers, The

<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2> In ten years, Cameron's had become the biggest clearing in the hills, as it was the oldest. Many others had been made and were scattered throughout the lower ranges overlooking the Wirree plains, though at great distances apart; ten, twelve and sometimes twenty miles lying between neighbouring homesteads. The hut that had been Donald and Mary Cameron's first home had been broadened by the addition of several extra rooms. Floors had been put down and a wide verandah spread out from them. Every room had a window with four small glass panes. The window-sills, verandah posts and doors had been painted green, and the whole of the house whitewashed. Its bark roof had given place to a covering of plum-coloured slates; there was even a coin or two of grey and golden lichen on them, and the autumn and spring rains drummed merrily on the iron roof of the verandah. Creepers climbed around the stone chimney and the verandah; clematis showered starry white blossom over the roof and about the verandah post. A little garden, marked-off from the long green fields of spring wheat by a fence of sharp-toothed palings, was filled with bright flowers—English marigolds, scarlet geraniums, pink, yellow and blue larkspurs—and all manner of sweet-smelling herbs—sage, mint, marjoram and lemon thyme. The narrow, beaten paths that ran from the verandah to the gate and round the house were bordered with rosemary. And in the summer a long line of hollyhocks, pink, white and red, and red and white, waved, tall and straight, at one side of the house. The edge of the forest had been distanced so far on every side of the clearing, except one, that the trunks of the trees showed in dim outlines against it, the misty, drifting leafage swaying over and across them. Only on the side on which the track climbed uphill from the road, the trees still pressed against the paddock railings. A long white gate in the fence where the road stopped bore the name Donald Cameron had given his place—"Ayrmuir." It was the name of the estate he had worked on in Scotland when he was a lad. It gave him no end of satisfaction to realise that he was the master of "Ayrmuir," and that his acres were broader than those of the "Ayrmuir" in the old country; not only broader, but his to do what he liked with—his property, unencumbered by mortgage or entail. On the cleared hillsides about the house, crops of wheat, barley and rye had been sown. An orchard climbed the slope on the left. Behind the old barn and the stables were a row of haystacks. The cowsheds and milking yards were a little further away. Round the haystacks and about the barn a score of the buff and buttermilk-coloured progeny of Mother Bunch, a few speckled chickens, black and white pullets, and miscellaneous breeds of red-feathered, and long-legged, yellow fowls, scratched and pecked industriously. Donald Cameron farmed his land in the careful fashion of the Lowland Scots. There was perhaps here and there a crooked line in his fields and a rick awry behind the barns. But all was neatness and order, from the beehives which stood with their pointed straw bonnets beneath the apple trees, to the cowsheds, where newly-cut bracken was laid down every day or two for the cows to stand in when they were milked. There was no filth or squelching morass in his cow-yards. The pigs wandered over the hills rooting under the tender grass. Scarcely a straw was allowed to stray between the back of the house and barns. In the feed-room, the harness-room, in every shed and yard, the meticulous precision and passion for order which characterised all that Donald Cameron did, was maintained. There were changes indoors as well as out. A long straight kitchen, with a bricked floor and small window looking out on to the yard, had been added to the original home. On the east side, two rooms had been built, and a small limewashed shed behind the kitchen served for a dairy. In it, on broad low shelves against the wall, the rows of milk pans, with milk setting in them, were ranged; a small window in the back wall framed a square of blue sky. When Mrs. Cameron was making butter, the sound of the milk in the churn, the rumble and splash of the curded cream, could be heard in the yard. The sweet smell of the new butter and buttermilk hung about the kitchen door. Ten years of indefatigable energy, of clearing land, breaking soil, raising crops and rearing cattle, doing battle with the wilderness, overcoming all the hardships and odds that a pioneer has to struggle against, had left their mark on Donald Cameron. Every line in his face was ploughed deep. His expression, gloomy and taciturn as of old, masked an internal concentration, the bending of all faculties to the one end that occupied him. Always a man of few words, as the farm grew and its operations increased, he became more and more silent, talking only when it was necessary and seldom for the sake of companionship or mere social intercourse. His mind was always busy with the movements of cattle, branding, mustering, breeding, buying and selling prices, possibilities of the market. He worked insatiably. He was reminded of the flight of time only by the growth of his son—a gawky, long-limbed boy. As soon as he could walk Davey had taken his share in the work of the homestead, rounding up cows in the early morning, feeding fowls, hunting for eggs in the ripening crops, scaring birds from the ploughed land when seed was in, and cutting ferns for the cowsheds and stables. His father was little more than a dour taskmaster to the boy. Davey had no memory of hearing him sing the gathering song of the Clan of Donald the Black. His mother had taught him to read and count as she sat with her spinning wheel in the little garden in front of the house, or stitching by the fire indoors on winter evenings. Davey had to sit near her and spell out the words slowly from the Bible or the only other book she had, a shabby little red history. Sometimes when he was tired of reading, or the click and purr of her wheel set her mind wandering, she told him stories of the country over the sea where she was born. Davey knew that the song she sang sometimes when she was spinning was a song a fairy had taught a Welshwoman long ago so that her spinning would go well and quickly. She told him stories of the tylwyth teg—the little brown Welsh fairies. There was one he was never tired of hearing. "Tell me about the farmer's boy who married the fairy, mother," he would say eagerly. And she would tell him the story she had heard when she was a child. "Once upon a time," she would say, "ever so long ago, there was a farmer's boy who minded his father's sheep on a wild, lonely mountain side. Not a mountain side like any we see in this country, Davey dear, but bare and dark, with great rocks on it. And one day, when he was all alone up there, he saw a girl looking at him from round a rock. Her hair was so dark that it seemed part of the rock, and her face was like one of the little flowers that grow on the mountain side. But he knew that it was not a flower's face, because there were eyes in it, bright, dark eyes—and a mouth on it ... a little, red mouth with tiny, white teeth behind it. They played on the mountain together for a long time and sometimes she helped him to drive his sheep. After a while they got so fond of each other that the boy asked her to go home with him to his father's house, and he told his father that he wanted to marry her. "That night a lot of little men, riding on grey horses, came down from the mountain on a path of moonlight and clattered into the farmyard of the farmer of Ystrad. The smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat ... they all wore red coats, and rode grey horses. Did I say that they all rode grey horses, Davey?" "Yes, mother," Davey breathed. She had this irritating little way of going back a word or two on her story if a thread caught on her wheel. "Well—" she began again, and, as likely as not, her mind taken up with the tangled thread, would add: "Where was I, Davey?" And Davey, all impatience for her to go on with the story, though he could have almost told it himself, would say: "And the smallest and fattest of the men, in a red coat—" "Oh, yes!" Mary started again: "Strode into the kitchen and pinched the farmer's ear, and said that he was Penelop's father ... the girl's name was Penelop ... and that he would let her marry the farmer's son, and give her a dowry of health, wealth and happiness, on condition that nobody ever touched her with a piece of iron. If anybody put a piece of iron on her. Penelop's father said, she would fly back to the mountain and her own people, and never more sit by her husband's hearth and churn or spin for him. So the farmer's boy married Penelop and very happily they lived together. Everything on the farm prospered because of the fairy wife, though she wore a red petticoat and was like any other woman to look at, only more beautiful, and always busy and merry. She made fine soup and cheese, and her spinning was always good, and everybody was very fond of her. Then one day when her husband wanted to go to a fair, she ran into the fields to help him to catch his pony. And while he was throwing the bridle, the iron struck her arm—and that minute she vanished into the air before his eyes." She paused for Davey's exclamation of wonderment; and then continued: "Though he wandered all over the mountain calling her, Penelop never came back to her husband or the two little children she had left with him. But one very cold night in the winter, he wakened out of his sleep to hear her saying outside in the wind and rain: "Lest my son should find it cold, Place on him his father's coat. Lest the fair one find it cold, Place on her my petticoat." Mary sang the words to a quaint little air of her own making, while Davey listened, big-eyed and awe-stricken. "When the children grew up they had dark hair and bright, sparkling eyes like their mother," she would conclude, smiling at him. "And when they had children they were like them, too, so that people who came from the valley where the farmer's boy had married the fairy were always known by their looks, and they were called Pellings, or the children of Penelop, because it was said they had fairy blood in their veins." Davey had always a thousand questions to ask. He liked to brood over the story; but he learnt more than fairy tales from his mother's memories of the old land. Her mind was beginning to be occupied with thoughts of his future. She and her husband were simple folk. Cameron could barely read and write, and what little knowledge Mary possessed she had already passed on to Davey. She knew what Donald Cameron's ambitions were, and after ten years of life with him had little doubt as to their achievement. The position that it would put Davey in had begun to be a matter of concern to her. She was turning over in her mind her plans for his getting a good education, as she sat spinning beside the fireplace in the kitchen one evening, when her husband said suddenly: "I wish to goodness you'd put that clacking thing away—have done with it now!" "My wheel?" she asked, mild surprise in her eyes. "Aye," he said impatiently. He was sitting in his chair on the other side of the hearth. "Don't you realise, woman, it's not the thing for Mrs. Cameron of Ayrmuir to be doing. Don't you realise y're a person of importance now. The lady of the countryside, if it comes to that, and for you to sit there, tapping and clacking that thing, is as good as telling everybody y' were a wench had to twist up wool for a living a few years ago." She stared at him. He shifted his seat uneasily. "I've been thinking," he continued, "it's no good having made the name and the money unless we live up to it. You must get a girl to help y' with the work of the house, and we'll not sit in here any more in the evening, but in the front room, and have our meals there." "But the new carpet that's laid down ... and the new furniture, Donald," she exclaimed. "They're not there to be looked at, are they?" he asked. "Last spring sales they were calling me 'Laird of Ayrmuir.' I cleared near on a thousand pounds. "I'm not wanting to be flash and throw away money," he added hastily. "But that's to show you, we can, and are going to live, something the way they did at Ayrmuir in the old country." She rose and lifted the spinning wheel from its place by the fire. It was like putting an old and tried friend from her. But when she sat down on her chair opposite Donald Cameron again there was a new steady light in her eyes. "You'll be a rich man indeed, Donald, if you go on as you are doing," she said. "Aye." He gazed before him, smoking thoughtfully. "And your son will be a rich man after you?" "Aye." "Well, you must have him properly educated for the position he is going to have." She came steadily to her point. "All your money won't be any use to him, it will only make him ashamed to go where the money could take him unless he has got the education to hold his own." Her eyes drew his from their contemplation of the fireplace and the falling embers. "You've the book learning, why can't you give it to him?" he said. "I have given him as much as I can," she sighed, "but it's little enough. I'm not such a fine scholar as you think, Donald. There are things in those books that you brought from the Port—in the sale lot with the arm-chair and the fire-irons—that I cannot make head nor tail of, though the fore-bits I've read say that: 'A knowledge of the contents is essential to a liberal education.'" She pronounced the words slowly and carefully; Donald Cameron frowned. He did not exactly know what she was driving at, but those words sounded important. "I've been thinking," Mary went on quickly, "there's a good many people about here now, and they ought to be getting their children educated too. There's the Morrisons, Mackays, Rosses and O'Brians. And there's a child at the new shanty on the top of the track, Mrs. Ross was telling me, last time she was here. Between the lot of us we ought to be able to put up a school and get a teacher. A barn on the road would do for a school. In other parts of the country the people are getting up schools. The newspaper you brought from Port Southern last sales said that. Why should not we?" "And where will you get y'r teacher," Cameron asked grimly. Her colour rose. "I know what you mean," she said. "The only sort of men who could and would think it worth while giving school to children are the convicts and ticket-of-leave men; but there are decent men among them. They seem to be doing very well in other places. I see that mothers are going to the school-room and sitting there, doing their sewing, so that they can be sure the children are learning no harm with their lessons. We could not do that every day here, but now and then one of us mothers could go to see that the school was going on well. Anyway, the children must be taught and we've got to make the best bargain we can." "I'll think of what you say," her husband replied. "You'll be going to the Clearwater River to-morrow, and be away a day or two, won't you?" she asked. "I might take the cart and Lass and go and see what Mrs. Ross and Martha Morrison and Mrs. Mackay think of getting a school." "If people about are willing," Donald Cameron said, brooding over his pipe, "it'd be a good thing for all of us—a school. The difficulty I can see will be the teacher. Can we get one? There's high wages for stockmen and drovers. But maybe there'll be just some stranded young fool glad of the job and the chance of makin' a little money without soiling his hands. You could pick them up by the score in Melbourne, but here—" He shook his head. "You might ask a few questions in the Port when you're there, if there is any likely young man," she said. "Aye, I might," he replied. There was an amused gleam in his eyes as he looked up at her. "You seem to have thought a good deal on this matter before using y're tongue." "Is it not a good way?" she asked, the smile in her eyes, too. "Aye," he admitted grudgingly, "a very good way. And you do not mean the grass to grow under y're feet, Mary?" "No, indeed!" She put her work-basket away, took the lighted candle from the table and went to her room. The loose star of the candle flickered a moment in the gloom and then was extinguished. But Donald Cameron, left alone before the fire, realised that the subject of Davey's schooling had been disposed of. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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