Fifteen Years After

A boy pushed the bracken and ferny grey and green wattle sprays from before a lichen-grown wooden cross. He was a sturdy youngster, with an eager, sensitive face, and dropped on one knee beside the mound the parted ferns and branches revealed, to read the inscription on the cross.

The path that wound uphill through the trees behind him was an old one, overgrown with mosses. Scraps of bark and sear leaves were matted across it. The weathered, rambling homestead of Ayrmuir was just visible through the trees, and a cornfield waving down the slope of the hill showed golden through a gap in the waving leafage. Donald Cameron had marked the place long before, and said that there, where the wagon had come to a standstill, he must be laid to rest. And it was within memory of the boy that his grandmother, Mary Cameron, had been laid beside him.

A voice floating down the hillside from the house called:

"Dan! Dan!"

Deirdre came down the path towards him, an older, graver Deirdre, with peace in her deep-welled eyes, though an undefinable shadow rested on her face.

"Here you are, dear!" she said. "It'll be time to be getting ready soon. Mick has the horses in—and your father won't like to be kept waiting. There was so much I wanted to say to you, too, before you go up to this big school. It won't be a bit like going to the school down here or doing Latin with me—going to the Grammar School, Dan."

"No, of course, mother."

"I wonder sometimes if I've been wrong to keep you so much with me," she said wistfully. "You had to be told all the terrible old story. I told you myself, because I wanted you to understand."

"Mother!" There were reverence and adoration in his eyes as they rested on her.

"You're sure—sure, you don't feel strange about your mother, Dan?" she asked. "A jury acquitted me, but I know I was right myself. There was nothing else to do."

She was quivering to the shock of startled memories.

"I can't feel that I could have done anything else than I did," she cried passionately, "but I can't forget, Dan. The horror of it all shadows me still—it always will."

The boy slipped his arms through hers and pressed against her.

"Whenever I read in history or a story of people who had to do terrible things for those they loved, I think: 'Like my mother!' But no one I've ever read, or heard of, was like you," he said shyly.

"Dan!"

A smile of melting, eager tenderness suffused her eyes.

As they turned away he looked back at the grave under the trees.

"I thought I'd like to say good-bye to them," he said. "They were pioneers, weren't they, grandfather and grandmother? Makes me feel like being a bit of history myself, to think that my grandfather and grandmother were pioneers. I was saying to myself just now: 'They did so much against such big odds, what a lot I ought to be able to do with everything made easy for me."

"I wish your father and mother were down here, too," he added.

"I never knew my mother, Dan," Deirdre said dreamily. "You know, I've told you all about that. She died when I was born—and it was because I was such a wailing baby, that my father called me Deirdre—Deirdre of the griefs. And he—lies over there in the Island."

"I remember him," the boy said eagerly, his voice hushed. "When I was a little kid, we went, you, and I, and father, to see him, didn't we? And I sort of remember a tall, thin man who had white hair—quite white hair, and was blind; he was always singing, so as you could scarcely hear him, and once he said suddenly when I was on his knee, don't you remember: 'He's got her eyes, Deirdre?'"

"Yes." Deirdre murmured, the pain in her eyes deepening.

"I've wondered ... I've often wondered what he meant, mother. How could he know what my eyes were like. He was blind."

"He meant your grandmother—Mary Cameron, Dan. He used to say she had twilight eyes; and that the light of them pierced his darkness," Deirdre said.

The boy puzzled over that.

"I remember, she said to me once," he said, thoughtfully. "'You ought to be a great man, Dan, because four great nations have gone to the making of you.' I didn't know what she meant at first. Then she told me that my four grandparents were English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh. 'They have quarrelled and fought among themselves, but you are a gathering of them in a new country, Dan,' she said. 'There will be a great future for the nation that comes of you and the boys and girls like you. It will be a nation of pioneers, with all the adventurous, toiling strain of the men and women who came over the sea and conquered the wilderness. You belong to the hunted too, and suffering has taught you.'

"Then she told me about prisons here in the early days, mother, and terrible stories of how people lived in the old country. 'They may talk about your birthstain by and by, Dan,' she said, 'but that will not trouble you, because it was not this country made the stain. This country has been the redeemer and blotted out all those old stains.'"

Deirdre gazing into the eager, wistful face of her son realised that he was unfolding a dream to her. She smiled into his eyes and he back to her with a consciousness of the serene understanding and sympathy between them.

"'You will be a pioneer too, Dan,' grandmother said," the boy continued with a shy reverence, "'a pioneer of paths that will make the world a better, happier place for everybody to live in. You will, because you won't be able to help it. There's the blood of pioneers in you.'"

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XLII
CHAPTER XLIII
CHAPTER XLIV
CHAPTER XLV
CHAPTER XLVI
CHAPTER XLVII
CHAPTER XLVIII