In the paddock beside it was his father's carry-all, and the grey horse beside it was Bessie, old Lass's daughter. A vague heart pain caught his breath. The wind brought the strain of a plaintive hymn. They must be inside, his mother and father, he told himself. He got off his horse and led her into the deep shadow the paling fence threw. A longing to see them seized him. He stood there trying to hear their voices.
After a moment he thought he could hear his mother's voice, frail and sweet, in the singing. He remembered how she had sung to him once, how she had sung over her spinning wheel and the quaint little song it was. The tune of it went flying through his brain with the tap-tap of the spinning wheel. How gay and dear her voice had been. He remembered how he used to love as a child to sit clutching at her dress when she sang like that. And the old man! In that moment of loneliness he forgot the hard speaking and bitterness there had been between him and his father. A wave of tenderness overwhelmed him. Pride and a longing for their love struggled in him with a physical hurt beyond endurance.
He determined to stand there and wait to see them come out of church.
Friday night services after the cattle sales were an institution as new as the church. They had been organised so that christenings, marriages, and some soul-saving into the bargain, might be done while the hill folk were down for the sales. McNab had done his best to move the parson who had accepted the Wirree as his cure of souls, but the young man stuck like a limpet, and there was no telling, the gossips said, how moral and church-going he might not make Wirreeford before he was done with it.
Davey waited and watched.
When the people came filing out of the doorway, he edged along the fence so that he could see their faces as they passed under the flare of an oil-can over the door.
There were not many of them, two or three women and children, and an old man or two. They gathered and were talking about the gateway when Mary Cameron came out.
Davey saw her face under the light for a moment. There was a shine of tears on her cheeks. Her figure, in the grey dress he knew so well, seemed thinner than it used to be. Her little straw bonnet was pressed down close on her head, her shawl drawn over her shoulders. She hurried from the church door without speaking to anyone. He saw her hand flutter out to the post by the door as she felt for the step.
"She's been crying and saying her prayers for me," he told himself with pain and self-reproach.
He waited to see Donald Cameron come from the church and join her.