Donald Cameron was made of the stuff that gives confidence and
appreciation grudgingly. He was obsessed by the idea that no one could
do anything as well as he could. He could only satisfy his own reckless
desire to be up and doing by girding at all that was being done for him.
If Davey had been less efficient a stop-gap it would have pleased him
better. He would have liked to see mistakes made which would assure him
that no one but himself could run Ayrmuir as it ought to be run. But
Davey had done very well in his place. He had brought off one bargain
with a smartness that his father vaguely resented, and Davey was
chockful of boyish pride over.
There had been chafings and crossings of will, two or three times. Mary
Cameron trembled when she heard them. Anxious fears fluttered and filled
her with foreboding every time her husband's irritability at his chained
helplessness and crippling pain was directed at Davey. The boy's short
answers with an underlying contempt in them fanned his father's
smouldering wrath.
"Davey, dear," she had said once, after there had been high words
between them, "try and be a little more patient with your father. It's
hard on him having to sit in a chair like this after the active life
he's led. He's fretting his heart out to be up and doing things, and
seeing them done the way he likes."
"There's no pleasing him, mother," Davey said, shaking her arms from
him.
She knew he was right, but Davey was almost as sullen and surly as his
father these days. Donald Cameron kept him going all day. The boy was
dog-weary when he came into the house at nightfall; then there were
entries to make and book-keeping to do, accounts of sales and movements
of stock to render, and nothing but carping and fault-finding for his
pains.
At one time, in the evenings he used to take out his books and read
intently for hours, sprawling over the table, till the candle flickered
down and his mother said softly: "Won't you go to bed now, dear?"
knowing that late hours were never an excuse, in Donald Cameron's eyes,
for failing to be out after the cows before the sun was up. But now he
lay in his chair, his long legs stretched out before him, after he had
given his father an account of the day's work, and got from him
directions for the next; and there was a sullen, brooding look on his
face, an expression in his eyes that it hurt her to see.
Davey's face had changed so within the last few months. It was a
revelation to her. There was a firmness of line about his chin and upper
lip that caused her to glance from him to his father. Little of the boy
was left in Davey now, she realised. What there was lay in his eyes and
about his mouth. It was as if the child in him were dying hard.
Something had hurt him bitterly, she surmised, and she wondered whether
it was bitter thinking, hard riding, or the life he was leading with
strange, rough men that had brought those creases about his nose, given
his face its dour manliness.
This man-Davey was a strange to her. Her heart yearned over him, as
though her baby had been snatched from her arms. She wanted to know him,
to understand his ways of thinking. But he had a new and strange manner
with her. His mind was shut. He kissed her in a perfunctory fashion, and
when she put her arms round him, he stiffened under them. In sympathetic
sensitive fashion she knew that he was guarding the kingdom of himself
against her. She had some subtle warning that he was afraid of her love,
of her tenderness, which, with its fine edge, might prize open the inner
shell of his being and discover the trouble and tremulous fury of
emotion which lay hidden within.
She was afraid of offending him, afraid of approaching him with her
affection and sympathy, afraid not to respect the reserve that he had
put between them. Yet her anxiety tormenting her, one day she said:
"Tell me what is troubling you, Davey? Tell me. It is breaking my heart
to see you like this."
"There's nothing to tell, mother," he replied sharply.
For a long time he had not been coming home till late. The silence of
the long evenings when she sat and sewed by the fire and Donald Cameron
glowered into it, smoking, had been unbroken. Sometimes he had asked
where Davey was. Then she stilled the tremors in her voice to say
quietly that she thought he was with the Rosses or at Mrs. Hegarty's for
the dancing.