Mrs. Cameron's exclamation was in the soft tongue of the spinning song she sang when she sat with her wheel in the garden. Deirdre did not know the words, but she understood their distress and the little gesture that went with them.
CHAPTER XXV
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.