For a long time he had sat staring while she knelt beside him, crying, murmuring eagerly and tenderly, trying to soothe and to comfort him. But from that time the dimming and obliterating of the whole world had begun for him.
The heavy darkness had passed. It was not all night yet, but a misty twilight. He had forbidden her to speak of it, so that Davey did not know. Conal and Steve had guessed, but Davey's mind, busy with its own problems, was slower to realise what was going on about him. It had roused every loyal and fighting instinct in him to see his mother with that look of suffering on her face; his father in the way of becoming McNab's prey—losing all that he had gained through years of toil and harsh integrity by falling into the pigs' trough McNab had set for him.
It was that stern righteousness of his, his sober, stolid virtue, which had given Cameron the place in the respect and grudging homage of the countryside that his wealth and property alone would not have won for him; they had cloaked even his meanness with a sombre dignity and brought him the half-jesting title of the Laird of Ayrmuir.
Davey led his horse into the paddock beside the church where the vehicles which had brought the hill folk to the township were standing. The horses out of the shafts, their heavy harness still on their backs, were feeding, tethered to the fence, or to the wheels of the carts and buggies.
He stood beside the high, old-fashioned buggy that had brought Mary and Donald Cameron to Wirreeford. He rubbed his hand along Bessie's long coffin-box of a nose, and told her on a drifting stream of thought that he had decided to go home, to ask his father to forgive him, and that he meant to try to get on with him again. Her attitude of attention and affection comforted him.
The people began to come from the church. They stood in groups by the doorway talking to each other. One or two men came into the paddock to harness-up for the home journey. Davey put the mare into her shafts. He was fastening the traces when Mary Cameron came round the back of the buggy. A catch of her breath told that she had seen him.
"Davey!" she cried.
He saw her face, the light of her eyes.
"Mother!" he sobbed.
His arms went round her, and his face with the rough beard—such a man's face it had become since it last brushed her's—was crushed against her cheek.