The complexities of human emotion were a mystery and a distress to her. She had the momentary vision of a prison yard, its grim walls, trains of sullen men in grimy grey and yellow clothes, all of the same pattern, and of one who walked among them, wearily, a little uncertainly, singing faintly, as she had often heard him singing on the hill roads. Her eyes went down the slope of the hill to the spot under the light-leafed trees where Donald Cameron had been laid to rest, her heart crying an assurance of loyalty and fidelity to the yoke mate. They had set a seed in the country that would bear fruit in the union of the two in the next room, she knew. All the labour of their pioneering had not been in vain. Donald Cameron had done what he set out to do, though his last days had been darkened with disappointment, the bitter sense of disgrace and the futility of all his long years of toil. But his name would go on, she realised, and his children's children would talk with pride of their grandfather who had come from the old country, a poor man, and had made a great name for himself in the new land. Of the spiritual undertow which bound Deirdre and Davey, she could not think. That was entwined with the subtle, inexplicable currents of her own soul. She had turned her face from them, shut her eyes and ears to the sight and sound of them. She had never allowed herself to recognise their existence even; yet she knew that they were there, rushing on, silently, irresistibly into eternity.
A vision of the prison yard came again, shaping itself slowly, vaguely, and with it a sound of chains, the harsh voices of warders and gaolers. Her thoughts went back to the lovers in the other room.
She folded her hands with a little passionate gesture; the light of her whole soul shone in her eyes.
"Oh God," she whispered breathlessly, "we broke the earth, we sowed the seed. Let theirs be the harvest—the joy of life and the fullness thereof."
CHAPTER XLVIII
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: