The Silver Bough

by Neil M. Gunn

  Chapter Twenty

  Mrs Sidbury showed remarkable tact and Grant wiped a drip of tea from his breast in a quietened manner. “You can leave Donald to me. You need not worry about him,” she said, thrusting the newspaper behind the cake stand.

  “Thank you.” He put his handkerchief back in his pocket with a shaking fist.

  “I’ll talk to Norman and find out exactly what happened that night. If the urn could be found before there’s any more fuss, then it wouldn’t really matter so much.”

  “Not so much,” he said automatically and got up.

  As he went on his way, he experienced a series of involuntary physical spasms. To think that I could have mistaken that black fellow for anything but a journalist! But the thought merely covered a much deeper one: Colonel Mackintosh, Blair . . . ! Archaeological circles everywhere! The British Museum to Egypt! . . . He groaned quietly. The fabulous crock of gold—stolen by the village idiot! . . . Hush! he said to the universe. Be quiet! He shook his stunned head.

  As he went in at the door, he called to Mrs Cameron, and when she appeared asked her if anyone had interviewed her.

  “There was one dark young gentleman—and very nice he was, I must say—who asked me what I knew about the pot of gold, but I said it had nothing to do with me and he better ask you.”

  “You didn’t give him any particulars?”

  “I felt it was not my place to do it.”

  “What questions did he ask you?”

  “He asked me about Foolish Andie and about life in the Highlands. He was very pleasant and gave a little present to Sheena—just to bring him luck, he said, for he was trying to do what he could to make the Highlands better known to the world, for that would help the tourist business, he said. He was so nice that he took a cup of tea.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “I didn’t think of it. Besides, he said he had been talking to yourself a little while before up at the cairn. So I thought you would know all about him and I was just doing my best. He said you were a very clever man and that warmed me to him.”

  When he had told her what had happened, she was very concerned and not a little amazed at the strange ways of the great world. “And he asked me if you were very tired when you came home late that night after Andie had stolen the pot of gold. And I said you were. Shame on him!”

  As he went up the road, he realised how attractive the simple detective work must have been for the journalist who would enjoy it all the more because of the way he had been foiled at the cairn. Norman and his friends had talked of the midnight encounter. The story had reached Kinlochoscar the following morning . . . . He became aware that three tourists were watching his approach. They stood by the side of the road and followed him with their eyes as he passed.

  He saw heads on the western skyline (no doubt keeping the movements of Andie under observation) as he turned off the road towards Mrs Mackenzie’s cottage. Andie was breaking peats at the stack and putting the clods in a wicker basket. He paused in his labours to regard his employer with a face like a mythological joke. Mrs Mackenzie took her visitor into the kitchen.

  Yes, the dark young gentleman had called. “He was very nice, and said that you were the one who would never get Andrew into trouble for stealing the pot of gold. And I said it was very hard on us that it should have happened for you had been so kind.”

  “You told him all about it?”

  “There was little need to tell him, for, as he said, he knew all about it himself. Everyone seems to know about it.” Her tone was mournful. “I told him nothing but what was the truth.”

  He sat in silence.

  “He asked me, too, about Andrew and—and about the past. He said I had had a hard life of it. I am not complaining, I said, though I should feel it if shame came on me now. He said he was sure that would not happen. I hope he is right, for I have tried to do my best.”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs Mackenzie,” he said quietly and hopelessly.

  “I have tried to bear my burden.”

  “You have borne it nobly,” he answered.

  The tears started into her eyes, ran down her strong solemn face. “It’s them watching the house!” she cried in a breaking voice. But she controlled herself and with shut mouth drew breath noisily in through her nostrils. It was not an easy grief.

  He got up and patted her on the shoulder. “When they speak to you don’t tell them anything. Tell them to go to me. I’ll deal with them.” He smiled wanly. She had brought a lump to his throat.

  Before leaving he said lightly that though work would he suspended meantime, they would both remain on the payroll. For the rest she was to answer no questions. All she had to do was to watch Andie and try to find the hidden pot. If she found that she would not only do a service to him but to the whole learned world.

  As he went down the road he felt quietly murderous.

  It seemed to him that Mrs Mackenzie and Mrs Cameron carried on a way of life that was the essence, the traditional inheritance, of long periods of human living. It was the invisible good, the selfless kindness, that had kept the living going. Without it, all systems of thought, ideologies, intellectualisms in a hurry, scientific constructions, all would have collapsed. They collapse anyhow damn them! he thought in spiring anger and cast his eyes up to the ridge on his left. There were a couple of torsos on the skyline. He swung left off the road, making for the cairn. Women like them are simple; poor ignorant creatures, immediately vulnerable to the attack of the massive intellect. Figures of fun. Destroy millions of them so that the massive intellect may flourish—at some future date. Don’t tell me! he said.

  One of the torsos came into full figure and tentatively approached the archaeologist. “You haven’t found the pot yet, sir?”

  “What pot?” asked Grant, tugging one lapel of his jacket with a gesture that increased the eye-flash.

  “The pot of treasure you found in the—the chamber over there.”

  “The chamber pot?”

  The man laughed awkwardly in face of such devastating concentration and Grant stalked on.

  That was the proper way to treat these curiosity-hunters, he decided. That was the kind of pot they understood. Enlivened somewhat, he ignored remnants of humanity still moving around, and contemplated the work which his labour staff had accomplished. They had certainly done a good job in the time. It mightn’t be a bad idea if they spent a few hours of the very early morning finishing off the complete replacement of all the stones so that the cairn would then be restored to its original condition. Meantime the entrance to the passage was satisfactorily masked. Before a somewhat flamboyant lady, whose long teeth were already showing in propitiation, could get her words out, he turned away.

  Five small pebbles met him on the doorstep, telling their dumb tale while waiting for Sheena and tomorrow morning. A little later, he heard some questions that forced him to a forlorn smile, for he had got into the guilty habit of leaving his door ajar the better to hear the bedtime story.

  “Perhaps, Granny, they were the five-stones of a princess?”

  “Indeed and why mightn’t they be? For a princess would have pretty stones if anyone would.”

  “Was she a beautiful princess?”

  “Of course she was. A very beautiful princess.”

  “Are all princesses beautiful?”

  “All the good ones are beautiful whatever. For if you are good then you become beautiful.”

  “And are all bad princesses ugly?”

  “Ugly enough,” answered her granny.

  “Do you think Mr Grant would show me them again?”

  “Well, now, we mustn’t be troubling Mr Grant, for he has many things to think about and many things to do.”

  “Would like to see them.”

  “Hsh, now! I’ll ask him, but not for a day or two.”

  Silence. “Granny?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s the present he’s going to give me?”

  “I�
�ve told you often enough I don’t know. Content yourself, and you’ll see that the present will come.”

  “When will it come?”

  “How do I know? We have just got to wait.”

  “Maybe it will never come.”

  “It will come all right if he said so. Now it is high time you were at your sleep.” She began to hum the Silver Bough as she moved around.

  Later, Grant called her into his sitting room. Having seated her, he said in a friendly voice, “I want to tell you my news.” And he told her of his talk with Mrs Mackenzie. “I’m not blaming anyone but myself, but you can see how awkward it is for me that all this should be appearing in the newspapers? It’s making a fool of me, because if the pot of gold is never found, what are folk to think, especially my friends?”

  “I understand you,” she said with feeling. “Never a word will I say to anyone now.”

  “Tell me this. Did Anna see Norman, the chauffeur at Clachar House? Did anyone tell him not to speak?”

  “I saw him myself. But it was a little late in the morning. And Jimmy Sangster, who has the old Ford car, he had left for Kinlochoscar. And he was one of the two Norman ran into on that night. So maybe he said something. I don’t know, but I could ask him.”

  “It doesn’t matter now. Anna didn’t care about going to see Norman?”

  “No.” Mrs Cameron stirred in the silence. “They were friendly at one time, Norman and Anna, and she didn’t care about going to see him herself.”

  “Ah, I see. I just wondered.”

  The room gradually became charged with feeling.

  “He lives in the cottage by the stables and eats in the Big House, so it would have meant going there, too,” she said.

  “I see.”

  “Maybe you will have heard things about Anna, and maybe what you will have heard is true.”

  “I haven’t heard anything, for I wouldn’t listen,” he answered. “I can see that she has a child and that she is not married. But I think so highly of her that I would let no one gossip about her in my presence.”

  “There are not so many gentlemen left now,” said Mrs Cameron simply.

  But somehow he shied again at the nearness of Anna’s story. “I was talking to Mrs Sidbury this afternoon. Where is her husband?”

  “They say he’s still out East, in India or somewhere. He’s a brigadier in the army.”

  “The regular army?”

  “Yes. A big solid man. He’s been here often enough.”

  “I should say that’s the kind of man she needs.”

  “You would think so,” she said. “All the same, she’s a nice lady. When her heart is touched, her hand will give you anything. She was a sprite of a little one and would dance like a fairy. But I never see her now.”

  “You think she’s not happy in her marriage?”

  “Who can say? She’s that taken up with her brother and the old House.”

  “She seems very concerned about her brother.”

  “She always was. Though it may seem a strange thing to say, I think he was always nearer to her than any man. That sometimes happens in families. When it’s in the blood nothing will get the better of it.”

  He sat quite still, wondering just how far her meaning went, for certain relations, even marriage relations between brother and sister in ancient societies, like Egypt, were known to him. “I’m not sure that I understand,” he said at last.

  “It’s just in the blood,” she said again. “And when a sister is like that, there’s nothing she won’t do for the brother.”

  “And does the brother feel the same?”

  “No, that’s different, very different,” she said.

  He could not follow her, and felt that this old woman had an understanding of a blood relationship working through the sexes that was beyond him; yet he sensed that it belonged to this place and came out of it in a refining that was at once more elusive and more potent than any straightforwardness of a Mediterranean culture, however archaic or introverted. The picture of the sunlit cairn and the two figures in the short cist flashed through his mind, from yesterday unto today, in the one pattern of time, momentarily apprehended. But in the very clarity of this he was somehow lost.

  “Anna was only about eighteen when she went to work in the Big House, just before war broke out. Mrs Sidbury had come home from London and there were some guests and she came and begged for Anna’s help. Anna had been a year in the hotel at Kinlochoscar and was doing well. Maybe she had had her lads, like any other bonny young girl, and Norman, who was driving one of the hotel cars then, managed to run her home many a time. He was a well-doing lad, and och! everything was fine. Anna didn’t want to go to the Big House, but it seemed a poor thing to me if we couldn’t help Mrs Sidbury. Anyway, she went. Then the war broke out, and everyone went away, and Anna herself went into the A.T.S., and soon she was in London.”

  Mrs Cameron paused in her story telling. Her face, with its finely etched lines, held her eyes as a lamp its light. A quiet light, in which all that had been written in her life was read. The eyes lifted to the window, to the light outside, quiet, too, before the coming of the night.

  “In London, she met him again, met Mr Martin. She wrote and told me of it. She was touched that he was so glad to see her and was so kind to her. Because of their uniforms, for he was a captain, it was not much they saw of each other, just once or twice when he was on leave. But after Dunkirk—I don’t know.” She paused again. “It’s difficult for me to tell you, but after a time she came home, and the child she had here was his child.”

  “I saw that,” he said.

  Her lips fell apart and she stared at him.

  He nodded. “It was last night; when you were taking Sheena away after she had seen the quartz pebbles. She looked at me in so still a way that he came into her face.”

  She heaved a big breath and removed her eyes. “I’m glad to hear that,” she said in a curiously final way.

  “Why? Surely no one doubted Anna?” He was watching her narrowly.

  “Who knows what anyone will doubt? They were saying it was a queer time in London then.”

  Some sinister something of the ways of gossip touched him for an appalled moment. “But surely a girl would never blame—would never say it was someone if it wasn’t?”

  “You would think not,” she answered quietly.

  In a moment he saw that his question had been terribly naïve. For a girl to have more than one lover round about the same time was not unknown! Particularly then!

  “Good God!” he said abruptly, and she didn’t stir.

  “But surely you were never in any doubt yourself?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered quietly.

  “And even if it was a queer time as people say—and it was bad enough, heaven knows—why, why would Anna land on Martin if there was any mortal doubt at all?”

  “He would be in the best position likely.”

  “But—but surely there are no people here who think like that?”

  “There are people who think like that everywhere.”

  “Even in Clachar?”

  “Even in Clachar, though I will say that all who knew Anna would never think that—because they couldn’t.”

  “But who in Clachar?”

  “There’s one woman who lives by herself. But I’ll say no more.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She never had a man,” said Mrs Cameron simply.

  He laughed. “That’s about it,” he agreed with some bitterness, and added, after a short silence, “I don’t want to appear curious, Mrs Cameron, but why didn’t Mr Martin stand up to his responsibilities; I mean, why didn’t he acknowledge the child?”

  “That’s just it,” she answered, “that’s the trouble: Anna never told him.”

  He gaped at her. “But surely——” His amazement stopped him. “Why?”

  She looked out the window. “I don’t know,” she answered almost automatically. “He was o
ut in the Far East, she said. And it was bad out there. Seemingly he said he would write to her, but she never heard. And the time went on. Then it was reported he was missing.”

  “Yes, but after he came back?”

  She shook her head. “She wouldn’t say anything.”

  A deep exasperation so got the better of him that he half rose out of his chair. “But why not? And if she wouldn’t say anything surely you would? Didn’t you do anything at all?”

  “I’m not good at the writing.”

  “But—but Martin himself? How was he to know? Shouldn’t you at least have given him a chance?”

  “He knows,” she answered. “And Mrs Sidbury knows.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  He looked at her. Her expression was quiet and strangely rested. He had the feeling of things happening in regions of fate beyond his comprehension, yet not altogether, so that he would have torn the regions apart like so many maddening webs. “Oh well,” he said, “I give it up. All the same, I think it ought to have been put to him straight. But you know your own business, Mrs Cameron.”

  “I thought so, too,” she said, “but she wouldn’t hear of it. She has her pride. She said she would leave me.”

  “I have heard of Highland pride,” he answered, “but this is surely its limit.” He refused her point of view.

  “Do you think so?” she asked.

  He looked at her. Her eyes were on him with so simple, so natural, an expression that they might have been asking him to repeat what he had said for her comfort, as if he were a man wiser than she and she wondered.

  It was too much for him. “I don’t know,” he murmured.

  “I didn’t know either,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. And the time came when you could do nothing.”

  He was silent. Then in a new, objective tone he asked, “Do you think it was Mrs Sidbury?”

  She took a little time, as if going over something in her mind. “No,” she answered.

  “But in view of what you said about her attitude to her brother——?” He waited.

  “I don’t think she would stand in his way, if she thought it was for his good. To be fair to her, I don’t think she would.”