The Silver Bough Read Free Page B

see,” said Grant, quietened, hardly knowing where to look.
    â€œSo we would be very glad if you could engage him. He is a good worker and very strong.”
    Grant felt the eyes on his face. The woman had talked in the matter-of-fact tone of one used to conducting such business, but there was a patience somewhere, a dumb waiting, that swept all anger away and left him uncomfortably but deeply moved.
    â€œVery well,” he said, nodding. “We’ll see. Yes—I’ll think it over.”
    â€œFive shillings for the whole day, if that’s not too much, though indeed he will be making much more when he is at the stone-breaking.”
    â€œI think it’s too little,” he declared, hitching up his rucksack. “However, I must be going now. Could you tell me the nearest way to the Stone Circle?”
    She was pointing to a footpath that left the road, when her son intervened. The face was upturned directly below them and through the thick protruding lips of the large mouth came sounds like “Gu-gu-gu——”
    As though she perfectly understood, she pointed to certain stones. “Take them, and that should about do.” His gaze followed her pointing finger and saw the stones, then he made for them earnestly, his broad shoulders dipping to the wading shambling gait.
    â€œVery well, then,” said Grant. “I’ll let you know. And thank you very much.”
    â€œWe stay in the first house, on the way in. You can just see it.”
    He followed her hand and saw it.
    â€œYou will find him a good worker,” she said. “And I am always with him myself.”
    â€œI can see he is a good worker,” he answered, smiling and touching his hat. “Good day, and thank you again.”

Chapter Three
    H
e muttered to himself as he walked away and gave small embarrassed laughs. Hang it, it had been awkward! And oh lord, that look in her face, knowing he was wanting to clear out, to make no arrangement, having stumbled on the unmentionable. Her son!
    Life is pure mystery, he said in marvel, thinking of the woman, aware again of the dumb patience, the silent knowledge, her face beside him on the air. Like a guilty schoolboy, he hardly knew how to contain his smile or where to look; so he looked for the path, saw it ahead, joined it by a short cut, followed its zigzag up the slowly rising ground, and emerged on a broad back of land whence Clachar in all its dimensions lay before him to the north.
    It was still and somehow very old, caught by the sunlight and held, as in an ancient almost wearied enchantment. Two of the three islands were flat and green, unexpectedly green, and the sea between them and the land was a deep blue, changing inshore to patches of bottle green and of purple. The stream found the sea through a breadth of hummocky land where houses faced about in many directions, before they spaced themselves out in more orderly fashion as they came up the valley with the road to Kinlochoscar. Not more than about a score of them all told, but from the configuration of the land and the islands of shelter and retreat in the sea, Grant knew that human life had indeed been here since prehistoric times.
    His eyes moved westward from the houses, from the little fields with their green crops, the grazing land dotted with lying cattle, to a belt of trees about a large house; concentrated, with a sudden knitting of eyebrows, on the stone walls, the roofs, the outhouses, the narrow sea inlet like a private harbour; and withdrew over the brows of cliffs, upward towards himself, until they paused where the land flattened, and saw the circle of standing stones with the great stone mound in its midst. His eyebrows grew smooth and his eyes round and steady. “That’s it,” he said softly to himself, as if the stones were waiting for him to come home.
    Forgetting to look where his feet went, he put one of them in a rabbit burrow and might easily have broken his