Hillsboro People Part 30

"But, Father, I'm the seventh son and sure ye must admit 'tis a lonesome country, all this, that looks so like Donegal and Killarney mountains, an'

is so dead-like, wi' no little people to fill up the big gap between the dead an' the livin', an' the good an' the bad. 'Tis empty, all this valley."

"Timothy Moran, that are my sister's husband's cousin's son, I'm ashamed of ye, an' I bid ye note that 'twas the hand of the Blessed Virgin herself that sent ye out o' Ireland, for if you'd 'a' stayed in th' ould country you'd 'a' been bewitched long before now--not, savin' us all th' blessed saints, that I belave in any of your nonsense!"

Timothy smiled at this with an innocent malice. "You see how 'tis, Father.

You cannot kape yourself from belivin' in thim and you a man o' G.o.d."

"I do _not_, Timothy! Tis but a way of speech that I learned in my childhood. An' 'tis lucky for you that I have a knowledge of thim, for any other priest would have driven you out of the parish, you and your stubborn pipes that do naught but play faery music. An' you a man of forty in a trifle of six days, and no wife an' childer to keep you from foolish notions. If ye had, now, you could be livin' in the proper tenant's house for the Wilc.o.x's man, instead of Michael O'Donnell, who has no business livin' up here on the hill so far from his work that he can come home but once a week to look after his poor motherless child. I will say for you, Tim, that you do your duty by that bit of a slip of a girl baby, keepin'

her so neat and clean an' all, times when Mike's not here."

Timothy did not raise his drooping head at this praise, and something about his att.i.tude struck sharp across the priest's trained observation.

The big, shambling, red-headed man looked like a guilty child. There was a moment's silence, while Father Delancey speculated, and then his experienced instinct sped him to the bull's-eye. "Timothy Moran, you're not putting your foolish notions in the head of that innocent child o'

G.o.d, Moira O'Donnell, are you?"

The red head sank lower.

"Answer me, man! Are ye fillin' her mind with your sidhe[A] and your red-hatted little people an' your stories of 'gentle places' an' the leprechaun?"

[Footnote A: p.r.o.nounced _shee_ (as in Banshee), the fairies.]

Timothy arose suddenly and flung his long arms abroad in a gesture of revolt. "I am that, Father Delancey, 'tis th' only comfort of my life, livin' it, as I do, in a dead country--a valley where folks have lived and died for two hundred years such lumps of clay that they niver had wan man sharp enough to see the counts in between heaven and earth." He lapsed again into his listless position on the Round Stone. "But ye needn't be a-fearin' for her soul, Father--her wid th' black hair an' the big gray eyes like wan that cud see thim if she wud! She's as dead a lump as anny of th' rest--as thim meat-eatin' Protestants, the Wilc.o.xes, heaven save the kindly bodies, for they've no souls at all, at all." From the stone he picked up a curiously shaped willow whistle with white lines carved on it in an odd criss-cross pattern. "To-day's her seventh birthday, an' I showed her how to make the cruachan whistle, an' when I'd finished she blew on it a loud note that wud ha' wakened the sidhe for miles around in Donegal. An' then she looked at me as dumb as a fish, her big gray eyes blank as a plowed field wid nothin' sown in it. She niver has a word to show that she _hears_ me, even, when I tell o' the gentle people." He added in a whisper to himself, "But maybe she's only waiting."

"'Tis the Virgin protectin' her from yer foolishness, Tim," returned the priest, rising with a relieved air. "She'll soon be goin' to district school along with all the other hard-headed little Yankees, and then your tales can't give her notions." With which triumphant meditation he walked briskly away, leaving Timothy to sit alone with his pipes under the maple-tree, flaming with a still heat of burning autumn red, like a faery fire.

His head sank heavily in his hands as his heart grew intolerably sad with the lack he felt in all the world, most of all in himself. He had often tried to tell himself what made the world so dully repellant, but he never could get beyond, "'Tis as though I was aslape an' yet not quite aslape--just half wakin', an' somethin' lovely is goin' on in the next room, an' I can't wake up to see what 'tis. The trouble's with th' people.

They're all _dead_ aslape here, an' there's n.o.body to wake me up."

"Piper Tim! Piper Tim!" was breathed close to his ear. He sprang up, with wide, startled eyes.

"Piper Tim," said the little girl gravely, "_I've seen them_."

The man stared at her in a breathless silence.

"A little wee woman with a red hat and kerchief around her neck, an' she said, 'Go straight to Piper Tim an' tell him to play "The Call o' the Sidhe" as he sits on the Round Stone, for this is th' day of the Cruachan Whistle.'"

The child put out her hand, and drew him to the pipes, still keeping her deep eyes fixed on him, "Play, Piper Tim, an' shut your eyes an' I'll see what you should see an' tell you what 'tis."

The first notes were quavering as the man's big frame shook, but the little hands across his eyes seemed to steady him, and the final flourish was like a call of triumph. In the silence which followed the child spoke in her high little treble with a grave elation. "They're here, Piper Tim, all the river fog in the valley is full of them, dancin' and singin' so gay-like to cheer up the poor hills. An' whist! Here they come up the road, troops and troops of them, all so bright in the ferlie green; an'

sure," with a little catch of merriment, "sure, they've no toes on their feet at all! They've danced them all away. And now, Piper Tim, hold your breath, for they'll be after comin' by, but all so still, so still! so you won't hear them and maybe think to open your eyes and see them--for that 'ud mean--s.h.!.+ s.h.!.+ Piper Tim, don't stir! _They're here! They're here_!"

His eyes ached with the pressure of the strong little hands across them, his ears ached with straining them into the silence which lay about them.

His heart beat fast with hope and then with certainty. Yes, it was no longer the thin, dead silence of the New England woods he knew so unhappily well. It was the still that comes with activity suspended. It was like the quivering quiet of a dancer, suddenly stricken motionless to listen for the sound of intruding footsteps. There was not the faintest sound, but the silence was full of that rich consciousness of life which marks the first awakening of a profound sleeper.

The hands were withdrawn from before his eyes, but he did not open them.

He reached blindly for his pipes, and played "The Song of Angus to the Stars," tears of joy running from between his closed eyelids, to recognize in his own music the quality he had been starving for; the sense of the futile, poignant beauty, of the lovely and harmless tragedy, of the sweet, moving, gay sad meaning of things.

When he looked about him he was quite alone. Moira was gone, and the road lay white and still before him.

II

He did not see her all the next day, although he went down to the little house to do the household tasks his big hands performed with so curious a skill. He wished to see her and clear his mind of a weight which the morning's light had put upon him; but she did not come in answer to his call. The little house seemed full of her in its apparent emptiness, and several times he had swung sharply about, feeling her back of him, but always the room had turned a blank face.

That evening he was returning late from the upland pastures where he had been searching vainly for a lost cow. His path lay through a thick copse of maple saplings where it was quite dark. As he emerged into a stony pasture, he saw the child standing still in the center of a ring of fern, brown and crumpled by the early frosts. When he appeared she held him motionless by the sudden pa.s.sion of her gestured appeal for silence. She did not stir after this, her hands laid along her cheeks as though to hold her head quite still, her eyes directed with a smiling eagerness toward a huge rock, looming dimly in the transparent twilight. The silence was oppressive. Timothy's blood ran chill as the expectancy grew more and more strained in the child's eyes. He did not dare look at the rock himself.

He stared only at the elfin creature before him, and when her hands were finally flung out in a gesture of welcoming ardor, he broke the unearthly silence by crying out loud in a rapid whirl, "G.o.d save us. Christ save us!

The Holy Virgin guard us! St. Patrick defend us! St. Columba--"

The little girl burst into a storm of tears and sank down on the ferns.

Timothy stopped his hysterical litany and ran toward her. "Don't you come a-near me, bad Piper Tim!" she sobbed. "You don't dare step on the magic circle anyhow. It 'ud burn your wicked foot!"

The big farm laborer drew back in a terror he instantly disguised. "I was just lookin' for you, Moira aroon," he said propitiatingly. "I was wis.h.i.+n'

to tell you--to tell you--why, that it's all pretend. There aren't any little people really, you know. Tis just old Tim's nonsense." He s.h.i.+vered at the blasphemy and crossed himself. "Or, if there are any, 'tis only in th' ould country." The child rose to her feet, eying him strangely, her eyes like deep pools.

He went on conscientiously, with a mental eye on Father Delancey, "An' if there _are_ any, which they aren't, they're bad things for Christians to have aught to do with, because they know neither right nor wrong, and 'tisn't fit that mortals should iver be light an' gay wi' that burden gone! So they're bad for us--an' we shouldn't think of thim, and just cross ourselves wheniver--"

The unspoken protest in the child's face was grown so pa.s.sionate that he interrupted himself to answer it in a burst of sympathy. "Och, Moira, acushla, sure an' I know how 'tis to ye--" And then with a reaction to virtue, he said sternly, "An' if they're not bad, why do they go when you call on the blessed saints?"

At this the child's face twisted again for tears. "Och, bad Piper Tim, to scare them away from me! It's not that they're bad--only that good's too heavy for them. They're such _little_ people! It's too heavy! It's too heavy." She ran away through the dusk, sobbing and calling this over her shoulder reproachfully.

In the weeks which followed, old Timothy Moran, as he was called, could scarcely complain that he was but half awake. He seemed to be making up for the dull apathy of his long exile by the storminess of his days and nights. Mrs. Wilc.o.x, bustling housewife, hastening about the kitchen, engaged in some late evening task, was moved to a sudden burst of hysterical tears, by the faint sound of Tim's pipes, dropping down to her from the Round Stone in a whirling roulade of ever-ascending merriness.

"You, Ralph!" she cried angrily through her sobs, to her oldest boy, stricken open-mouthed and silent by his mother's amazing outburst, "you, Ralph, run up to the Round Stone and tell the Irishman to stop playing that jig over and over. I'm that tired to-night it drives me wild with nerves!" As she brushed away the tears she said fretfully, "My sakes!

When my liver gets to tormenting me so I have the megrims like a girl, it's time to do something."

The boy came back to say that Old Tim had stopped playing "the jig" before he reached him, and was lying sobbing on the stone.

Moira was as approachable as a barn swallow, swooping into the house for a mouthful of food and off again to the sky apparently. Timothy's child-heart was guiltily heavy within him, for all his excitement, and when he finally caught her in the pine woods he spoke briefly and firmly, almost like Father Delancey himself. "Moira, Tim was a big fool to tell you lies. There aren't really any little people. Tis only a way of talkin'-like, to say how lovely the woods and stars an' all are."

"Why do you sit on the Round Stone evenings?" asked Moira defiantly.

"That's just it! I pretend all kind o' things, but it's really because the moon is like gold, and the white fog comes up in puffs like incense in the church, an' the valley's all bright wi' lamps like the sky wi' stars.

That's all anybody means by fairies--just how lovely things are if we can but open our eyes to see thim, an' take time from th' ugly business o'

livin' to hear thim, and get a place quiet enough to half see what everything means. I didn't know before, in Ireland, but now I'm like one born again to the ferie country, and now I think I know. There aren't any Little People really but just in your own head--"

Moira shook off his hand and faced him, laughing mockingly, her dark eyes wide with an elfin merriment. "Are there not, Piper Tim? Are there not?

Listen! You'll see!" She held up a tiny forefinger to the great man towering above her. As he looked down on her, so pixy-like in the twilight of the pines, he felt his flesh creep. She seemed to be waiting for something infinitely comic which yet should startle her. She was poised, half turned as though for flight, yet hung so, without a quiver in an endless listening pause. The man tried in vain to remember the name of a single saint, so held was he by the breathless expectancy in the eyes of the little hobgoblin. His nerves gave way with a loud snap when she suddenly leaped up at him with snapping fingers and some whispered, half-heard exclamation of "_Now! Now_!" and turning he plunged down the hill in panic-stricken flight. And the next day Father Delancey took her down to the valley to begin her schooling.

III

Upon her return she had adopted the att.i.tude which she never changed during all the years until Timothy went away. She would not speak openly, nor allow Tim to discuss "their" existence. "They mind their business and we should mind ours," she said, eying him hard; but she made his world over for him. Every spring she came back from the valley school and every autumn she went away; and the months in between were golden. After Timothy's work was done in the evenings, he left the hot kitchen, redolent of food and fire and kindly human life, took his pipes up on the Round Stone and played one after another of the songs of the sidhe, until the child's white face shone suddenly from the dusk.