Hillsboro People Part 31

Then their entertainment varied. Sometimes they sat and watched the white river fog rise toward them, translucent and distant at first, and then blowing upon them in gusty, impalpable billows. Timothy's tongue was loosened by the understanding in the little girl's eyes and he poured out to her the wise foolishness of his inconsequent and profound faery lore.

He told her what was in the fog for him, the souls of mountain people long dead, who came back to their home heights thus. He related long tales of the doings of the leprechaun, with lovely, irrelevant episodes, and told her what he thought was their meaning.

Some nights the moon rode high and the air was clear and those were not the times for words--only for sitting quite still and playing every air in all the world on the pipes. Moira lay beside him, her strange, wide eyes fixed intently on the road and the shadows until she peopled them almost visibly to the musician with the folk of his melodies--with Angus, the beautiful and strong, with Maive, the sad, the happy, with Congal of the frightful Vision of War, and Mananan, strange wanderer on these mountain tops.

Sometimes it rained, the long steady downpour of summer nights, and they sat on the steps of Michael O'Donnell's little cabin, Timothy's pipes sounding sweet and shrill against the deep note of the rus.h.i.+ng rain. This was the time of the wildest stories, when sheltering walls were close about them; of newly wed wives carried off by the fairies to live happy always, always without a moment of pain, and then to perish utterly on the Day of Judgment, like a last year's b.u.t.terfly, for souls cannot live without sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by the sidhe because a c.o.c.k was not killed on the night of their birth, and of the mystic meaning of vicarious sacrifice; of people who had lain down to sleep unaware in a fairy ring and were foolish ever afterward--that is, as people say, foolish, but really wise, for they saw how things are; of homes built unknowingly across a fairy path where the sidhe take their journeys, and how ill luck followed the inhabitants until they moved, and of the strange penalties for living out of harmony with the little-known currents of the soul's life; of how blind men see more than others; of how a fool is one whose mind is so cleared of all futile commonplace traffic that it reflects untroubled and serene the stars and their courses; of how wisdom is folly, and life, death. All these things and many more did Timothy say in words and play in music on his pipes, and to all of them Moira gave her wide comprehending silence.

The best of all was on evenings when the stars came out first, and then as the two sat watching them from the Round Stone they suddenly began to pale, and the moon flashed into sight, rising swiftly over the mountain Moira called "The Hill o' Delights," because it was from a wide, white door in it that the rus.h.i.+ng, light-footed little people came out every evening when the twilight fell and the harsh endeavor of human life was stilled to peace. There was neither talk nor music on those evenings, but a silence full, like the lovely world about them, of unsaid, quivering joy. Sometimes Timothy would turn after such a long time of deep and cheering mutual knowledge of how fair were all things, and find Moira slipped away from beside him; but so impalpable was the companions.h.i.+p she gave him in the strange and sweet confusion of his thoughts that he did not feel himself alone, though she might be already deep in the pines behind him.

The girl grew taller, but the cool whiteness of her face was untinged by any flush of young maidenhood. At seventeen she was a slender sprite of a girl, to reach whose unearthly aloofness the warm human hands of her companions strained unavailing. Each winter she descended to the valley and to school and church, a silent, remote child, moving like one in a dream. And every spring she came back to the hill, to Timothy and his pipes, to the pines and the uplands, to the Round Stone and the white road in front of it. Ralph Wilc.o.x, hearty, kindly son of his hearty, kindly parents, tried to speak to her long enough to make her seem real, but she was rarely in the house except during the day and a half of each week when her father was there; and on their casual encounters out of doors she melted from before his eyes like a pixie, knowing the hiding places and turns of his own land better than he. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of her afterward, regarding him steadily and curiously from a nook in a hillside, and once as she darted away she had dropped a handkerchief and turned her head in time to see him pick it up; but she did not slacken her pace, or speak to him then or at all.

She rarely spoke, even to Timothy, but this was no barrier between them.

All the winter Timothy lived on the thoughts of the spring, and when the arbutus and Moira came back he poured out to her the strange treasures he had found in his heart. Scarcely to her, for she only gazed silent at the stars as he talked. Rather she seemed to unlock in him the rich stores of his own understanding and emotion. He marveled that he could ever have found the valley empty. He felt within him a swelling flood, ever renewed, of significance to fill all his world with a sweet and comforting meaning.

And so his red hair grew threaded with white, and his foolish, idle heart happier and happier as the years went on. Then, one midwinter day, Father Delancey climbed the hill to say that Timothy's sister's husband was dead, and that Timothy was sent for to take his place, hold the Nebraska claim, work the land, and be a father to his sister's children. Timothy was stunned with horror, but the unbending will of the never-contradicted parish priest bore him along without question.

"Sure, Tim, go! I tell you to! 'Tis the only thing _to_ do! And 'twill be a man's work and earn ye many hours out of purgatory. An' 'twill be grand for ye, ye that never would have a family o' your own--here's the Blessed Virgin pus.h.i.+n' ye into one, ready-made. 'Twill be the makin' o' ye, 'twill make ye rale human, an' ye'll have no more time for star-gazin' an' such foolishness. Ye can find out what people are in the world for, instead keepin' yerself so outside o' things. Sure, yes, man, yes, I'll tell Moira ye said good-by to her, an'--yes, I give ye my word, and promise true and true, I'll lave ye now if she moves away or if any harm comes to her."

IV

His grizzled hair was turned quite white when his sister kissed him good-by, fresh tears in her eyes, scarcely dry from the excitement of her youngest daughter's wedding. She had a moment of divination like his, and said sadly, "There's no use trying to thank ye, Timmy, words can't do it.

If ye'd been anybody else, I cud ha' said ye got ye'r pay for all these long, hard years in the love the childer bear ye. That's the pay folks get for workin' an' livin' for others--but ye're not folks. Is't that ye're the seventh son? Is't that ye've second sight? Is't that--_what_ is't that makes ye so far away? An' what _is_ ye'r pay, Tim? Now that it's over and the children all safe and grown up, ye look yerself like a child that's done its lesson an' run out to play. Is't all just work or play with ye?

Can't ye niver just _live_?"

In truth her brother's eagerness to be away was scarcely concealed at all from the grateful, wistful Irish eyes about him. He was breathless with haste to be off. The long trip to New England was a never-ending nightmare of delay to him, and although he had planned for years to walk up the hill, his trembling old legs dragged in a slow progress maddening to his impatience. A farmer, driving by, offered him a lift, which he accepted gratefully, sitting strained far forward on the high seat. At a turn of the road he looked back and saw that he had pa.s.sed the cl.u.s.ter of pines where Moira had laughed at him, and where he had felt so thick about him the thronging rush of his newly awakened perceptions of the finer meaning of things, the gay, sweet crowd of gentle little people.

He stopped the farmer and, leaping down from the high seat, he took his pipes under his arm and fairly ran up the little path. His rheumatic knee creaked a little, but the color came up hard in his tired old face as the twilight of the pines and their pungent, welcoming breath fell about him.

He cast him down and buried his face in the rust-red dried needles. He did not weep, but from time to time a long sigh heaved his shoulders. Then he turned over and lay on his back, looking at the sunset-yellow sky through the green, thick-cl.u.s.tered needles, noticing how the light made each one glisten as though dipped in molten gold. His hand strayed out to his pipes, lying beside him with mute, gaping mouths. "The Gold o' the Glamour," he murmured to himself, and as he broke the silence with the old tune faintly blown, he felt the wood peopled about him as of yore with twilight forms. Unseen bright eyes gazed at him from behind tree-trunks, and the branches were populous with invisible, kindly listeners. The very hush was symbolic of the consciousness of the wood that he was there again. There was none of the careless commonplace of rustling leaves, and snapping twigs, and indifferent, fearless bird-song. In the death-like still he felt life quivering and observant with a thousand innocent, curious, welcoming eyes.

When he had quavered through the last note he let the pipes fall and gazed about him with a smile, like a happy old child. The sun sank behind the mountain as he looked, and he pulled himself heavily up. His way to the farm lay over bare upland pastures where his feet, accustomed for years to the yielding prarie levels, stumbled and tripped among the loose stones.

Twilight came on rapidly, so that he found himself several times walking blindly through fairy rings of fern. He crossed himself and bowed his head three times to the west, where the evening star now shone pale in the radiance of the glowing sky. Between two of the ridges he wandered into a bog where his feet, hot in their heavy boots, felt gratefully the oozing, cool brown water.

And then, as he stepped into the lane, dark with dense maple-trees and echoing faintly with the notes of the hermit thrush, he saw the light of the little house glimmer through the trees in so exactly the spot where his hungering eyes sought it that his heart gave a great hammering leap in his breast.

He knocked at the door, half doubtfully, for all his eagerness. It might be she lived elsewhere in the parish now. He had schooled himself to this thought so that it was no surprise, although a heavy disappointment, when the door was opened by a small dark man holding a sleeping baby on his arm. Timothy lowered his voice and the man gave a brief and hushed answer.

He spoke in a strong French-Canadian accent. "Moira O'Donnell? I nevaire heard before. Go to ze house on ze hill--mebbe zey know--"

He closed the door, and, through the open window, Timothy saw him sit down, still holding the baby and looking at it as though the interrupting episode were already forgotten. The old man s.h.i.+vered with a pa.s.sing eerie sense of being like a ghost knocking vainly at the doors of the living. He limped up the hill, and knocked on the kitchen door of the old Wilc.o.x house. To his eyes, dilated with the wide dusk of the early evening, the windows seemed to blaze with light, and when the door was opened to him he shaded his eyes, blinking fast against the rays of a lamp held high in the hand of a round, little woman who looked at him with an impersonal kindness. His heart beat so he could not speak.

Suddenly from the past rang out his old name, the one he had almost lost in the dreary years of "Uncle Tim" which lay behind him.

"Why, Piper Tim!" cried the woman in a voice of exceeding warmth and affection. "Why, it's dear, dear, darling old Piper Tim come back to visit his old home. I knew ye in a minute by the pipes. Come in! Come in!

There's not a soul livin' or dead that's welcomer in th' house of Moira Wilc.o.x."

The name blazed high through all the confusion of his swimming senses. To his blank look she returned a mellow laugh. "Why sure, Timmy darlint, hasn't anybody; iver told ye I was married? I'd have written ye myself, only that I knew you couldn't read it, and 'twas hard to tell through other people. Though, saints preserve us, 'tis long since I thought anything about it, one way _or_ th' other. 'Tis as nat'ral as breathing now."

She was pulling him into the warm, light room, taking his cap and pipes from him, and at the last she pushed him affectionately into a chair, and stood looking kindly at his pale agitation, her arms wide in a soft angle as she placed her hands on her rounded hips. "Oh, Timothy Moran, you darlint! Moira's that glad to see you! You mind me of the times when I was young and that's comin' to be long ago."

She turned and stepped hastily to the stove from which rose an appetizing smell of frying ham. As she bent her plump, flushed face over this, the door opened and two dark-eyed little girls darted in. On seeing a stranger, they were frozen in mid-flight with the shy gaze of country children.

"Here, childer, 'tis Piper Tim come back to visit us. Piper Tim that I've told ye so many tales about--an' the gran' tunes he can play on his pipes.

He can play with ye better nor I--he niver has aught else to do!" She smiled a wide, friendly smile on the old man as she said this, to show she meant no harm, and turned the slices of ham deftly so that they sent a puff of blue savory smoke up to her face. "Don't th' ham smell good, ye spalpeens, fresh from runnin' th' hills? Go an' wash ye'r faces an' hands and call ye'r father an' brothers. I've four," she added proudly to the man by the table watching her with horrified eyes.

The fumes of the cooking made him sick, the close air suffocated him. He felt as though he were in some oppressive nightmare, and the talk at the supper-table penetrated but dully to his mind. The cordiality of Moira's husband, the shy, curious looks of the children at his pipes, even Moira's face rosy from brow to rounded chin, and beaming with indulgent, affectionate interest all melted together into a sort of indistinguishable confusion. This dull distress was rendered acute anguish by Moira's talk.

In that hot, indoor place, with all those ignorant blank faces about her, she spoke of the pines and the upland bogs, of the fog and the Round Stone, and desecrated a sacred thing with every word.

It would have been a comfort to him if she had even talked with an apostate's yearning bitterness for his betrayed religion, if she had spoken harshly of their old, sweet folly; but she was all kindness and eager, willing reminiscence. Just as she spoke his name, his faery name of "Piper Tim," in a tone that made it worse than "Uncle Tim," so she blighted one after another of the old memories as she held them up in her firm, a.s.sured hands, and laughed gently at their oddity.

After supper as Tim sat again in the kitchen watching her do the evening work, the tides of revulsion rose strong within him. "We were a queer lot, an' no mistake, Piper Tim," she said, sc.r.a.ping at a frying pan with a vigorous knife. "An' the childer are just like us. I've thried to tell them some of our old tales, but--I dun'no'--they've kind o' gone from me, now I've such a lot to do. I suppose you were up to the same always, with your nephews an' nieces out West. 'Twas fine for ye to have a family of your own that way, you that was always so lonely like."

Timothy's shuddering horror of protest rose into words at this, incoherent words and bursts of indignation that took his breath away in gasps.

"Moira! _Moira_! What are ye sayin' to me? _Me_ wid a family! Anyone who's iver had th' quiet to listen to th' blessed little people--_him_ to fill up his ears wid th' clatter of mortial tongues. No? Since I lift here I've had no minute o' peace--oh, Moira, th' country there--th' great flat hidjious country of thim--an' th' people like it--flat an' fruitful. An'

oh, Moira, aroon, it's my heart breakin' in me, that now I've worked and worked there and done my mortial task an' had my purgatory before my time, an' I've come back to live again--that ye've no single welcomin' word to bid me stay."

The loving Irish heart of the woman melted in a misunderstanding sympathy and remorse. "Why, poor Piper Tim, I didn't mean ye should go back to them or their country if ye like it better here. Ye're welcome every day of the year from now till judgment tramp. I only meant--why--seem' they were your own folks--and all, that ye'd sort o' taken to thim--the way most do, when it's their own blood."

She flowed on in a stream of fumbling, warm-hearted, mistaken apology that sickened the old man's soul. When he finally rose for his great adventure, he spoke timidly, with a wretched foreknowledge of what her answer would be.

"Och, Piper Tim, 'tis real sweet of ye to think of it and ask me, an' I'd like fine to go. Sure, I've not been on the Round Stone of an evening--why, not since you went away I do believe! But Ralph's goin' to the grange meetin' to-night, an' one of th' childer is restless with a cough, and I think I'll not go. My feet get sort of sore-like, too, after bein' on them all day."

V.

As he stepped out from the warm, brightly lighted room, the night seemed chill and black, but after a moment his eyes dilated and he saw the stars s.h.i.+ning through the densely hanging maple leaves.

Up by the Round Stone the valley opened out beneath him. Restlessly he looked up and down the road and across the valley with a questing glance which did not show him what he sought. The night for all its dark corners had nothing in it for him beyond what lay openly before him. He put out his hand instinctively for his pipes, remembered that he had left them at the house, and sprang to his feet to return for them. Perhaps Moira would come out with him now. Perhaps the child had gone to sleep. The brief stay in the ample twilight of the hillside had given him a faint, momentary courage to appeal again to her against the narrow brightness of her prison.

Moira sat by the kitchen table, sewing, her smooth round face blooming like a rose in the light from the open door of the stove. Her kindly eyes beamed sweetly on the old man. "Ah, Piper Tim, ye're wise. 'Tis a damp night out for ye'r rheumatis. The fog risin' too, likely?"

The old piper went to her chair and stood looking at her with a fixed gaze, "Moira!" he said vehemently, "Moira O'Donnell that was, the stars are bright over the Round Stone, an' th' moon is risin' behind th' Hill o'

Delights, and the first white puffs of incense are risin' from th'

whirl-hole of th' river. I've come back for my pipes, and I'm goin' out to play to th' little people--an' oh, shall old Piper Tim go without Moira?"

He spoke with a glowing fervor like the leaping up of a dying candle. From the inexorably kind woman who smiled so friendly on him his heart recoiled and puffed itself out into darkness. She surveyed him with the wise, tender pity of a mother for a foolish, much-loved child. "Sure, 'tis th'

same Piper Tim ye are!" she said cheerfully, laying down her work, "but, Lord save ye, Timmy darlint, _Moira's grown up_! There's no need for my pretendin' to play any more, is there, when I've got proper childer o' my own to keep it up. _They_ are my little people--an' I don't have to have a quiet place to fancy them up out o' nothin'. They're real! An' they're takin' my place all over again. There's one--the youngest girl--the one that looks so like me as ye noticed--she's just such a one as I was.

To-day only (she's seven to-morrow), she minded me of some old tales I had told her about the cruachan whistle for the sidhe on the seventh birthday, an' she'd been tryin' to make one, but I'd clean forgot how the criss-cross lines go. It made me think back on that evening when I was seven--maybe you've forgot, but you was sittin' on the Round Stone in th'----"

Timothy's sore heart rebelled at this last rifling of the shrine, and he made for the door. Moira's sweet solicitude held him for an instant in check. "Oh, Tim, ye'd best stay in an' warm your knee by the good fire.

I've a pile of mendin' to do, and you'll tell me all about your family in th' West and how you farmed there. It'll be real cozy-like."

Timothy uttered an outraged sound and s.n.a.t.c.hing up his pipes fled out of the pleasant, low-ceilinged room, up the road, now white as chalk beneath the newly risen moon. At the Round Stone he sat down and, putting his pipes to his lips, he played resolutely through to the end "The Song of Angus to the Stars." As the last, high, confident note died, he put his pipes down hastily, and dropped his face in his hands with a broken murmur of Gaelic lament.