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 passion 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, "God 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 wishin'
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 shivered
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 passionate 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. Wilcox, 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.