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
shining 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 snatching 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.
When he looked abroad again, the valley was like a great opal, where the
moon shot its rays into the transparent fog far below him. The road was
white and the shadows black and one was no more devoid of mystery than the
other.
The sky for all its stars hung above the valley like an empty bowl above
an empty vessel, and in his heart he felt no swelling possibilities to
fill this void. To the haggard old eyes the face of the world was like a
dead thing, which did not return his gaze even with hostility, but
blankly--a smooth, thin mask which hid behind it nothing at all.
He was startled by the sudden appearance of a dog from out of the shadows,
a shaggy collie who trotted briskly down the road, stopping to roll a
friendly, inquiring eye on his bent figure. His eyes followed the animal
until it vanished in the shadows on the other side. After the sound of its
padding footsteps was still, the old man's heart died within him at the
silence.
He tried vainly to exorcise this anguish by naming it What was it? Why did
he droop dully now that he was where he had so longed to be? Everything
was as it had been, the valley, the clean white fog, tossing its waves up
to him as he had dreamed of it in the arid days of Nebraska; the mountains
closing in on him with the line of drooping peace he had never lost from
before his eyes during the long, dreary years of exile. Only he was
changed. His eye fell on his mud-caked boots, and his face contracted.
"Oh, my! Oh, my!" he said aloud, like an anxious old child. "She couldn't
ha' liked my tracking bog durt on to her clane kitchen floor!"
But as he sat brooding, his hand dropped heavily to the Round Stone and
encountered a small object which he held up to view. It was a willow
whistle of curious construction, with white lines criss-cross on it; and
beside it lay a jackknife with a broken blade. The old man looked at it,
absently at first, then with a start, and finally with a rush of joyful
and exultant exclamations.
And afterward, quite tranquilly, with a shining face of peace, he played
softly on his pipes, "The Call of the Sidhe to the Children."