III

Upon her return she had adopted the attitude 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.

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 rushing 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 butterfly, for souls cannot live without sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by the sidhe because a cock 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.