THE BLIND PIPER.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 47, 25 February 1935, Page 15

THE BLIND PIPER.

[SHORT STORY.J

(By NINA CONARAIN.)

The first time we saw him was with the rain sparkling round him. His face was wide and calm in' the stone frame of the house door, and his eyes, in spite of their blankness, had a joyfulness in them. They were small and bhre, like wet speedwell. They looked over our heads, fixed on something in the darkness behind us, which frightened us a little. "The Lord be with yon!" ho said. "My two little fairy women, my pair of banshees." His voice was wheezy and drifting as the sound his own bagpipes made in the beginning of any tune he«would play. The rain hissed in the ivy, hanging from the heart-shaped leaves'in flittering drops, and when the wind blew the drops fell down like spilled beads. Water from the caves was pouring into the rain barrels in a great hurry. "My lovely little banshees," said the blind piper, and wc ran back into the kitchen because wc were afraid of the word he had put on us. "He is calling us banshees," we told Norall, the kitchen woman. "Bring him in out of the weather, the poor dark man," said Norah. "Sure he won't do you any evil—he's as mild as a bird." When he sat by the fire the moisture came up out of his old frieze coat and hung about him in puffs of cloud. He smiled at the place the lire was, and sometimes at the thing which was elways above our heads. No matter how long you would watch his eyes they were never drawn down to you, though he would turn to your voice when you spoke. Norah, the kitchen woman, made tea for him and cut slices of fresh cake. He ate delicately and slowly and blessed us all with his hand uplifted as though he were a priest. Ho was in no way like a beggar accepting charity. "It's a miracle," Norah said to him, "the way you do trace out your way safely on the black roads this time of night. God help us!" "Black or white, what is it to me 1" said the blind piper. "I have the roads in my heart since I was a child." "Can you see nothing at all?" my sister asked, and I was asjiamed for her to be speaking out so bluntly aboiit the poor man's infirmity. I made faces at her to stop, but she never lifted her wide eyes off the shining face of the old man.

"I know the colour of the morning,'- 1 he told her. "And the fire?" she said. "Will 1 tell you the way a lire looks?" "Whist out of you and for shame, Miss Kathleen," cried Norah from the dim end of the kitchen table, where she was folding linen from the piled-up washing basket. "The colour of the fire is fresh as scarlet," said the old piper. "That is a thing I can feel." "But why did you say about us being banshees?" I asked him. "That was but talk," Norah said in a hurry. "What's one word more than another when a person will be making fun?"

"You've no call to be afcard of the banshees —the little sorrowful women," the piper said. When he played to us he had no need to walk up and down like the pipers we had seen at the fair in the summer. Low by the fire he sat with the pipes drawn into his breast and his arms around them, and he laid his face down close to them. His elbow which was ragged lifted up and down on the belly of the pipes, and his right foot kept time to the music, tapping soft on the tiled floor. He played "Donal Abu," lively and sharp as an April sun shower, and "Tuirne Mhiarc," a drowsy tuna about a spinning wheel, and "All round my heart I'll wear the green willow," and that was so sad our eyes were wet when he had done. When he was gone wo sat quiet, thinking about him in the rainy night, his stick stretched out before him, strik-

ing against the stones on the road, his head lifted up to the sky and his pipes held close against his heart. Norah whisked little showers of bright water over the clothes for ironing, and said it was to the workhouse he would go, and we felt it was a shameful thing for him to have to do, and looked at ono another with pitying glances. "I think ho can see something," Kathleen said. "His eyes are too dead," I said. "The Lord gives him a sight of his own," Norah said then, and came over to the fire where we were. "He is a wise man in his darkness. Did you hoar him and he remarking the colour of scarlet?" she whispered. "It's the one colour with the dresses of the little people. 'Tis my belief there is that kind of thing before his inner eyes." "Ho 6aw banshees whero we were,'' sighed Kathleen, very happy. "Wishoo, don't be talking nonsense," Norah said, hot and angry all of a sudden, snapping open the oven door. "Move over out of my way, Miss Kathleen, until I leave out this bread. It's done and double done."

All the years we were growing up we had a friendship with the blind piper. It was a slow, easy-going friendship, with the months passing and no sight of him, and then he would be at the door once more with the happy shining look in his little blue eyes that never rested on us. When we came on him of a fair day playing in the market place wo had a feeling of pride because ho was our friend.

In the summer lie played by the sea wall out-side the. town. There was a long rough seat of stones there, where the old men and women would gather in the evening smoking their clay pipes and talking, and there was a small bay just below it with the seaweed, brown and curly as a child's hair, floating on the green water. There was a lovely fresh, smell from the seaweed, and the evening sky would be high and red over our heads and filled with the crying music of the pipes. There was an evening wo passed that way and the old piper was playing "Savourneen Deelish." It was so pure and sad a sound that it was a pain to me, and my body grew heavy and quiet. I wished that all the world might be empty of people so that I could lie down and press myself against the stiff sea grass by the shoreside, and that I could stay that way listening only to the music. I was about thirteen then, but there is never a time I hear that same tune now without the notion coming to me of something lost and gone from me for ever. I think it was the autumn of that year a busybody of a young policeman arrested the blind man on a charge of vagrancy. The magistrate was a stony man, and a foreigner, and sent him to prison for three months, with hard labour. Kathleen and I read about it in the local paper with a sense of personal disgrace.

We had never known anyone who had been sent to prison, and we thought about it a lot, and when we went under the high, black walls of the gaol on our way to town, we would look at one another and begin to talk quickly of some other thing. It was deep winter when we saw the piper again. He was older and smaller inside his poor clothes, and he would not play the pipes for us, only laid his head along the stems of them and crouched close to the fire. We did not like to mention about the prison, but by and by he said himself:— "Without food quickly on a dish, AVlthoiit a cow's milk whereon a calf grows; Without a man's abode under the gloomy night. Without a goodly company of bards . . ." "That v»s the ancient curse of poverty they would put on a hated man," he said, "in the days when it was the one hunger to be without music or food. It was that curse I said out to the magistrate beyond, but there was a stubbornness on him. He was not a man of the people or a man with knowledge of this land at all.

"Is a wandering bard a beggar? I asked him, but never an answer cut of him, no, not so much as a word even when I brought out the great name of Homer, who was dark as myself and poor as myself, seeking money in return for the songs that have lighted the hearts of the world for a thousand years."

"There was Milton, too," said Kath leen. "He was blind."

"Milton was an English lord. There is a coldness to him. It is not of him I would bo proud," the old man answered.

It was soon after that the blind piper left the roads for a little cottage some kind-hearted patron gave to him. It was not in our town at all, but miles away in a distant part of the mountain country, and we never saw him again. Years later, after we were grown up and living in England, we went back on a visit to our old home, and Norah told us about his death. "He was over a hundred in the wind up," she said, "but ho was a wise man to the end. For the last dozen years he would walk regularly the ten miles into Oughterard every Sunday to Mass, and he would walk the same distance again of a Friday for his pension. There was never any sickness to him no more than to an ageing lion or an eagle. Then one day that was neither a Friday nor a Sunday he rose up and went over the road for the last time. Well he knew it was the last time, for it was to the priest he went asking to be anointed. The priest gave him the last rites of the church just to humour him, for thero was nothing wrong with him that mortal eyes could sec, but it is a surety that he saw death coming to him as clear as you or I will see the evening drawing down. He went home then, and the next day he died.

"There is no doubt," said Norah, "that there was something queer about him. The dark people are like that, and I have often remarked it. There is si<jht to them, that is not connected with this world at all, and it is a lucky thing for those that will befriend them."