The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  The first cock was crowing when she stood up again. The motive power of Thomas’s life had burst its dams. Its torrents still swept over her. The daughter of Sir Roderick O’Carroll and his servant boy! young, nameless, tribeless Thomas! It was like something out of a red-backed novel. No, out of a fairy tale. A pair of children shut off together in a fairy world of castles and grandeur and bygone glory. And no one to warn one of those children, the friendless, bewitched one, that the other would grow up and away into her own proud womanhood. Kitty looked across to Thomas, musing like herself. In troth he had grown into a manhood that seemed just as proud! And will that strange bearing of his grow less assured if it turns out that it has its origin in ignominy?

  *

  There was no ignominy. ‘But why,’ Thomas repeated, ‘did you bring me to the back door of the castle?’

  The woman-who-had-brought-Young-Thomas had materialised from a phrase into Mrs. Willis, a small, neat woman; grey and severe and—bewildered. Where else but to the back door would she have brought a ragged, bare-legged boy? One didn’t bring the likes of him to the hall doors of great houses; this grand gentleman who had knocked at her own hall door must have travelled too far into prosperity to recall his appearance and circumstances the day that she brought him to Kilsheelin Castle. People prospered in America. Hadn’t she prospered herself? But America had not given him that—air. She had always associated it with high birth. The dear knows that there was nothing grand about his birth. He’d have been born in the ditch if she had not taken in his mother when she collapsed at her gate.

  She had told him all and now she wanted to make tea for him but Thomas wanted to go on asking questions. Why the back door, indeed! She was in a tumult; the little nurse-boy she had reared. Parting with him had hurt.

  ‘You must eat,’ she twittered and despite his protests she was gone. Some people found it easier to produce a meal than a caress.

  He thought to follow her. He might lose her again; the faceless, nameless subject of a lifetime’s yearning for identity. He strode up and down the little room; his feet kept displacing the rabbit footmats that protected the carpet. He studied the dried grasses and sea shells on the whatnot in the corner. He turned to the chiffonier, and there behind the little glass doors on the upper shelf he saw the silver drinking cup! A thing of artistry and beauty, startlingly out of place amongst all the quasi-genteel trumpery! Once before he had seen such a cup. On the stone shelf of the hermit’s cave.

  His face was still pressed to the glass when the woman returned with the tray. Her colour drained away. So that was what he had come for! She lowered the tray and came over to the cabinet. ‘I never meant to deprive you of what was your right. A crumb that wasn’t mine I’ve never in my life taken. But that cup was so long in the little cabinet in the house in Aughnacloy, then, after my husband died and the passage money came so unexpected from America—a neighbour helped me to pack—there was only a few days to find a home for you—’

  ‘So my mother had this with her?’ All the time she talked Thomas studied the cup, turning it over and over. It was an exact replica of the one in which The O’Meara had once given him a drink of goat’s milk. The hermit had told him that the hawk wrought on its side combined the O’Carroll symbol and the Hapsburg. A great throb of discovery surged through Thomas as though the cup were a water diviner’s rod. It was a while before Mrs. Willis’s embarrassed excuses reached him.

  He turned to her. ‘Please, please don’t think that I have come to question what you did with anything that she may have possessed. You shall have a dozen silver cups. It is just that this one has a special significance for me. Meantime, I should love a cup of tea.’ Over the tea he probed again for the scant details of his origin. His mother had died the night that he was born. She had asked for water and the woman, thinking she was thirsty, had proffered milk; when it was waved away and water brought, the sick woman had made a desperate effort and struggled up. She poured the water over the baby’s head and her voice was steady and clear as she said, ‘I baptise you Thomas in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ The words of his Conditional Baptism were the last she spoke.

  Thomas was profoundly moved by the infinite pathos of his mother’s death. She must have started to die a few nights before when her husband had been killed at his door by the Tithe Proctor’s men before they tumbled the house.

  ‘There was a bit of writing pinned inside her mantle—’ Thomas jerked out of his reverie.

  ‘Writing? Where is it?’

  But it had been handed over with himself to the housekeeper at Kilsheelin Castle and Thomas knew the rest. The housekeeper had been killed in the Big Wind a few nights later. Her room was one of those that had been destroyed with all their contents. Including the identity of the waif who became Young Thomas here, and Young Thomas there, and You, Young Thomas!

  ‘...so I wrapped you in the sheet that she brought...’ Mrs. Willis had resumed her story and Thomas uncrossed his legs with a force that slopped his tea. She insisted upon going off for a fresh saucer. He didn’t want a fresh saucer. He wanted to know about the sheet. But he had to sit and chafe while the china cupboard was unlocked and a perfectly clean saucer washed. No, it might be dusty. This set is only used once a year.

  ‘There is no use looking for the sheet,’ she said when she returned and her voice had gone edgy. ‘It was thin with age even then. I covered you with it for years.’

  Thomas brushed aside her self-defence. ‘Please, please don’t think that I am here to question anything you may have done with her possessions. I can never do enough to repay you for your immense Christianity and kindness to my mother and to myself. But these articles—the cup and the sheet—have a very special significance for me; anything that you can recall about them? What kind of stuff was in the sheet? I mean, was it linen and had it a monogram?’

  ‘A monogram?’ Mrs. Willis looked with new interest at the undoubted gentleman before her. ‘There was a bit of embroidery on the corner—an initial maybe or something, I don’t know. But it was made of linen all right. Fine linen, the sort that makes good bandages. That’s what I did with it afterwards when it was too threadbare to use. I bandaged your leg with it when you cut it on a scythe; a terrible cut.’ She paused to savour the recollection of the cut. ‘Anything that she possessed I put to your own use. Her clothes were good and I cut them down to clothe you while they lasted. I even gave you her religion. I taught you the Lord’s Prayer with a Who instead of a Which and I sent you at night to a neighbour’s house to join their rosary. It wasn’t an easy thing for me to do at the time,’ she concluded.

  Thomas fully appreciated how much such an act had meant for his Protestant foster-mother. The Penal Code still lingered at the time. It was a risky thing for a Protestant to shelter a Catholic, much less to endeavour to rear one in the Catholic faith. But man’s essential humanity had shown itself like a bright, warm thread through all the dull and blood-stained fabric of the terrible Code. Many a Protestant might have enriched himself with the price on the head of a hunted priest had he not chosen instead to grant him the shelter of his home. Just as the Irish Catholics in an earlier persecution had sheltered the fleeing refugees of the Huguenot and Bloody Mary purge. A thought struck him. ‘That piece of writing! It was destroyed the night of the Big Wind, but you must remember what was written on it?’ She shook her head. She could not read. He was on his feet, the cup neatly parcelled under his arm when another point struck him. ‘There were so many gentlemen’s places where similar employment was available for me, places like Lord Strague’s or the de Guiders’ of Aughnacall or the De Laceys’—any of their places was nearer to you, more convenient when you were so pressed for time. What made you think of Kilsheelin?’

  She drew her brows together. What had made her go there? Across the distance of time and ocean one of these places was the same as the other and all of them equally dim in her memory. But the walk to Kilsheelin, she remembered, had been longer than to thos
e other places. Oh, she remembered now why she had passed them by. Setting out with the lad that day she had recalled suddenly that his mother, before she collapsed at the gate, had asked how far it was to Kilsheelin Castle. His foster-mother had picked on the place as a sort of omen.

  Thomas went still. Things don’t happen by chance. After nearly six years his foster-mother had completed his mother’s journey: but not her mission! ‘And so,’ he said quietly, ‘you brought me to the back door.’

  This time his remark did not strike Mrs. Willis as foolish. There was something like timidity in her voice as she said, ‘Would it have made a difference if I had faced up to the front door?’ He looked so long and keenly at the viewless window that she thought he was admiring the draped and tasselled curtains in the gleaming brass bands.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, still gazing through the plush and the lace. ‘Perhaps. But,’ he said, turning to her with a smile that warmed her, ‘it would have made a world of difference if you had not brought me there at all—a lost world of difference.’

  There was panic in his heart as he left the neat house and the neat-minded woman whose charity had persisted doggedly up to the blessed urging that had opened to him the back door of a wonder world. Supposing she had dumped him at the de Guiders’, the nearest place. He would have got some kindly, hanger-on’s employment that would have ensured food and shelter. But his intellect would have remained plunged forever in darkness. The panic of the fate he had escaped remained with him as he finished the engagement that had justified this trip across the Atlantic to his foster-mother. It kept dogging him in the train between performances. The Big Wind, he thought, might have held for him no meaning but that of a severe storm. He might never have gone out into that rocking amphitheatre of nature: never witnessed from a privileged seat the tumult of the heaven’s drama. That night his own sense of drama was born as he watched nature’s portrayal of the violently illuminated passions of life, its tragedy, its sombre ferocity, its splendour and again, its mirthless comedy when an arctic wind scooped up an entire, unbroken field and tossed it up to the ranting clouds. He would never have encountered that scenic prop of the storm’s drama, his own ancestor’s uprooted tombstone from which he had learned to read and later to scrawl.

  Supposing that the Big Wind had not produced the tragedy of the housekeeper’s death! Supposing that she had lived! Would he still have gone with mop and duster to the library where his tallow candle had flickered over the shades of the classic period, Roman and Attic, and on to the pages of the play-actor of Stratford in whose strolling path he now followed? Would he have lingered at the bookshelves, absorbing the story of his master’s family caracoled in stately fashion down the centuries; awakening to the problematic enigma of heritage?

  He took the cup from its wrappings. Reverently he touched the outline of the hawk, the heraldic symbol of the O’Carrolls. ‘Which of them are you?’ the Bard would say. And Thomas had put it down to the vapourings of a bardic mind gone senile. But it was The O’Meara who had started Thomas’s odyssey that had led him to this Holy Grail of his heritage. ‘May the angels spread a bed for you in Heaven, O’Meara!’ He gazed through the window, and out of the rolling mists a pair of purple-blue eyes looked up at him in child-wonder. ‘Maybe you are a prince in disguise, Young Thomas.’ And now, when the prince had succeeded in taking the jewel from the head of the toad, the princess had vanished. And now there was Dorene waiting for him in Switzerland.

  *

  Thomas returned to Europe to a jubilant Paris, a city once more en fête. This time for Napoleon’s vast congress of nations to bring the conditions of Europe under review.

  ‘I believe they are on the brink of Civil War in America,’ said a man with whom Thomas shared a compartment on the train to Switzerland. Thomas was startled. He had been living in a wildly swinging world of his own. ‘I have heard no war cry,’ he said.

  Alphabet met him at the Swiss station. The multi-named body-servant had been aggrieved to have to miss an exciting tour in order to escort a blind young lady. The news of Dorene was not encouraging. ‘Not that she gave me the specialist’s verdict but she intimated it by her manner. I urged her—respectfully—to join the society for improving the conditions of the blind; to make them more self-supporting.’

  Thomas caught that. He rounded on Alphabet. ‘Do you consider yourself self-supporting? If I find that you have distressed Miss du Clos you can support your interfering self at someone else’s expense, Duignan!’

  Alphabet looked at the stern countenance beside him and trembled for his cushy job. Duignan! Twenty-six Christian names and to be addressed by the far-off surname that was only a weary sigh at the end of his baptismal alphabet! The boss must be proper peeved.

  The boss was feeling deflated. In the excitement of his own discoveries he had relegated the problem of the blind girl to the background.

  Now he must face it, and the cause of her blindness; a poor innocent caught up in the maelstrom of his frenzy to catch himself a bride from beyond his utmost reach. Besotted, presumptuous fool. What did he know of women? All his life had been a preparation and a dedication. Because he had given his love to a child. Girl-children became women, unpredictable, unfathomable. The memory of his first glimpse of the girl-child turned woman returned. There was no erasing from his memory that tableau of lovely girls moving in procession up the stairway, their candles flickering over the black marble; and, last and loveliest, the girl in turquoise blue.

  He took out a gold cigarette case and tapped it savagely. Fool! Damned, quixotic, romantic fool! I’ve lived too long in the world of make-believe. He struck the long sulphur match. It quenched immediately under the cold cloud of his breath.

  ‘A superior servant,’ he said aloud to the second match, ‘is neither fish, flesh nor good red herring.’

  Alphabet turned to him. ‘I do my best, sir, but I do appreciate that you appreciate that I am superior.’

  Thomas blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘And an actor is no better. Romance and tragedy are his stock-in-trade. I returned to her at a propitious moment; the prelude to a splendid marriage that lacked but one thing—romance; and the strolling player supplied it from his repertoire.’

  He sought out Dorene immediately, dreading the interview; but at the door of the sitting room he stopped dead. She was seated at the piano playing, of all things, a gay galopade. It was amazing the dexterity with which her fingers raced up and down the keyboard, never fumbling a note. Ornaments on the piano, lustres on the mantelpiece tinkled and danced to the force of her playing. Thomas was at a loss to define his reaction. It was like hearing rollicking music hopping out of a church organ. What had he expected? A blind Cecilia strumming mystic melodies!

  Somehow it was all out of character. A person stricken down with blindness would not play with that reckless gaiety; and suddenly the explanation dawned on him. Of course! She was hardly going to tell Alphabet. The news was good and she was keeping it to surprise him.

  She sent a ripple of graceful notes running down the board and lifted her hands with a flourish.

  ‘Bravo!’

  She gave a startled shriek and whirled around on the stool. Her eyelids lifted over a flash of brown, then drooped weakly as she groped to her feet. His arm went round her as she swayed uncertainly.

  ‘I’m sorry I startled you, but it was such a rousing performance. I don’t have to ask what had induced such élan; the news is good. It is, isn’t it?’ It had to be. It couldn’t be otherwise. She had expressed it in every note; and yet, she was silent.

  The news was not good. The doctor could do nothing for her. Thomas took her chin in his hand and forced her face up. ‘Look at me!’ He cursed himself. But wasn’t there a bloom on her cheek like a sunkissed peach? Wasn’t there rejoicing in her spirit?

  She twisted her face from his grasp. ‘I’m sorry that you have to be disappointed—’

  ‘To the devil with my disappointment—forgive me, my dear. It is your disappointment t
hat matters. Dammit, I must see the doctor at once.’

  ‘No! No!’ The vehemence in her voice startled him. Or was it that her voice was becoming more mobile; acquiring the power of expression denied her eyes? She could become a better actress than before. ‘He can tell you nothing that he has not told to myself. It is not nice hearing, and it doesn’t improve by repetition.’ For the first time since her blindness, he discerned bitterness in her voice. Who could blame her. ‘He—the doctor—did everything that he could for me and when there was no improvement I asked for the truth. I asked him not to spare me. I see no mercy in giving false hope—I see no mercy anywhere but—’ her voice cracked, ‘that’s only because I can’t see anything.’

  His arm that had assisted her from the piano tightened around her waist. ‘It is all right, Mr. Young. I’m not going to be hysterical. I’m going to be sensible; very sensible. That was why I was practising that dance tune just now. The new railway round the Simplon is bringing a great many people here for winter holidays. Madame Kohlat, the proprietress, told me that there would be plenty of employment for me playing for carpet dances after dinner. I thought I would earn enough to go to America.’

  The poor child! Trying to earn what would release her from this prison of snow and silence.

  ‘I was longer than I expected to be. There were some tempting engagements offered. Did you think that I was going to leave you here to turn into an icicle?’

  ‘It was nice in the summer. The summer catered for the other senses. There was life in all those lovely smells from shrubs and roses; in the sound of the waterfalls from the little streams of melted snow always rushing and gurgling down the mountain, and in and out through their sound I could hear the nightingales. It was like a constant orchestra. Then everything went away, the orchestra, the roses, the waterfalls, the nightingales...’

  Poor child, he thought again. To be blind within sight of Mont Blanc! To be blind at Lake Leman! Not to glimpse it through branches of tulip trees and clumps of crimson rhododendrons!