The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

  At last Sterrin received a note from Donal. He wished to speak with her about a matter of some importance. They met in the hermit’s cave at Bannandrum. ‘I cannot understand it,’ she said to him, ‘when I was a little girl and the Liberator was conducting the Repeal campaign, the American President warned England that he would invade Canada if it fired on a Repeal gathering...’ she faltered.

  Donal did not want to talk about politics. He wanted to talk about Sterrin. He wanted her to marry him. It was a strange setting for a proposal, she thought. She looked round the cave, it reminded her of the forge. But the heart inside of her was not turning over as it had in the forge. It was calm. It had burned itself out on the flame of its own passion. In such a setting as this her dream love had received its final blow. Donal was urging his own love; enough for two. The flame from the sods burning in a makeshift hearth in the corner flickered across his face and showed it handsome, attractive, but white: too white, too thin. In the flicker a silver cup glinted on a stone shelf. A cup, china, gold-edged, had glinted on the stone shelf of the forge, too. Why should Donal have to love for two? He deserved the full measure of love. And why should I go without love; if he has so much to give? ‘What a place to propose marriage to me; and what a way to rush me here by night!’

  It was half-flippant, half-angry, wholly temporising. She shrank from the final commitment of acceptance. There was so much to be considered. Her mother would never consent. Sterrin to marry a Keating of Poolgower! Her father would die again in his grave. She herself would probably have died in her mother’s arms on the night of her first birthday if the horrible James’s James Keating had fired into the drawing-room five minutes earlier. She might never have lived to receive his brother’s proposal! Never have lived to receive the insult of his own—assault—And almost as the acceptance trembled upon her lips she remembered that it was to punish James’s James Keating she had married Sir Jocelyn Devine—and made havoc of her life—and looks—and by-passed her life’s love. She stepped back, irresolute. Donal shook his head sadly.

  ‘What is it you want?’ he asked low and tense. ‘If it is a romantic setting you need, remember that I asked you under the blossoms of Lissnastreenagh. You said then that they had not blossomed enough, I should wait for them to fall. I waited and they fell and they bloomed again, and fell; season after season and still I’ve waited.’

  ‘You’ve waited a long time,’ she murmured gently.

  ‘I can wait no longer.’ His tone startled her.

  An ultimatum? Was he intimating that he was not going to wear the willow for her. ‘You’ve made up your mind to marry, if not me then someone else? Thank you for the honour of first choice!’

  ‘There is no one else. There never could be. Caitlin Ni Houlihan is the only other woman in my heart and—she is calling very urgently.’

  ‘The insurrection?’ she breathed. ‘But—it has—dissolved?’

  ‘No, the Canadian thing has put new heart into the movement. The men turned back from Canada are pouring in here. Ah, Sterrin! We have been through so much together, must I go into the crucible without something more from you than half-promises and withdrawals? I must go to take my stand against our enemies. I seek no mercy and I shall make no compromise. And somehow, Sterrin, I see this attitude to my enemies as the attitude to the woman I love with all my soul and being. I want no mercy, no compromise, from her.’

  The gentle face was resolute as never before. Suddenly the full portent of his words came upon her. It was one thing to talk of rebellions, to plan and hope, but here was the reality! This splendid life; the brilliant intellect, the heart so tender to human sufferings; the heart that was her one sure resource. ‘No, Donal,’ the cry burst from her heart, ‘don’t go—the sacrifice is too great.’

  ‘No lesser sacrifice will serve; but if I return—’ he put his hands on either side of her face. She stiffened and his hands dropped, despairingly.

  ‘No,’ she cried again, ‘it is because of my face. You haven’t seen it.’

  ‘It is not by the skin of your face that I measure your soul. I still glimpse your eyes behind that veil. Their spirit is the same as when it challenged your hostile servants and made them feed the multitude. I remember the beauty of your face when I danced with you at the Assizes Ball, but more vividly do I remember the tenderness of your face next day, when you held those bereft children in your arms on that railway bank. Aye, and your head is poised as proud and graceful as when you rode between the lines of your captors—to jail, maybe.’

  ‘And you ransomed me. Oh, Donal!’ Her head rested on his shoulder. His arms went about her.

  There was a sound at the cave’s entrance. The old hermit came in, upright, not a hair of the great curled head missing. ‘The patrol has reached the top of the hill. It will be starting to return, but it will be half an hour before it winds this way by the road. You’ll have crossed the bog long before then.’ He handed Donal a vaulting pole. ‘I have left a burning sod of turf on every foothold. It will light your way. Jump from one to the other.’ He went out.

  Donal laid aside the pole and took Sterrin in his arms. He pushed up the veil and kissed her lips. He stroked the hand where she had once shown him the scars and on the finger that he kissed she glimpsed, through her tears, a shimmering whiteness. Then he took up the pole and it was like a lance as he went forth to his rendezvous with Caitlin Ni Houlihan.

  59

  From end to end of Ireland there was something in the air. It seethed in the earth. It rode on the night wind. Men straightened their shoulders and told each other that Fenianism was no longer an idle theory. The Fenians could have swept through Canada! The men took heart again and drilled in the forts and raths. There were many arrests, many more than before. But now the men from America came, men who had fought against each other at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, survived the war to unite under the Fenian banner and march side by side to Buffalo, sleeping on its sidewalks, waiting to carry the green flag over the frontier into Canada. They carried it instead to Ireland and with it the Stars and Stripes that they had fought for. Twin banners equally loved; equally sacred. ‘Soon or Never,’ was the Fenian cry. Now it was to to be soon.

  Thomas travelled through the heart of the country alerting men to the coming rebellion. He noticed birds that he had not seen so far inland since the afternoon of that twelfth day in 1839 when he had scurried over the bogs and fields with Lady O’Carroll’s gift to Lady Cullen. That day the prescience of some terrible storm drove the birds far inland. Now this March day of 1867 he noticed birds that should be starting on their journey to the islands of the Hebrides and Iceland sitting in rows discussing the wisdom of undertaking the journey. Never had spring wind blown so cold. The wind whittled through the flesh of the men as they struggled across the mountains and through the hidden ways to their long-delayed tryst with rebellion. Many fell in their tracks, and lay there. Only time dare move, and halt their purpose.

  When the storm quietened the men rose again. Then the snow fell pensively, and without wind. It betrayed the footsteps of the tiring rebels, then relented and covered them again. The snow continued to fall with the silence of a multitude. And now it covered their fallen bodies. Men remembered no storm so cruel. The older men recalled the Big Wind, but that had been a manly storm—a storm that lashed a man’s blood to warmth. This snow was mean and biting. It slowed the march. It betrayed the cause, and simplified the task of the police and the military.

  It was easy to track down those whose feet were fettered by frostbite; whose hands were manacled with its numbness. The government acted in other ways, too. Thomas tried to contact Major de Waters but he had been transferred overnight, with his Fenian-tainted regiment, to India. Every disaffected regiment had been transferred from Ireland. The Channel Fleet had been drafted to Bantry Bay.

  Thomas rode to the Waterford coast to watch for a vessel that had left New York with arms and ammunition, and with officers who had been trained at West Point, tried a
t Gettysburg. It was a lonely, frigid watch. The cliffs that curved around the fairy cove where Maurice O’Carroll’s house stood, had become an ice cathedral, and Thomas wondered if the half moon alone in the great grey sky was feeling as bleak as himself. It answered his thoughts with a spectral beam that revealed the outlines of the ship.

  It flew the green flag bearing the proud motto: ‘Erin Resur-gente’, it waved like a taunt in the face of Ireland’s despair. Thomas signalled his presence and slowly rowed out to the ship. He brought the men aboard the same tale of defeat they had heard from messengers at other coves along the coast. The storm, he told them, that had delayed the ship had scattered and disorganised the battalions of seasoned troops who had endured and waited its coming. Most of them had been arrested, some already on the high seas to deportation and others were imprisoned in Arbour Hill Barracks over the graves of the executed rebels of ’98. Some were already aboard ships en route to penal deportation. His own work amongst the military gone for naught. And those who were left had pitifully few arms. It would be futile to land. The officers and men bade Thomas a grim farewell, helped him into his boat and watched him to shore. Then the ship that one week ago might have precipitated the capture of Munster, the prelude to ultimate freedom, turned round and faced west into the gale.

  Thomas galloped through the snow to where Donal Keating and Bergin waited near the coast with other survivors of the storm. A sod of turf blazing on a pike’s head guided him down the rugged track to a camp fire in a hidden glen. Donal, on a knoll away from the fire, had watched through the night alone; guiding the stragglers by signals; shivering and dreaming warm dreams of Ireland’s liberation. The night of her slavery would soon be brightened by the gleam of patriot steel; her centuries of slumber broken by the music of patriot cannons!

  He listened to Thomas in silence as he watched the distant light of their ship of hope going from them, back across the Atlantic to freedom: to transatlantic Ireland with its thousands of disbanded Irish soldiers ready and waiting to come and free their land of the thraldom that had made them exiles. It was not to be soon. It was to be never. ‘I told them in Dublin that we were delaying too long,’ Donal said bitterly. ‘Why did Stephens wait so long? I told him in Dublin nearly two years ago that we should not place our hopes entirely upon American aid and upon the arms in British barracks. I suggested that we purchase supplies from England. There was absolutely no restriction upon their sale at that time. A few hundred armed rebels to meet that ship would have altered the course of Irish history.’

  Thomas, too, fixed his eyes on the receding speck of light, trying to hold it back. ‘That is what they said out there. But to have landed without some armed co-operation would have been madness. Now we must send these men back to their homes! I’ll go and divert the rest.’

  All night Thomas met the stragglers as they arrived, the unpaid soldiers of Ireland, exhausted, but exultant at having won through the gale. It reminded him of Tom Steele waving his peace bough at the weary hopeful marchers who had converged on Clontarf for the last, glorious rally of the Monster meeting that was to have brought Repeal to Ireland. ‘Go back! Go back!’ the Head Pacificator had cried, ‘there is no meeting.’ ‘Go back! Go back!’ cried Thomas to their sons. ‘There is no rebellion.’ They listened dumbfounded.

  ‘Fate is on the side of England,’ said Bergin. ‘Nothing could have defeated us in 1796 if the Expedition that Wolfe Tone sent from France had not been scattered by a hurricane, with thousands of troops and ammunition for the rebels waiting as we are; the hand of God is against Ireland.’

  ‘Don’t blame God,’ said Donal, ‘it is bad leadership.’

  ‘Bah!’ fumed Bergin, ‘there was nothing wrong with Davis’s leadership in ’45. He had the entire country marshalled to a victory march! It was the hand of God who withdrew him from us. And on top of that the famine. My grief to see brave men deserted!’

  ‘Enough of this defeatist talk,’ said Thomas. ‘Every rebellion is a step nearer freedom. The next rising will gain us our freedom.’

  It was the afternoon of the next day before the three reached the Tipperary hide-out and rest. As Donal slept, Thomas studied the exhausted face of the young lawyer who had been prepared to toss away the prospect of a brilliant career. But lots of patriots had prospects of brilliant careers. What man had such a prospect as Sterrin? What were they to each other? Husband and wife? Betrothed? He had not passed on her message at the forge. He must do it now when Donal awakened.

  Bergin’s scar gaped hideously against the weary whiteness of his face. Sleep was gradually relaxing the bitter lines of his mouth. Thomas leaned up on his elbow. A mouth capable of tenderness; a handsome face before it had been disfigured by her husband.

  Donal stirred and muttered a word. Thomas heard it. She was everywhere. Her husband’s brand on Bergin’s face, her name on Donal’s lips.

  Clouds of sleep draped his brain. He would anchor a loyalty to his poor, blind Dorene. Of heart he had none to give her, but he would give her—give her—his lids drooped—kindliness and—and—courtesy—his possessions. He would look no longer across the sea to that fairy turret whose occupant had become—a mortal.

  Three hours later he was shaken forcibly awake. A battle was in progress. General Burke had taken the field a few miles beyond Tipperary town. Thomas’s spirits rose. He had served under Burke in the Civil War. All was not lost. Thomas, Bergin, and Donal jumped on their horses and galloped off to the battle.

  It was a sorry rising. Near the fort that was to be the gathering point Thomas met some of the men whom he had trained. Like the rebels whom he had been forced to send home last night, these too had been dispersed without firing a shot. ‘We hadn’t a gun to fire one,’ a Yankee private said bitterly. He held up his arm. ‘That’s the only arm I’ve left. I’d have gladly given it if I had the opportunity to make one stand for my own country.’

  Thomas spurred in the direction the men told him Burke had taken. A few moments later he had to pull his horse hastily into the shade of the trees. Ahead of him was a party of military and even as he sighted them he saw Burke fall from his horse; saw him manacled by the British and marched to captivity. Thomas beat his hand against the saddle in helpless fury. The ignominy of it! A gallant officer like Burke. Captured in this pitiful, puerile expedition.

  A burst of firing behind him brought him weaving back to where he had left Bergin and Donal. The firing was nothing; just a few bravado shots fired at random after the dispersing rebels. Thomas found Bergin almost at once. They spied Donal’s horse a few paces away; riderless. Donal had been thrown; but he made no move to remount. When Thomas reached Donal’s side he saw at once the crimson stain spreading across his shirt. One of those random bullets had found a rebel’s heart. Donal smiled faintly, at Thomas, whispered something, sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Give her—’ he paused. Thomas bent closer. ‘Give her my eternal love.’

  60

  Sterrin glanced through the library window. The snowdrops had melted. She could see the violets studding the tree boles on the avenue. In every bush and tree the blackbirds, thrushes and chaffinches were discussing their marriage and housing plans. But Sterrin could plan no more.

  Why, she asked herself, for the thousandth time, had she deprived Donal of the happiness for those past few years: herself too? She could not have failed to be happy with him. He was incapable of making anyone unhappy. His goodness had been transparent. It had a distinct presence. That was what had made her so impervious to the bitter background between their two families. That was what had been the well-spring of his joyousness.

  Hegarty opened the door without knocking. ‘Is it there you are, Miss Sterrin?’ Age was dulling his formality as well as his vigour. ‘It’s Mr. de Guider. He’s in the hall.’

  She shook her head. ‘Make my excuses.’ Then custom asserted itself. ‘In the hall? What are you thinking of, Hegarty? Show him into the drawing-room. Mamma is there.’

  ‘It’s yourself he want
s to see first. It’s private and important.’

  James de Guider made a tiptoed entrance. He waited for Hegarty to leave. ‘I was entrusted to give you this.’ He drew a letter from inside his coat and handed it to her.

  ‘Who gave you this?’

  ‘Read it,’ was all he would say. He was portentous with mystery.

  She read:

  DEAR LADY DEVINE—Before Mr. Keating died he regained consciousness briefly. He whispered a message that I feel was intended for you. It was—“Give her my eternal love.” Earlier that afternoon I had conveyed to him the message that you passed to me in Denis’s forge. It was the first opportunity that I had of doing so.

  He died bravely. May his gentle soul rest in peace.

  I beg to remain

  Your obedient servant,

  THOMAS O’CARROLL.

  James de Guider hurried towards her. ‘Sterrin, Lady Devine! Are you faint? Shall I summon someone?’

  She didn’t answer him. Her head was bowed down over the letter. ‘Oh God,’ he heard her moan, ‘this is beyond bearing. Oh Donal!’ The poignancy of his message was rending her; then blessedly, she began to cry. Till now her grief, as always, had dried her eyes the way the east wind dries the soil.

  She felt a touch on her bowed head. ‘I shall not intrude further. I had no idea—the—’ She looked up; aware of James, then down at the letter; aware too for the first time of its signature. Donal’s message had dimmed out the rest of the letter.

  ‘Thomas O’Carroll?’ She looked up, a slow wonderment knifing through the numbness of anguish. ‘Who gave you this? How do you come to know about—about Mr. Keating?’