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Tragic Bride

<h2 id="id00112" style="margin-top: 4em">V</h2> But the spring passed, and the summer wore on, and Gabrielle heard no more of him. It was a summer of terrific heat; the flanks of the mountains were parched and slippery even in that moist countryside, and it would have taken more than a dream to make her climb Slievannilaun. She lived the life that an animal leads in summer, cooling her limbs in the lake, and only stirring abroad in the early morning or the dusk. The weather told on Biddy, who lived in the kitchen where a fire burned all the year round, on Considine, who walked up to Roscarna for Gabrielle's lessons in the morning sun, and on Jocelyn, who seemed to feel it more than either of them. Indeed, if they had noticed Jocelyn, they would have had some cause for anxiety; but Jocelyn never talked about his health, even to Biddy, though he himself perceived, with some irritation, that he was growing old. Secretly he fought against it, driving himself to youthful exertions with an artificial and desperate energy that deceived them, but he slept badly at night, and could not keep himself awake in the daytime. Even Gabrielle remarked that he was losing his memory for names, and got snubbed for her trouble. She found it was better to leave him alone, and put his irritability down to the excessive heat. In the blue evening, when flocks of starlings were already beginning to sweep the sky above the reedbeds of the lake, and white owls fluttered out like enormous moths, Gabrielle would walk out for a breath of cool air over the baked crevasses of the bog, or more often down their only road; a track that flattered the dignity of Roscarna at the lodge gates but degenerated as it approached Clonderriff. In the full glare of daylight Clonderriff, for all Mr. Considine's labours, was a sordid collection of cabins, whitened without, but full of peat-smoke and the odours of cattle within. The cabins stood on the brow of a hill. In winter they seemed to crouch beneath a sweeping wind—and the grass thatchings would have been whirled away if they had not been kept in position by ropes that were weighted with stones. The small irregular plots in which the villagers grew their potatoes were bounded by dry walls through crevices of which the wind whistled shrilly, and scattered with boulders too deeply imbedded to be worth the labour of moving, and the walls and boulders were alike covered with an ashen lichen that made them look as if they were crusted over with bitter salt that the wind had carried in from sea. Between the garden plots lay a wilderness of common land, on which lean cattle grazed or routed among heaps of decaying garbage: in winter a desolation, in summer a purgatory of flies. But with the coming of evening and a softer air Clonderriff became transformed. One saw no longer the sordid details, only the long and level lines of the bog, the white-washed cabins shining milky as elder-blossom in moonlight, their windows bloomed with candlelight. In every cranny of the garden walls the crickets began their tingling chorus, but every other living thing in the village seemed at rest. Often, when she felt lonely, Gabrielle would walk down the road to Clonderriff, not because she found it beautiful, as it surely was, but for the sake of its homeliness and the contrast of its gentle life to the moribund atmosphere of Roscarna. She loved the pale cabins, each a cradle of mysterious life; she loved the sound of placid cattle feeding in the darkness, and above all she loved the sound of human voices when the men sprawled by the roadside telling old stories, and the tall, barefooted women stood above them very slim in their folded shawls. Sometimes as she passed quietly along the road, she would become conscious, without hearing, of human presences, and see a pair of lovers sitting on the end of a stone wall with their lips together, and then she would return to Roscarna full of wonder and excitement. One night in August the impulse seized her to put on the white dress that she had worn in Dublin. When dinner was over she left Jocelyn snoring over his port and walked as though she were dreaming down the Clonderriff road. The air was full of pale grass-moths. Her heart fluttered within her: she couldn't think why. She herself was like a white, fluttering moth. She came quickly to the outskirts of the village. The cabins were asleep. In none of them could as much as a candlelight be seen. It was strange that the village should be deader than Roscarna, and she felt as though a sudden and deeper darkness had descended on her. A little frightened she decided that she would go through to the end of the village and pay a visit to Considine: not because she wanted to see him in the least, but because she loved shocking him, and nothing surely could shock him more at this time of night than the moth-like apparition that she presented. She even felt a wayward curiosity to know what he did with himself at night. For several years there had been whispers of a theological thesis that he was writing for his doctor's degree. She imagined him, with a reading lamp and red eyes, up to his ears in the minor prophets. It would be fun to see what he thought of her. She hurried on through the silent village, but when she came to an isolated cabin at the end of it she heard a sound that explained the desolation of the rest; a noise of terrible and unearthly wailing. In the darkness of this curious night it seemed to her a very awful thing. She guessed that somebody had died in the last cabin, and that a wake was being held. For a moment she hesitated, and then, as curiosity got the better of her horror, she came gradually nearer. The women were keening somewhere at the back of the house, but the front windows blazed with the light of many candles, and the door of the cabin was wide open. Inside its narrow compass a crowd of villagers, twenty or thirty of both sexes, was gathered. Gabrielle, clutching at the wall, drew nearer and looked inside. The room was full of bottles, a thicket of empty bottles stood on the table, the press, and in the corner by the fireplace. The floor was strewn with the figures of men and women who had drunk until they dropped. Those who were still awake, and reasonably sober, were playing a kind of round game, passing from hand to hand a stick, the end of which had been lighted in the fire. As it passed from one to another the holder said the words: "If Jack dies and dies in my hand a forfeit I'll give." The game was quite exciting, and Gabrielle found herself wondering in whose hand the glowing stick would go out; but while she watched it her eyes became accustomed to the light of the room and fell at last upon a spectacle of cold horror. The coffin in which the dead man was to be buried had been reared up on one end against the further wall, and within it the body stood erect, held in this position by a cross-work of ropes. It was that of an old man with grey untidy hair. He stood there bound, with his eyes closed, his head lolling forward, and his mouth open. She couldn't stand it. She wanted to cry out, but her voice would not come, and so she simply turned and ran blindly along the dark road towards Oughterard. She ran till she was out of breath and stood against a wall panting and trembling. She hated the darkness, for it seemed vaguely threatening. The thin music of the crickets made it feel as if it were charged with some electric fluid in which the silence grew more awfully intense. It came to her, with a sudden shock, that if she were to return to Roscarna she must pass that dreadful spectacle again, and alone. The only thing that she could possibly do to save herself from this calamity, was to go on to Considine's house and beg him to take her home again. She didn't want to do this, for she felt in her bones that he would laugh at her. She stood in the shadow of a white-thorn, and though she had now ceased from her storm of trembling, her body gave a shudder from time to time, like a tree that frees its storm-entangled branches when the wind has fallen. She heard a slow step mounting the road. She prayed that the new-comer might be Considine, for then her frightened condition would spare her explanations. The steps came nearer. Out of the darkness a shadowy form approached her. It seemed to her that it was that of a man of superhuman size—one of the giants who, Biddy had told her, lay buried in the long barrows on the edge of the bog. But this was nonsense. She planned what words she would say to him. Abreast of her he stopped, and stared at her white dress. Then suddenly he cried, "Gabrielle!" in a voice that she remembered well. It was Radway's. In a moment she found herself crying, beyond control, in his arms. She clove to him, sobbing desperately, and he kissed her, her eyes, that she tried to shield from him, her neck, her lips. It was an amazing moment in the darkness. Then she stopped crying and began to laugh unnaturally. In this way she blurted out the story of her fright, and he, still clasping her, listened until she was calm. "But what are you doing here? How did it all happen?" she said. She did not know what she was saying for happiness. Little by little he told her. The Pennant had put in to Devonport for repairs a week before. He had been granted a month's leave, and his first thought had been Roscarna. After a couple of days at his own home he had crossed to Ireland, arriving late in the afternoon at Oughterard, where he found a room at an hotel. In Dublin he had armed himself with an Ordnance map, and looking at this, it had seemed to him that it would be easy enough to walk to Roscarna in the evening and let her know that he had arrived. Time was so short that he could not bear to miss a moment of her. So he had set out from Oughterard along the road to Clonderriff, hoping to reach Roscarna in daylight and to return with the rising moon. He had reckoned without Irish miles and Irish roads, and forgotten that a sailor who has been long afloat is out of walking trim. He had made poor progress, and nothing but the distant light of the cabin on the top of the hill in which the wake was being held had prevented him from giving up his attempt to see her. And then this astounding miracle had happened, and he had found her crying in his arms … surely a lover's luck! "And now you'll be coming with me to Roscarna," she said. She was so happy. She passed the cabin of the wake without a shudder. They walked as lovers, arm in arm, and soon a yellow moon, in its third quarter, rose, making Clonderriff beautiful, and flinging their moving shadows upon the pale stones at the roadside. As they breasted the hill, an arm of Corrib burned above the black like a band of sunset cloud, rather than moonlit water. Its beauty overwhelmed them. They clung to each other and kissed again. He told her that she was just as he had seen her first in her white dress, just as he had always imagined her in his days at sea, only more beautiful. She was so pale in the moonlight, and her lips so happy. She was glad that an inspired caprice had made her put on her white dress. He asked her whether it was very far to Roscarna. "If you could miss the way," he said, "we might go on wandering for ever in the moonlight. There never could be another night like this." But they had come already to the dark belt of woodland that the first Hewishes had planted, a darkness unvisited by moonlight, where their feet rustled a carpet of dead leaves, and shy, nocturnal creatures made another rustling beside them. At the edge of the wood a bird flew out of a thorn tree. "It's a brown owl," cried Radway; but when its wings caught the moonlight they saw the band of white. "It's a magpie," she said. "One for sorrow …" and smiled. Roscarna stood before them, the ghost of a great house with many solemn windows for eyes. It looked blank, uninhabited, lifeless. Between the house and the river moonlight smoothed the lawns. The moon made that cold stone phantom imponderable, a grey mirage. Radway could not believe, for a moment, that it was real; but the sense of Gabrielle's cold cheek against his lips, her fingers twined in his, and her soft, unhurried breathing recalled him, telling him that he was a lover, awake and alive. They crossed the bridge and entered the house by the front doors. The latch clanged to, echoing, and Biddy Joyce appeared in a red petticoat. Gabrielle introduced Radway, and Biddy was not scandalized, being used to the freedoms of Irish hospitality. Jocelyn had been in bed for half an hour or more, she said, and as the state in which he had retired was problematical they thought it better not to disturb him. They gave Radway supper in the dining-room, Gabrielle sitting opposite to him with her chin in the cup of her hands and her face white with candle-light. In the meantime Biddy had prepared a guest-room for him, a sombre chamber with long windows, so sealed by neglect that they could not be opened, in which a broken pane served for ventilator. In the middle of it stood a bed, painted and gilt, in the manner of the seventeenth century, with panels of crimson brocade, threadbare but still beautiful, although the pattern of their ornament had faded long since. Gabrielle lighted him to his room, stepping softly along the uncarpeted passage. At the door they surrendered themselves to a passionate good-night. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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