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Tragic Bride

<h2 id="id00196" style="margin-top: 4em">IX</h2> It is certain that Considine secretly regarded the death of Gabrielle's child with thankfulness. It had brought their equivocal relation to an end, and now that the matter was cleared up there was no reason why their married life should not be as plain-sailing as he desired. This was the beginning. As for Gabrielle, she recovered slowly. The emotional storm that had been the cause of her accident had affected her more deeply than the illness itself, which Biddy, as might be expected, mismanaged. The wintry season was at its loneliest when she came downstairs again, very pale and transparent, and began to settle down into the ways of the house. Even so the storm had cleared the air, and when she began to recover her strength she also recovered some of her spirit. Looking backward she realised the depths in which she had been struggling and determined, rather grimly, that whatever happened she would never descend to them again. She was naturally a healthy and a happy creature, and now that her troubles were over she meant to enjoy life. Considine rejoiced at her recovery. It must not be forgotten that Considine was genuinely in love with her, that he found her physically exquisite, and had always delighted in her swift mind. And even if Gabrielle could not give him in return an ideal passion, she did not, in the very least, dislike him. She had always looked upon him as a good friend. Before their marriage, ever since her earliest childhood they had spent many happy hours together. As a tutor he had been able to interest her, and apart from the fact that he was now her husband and could offer her tenderness and admiration as well, there was no reason why her life should be very different from what it had been. The only thing that she loved of which he had deprived her was Roscarna. At first, she had felt that more than anything; but when she recovered from her illness and was able for the first time to accompany Considine on his visits to the estate, it seemed to her that her passion for Roscarna had faded. Perhaps also she was now a little frightened by its associations, and felt that it would be safer for her to cut herself entirely free from everything that reminded her of the old era. When she visited the house to see her father she would look wistfully, almost fearfully, at her old haunts; the path to the lake, the woods that she never entered now, and, above them, the cloudy vastness of Slieveannilaun. She used to go there once a week, and Considine, as a matter of course, went with her. By the beginning of the spring her reason for these visits ceased. Jocelyn, who had been ailing for a year or more, suddenly died. I suppose it was the kind of death that he might have expected. It was now two years since he had been able to take the keen physical delight in country life that had been his chief apology for his early excesses. Even before the blow of Radway's accident and Gabrielle's marriage had fallen upon him his arteries had been ageing, and though he was barely sixty years of age a man is as old as his arteries. The end came swiftly with a left-sided cerebral haemorrhage that robbed him of his speech and paralysed the right side of his body, not in the middle of any unusual exertion, but when he was sitting quietly over the fire after dinner. Biddy found him there when she brought him in his nightcap, huddled up on the floor where he had fallen. She had expected something of the kind for long enough. No one in the world knew Jocelyn as well as she did. She guessed that nothing could be done, and waited for the morning before she sent for Considine or the doctor. In the afternoon when Gabrielle and Considine visited him Jocelyn was almost good-humoured, laughing sardonically and screwing up one of his bird-like eyes while, from the other, tears escaped. He passed from laughter to tears quite easily. It was very horrible to see one side of his childish grey-whiskered face puckered up with crying and the other limp and blank. He finished by making cheerful signs to them that he was sure he would be better in a week. Of course he wasn't. Within five days his poor brain was smitten with two more tremendous blows. The third stroke killed him, coming in the night. It was Biddy who kissed his face and put Peter's pence upon his eyes and folded his arms on his breast. If any woman in the world had a right to perform this melancholy function for Jocelyn it was she. He was hers, and when he died she was alone with him, which was as it should have been. Even when he was dead, Biddy had not finished with him. For many years he had trusted her with the key of the cellar, and this privilege allowed her to arrange a wake exceeding in magnificence anything in the memory of Joyce's Country. They kept it up for three days, the scattered Joyces foregathering from outlandish corners of Mayo and Connemara. Naturally she didn't tell Considine. He himself discovered the darkened dining-room at Roscarna strewn with human débris and lit with fifty candles. The candles were popish and the drinkers were pagan, so he turned on Biddy and told her more or less what he thought of her. He pointed with disgust to a couple of drinkers who lay snoring on a sofa under the window. "All the riff-raff of the country!" he said. Biddy flared up. "Riff-raff, is it? Sure it's his own sons and mine who do be after paying respect to their own father, and him lying dead!" But Considine was not to be beaten. He had known for many years that Biddy was a kindly humbug. He knew that if he didn't now get rid of her Roscarna would become nothing more than a warren in which her innumerable relatives might swarm. He purged Roscarna of Joyces, Biddy included. He buried Jocelyn decently according to the ritual of the Church of Ireland, and proceeded to put his wife's estate in order as soon as her father's remains were disposed of. There was more work in it than he had bargained for. Even the small immediate courtesies and formalities took time; the announcements in the papers and short obituary notices; letters, discreetly composed, announcing the melancholy event to Lord and Lady Halberton; an official search for Jocelyn's last will; a formal application for probate. When these things were finished, Considine's real work had only begun. He had to readjust the whole financial fabric of Roscarna, to find out what money was owed or owing, to decide how much of Gabrielle's paper inheritance was tangible. He unearthed the firm of Dublin solicitors in whose hands the business of the estate had been allowed to drift for the last twenty years. They seemed to him a pack of shifty rogues. He was not used to dealing with lawyers, and what he took for cunning was nothing more than the traditional gesture of the profession. It was unthinkable that a firm of such ancient establishment should show any traces of haste in a matter of business. When Considine began to hurry them up they simply offered to surrender the business. No doubt they knew far better than Considine that there wasn't much in it. He imagined that they were bluffing and took them at their word, with the result that there fell upon Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents—leases and mortgages and conveyances and post-obits—all the documentary débris of a crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing days. Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room enough for this accumulation of papers, so they set aside the library at Roscarna for the purpose, sorting and indexing the Hewish dossier as long as the daylight lasted. Considine worked steadily through them as though he were dealing with a mathematical calculation. To Gabrielle, on the other hand, there was something mysterious in her occupation; fingering these papers that other fingers had touched she communed with the dead—not with her father, who could scarcely write his own name, but with the ancient stately Hewishes who had built Roscarna and grown rich on the Spanish trade. Sitting at the long table with Considine, a pile of papers before her, her attention would wander, and while her eyes watched the west wind blowing along the woods she would feel that she was not herself but another Hewish woman staring out of the library windows on a rough day in March a hundred years ago. And in this dream she would be lost until the light died on the woods in a stormy sunset, and Considine began to collect the papers in sheaves and lock them in the press. By the time that spring appeared, Considine doing his best to put the affairs of Roscarna in order, had realised the hopeless disorder in which they were involved. In the whole of Jocelyn's tenure of the estate the only stable period had been that of his bourgeois marriage. In youth he had been wildly profligate, in old age negligent, in neither caring for anything beyond his immediate needs. His tenants owed him thousands of pounds that he had never attempted to recover, for he had found it easier to borrow money on mortgage than exact it in rent. As a result of Jocelyn's finance Considine found that Gabrielle's only hope of saving anything from the ruined fortune lay in the sacrifice of Roscarna itself. The property, hopelessly degenerated as an agricultural estate, had still some value as a fishing or shooting box, and there was a chance that some wealthy Englishman might buy it for that purpose. For a moment the idea of selling Roscarna hurt her, but after a little thought she consented to the sale. Considine advertised the opportunity in the English sporting papers, but the only reply that came to him was a long and anxious letter from Lord Halberton, who had been shocked to see the Irish branch of his family reduced to selling their house and lands. His lordship offered to come over in person and give Considine the benefit of his opinion. Considine wrote very fully in reply, enclosing a balance-sheet that made Lord Halberton sit up and rub his eyes. The business-like tone of Considine's letter struck him very favourably; that sort of thing was so rare in a parson. As a matter of fact he had already heard from the Radways how tactfully Considine had managed the difficult situation of their son's death. It struck him that Considine was too good a man to be wasted in the wilds of Ireland where the cause of tradition and aristocracy needed no bolstering. A fellow who could wind up an estate as entangled as Roscarna would be useful in the sphere of the Halberton territorial influence. He talked the matter over with his wife, and in the end wrote to Considine at some length, concurring in his wise determination to get rid of Roscarna. "If you sell Roscarna," he wrote, "it will scarcely be fitting for your wife to remain in the district occupying a small house in Clonderriff. My lady and I both consider that this proceeding would be incompatible with Gabrielle's dignity. As luck will have it the living of Lapton Huish (that is the way in which your wife's name is spelt in England) will shortly be vacant. I have persuaded Dr. Harrow, the present incumbent, who is over ninety and not very active, that it would be well for him to make way for a younger man. The living is not generously endowed, but it has the advantage of being on the edge of my estates, and I have great pleasure in offering it to you. There is no reason why it should not lead to further advancement." The receipt of this letter made Considine tremulous with pleasure. His original settlement in Ireland had been the result of a romantic inclination to play the missionary in a godless Catholic country. When first he came to Clonderriff he hadn't for a moment realised that the huge inertia of the west would get hold of him and enchain him; but with the passage of time this was what had happened. He knew now that he could not, of his own will, escape; and at the very moment when Jocelyn's death had created a general upheaval and made the situation in Clonderriff restless, Lord Halberton's offer gave him the chance not only of returning to his own country, but of making up for lost time. He jumped at it, and Gabrielle, who could not bear the idea of seeing her own Roscarna in the occupation of strangers, gladly consented. I do not suppose it would have made much difference to Considine if she had objected. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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