I never met Gabrielle Hewish. I suppose I should really call her by that
name, for her marriage took the colour out of it as surely as if she had
entered a nunnery, and adopted the frigid and sisterly label of some
female saint. Nobody had ever heard of her husband before she married
him, and nobody ever heard of Gabrielle afterwards, except those who were
acquainted with the story of Arthur Payne, as I was, and, perhaps, a
coroner's jury in Devonshire, a county where juries are more than usually
slow of apprehension. In these days you will not even find the name of
Hewish in Debrett, for Gabrielle was the baronet's only child, and when
Sir Jocelyn died, in the early days of his daughter's married life, the
family, which for the last half century had been putting out no more than
a few feeble and not astonishingly brilliant leaves on its one living
branch, withered altogether, as well it might in the thin Irish soil
where it had stubbornly held its own since the days of Queen Elizabeth.
After all, baronetcies are cheap enough in Ireland, and one more or less
could make very little difference to the amenities of County Galway,
where Roscarna, for all I know, may have been absorbed and parcelled out
by the Congested Districts Board ten years ago. Even in clubs and places
where they gossip, I doubt if the Hewishes of Roscarna are remembered,
for modern memories are short, and in Gabrielle's day the illustrated
Sunday newspapers had not contrived to specialise in the smiles of
well-connected young Irishwomen.
Of course the Payne episode--I'm not sure it should not rather be called
the Payne miracle--had always lain stored somewhere in my literary attic;
its theme was too exciting for a man who deals in such lumber to have
forgotten; but that admirable woman, Mrs. Payne, had whetted my curiosity
to such an extent that I weakly promised her secrecy before she told it
to me. "I can't resist telling you," she said, "because it wouldn't be
fair of me to deprive you: it's far too much in your line." She even
flattered me: "You'd do it awfully well too, you know; but I have a sort
of sentimental regard for her--not admiration, or anything of that kind,
but an indefinite feeling that _noblesse oblige_. In her own
extraordinary way she did us a good turn, and however carefully you
wrapped it up she might recognise her portrait and feel embarrassed.
It's she that I'm thinking of, not Arthur. Arthur was too young at the
time to realize what was happening, and if he saw your picture of two
women desperately fighting over the soul or body of a boy of seventeen
who resembled himself I doubt if he'd tumble to the portrait. He's a
dear transparently honest person like his father. Still, I don't want to
hurt her, and so, if you want the story, you must gloat over it in
private, and cherish it as an unwritten masterpiece. Probably if you
_did_ write it, it wouldn't be a masterpiece at all. Console yourself
with that."
She told me her story--for of course I gave her the promise that she
demanded--in a midge-infested corner of the garden at Overton, while
Arthur, the unconscious subject of it, was playing tennis with the
clergyman's daughter whom he married a year later. I think Mrs. Payne
knew that this affair was coming off, and offered me the tale as a
combination of oral confession and Nunc Dimittis, watching the boy while
she told it to me with a sort of hungry maternal satisfaction, as
somebody whom she had not only brought into the world but for whose
salvation she was responsible. No doubt she had put up a hard fight for
him and had every reason to be satisfied, though Gabrielle shared the
honours of the mother's triumph in her own defeat. We sat there talking
until all the birds were silent, but a single blackbird that made a noise
in the shrubbery like that of two pebbles knocked sharply together; until
the young people on the tennis court could no longer see to play, and the
tall Californian poppies at the back of the herbaceous border that was
her special pride shone like moon-flowers in the dusk.
"When I think of all that ... that summer," she said with a sigh, "I'm so
thankful ... so thankful." And then Arthur came back with his sweater
over his arm, swinging his racket, and she went straight up to him and
kissed him with the sort of modesty that you would have expected in a
young girl rather than a middle-aged widow.
"You dear thing, Mater," he said, kissing her forehead in return.
This is the land of digression into which memories of Overton lead one.
My only excuse is that part of the story, and indeed its emotional climax
belongs to Overton, to that smoothly ordered country house with its huge
sentinel elms and its peculiar atmosphere of leisure and peace. No doubt
Mrs. Payne was aware of this when she kissed her son. From the lawn
where we were sitting she could see the yew-parlour and the cypress hedge
in the shadow of which she had stood on the tremendous evening about
which she had been telling me. We walked back to the terrace, and on the
way she gave me a shy smile, half triumph, half apology. She never
mentioned the episode again and though the story fermented in my brain,
maturing, as I hoped, like a choice vintage, and has emerged from time to
time when my mind has been free from other work, I have kept my promise
and have neither repeated it nor written it till this day.
Now, at last, I find myself absolved. Arthur Payne, I believe, is
happily married to the fresh young person with whom he was playing
tennis. Soon after their marriage they emigrated to the backs of Canada,
or was it New Zealand: somewhere at any rate beyond the reach of colonial
editions. Overton is now in the possession of a Midland soap-boiler.
Mrs. Payne, having fulfilled her main function in life and fearing
English winters, has retired to a small villa at Mustapha Superieur, near
Algiers, where, though she live for ever she is not likely to read this
book. And Gabrielle, the beautiful Gabrielle, is dead.
The news came as a shock to me. For the moment I, who had never even set
eyes on her, suffered the pain of an almost personal bereavement; I was
moved, as poets are moved by the vanishing of something beautiful from
the earth. Was she then so beautiful? I don't know. But I like to
persuade myself that she was a fiery, elemental creature of a rare and
pathetic brilliance ... for the sake of her story, no doubt. But, for
the moment, when old Colonel Hoylake, who always began his _Times_ by
quotations from the obituary column--he had survived the age when births
or marriages are interesting--suddenly brought out the word Hewish:
Gabrielle Hewish, I was startled out of the state of pleasant lethargy
into which a day's fishing on the Dulas and the Matthews' beer had
plunged me, and became suddenly wide awake. I had the feeling that some
bright thing had fallen: a kingfisher, a dragonfly. "Hewish," he
murmured again. "Gabrielle Hewish ... Well, well."
"You know the family?"
"Yes, I knew her father, poor feller," he said.
Now I was full of eagerness. It had come over me all at once that this
obituary notice was, for me, a happy release. It meant that, for a month
or two, all through the mesmeric hours that I should spend up to my knees
in the swift Dulas, alone with the dippers and the ring-ousels and the
plaintive sand-pipers, I should be able to explore, to my own content,
this forbidden treasure, searching in the dark soul of Marmaduke
Considine and the tender heart of Gabrielle; threading the lanes that
spread in a net about the schoolhouse at Lapton Huish; brooding over the
deceptive peace of Overton Manor; recalling the scene in the yew-parlour,
the atmosphere, terrifically charged with emotion, of the day when Mrs.
Payne took her courage in her hands and fought like a maternal tigress
for Arthur's soul. My heart beat faster as I led the old fisherman on
with "Yes?"
He laid aside _The Times_ and lit one of the long Trichinopoly cheroots
that he smoked perpetually, settling himself back in the comfortable
hotel chair.
"Hewish," he said. "Sir Jocelyn Hewish. That was the father's name.
Lived at a place called Roscarna in the west of Ireland. He was an
extraordinarily good fisherman: tied his own flies. I have some
sea-trout flies in my book that he tied thirty years ago ... a kind of
blue teal that he'd invented. Of course they had a fine string of
white-trout lakes--many a good fish I've had there--but the remarkable
thing about Roscarna was this. Right in front of the house at the bottom
of the sunk fence, there ran a stretch of river,--about three hundred
yards of it, clear deep slides with a level muddy bottom. One winter old
Sir Jocelyn took it into his head to clean up this bit of water, and when
they came to scrape the bottom they found under the mud that the whole
bed of the stream was paved with marble slabs like a swimming bath ...
Connemara marble. They went on with the job because it looked so well,
all this green, veined stuff shining through the clear water. So they
scoured the bottom and fixed up a banderbast for keeping the mud from
coming downstream from above, and having made a sort of stewpond, put in
four or five hundred yearling brownies. You'd never believe how those
fish grew. In a couple of years the water was full of three and four
pounders, lovely fish with a small head and pink flesh like a salmon.
Quite a curious thing! And you'll never guess the reason. No sooner had
they cleared away the mud than the place swarmed with freshwater shrimps.
The yearlings throve on them like a smolt when it goes down to the sea.
That was the remarkable thing about Roscarna...."
I knew, of course, that it wasn't. The remarkable thing about Roscarna,
to anyone with a ha'porth of imagination, was Gabrielle Hewish. Luckily
that admirable gossip Hoylake had another interest in life besides
fishing stories, and one that served my purpose,--genealogy. It is an
interest not uncommon with old soldiers--that is why they often write
such incredibly dull memoirs--and after allowing him a number of sporting
digressions in the direction of a Lochanillaun pike and the altogether
admirable blackgame shooting at Roscarna, which, he assured me, was
better than anything in the west except Lord Dudley's shoot on the
Corrib, I played him tactfully into the deeper water that interested me
and, by the end of the week, had succeeded in drawing from him a good
deal of irrelevant family history and, what is more to the point, a
fairly consecutive account of the last of the Hewishes, Sir Jocelyn and
his amazing daughter.
As he told it to me in the parlour of the fishing inn beside the Dulas, I
began to realise that accidentally, and at the moment when I needed it
most, I had stumbled on a fountain of curious knowledge. If I had missed
meeting him, my story, fascinating as it was, would have been incomplete.
It armed me with a whole new theory of Gabrielle, suggesting causes, or,
if you like, preparations for the extraordinary episode that followed.
It showed me that I had been flattering myself that I knew all about it
when, as a matter of fact, I had only got hold of one--and the wrong--end
of the stick. I fished the Dulas for a fortnight, hypnotised, pondering
on the whole curious business, not only when the bright water rippled by
me, but when old Hoylake told me stories of mahseer and tiger fish and
barracuda that he had missed, when I was walking through the pinewoods
under the mountain, when I was eating, and, I verily believe, when I was
asleep. I had thought before that my friend Mrs. Payne was the heroine
of the story. Now I am not sure that Gabrielle does not share the
honours.
I
And, first of all, I dreamed of Roscarna. Partly for the sheer pleasure
of reconstructing a shadowy countryside that I remembered, partly because
Roscarna, the house in which the Hewish family had run to seed in its
latter generations, was very much to the point. Twenty miles from
Galway--and Irish miles, at that--it stands at the foot of the mountains
on the edge of the tract that is called Joyce's Country, a district
famous for inbreeding and idiocy where everyone was called Joyce,
excepting, of course, the Hewishes of Roscarna, who were aliens,
Elizabethan adventurers from the county of Devon, cousins of the Earls of
Halberton, who had planted themselves upon the richest of the Joyces'
lands in the early seventeenth century and built their house in the
English fashion of the time.
I imagine that it was the founder of the house who paved his river bed
with marble slabs, smoothing the stickles into a long clear slide.
Labour, no doubt, was cheap or forced, and the Elizabethan fancy lavish.
In the mouth of the valley, where it opens on the lake, they planted a
girdle of dark woods growing so near to the new house that the Hewishes,
walking in their gardens, could almost fancy themselves in England and
lose sight of the mountain slopes that swept up into the crags behind
them. The house stood with its back to the hills and all western
barrenness, looking over a level, terraced sward, past a river that had
been tamed to the smoothness of a chalk stream, to homely woodlands of
beech and elm that might well have been haunted by nightingales if only
there had been nightingales in Ireland. There were no nightingales in
Devon, so that the first Hewish was under no necessity of importing them
to complete his picture. But he had his gravelled walks, his poets'
avenue of yews, that grew kindly, his sundials with their graceful and
melancholy admonitions, his box-hedges and white peacocks, and the fancy
of some Hewish unknown had blossomed at last in a Palladian bridge of
freestone, spanning the quiet river.
Roscarna, in fact, was a bold experiment, destined from the first to
fail. Never, in all its history, could it have become the living thing
that its founders dreamed, any more than the Protestant Church that they
built in the village of Clonderriff could be the home of a living faith;
for though they turned their backs upon the mountains of Joyce's Country,
the mountains were always there, and the house itself, which should have
glowed with the warmth of red brick, or one of those soft building-stones
that mellow as they weather, seemed always cold and desolate, being made
of a hard, cold, Connaught rock, that made the Palladian bridge look like
the fanciful toy that it was, and grew bleaker, bluer, colder, as the
years went by.
I think of it as one thinks of the villas that Roman colonists built
above the marches of Wales, built obstinately on the Roman plan that the
climate of Italy had dictated to their fathers, with open atrium and
terraces protected from the sun. "What's good enough for Rome," they
said, "is surely good enough for Siluria," and, shivering, showed the
latest official visitor a landscape that might have been transported
bodily from the Sabine Hills ... if only there were more sun! "But we
_do_ miss the lizards and the cicalas," they would say with a sigh. No
doubt the most enthusiastic built themselves Palladian ... I mean
Etruscan bridges and marble stew-ponds for mullet, until, in the end, the
immense inertia of the surrounding country asserted itself and the
natural desires of mankind led to a mingling of British blood with
theirs, till the Roman of the first century became the Briton of the
third.
The parallel is as near as it may be, for though the first Hewish was an
Englishman, his great-great-grandson was Irish, and the only thing that
was left to remind him of his ancestry was the house of Roscarna, the
sullen Connaught stone fixed in an alien design, and the huge belt of
timber through which the gorse and heather were slowly creeping down from
the mountain and settling in the valley bottom that they had once
inhabited. But the foreign woods that trailed along the shore of the
lake were admirable for black-cock.
The transformation was very gradual. The first Hewishes, no doubt, kept
in touch with their English cousins. London was their metropolis, and to
London, in the fashions of their remote province, they would return with
amusing tales of Irish savagery that made them good company in an
eighteenth century coffee-house. Little by little they found their
English interests waning, and the social centre shifting westwards.
Dublin became their city, and to a stately house in Merrion Square the
family coach migrated in the season, until, at last, it seemed hardly
worth while to cross the dreariness of the central plain, and a
town-house in Galway seemed the zenith of urbanity. Galway, indeed, had
risen on a wave of prosperity. In the streets above the Claddagh,
merchants who had grown rich in the Spanish trade were building solid
houses with carved lintels and windows of stained glass. The Hewishes
invested money in these new ventures. In Galway a Hewish of Roscarna was
somebody: there the family was taken for granted and, following the way
of least resistance, the Hewishes settled down into the state of
provincial notabilities.
Notabilities as long as the Spanish money lasted--then notorieties. For,
as Roscarna, the symbol of a tradition, decayed, the men of the Hewish
family developed a curious recklessness in living.
It was as though the original vigour of the tree planted in a foreign
soil had been enough to keep it fighting and flourishing for a couple of
hundred years and then had suddenly failed, dying, as a tree will, from
above downwards.
For the first half of the nineteenth century a series of dissolute
Hewishes--they never bred in great numbers--lived wildly upon the edge of
Connemara, drinking and fighting and gaming and wenching while the roof
of Roscarna grew leaky and the long stables were turned into pigsties,
and soft mud silted over the marble bottom below the Palladian bridge.
If they had lived in England the estate would have vanished field by
field until nothing but the house was left; but the outer land at
Roscarna was of no marketable value, and when Sir Jocelyn succeeded to
the property in the year 1870, he found himself master of many worthless
acres and a ruined house that he was powerless to repair. It was no
wonder that he went to the dogs like his father before him, for the
passage of every generation had made recovery more difficult. Of course
he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was
an expensive calling. As a baronet--even as an Irish baronet--a good
deal would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means
of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed
to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be blamed for
having followed it.
When Colonel Hoylake knew him he was a middle-aged man and a reformed
character, and the fact that he ever came to be either is enough to show
that the original Hewish strain was still strong enough to put up some
sort of fight. He cannot have been without his share of original virtue,
but by his own account, his youth, hopeless and therefore abandoned, must
have been pretty lurid. Of course he drank. His father must have taught
him to do that as a matter of habit. He was equally at home with the
ancient sherries, a few bins of which remained in the Roscarna cellars to
remind him of the Spanish trading days, or with the liquid fire that the
Joyces distilled in the mountains under the name of potheen.
Of course he gambled. He was sufficiently Irish for that: and his gaming
passion soon made Roscarna a sort of savage Monte Carlo, to which the
more dissolute younger sons of the surrounding gentry foregathered:
Blakes and O'fflahertys, and Kilkellys, and all the rest of them.
In the middle of the stables, at the back of the house, stood a huge
deserted pigsty surrounded by a stone wall, and this place became under
Jocelyn's regime, a cockpit, in which desperate birds were pitted against
one another, fighting fiercely until they dropped. Even in his later
days according to Hoylake, he was not ashamed of these exploits. The
gamblers invented for themselves new refinements of sport or cruelty.
Spider-racing. I do not suppose that anyone living to-day knows what
spider-racing is. This was the manner of it. At night, when the big
black-bellied spiders that haunted the lofts came out to spread their
nets, stable-boys were sent with candles to collect them in tins, and
next morning, when the gamblers assembled in the pigsty at Roscarna a
piece of sheet iron, fired to a dull red heat would be placed in the
centre. On this hot surface the long-legged insects were thrown.
Naturally they must run or be shrivelled with heat. And the one that ran
the furthest was counted the winner. Betting on these unfortunate
creatures Jocelyn and his friends spent many happy forenoons, and Jocelyn
was counted as good a judge of a spider as any man in Galway. In his
dealings with women he was relatively decent, relapsing, at an early age
into a relation irregular, but so domestic as to be respectable, with a
woman named Brigit Joyce who kept house for him and cooked potatoes and
distilled potheen as well as any female in the district. I do not know
if they had many children. If they did, it is probable that these found
their vocation in collecting spiders in the stables, or even drifted back
into the hill community from which their mother had come.
Through all his dissipations Sir Jocelyn preserved one characteristic, an
unerring instinct for field-sports that no amount of drinking could
impair. He could hit a flying bird with a stone, was a deadly shot for
snipe or mallard, rode like a centaur, and fished with the instinct of a
heron. It is probable that his consciousness of this faculty was at the
bottom of his startling recovery. Possibly he was frightened to find a
little of his skill failing. I only know that at the age of forty-eight,
he pulled himself up short. His eyes, seeing clearly for the first time
in his life, became aware of the appalling ruin into which Roscarna had
fallen. He became sober for six days out of the seven, setting aside the
Sabbath for the worship of Bacchus, and during the remainder he devoted
himself seriously, steadily to the reclamation of his estate. He
repaired the roof of the house with new blue slates, cleared the attics
of owls and the chimneys of jackdaws; he dredged the river and discovered
the marble bottom, netted the pike and put down yearling trout.
Gradually he restored Roscarna to its old position as a first-class
sporting property; and so, having fought his way back, step by step, into
the company of decent men, he married a wife.
Hardly the wife one would have expected from a Hewish, it is true. Her
name was Parker, her father was a shop-keeper in Baggot Street, Dublin,
and how Hewish met her God only knows. She was a sober, plain-sailing
Englishwoman, a Protestant, with a religious bias that may have made the
reformation of a dissolute baronet attractive to her. She had a little
money, to which she stuck like glue, and an abundance of common-sense.
It speaks well for the latter that she appreciated, from the first, the
value of Biddy Joyce in the kitchen, and kept her there, boiling
potatoes, although she knew that she had been her husband's mistress.
Firmly, but certainly, she ordered Jocelyn's life, realising, with him,
that Roscarna was worth saving, subsidising, with a careful hand, his
attempts to restore the woods and waters, interesting herself in the
housing of his tenants, and renewing the connection of Roscarna with the
parish church of Clonderriff, of which the Hewishes were patrons. It was
she who appointed Marmaduke Considine to the vacant living.
For ten years she lived soberly with Sir Jocelyn at Roscarna, hoping
ardently that a son might be born to them who should carry on the family
name and succeed to the fruits of her economies. In the eleventh year of
their married life it seemed that her hopes were to be realised. Even
Jocelyn, the new Jocelyn, appreciated the importance of the event. He
and Biddy Joyce, now an old and shrivelled woman, but one unrivalled in
maternal experience, nursed Lady Hewish as though the whole of their
future happiness depended on it. Every Sunday young Mr. Considine dined
at Roscarna with the family, and spent the evening in religious
discussions with her ladyship. Every month the doctor rode over from
Galway to feel her pulse. On a dark winter evening in the year eighteen
eighty-three the child was born--a girl. They christened her Gabrielle,
and a week later Lady Hewish died.