It is extraordinary to think how forty-eight hours had turned this
amazing, sexless creature into a woman. The problem of a dinner-dress
was solved for her almost at once by Jocelyn himself. As soon as they
were safely back at Maple's he asked her if she really wanted to dine
with the Halbertons at the Shelbourne, and when she said, "Of course!"
he produced a five pound note from the pigskin case that he carried in
his coat-tail, and turned her loose in Grafton Street. An hour later
she returned, breathless with excitement, carrying the dress that she
had bought, a frock of white muslin, high at the neck and
hand-embroidered with a pattern of shamrock. Life was becoming a
matter of great excitement.
The maid at Maple's dressed her in the evening, a blowsy young woman
from Carlow who called her 'my darlin,' and told her that she had a
beautiful head of hair. Biddy had never told her that her hair was
beautiful, and Gabrielle herself had always considered it something of
a nuisance. In the hotel bedroom a cunning combination of mirrors
showed her the thick plait hanging down her back. She had never seen
her own back before. Looking at it she shrugged her shoulders to see
what they looked like.
Of course she was ready dressed long before she need have been. She
went down into the hall of the hotel and waited for her father. She
hoped, and was almost sure, that she looked lovely. While she stood
there, looking into a huge oval mirror, an old gentleman of much the
same cut as her father came in and stared at her as though she were
some new and curious animal. She turned and smiled at him. She would
have smiled at anyone on that evening. He did not give her a smile in
return. He only went red in his bald scalp and cleared his throat,
hobbling up to his room and wondering what the devil Maple's was coming
to.
A moment later Jocelyn arrived, very stately in the evening dress of
the seventies. His face looked brown and hard and weathered, like a
filbert, against his white spread of shirt-front. His eyes twinkled,
his temples were flushed, and the twisted cord of an artery could be
seen pulsating across each of them: all three being symptoms of the
bottle of Pommery on which he had dressed. When he saw Gabrielle he
said "Ha--very good, very good," and she, in an access of enthusiasm,
kissed him and smelt his vinous breath.
It was no more than a stone's throw from their hotel to the Shelbourne,
Jocelyn remembering his long-forgotten manners stepped aside
courteously when they crossed the road as if he were escorting a real
lady. Gabrielle couldn't understand this at all; she would have liked
to jog along with him arm in arm. The magnificence of the Shelbourne
with its uniformed porters overpowered Gabrielle, and when she reached
the Halbertons' private room, she, who had often been reproved for
talking the heads off Biddy and Mr. Considine, was dumb. Jocelyn,
however, pouring gin and bitters on his Pommery, did talking enough for
both of them. He was in excellent form. His talk flowed steadily and
Gabrielle, drifting as it were, into an eddy, was left at liberty to
examine her cousins and their company.
Lord Halberton and Jocelyn Hewish had very little in common. The peer
she noticed wore an air of great fragility, as though he had been
sprinkled with powder to preserve him. His movements were all minute
and precise. He walked with short steps; and when he smiled, as
Jocelyn, already in the story-telling stage, compelled him to do, his
lips twitched apart for a moment and then closed again as if he were
afraid that any expression more violent might make his teeth fall out.
Gabrielle decided that he must be very old, so old that he was only
kept alive by these precautions. She had noticed, too, when she shook
hands with him that the flesh of his fingers was limp, and that the
joints were stiff like those of a dead man.
Lady Halberton, who, at the Horse Show had struck her as an ancient and
withered woman, now appeared middle-aged, scintillating in a scheme of
black and silver. Her dress and her toupet were black, relieved by
silver sequins and a silver mounted tiara. High lights in keeping with
the scheme were supplied by other jewels on her fingers, her glittering
filbert nails and a diamond pendant that sparkled on the white and bony
ridge of her breastbone. The Halberton daughters, whose accents
Gabrielle had been imitating in her bedroom when she lay awake with
excitement the night before, were inclined to be friendly with her; but
as all their conversation had to do with a world of which Gabrielle
knew nothing, they did not get very far. Both of them were over thirty
and unmarried. From time to time, taking new courage, each in turn
would make a pounce on Gabrielle with some question that led nowhere,
and then flutter off again. The fact that she obviously puzzled them
amused Gabrielle, and she soon regained the confidence that the sight
of the hall porters had shaken. From time to time Lady Halberton would
turn on her a smile full of glittering teeth, and twice, apropos of
nothing, Gabrielle heard her say: "Sweet child! You must really let
her come and stay with us at Halberton, Sir Jocelyn," though the
baronet did not seem to hear what she said.
They dined _en famille_. Lord Halberton ate as gingerly as he smiled,
probably for the same reason. The party had been squared by the
addition of two young men, one of them a soldier from the Curragh,
named Fortescue, and the other a naval sub-lieutenant, named Radway.
He and Gabrielle, as the least important persons, found themselves in
each other's company, while Captain Fortescue dished up the kind of
small talk to which they were accustomed to the two Halberton girls,
Lady Halberton continuously sparkling at Sir Jocelyn and her husband
presiding over the whole function with set lips like a cataleptic.
It was Radway who saved Gabrielle from throttling herself with the
flower of a French artichoke, a vegetable with which she was
unacquainted, and in a burst of gratitude she confided to him the fact
that this was her first dinner party. From this they slipped into an
easy intimacy; easy for her because she was so thankful to find someone
to whom she could babble, and for him because she was so utterly
unguarded. It had been unusual for him to meet a girl of birth or
breeding who was not preoccupied with matrimonial possibilities; and
this creature was as frank as she was beautiful.
Radway had never been in Ireland before. The cruiser on which he
served was visiting Kingstown, and at the Horse Show he had run across
the Halbertons whom he had met when he was stationed in their own
county at Devonport. Beyond them he didn't know a soul in the country,
and the soft western brogue of Gabrielle fascinated him. He encouraged
her to talk, and she was quite willing to do so, telling of Roscarna
and the hills and the river, of her lessons with Mr. Considine, of her
secret bathes in the lake and other things as intimate which would have
persuaded him that she was an exceedingly fast young woman if he had
not been already convinced that she was nothing but a child.
It gave her a great happiness to talk about Roscarna in this alien
land. And Radway was glad to listen if only for the pleasure of
hearing her voice.
Radway was a straight-forward young man, twenty-four or five years of
age. That he was eminently presentable one deduces from the fact that
the Halbertons condescended to entertain him, though Lady Halberton, as
the years went by, was known to make social sacrifices for the sake of
the dear girls. I do not think it is profitable to seek for much
subtlety in Radway. It is better to accept him as the clean sturdy
type of youth that Dartmouth turns afloat every year. Physically he
was fair (Arthur Payne also was fair), with a straight mouth, excellent
teeth, and blue, humorous eyes.
There is nothing younger for its age than a naval sub-lieutenant. In
the traditional simplicity of seamen there is more than a tradition;
for the inhabitants of a ship are a small island community in which
grown men live and accept a glorified version of life at a public
school until they reach the flag-list, or are shot out into the world
on a pension that is inadequate for its enjoyment. The one subject on
which the wardroom claims to be authoritative is that of women; and
Radway was already as well acquainted with the Irish aspects of the
sport as with the Japanese. In daring, as in physical perfection, the
wardroom of the _Pennant_ considered that the daughters of the Irish
squirearchy took some beating; and Radway had heard, no doubt, stories
of many wayward and passionate episodes with which the hospitality of
Irish country houses had been enlivened. Gabrielle was the first of
the kind that he had met, her frankness, her beauty, and her sudden,
enchanting intimacy seemed to tell him that he was in luck's way and on
the edge of an adventure. It was not the part of a sailor to miss
opportunities of experience. He couldn't guess, poor devil, what the
end would be, but naval tradition favoured the taking of all possible
risks, and he determined to let the affair develop as rapidly as
possible.
The dulness of the rest of the party isolated them. To all intents and
purposes they were alone. The difference between this girl and all the
others that he had met was that she withheld nothing, she didn't hedge,
or try to protect herself with any assumption of feminine mystery. It
puzzled Radway. He wondered, in his innocence, if he had succeeded in
making a swift, bewildering conquest. Of course he hadn't done
anything of the sort, but the speculation disarmed him, and by the end
of the evening he was thoroughly bowled over.
So was Sir Jocelyn--but in another way. All the time that she had been
talking to Radway Gabrielle had kept her eye on him. She knew that
things were reaching a point of danger when she saw his eyes fill with
tears as he told the sympathetic Lady Halberton of the loss of his
wife. The achievement of sentiment in Jocelyn marked a fairly high
degree of intoxication. In the middle of her description of the
Roscarna black-game shooting Gabrielle stopped dead. Radway wondered
what on earth had happened to her.
It was a difficult moment, for she hadn't the least idea of its
conventional solution. She only knew that somehow she must rescue her
father before he became impossible. She supposed that, in the ordinary
way, it was his duty and not hers to bring the visit to an end, but she
knew that as long as there was whiskey in the decanter he wouldn't
dream of going. So she left Radway in the middle of her sentence,
walked straight up to Lady Halberton and said, "Good-night," with a
staggering abruptness, and before he knew what had happened Lord
Halberton was handing Jocelyn his hat.
It took Radway more than a minute to recover from this cold douche; but
he was too far gone to let the possibility of romantic developments
slip, and before the Hewishes left, he contrived to let Gabrielle know
that he wanted to meet her again. "Outside the gates of Trinity
College to-morrow at four o'clock," he whispered. She said nothing.
He wondered, for one moment, whether she was deeper than he had
imagined. Then she looked him full in the eyes and nodded. It gave
him a thrill of delight. He found himself listening in a dream to Lady
Halberton's reminiscences of the Admiral's garden party, at which they
had met, and a maternal appreciation of the accomplishments of her
elder daughter, Lady Barbara.