IV

Gabrielle piloted Jocelyn, who was still in a good humour, to his

bedroom door. Then she went to bed herself and slept as well as ever.

Jocelyn, alone in his room, called for another bottle of whiskey and

made a night of it. To be exact he made three days of it--four less

than might reasonably have been expected. For Gabrielle to have taken

him back to Roscarna was out of the question: and so she went on

quietly living at Maple's, and absorbing the strangeness of Dublin

while he finished it out. The servants of the hotel were very kind to

her; and the waiter who attended to Jocelyn's desires brought her night

and morning bulletins of her father's condition that were tinged with a

kind of melancholy admiration. "A wonderful gentleman for his age," he

said. "There's many a young man would envy the likes of him. Sure,

he'd drink the cross off an ass's back, so he would!"

Of course she met Radway. They met, as he had arranged, at Trinity

College gates, and went for a long walk along the blazing quays of the

Liffey. It was an unusual promenade for the month of August, but

neither of them knew Dublin.

He found her difficult. The affair did not develop along the lines

that he had intended, and as his time was limited, this made him

anxious. With Gabrielle the anticipation was always so much more

wonderful than the event. It thrilled him strangely to see her

approaching when they met: this tall slim girl with her splendid

freedom of gait, her black hair, her pallor, her red lips. When he saw

her coming he would think of all the passionate things that he wanted

to say to her; but as soon as they started on their walk together she

made the saying of them impossible--she was so obviously and vividly

interested in other and unsentimental things.

Her interest in the commonplace and (to his mind) unromantic irritated

him; but an instinct of good manners, that was not the least of his

charm, compelled him to humour her. Once she sat for a whole hour in a

dark cellar that smelt of tallow where a couple of men were engaged in

making those enormous candles that people in Ireland light on Christmas

Day; and once Radway was forced to follow her into the forecastle of a

Breton schooner reeking of garlic, where she practised the French that

Considine had taught her.

Later in the afternoon he took her to tea at Mitchell's, where she

consumed the first ice of her life, and was so pleased with the

sensation that she demanded a second; all of which was disappointing

for Radway, who wanted to arouse her appetite for romance rather than

ices. It seemed as if his nuances of love-making, the indirect methods

of approach that modern girls expected, were wasted on her. In the

evening he took her out to Howth, relying on the influence of time and

place to help him in methods more primitive. It was incredible to him

that she shouldn't--or perhaps wouldn't--realise what he was driving

at. Apparently she didn't understand the first conventions of the

game, and when her obtuseness forced him to a sudden and passionate

declaration she laughed at him.

This damping experience, so unusual in the traditions of the wardroom,

took the wind out of his sails. He decided that she had been making a

fool of him and that he had been wasting his time. With a desperate

attempt at preserving his dignity he took her back to Maple's,

conscious all the time, of her tantalising beauty. He had planned a

formal goodbye; but when he told her that his ship was sailing on the

next day, she said, quite simply and with an unusual tenderness in her

eyes that she was sorry. "If only you meant what you say..." he said,

clutching at a straw. "Of course I mean it," she said. "I shall be

very lonely without you. You're the first friend I've ever had. I

wish some day," she added, "you could come to Roscarna."

He told her that it was not at all unlikely that the _Pennant_ would

some day put into Galway, and she warmed at once to the idea. "How

splendid!" she said. "I shall expect you. Don't forget to bring a gun

with you."

They walked up and down Kildare Street making plans of what they might

do. "But in a week you'll have forgotten all about it," she said.

"Nobody ever comes to Roscarna."

"Do you think that I could possibly forget you?" he protested.

This time she did not laugh at him. "No... I don't think you will,"

she said, and then, after an awkward silence, "Please don't take any

notice of what I said this evening. I don't really understand that

sort of thing." Then they said good-bye. It was a queer

unsatisfactory ending for him, but her last words had reassured him.

Thinking it over in the train on the way to Kingstown he decided that

she had been honestly and quite naturally amused at the conventional

phrases of a modern lover, and the realisation of this only made her

more unusual and more desirable. It would be a strange experience to

meet her in her proper setting, and if the _Pennant_ should give him

the opportunity he determined not to miss it. Next morning the ship

left Kingstown for Bermuda.

It was not in Radway's nature to take these things lightly. At a

distance the memory of Gabrielle gained a good deal by imagination. It

seemed to him that she was far too precious to lose, and the fact that

she was a cousin of the exclusive Halbertons settled any social

scruples that might have worried him. He forgot his repulse at Howth

in the memory of the sweeter moment when they had parted. After all

there was no hurry. She was only a child, as her behaviour had shown

him so often. At the same time he was anxious that she should not

forget him, and for this reason he wrote her a number of letters from

Bermuda, from Jamaica and Barbadoes and other ports on the Atlantic

station. They were not love letters in any sense of the word; but they

served to keep him in her mind, and, few as they were, made an immense

breach in the zone of isolation that surrounded Roscarna.

They were the first letters of any kind that Gabrielle had received.

The postman from Oughterard did not visit Roscarna twenty times in the

year, and since his arrival was something of an event, entailing a meal

and endless gossip with Biddy Joyce, Sir Jocelyn soon became aware of

his daughter's correspondence. He questioned her about it, and she,

without the least demur, handed him Radway's letters. He sniffed at

them. If that was all the fellow had to say it struck him as a waste

of time and paper. Who was he, anyhow? Gabrielle explained that he

had dined with them at the Halbertons, and Jocelyn, who naturally had

no recollection of the event, was satisfied with these credentials. "I

asked him to come and shoot here," said Gabrielle. Jocelyn stared at

her with wrinkled eyes. "The devil you did!" said he.

Radway's letters had exactly the effect on her that he had intended.

They were an excitement, and she read them over and over again till she

almost knew them by heart. They were the first outside interest that

had ever entered her life. With Considine's help she looked up the

ports at which they were posted on a big map in the library and

thinking of their romantic names and the wonders that they suggested,

she also thought a good deal of the writer.

So it was, almost unconsciously, that Radway began to fill a

considerable place in her thoughts. His impression had fallen on an

extraordinarily virginal mind that the thought of love-making had never

disturbed. Physically, she hadn't responded to him in the least; but

the long silences of Roscarna and particularly those of the following

winter, when Slieveannilaun loomed above the woods like an immense and

snowy ghost, and the lake was frozen until the cold spell broke and

snow-broth swirled desolately under the Palladian bridge, gave her time

for reflection in which her fancy began to dwell on the problems of

ideal love. In this dead season the letters of Radway were more than

ever an excitement. They stirred her imagination with pictures of

burning seas and lurid tropical sunsets, and with this pageantry the

memory of him would invade the dank gloom of the library where she and

Considine pursued the acquisition of knowledge.

It was inevitable that she should have found some outlet of the kind,

for in the curious circumstances of her upbringing she had missed that

sentimental stage which is the measles of puberty. She had never

trembled with adoration of a schoolmistress and Considine was an

unthinkable substitute. In Dublin she had learned for the first time

that she was beautiful, and that her country clothes did not show her

at her best. This, together with Radway's attentions, had revealed to

her the fact that she was a woman, and therefore made to love and be

loved.

She loved Roscarna passionately, but in this neither Roscarna nor its

inhabitants could help her. Under the most romantic circumstances in

the world she could find no romance. Her new-born instinct revealed

itself in a curious, almost maternal devotion to her father and the

current litter of puppies. Jocelyn found its expression unusual but

not unpleasant: the attentions of this charming daughter flattered him;

and the puppies liked it, too, licking her face when she smothered them

with motherly caresses. But these things were not enough for her, and

it came as a great relief when she discovered another outlet in the

contents of the library bookshelves.

She became a greedy student of romance. The Hewishes had never been

great readers, but in the early nineteenth century one of them had felt

it becoming to his position as a country gentleman to buy books. The

romantic education of Gabrielle was accomplished, as became an

Irishwoman, in the school of Maria Edgeworth. _Castle Rackrent_

ravished her. She thrilled to the elegancies of _Belinda_ and to the

Irish atmosphere of _Ormond_. From these she plunged backwards into

the romantic mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe, living, for a time, in

surroundings that might well have been imitated from the wintry

Roscarna. She read indiscriminately, and, in her eagerness of

imagination, became the heroine of fiction incarnate and the beloved of

every dashing young gentleman in print that she encountered.

Jocelyn was inclined to laugh at her, but Biddy, who considered that

all books except the breviary, which she possessed but could not read,

were inventions of the devil, disapproved. "Sure and you'll be after

rotting your poor brain with all that rubbidge," she said, rising to a

more vehement protest when, in the middle of the night, she discovered

Gabrielle fallen asleep with an open copy of _Don Juan_ beside her

pillow and a spent candle flaring within an inch of the lace

bed-curtains. Gabrielle smiled when Biddy woke her with a stream of

fluent abuse, for she had been dreaming that she herself was Haidee and

her Aegean island lay somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.

She lost a little of her gaiety, and irritated the serious Considine by

her dreaminess at the time when she was supposed to be acquiring useful

knowledge. He complained to Jocelyn, and Jocelyn, who hated being

worried about his daughter, was at last induced, after consultation

with Biddy Joyce, to send into Galway for the doctor. It pleased him

to have the laugh of Considine when the doctor pronounced her sound in

wind and limb--as well he might, for both were of the best.

Gabrielle couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. She was

happy in her new world--just as happy as she had been in the old

one--with the difference that she was possibly now more sensitive to

the beauty that surrounded her. In the time of her childhood she had

lived purely for the moment; sufficient unto each day had been its

particular physical joys; now she knew that the future held more for

her, that the life which she had taken for granted would not go on for

ever. Strange things must happen, possibly things more strange than

the adventures that she had found among books. She was now seventeen.

In her heart she felt an intuition that something must happen soon.

She waited for it to come with a kind of hushed excitement.

At the beginning of May she received a letter from Radway in which he

told her that the _Pennant_ was leaving the West Indies. Taking it for

granted that he would keep his promise of coming to Roscarna she was

distressed to think that the shooting season was over. She had always

remembered the long grey shape of the _Pennant_ that he had shewn her,

lying off Kingstown on the evening of their visit to Howth. From

Roscarna itself the sea was not visible, but from the knees of

Slieveannilaun, a mile or so behind the house, she knew that she could

overlook, not only the shining Corrib, which is an inland sea, but all

the scattered lakelets of Iar Connaught, the creeks, the islands, and

beyond, the open sea. Lying in the heather, hearing nothing but the

liquid whinny of the curlews that had lately forsaken the tidal waters

for the mountains, she would watch the foam that fringed the islands,

unconscious of the sea's sound and tumult, half expecting that a

miracle would happen and that someday she would see the three-funnelled

_Pennant_ steaming over the white sea into Galway Bay.

V

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.