IX

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.

X

At Lapton Huish, in the following autumn, Mrs. Payne found them. The

details of what had happened in the interval are not very clear, but

the effect of the change upon Gabrielle must have been considerable,

for the Mrs. Considine who appeared to Mrs. Payne does not seem to have

had much in common with the dazed, hysterical child we left at

Roscarna. I doubt if it was the experience of her marital relations

with Considine that made her grow up; from the first she had tacitly

disregarded them. I suppose the change was simply the result of living

in a more civilised and populous country, for South Devon was both, in

comparison with her lost Roscarna.

The Halbertons had been very kind to them. How much of their kindness

sprang from original virtue, and how much from anxiety that the least

connection of the family should be worthy of their reflected lustre, it

is difficult to say. No doubt it pleased them to be generous on a

feudal scale, particularly since Gabrielle, with her striking beauty

and sharp wits, showed possibilities of doing them credit. As soon as

the aged Dr. Harrow had been bundled out, the establishment of the

Considines became a game as entertaining to Lady Halberton in the

sphere of religious culture, as chemical experiments were to her

husband in that of root-crops--with the delightful difference that

human souls ran away with much less money than mangolds.

While the Rectory at Lapton was having its roof repaired, its walls

painted, and the fungus that grew in the cupboards of old Canon

Harrow's bedroom removed, the Considines were housed at Halberton and

instructed in the family tradition. In the case of Dr. Considine--his

honeymoon activities had pulled off the degree in divinity--this was

easy, for he had spent his childhood on a feudal estate in Wiltshire

and his politics were therefore identical with Lord Halberton's. With

Gabrielle, whom Lady Halberton took in hand, the process was more

difficult. She couldn't, at first, quite catch the Halberton air, but,

being an admirable mimic, she soon tumbled into it. The clothes with

which Lady Halberton supplied her helped her to realise the character

that she was expected to assume. Sometimes she felt so pleased with

her performance that she was tempted to overdo it and suddenly found

herself presenting a caricature of Halberton manners that was so acute

as to be cruel. And sometimes, when she felt that she couldn't keep it

up, she would suddenly drop the whole pretence and relapse into the

insinuating brogue of Biddy Joyce; an amazing trick that she employed

with scandalous effect in later years. But although she occasionally

laughed at it, Gabrielle found the ease and luxury of Halberton House

very much to her taste. She lost her thin and anxious expression and

became a great favourite, not only with Lady Halberton, but also with

the old gentleman and Lady Barbara, the elder daughter, who was still

unmarried and likely to remain so.

After six weeks at Halberton the Considines moved into the Rectory at

Lapton, a square, solid building, endowed with luxuriant creepers and

protected on the side that faced the prevailing wind and the roadway,

with a covering of hung slates. On the three other sides lay a garden

which had been too much for Canon Harrow and his gardener Hannaford.

Both of them had been old and withered, and the tremendous vitality of

the green things that grew in that rich red soil had overcome all their

efforts at repression so that the house had been besieged and choked

with vegetation and mildewed with the dampness of rain and sap. It was

all very lush and generous and cool, no doubt, in summer; but when the

rain that drove in from the Channel glistened on the hung slates and

dripped incessantly from myriads of shining leaves, the Rector of

Lapton Huish might as well have been living in a tropical swamp. To

the north of them, the huge masses of Dartmoor stole the air, so that

their life seemed to be lost in a windless eddy, and in the deep

valleys with which the country was scored the air lay dead for many

months at a time. Gabrielle, accustomed to the free spaces of

Connemara, felt the change depressing, though she would not admit it;

indeed, she had far too many things to think about to have time for

speculating on her own health.

First of all the callers. At Roscarna the reputation of Jocelyn and,

above all, his relations with Biddy Joyce, had saved the Hewishes from

these formalities; and the great distances that separated the houses of

gentlefolk in the west of Ireland would have made hospitality a more

spontaneous and less formal affair in any case. In Devon, as Gabrielle

soon discovered, calling was a ritual complicated by innumerable shades

of social finesse. Lady Halberton had already coached her in the list

of people whom she must know, people she could safely know at a

distance, and people whom it was her duty to discourage. As soon as

she was settled in at Lapton the county descended on her and she was

overwhelmed with visitors from all three classes.

If she had been a stranger the Devonshire people would probably have

watched her with a preconceived suspicion and dislike for a couple of

years, but even her questionable qualities of youth and spontaneity

could not dispose of the fact that she had been born a Hewish and had

lately visited at Halberton House. In that mild climate people remain

alive, or, if you prefer it, asleep, longer than in any other part of

England, and the visitors who came flocking to Lapton were, for the

most part, in a stage of decrepit or suspended life. They drove

through the steep and narrow lanes in all sorts of ancient vehicles, in

jingles, victorias, barouches and enormous family drags. Their

coachmen, older and more withered than themselves, wore mid-Victorian

whiskers, and shiny cockades on their hats. In Gabrielle's

drawing-room the visitors sat on the extreme edges of their chairs.

They spoke with a faded propriety, dropped their final "g's," and

specialised in the abbreviation "ain't." They stayed for a quarter of

an hour exactly by the French clock on the mantelpiece, contriving, in

this calculated period, to make it quite clear that they were on terms

of intimacy with the Halbertons, and they invariably finished by

inviting the Considines to lunch.

In this way Gabrielle became familiar with a number of dining-rooms

furnished in mahogany and horsehair and hung with opulent studies of

still life in oils and engravings after Mr. Frith. The meal was

usually served by the whiskered coachman, who wore, for the occasion, a

waistcoat decorated with dark blue and yellow stripes, and there was

always cake for lunch. After the port, which generally made her feel

sleepy, Considine would be taken off to see the stables, and Gabrielle

conducted to a walled garden, heavy with the scent of ripening fruit,

where there was no shade but that of huge apple trees, frosted with

American blight, that reminded her, in their passive mellowness, of the

people who owned them. Nothing more violent than archery, in its old

and placid variety, ever invaded the lives of these county families.

If it had not been for the headaches with which their society always

afflicted her, Gabrielle would have been tempted time after time to

scandalise them, but the example of Considine, who was always frigidly

at ease, restrained her, and so she allowed herself to be lulled to

sleep, recovering slowly as they drove back through the green lanes to

Lapton.

Her symptoms of boredom were taken, in this society, for evidence of

her good breeding, and since she was too tired to be scandalous,

Gabrielle became a social success. Her success is important, not

because it changed her in any way, but because it paved the way for the

development by which she became acquainted with Mrs. Payne, and the

most intriguing episode of her life began.

It was notorious that Considine's parochial labours occupied very

little of his time. The parish was small and scattered, Lapton Huish

itself being a mere hamlet, and the neighbouring farmers so soaked in

respectable tradition and isolated from opportunities of vice that

their souls lay in no great danger of damnation. The activities of

Considine were practically limited to his Sunday services, but though

the softness of the climate might eventually have transformed him into

a likeness of the ancient automaton who had preceded him, it was not in

his nature to take things easily. He came of a vigorous stock. The

clear, thin air of the Wiltshire downland that his ancestors had

breathed makes for energy of temperament. At Roscarna he had given

vent to this in the education of Gabrielle, the acquisition of his

doctor's degree, and the management of his father-in-law's estate. His

capacity for management, of which he had shown evidence in his

winding-up of the Roscarna affairs, appealed to Lord Halberton, and it

was not long before he proposed a series of improvements to the Lapton

property that took his patron's fancy. In Considine's ideas there was

not only imagination, but money, and Halberton was getting rather tired

of his own expensive agricultural experiments.

The big house of the parish, Lapton Manor, had lain for several years

unoccupied, for no other reason apparently but that it was isolated and

out of date. To Lord Halberton it represented at least a thousand

pounds a year in waste. When Considine had been at Lapton Huish for a

little more than six months this deserted mansion suggested itself to

him as an outlet for his energies. He told Gabrielle nothing of

this--he was not in the habit of discussing business matters with

Gabrielle--but he rode over to Halberton House one day with an

elaborate and practical paper scheme. He proposed, in effect, to

vacate the Rectory, and take over Lapton Manor as it stood.

The idea had been suggested to him at first by one of the consequences

of Gabrielle's social success. The wife of a neighbouring baronet had

fallen in love with her--the fact that her husband had followed suit

made things easier. This woman was the mother of two sons, of whom the

elder, the heir to the title, was delicate. She did not wish to

separate the boys, and realising that it was impossible to send them

together to an ordinary preparatory school, the notion had come to her

of asking the Considines if they would take them into their house at

Lapton. Doctor Considine, no doubt, would find time to equip them with

a good classical education, while Gabrielle could supply the feminine

influence which was so essential to real refinement. She was not only

tired of tutors--their equivocal social status was so tiresome!--but

sufficiently Spartan to feel that her sons would be better away from

home for a little while. Away, but not too far away. Gabrielle had

thought it would be rather fun to have a couple of boys, even dull boys

like the Traceys, in the house. She had told Considine that she would

like the arrangement if only the Rectory were bigger. As it was they

couldn't possibly entertain the proposal.

This set Considine thinking, and from his deliberations emerged the

much more ambitious scheme of taking over Lapton Manor, and equipping

it as a special school for the education of really expensive boys. He

decided that he would not take a greater number than he could educate

by himself. His pupils must all be well-connected or wealthy. He

would teach them not only the things with which a public school might

reasonably be expected to equip them, but the whole duty of a landed

proprietor. The neglected Manor lands, already a drag on the Halberton

property, should be his example. His pupils should see it recover

gradually with their own eyes. The fees they paid should go to its

development, and provide at the end of three or four years' work the

satisfaction of a model and profitable estate.

All Considine's heart was in the plan. He loved teaching, and he loved

the land. He had a natural aptitude for both, and the opportunity of

developing them seemed too good to be missed. Lord Halberton agreed.

A lease was signed in which Considine, paying a nominal rent for Lapton

Manor, undertook to restore the lands and house to the condition from

which they had fallen. Both landlord and tenant were delighted with

their bargain. In six weeks the Rectory had been vacated and relet to

an old lady from the north of England who wanted to die in Devonshire,

and the Considines had moved to the Manor, under the benignant eyes of

Lady Halberton. In another fortnight the first pupils, the Tracey

boys, arrived, and Considine was advertising in _The Morning Post_ and

_The Times_ for three at fees that even Lord Halberton considered

outrageous. "There's plenty of money in the country," said Considine.

With the insight of genius he added to his advertisement, "Special care

is given to backward or difficult pupils."