The Tragic Bride

by Francis Brett Young

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.