The Tragic Bride

by Francis Brett Young

With the spells of moonshine withdrawn he knew it for the wan, neglected ruin that it was, but her romantic passion for its stones helped to maintain the first atmosphere of illusion. She showed him, with a beautiful emotion, the room in which she had been born, the lofts in which she had played with the stableboys in her childhood, her alder-screened bathing place by the lake, the library where her romantic education had been begun.

Here, by the most likely chance, they encountered Considine. He had walked up, as usual, in the morning to read Dante with her. He came through the house unannounced and entered the library where the lovers were bending with their heads close together over the map on which Gabrielle had followed the course of Radway's West Indian voyages, and, being engrossed in these tender reminiscences, they did not see him. He stood in the doorway, gazing, uncertain as to what he should say or do. In his seventeen years at Clonderriff he had got out of the way of dealing with social problems.

At last Gabrielle looked up, saw him, and blushed. She hastened to introduce Radway: "The friend I met in Dublin" … as if there had been only one.

By this time Considine had recovered himself. He shook hands with Radway heartily and talked to him about the shooting. In those few moments it was the man and not the parson who appeared, and Radway, frankly, took him at his own valuation and liked him.

"Quite a good sort, your padre," he said to Gabrielle afterwards, and she was glad that he was pleased. For herself it had never occurred to her to consider whether he was good or bad. To her he had never been anything more than a figure: Mr. Considine: but it pleased her that anything associated with her should give her lover pleasure. Considine was sufficiently tactful not to mention Dante, and Gabrielle solved his difficulty by asking him for a short holiday during Radway's stay. He coughed and said he would be delighted, and since he did not offer to go they left him in the library.

From the first he must have seen how things were. At the best he was a lonely man, and this must have seemed the last aggravation of his loneliness. I do not suppose he considered that he was in love with Gabrielle, but he was undoubtedly attached to her, for he was not an old man nor vowed to celibacy, and it had been his leisurely delight to watch her beauty unfolding. Leisurely … because he was slow in everything, slow in his speech, slow to anger, and slow to love—which does not imply that he was without intelligence or feeling or sex. It would not be fair to dismiss the feelings of Considine as unimportant; but it would be even less fair to sentimentalize them, for the least thing that can be said of him is that he was not sentimental himself. When they left him he tried to persuade himself that he was not jealous by settling down to the composition of his weekly sermon; but he did not risk any further disturbance of mind by seeing them together again.

The sunny season held. The river water was so low as to be unfishable, but in the string of lakelets below Loughannilaun Radway landed half a dozen sea-trout with Gabrielle, who knew the stones in every pool, as ghillie. In the divine relaxation of their love-making they were not inclined for strenuous exercise; but when evening fell, and the sky cooled, they would wander abroad together by the lake and through the woodlands or lie dreaming, side by side, in the deep heather.

During the days of Radway's visit, Jocelyn felt an obligation to appear presentable, and every evening, when dinner was over, Radway would smoke a cigar in his company, listening to his stories of old Galway days and sportsmen long since dead. As Jocelyn's memory for immediate things had faded he seemed to remember his early days more clearly, and, like many Irishmen, he was an amusing talker. Gabrielle would sit on a low stool between them in the white dress that Radway loved. It made the solitude for which they were both waiting seem more precious to see her thus at a distance, pale and fragile and miraculous against the sombre background of the Roscarna oak. Then Jocelyn would begin to yawn, and fidget for the nightcap of hot whiskey that Biddy prepared for him, and at last discreetly vanish. And so the most precious of their moments began.

Of these one can say nothing. Naturally enough, in later years, when she made Mrs. Payne her confidante, Gabrielle did not speak of them. And even if she had done so Mrs. Payne was too surely a woman of feeling ever to have betrayed her confidence. Under that wasting moon they loved, and I know nothing, but that it must have been strange for the empty shell of Roscarna, that tragic theatre, to reawaken to such a vivid and youthful passion. The world was theirs, and nobody heeded them, unless it were Biddy Joyce, a creature whose whole life was coloured by shadowy premonitions.

Gabrielle could not bear that he should leave her, but Radway's plans for the immediate future had been made without reckoning for anything as momentous as this love-affair. He was pledged, in four days, to visit an aunt in North Wales, and though he could not undertake to disappoint the old lady, he consoled Gabrielle by showing her how short and how convenient the passage to Holyhead was. To her, England seemed a country as remote as Canada, but he promised her that he would return within a week, and suggested that this would be a good opportunity of speaking of their engagement to Jocelyn. "But I wish you were not going," she said. "I feel as if I shall lose you."