The Tragic Bride

by Francis Brett Young

After dinner they proceeded to business. They sat together in the drawing-room, Mrs. Considine busy with her embroidery at a small table apart, while her husband, capably judicial, begged Mrs. Payne to tell him the peculiar features of Arthur's case. She found Considine sympathetic, and the telling so easy that she was able to express herself naturally in the most embarrassing part of her story. Considine helped her with small encouragements. Gabrielle said nothing, bending over her work while she listened. Indeed, she had scarcely spoken a dozen words since Mrs. Payne's arrival. When she came to the episode of Arthur's expulsion from the school at Cheltenham, Considine made an uneasy gesture suggesting that his wife should retire, and Gabrielle quietly rose.

Mrs. Payne begged her to stay. "It is much better that you should both know everything," she said. "I want you to realise things at their worst. It is much better that you should know exactly where we stand."

She wondered afterwards why Considine had suggested that Gabrielle should go. At first she had taken it for granted that he was merely considering her own maternal feelings in an unpleasant confession. It was not until she thought the matter out quietly at Overton that she decided that his action was really in keeping with the rest of his attitude towards his wife; that he did, in fact, regard her as a small child who should be repressed and denied an active interest in his affairs. Gabrielle's quietness had puzzled her. Perhaps this was its explanation.

For the time the story absorbed her and she thought no more of Gabrielle. Considine was such an excellent listener, sitting there with his long fingers knotted and his eyes fixed on her, that she found herself subject to the same sort of mesmeric influence as had overcome Lord Halberton. He inspired her with a curious confidence, and she began to hope, almost passionately, that he would undertake the care of Arthur. Before she had finished her narrative she was assailed with a fear that he wouldn't—he seemed to be weighing the matter so carefully in his mind—and burst out with an abrupt: "But you will take him, won't you?"

Considine smiled. "I shall be delighted," he said.

Her thankfulness, at the end of so much strain, almost bowled her over.

"You make me feel more settled about him already," she said. "I'm almost certain that he will be happy here. I feel that I'm so lucky to have heard of you. You and your wife," she added, for all the time that she had been speaking, she had been conscious of the silent interest of Gabrielle. When it came to a question of terms there was nothing indefinite about Considine. The fees that he suggested were enormous, but Mrs. Payne's faith in him was by this time so secure that she would gladly have paid anything. All through the rest of her visit this slow and steady confidence increased. From the bedroom in which she slept she could see the wide expanse of the home fields. It seemed to her that the quiet of Lapton was deeper and mellower and more intense than any she had ever known. It was saturated with the sense of ancient, stable, sane tradition. It breathed an atmosphere in which nothing violent or strange or abnormal could ever flourish. She felt that, in contrast with their restless modern Cotswold home, its intense normality must surely have some subtle reassuring effect upon her son. Gazing over those yellow fields in the early morning she felt a more settled happiness than she had ever known since her husband's death.

So, full of hope, she returned to Overton and announced the arrangements she had made to Arthur. He took to them gladly. He was tired of the unnatural indolence of Overton, and in any case he would have welcomed a change. In everything but his fatal abnormality he was an ordinary healthy boy, and the prospect of going into a new county, and learning something of estate management, a subject in which he was really interested, appealed to him. She described the drive from the station, the house, and the general conditions in detail. Her enthusiasm for Considine rather put him off.

"I hope he isn't quite such a paragon as you make out," he said, "or he'll have no use for me."

Gabrielle appeared as a rather shadowy figure in his mother's background. "Oh, there's a wife, is there?" he said. "That's rather a pity." She smiled, for this was typical of his attitude towards women.