The Tragic Bride

by Francis Brett Young

The child matured very quickly. Physically I mean. That is the way in the west. Of course she was a great tom-boy, tall for her years, very frank in her speech and totally unconscious of her sex, as free and virginal as the young Artemis. The world of books to which Mr. Considine introduced her in her school-hours was wholly forgotten outside them. In the woods and on the mountains she throve as a magnificent young animal, moving with an ease and grace and freedom that civilised woman has lost. Her clothes were of Connemara homespun, but to a body such as hers, clothes did not matter. She went barefoot like the girls of Joyce's Country, and her ankles were as clean cut as the cannon of a thoroughbred. She wore her black hair in a thick plait that fell below her waist. She had no friends but Biddy, her father and Considine, except a few men, contemporaries of Jocelyn, who joked with her in the hunting field. She knew no women; for ladies did not call at Roscarna, and the county could never forgive her mother's origins in Baggott Street. All her life was uncomplicated and miraculously happy.

This Arcadian state of affairs might well have gone on for ever, if Jocelyn, feeling that he would like to give her a great treat and, perhaps, becoming proudly conscious of her beauty, had not determined, in the August of her sixteenth year, to take her to Dublin for the Horse Show week. She thrilled to the idea, not because she was anxious to meet her own species but because she loved horses. They travelled up by train from Galway through the vast monotonies of the Bog of Allen, and put up at Maple's Hotel in Kildare Street, within five minutes' walk of her maternal grandmother's shop. In those days no Irish gentleman would have dreamed of dining in a public room, and they took their meals sedately in a private apartment.

Gabrielle had never set foot in a city before. The smooth pavements, the high buildings and the shop windows of Grafton Street excited her. Everything in Dublin wore an air magnificent and spacious. Even the ducks on the pond in the middle of Stephen's Green were exotic, and like no other ducks that she had known. But she could not enjoy her excitement to the full, for the feminine instinct in her realised from the first that her clothes were different from those of the people about her; and this disappointed her, for they were her best, made by the urbane fingers of Monoghan, the tailor at Oughterard.

When she walked down Grafton Street she fancied that people stared at her. It never struck her as possible that they were staring at her vivid and unusual beauty. It struck her as funny that her father did not seem to be aware of the discrepancy in her dress. He wasn't in the least. He had taken his daughter for granted. In his unconscious arrogance he imagined that the distinction of being a Hewish of Roscarna was sufficient in itself to make her independant of externals, and, as he proposed no alterations she trusted his judgment and they went to the Horse Show together in their ill-cut tweeds.

Gabrielle was entranced by the jumping. Whenever a horse topped the fences she straightened her back automatically as though she had been riding herself. With such splendid animals as those she felt that she could have made a better job of it. For the moment she forgot all about her questionable clothes; but when, later in the day, she was taken by her father to be presented to the Halbertons, the family of the Devonshire peer with whom the Hewishes were connected, she became immediately and horribly conscious of Lady Halberton's magnificence and the elegance of her daughters. It shocked and thrilled her to see that the elder Halberton girl powdered her nose. She wondered what it must feel like to have one's hands encased in skin-tight gloves, and how these English people managed to speak with such an elegant tiredness. It seemed to her inevitable that Lady Halberton must be ashamed of her cousins, and she was relieved, but a little frightened, to hear this great lady invite her father and her to dinner at the Shelbourne on the following night. After all, she reflected, there must be something in the name of Hewish. She wondered how on earth she could make her father understand that she couldn't very well go to dinner in the dress that she was wearing, the only one that she possessed.

III

It is extraordinary to think how forty-eight hours had turned this amazing, sexless creature into a woman. The problem of a dinner-dress was solved for her almost at once by Jocelyn himself. As soon as they were safely back at Maple's he asked her if she really wanted to dine with the Halbertons at the Shelbourne, and when she said, "Of course!" he produced a five pound note from the pigskin case that he carried in his coat-tail, and turned her loose in Grafton Street. An hour later she returned, breathless with excitement, carrying the dress that she had bought, a frock of white muslin, high at the neck and hand-embroidered with a pattern of shamrock. Life was becoming a matter of great excitement.

The maid at Maple's dressed her in the evening, a blowsy young woman from Carlow who called her 'my darlin,' and told her that she had a beautiful head of hair. Biddy had never told her that her hair was beautiful, and Gabrielle herself had always considered it something of a nuisance. In the hotel bedroom a cunning combination of mirrors showed her the thick plait hanging down her back. She had never seen her own back before. Looking at it she shrugged her shoulders to see what they looked like.

Of course she was ready dressed long before she need have been. She went down into the hall of the hotel and waited for her father. She hoped, and was almost sure, that she looked lovely. While she stood there, looking into a huge oval mirror, an old gentleman of much the same cut as her father came in and stared at her as though she were some new and curious animal. She turned and smiled at him. She would have smiled at anyone on that evening. He did not give her a smile in return. He only went red in his bald scalp and cleared his throat, hobbling up to his room and wondering what the devil Maple's was coming to.

A moment later Jocelyn arrived, very stately in the evening dress of the seventies. His face looked brown and hard and weathered, like a filbert, against his white spread of shirt-front. His eyes twinkled, his temples were flushed, and the twisted cord of an artery could be seen pulsating across each of them: all three being symptoms of the bottle of Pommery on which he had dressed. When he saw Gabrielle he said "Ha—very good, very good," and she, in an access of enthusiasm, kissed him and smelt his vinous breath.