The Tragic Bride Part 1

The Tragic Bride.

by Francis Brett Young.

PROLOGUE

I never met Gabrielle Hewish. I suppose I should really call her by that name, for her marriage took the colour out of it as surely as if she had entered a nunnery, and adopted the frigid and sisterly label of some female saint. n.o.body had ever heard of her husband before she married him, and n.o.body ever heard of Gabrielle afterwards, except those who were acquainted with the story of Arthur Payne, as I was, and, perhaps, a coroner's jury in Devons.h.i.+re, a county where juries are more than usually slow of apprehension. In these days you will not even find the name of Hewish in Debrett, for Gabrielle was the baronet's only child, and when Sir Jocelyn died, in the early days of his daughter's married life, the family, which for the last half century had been putting out no more than a few feeble and not astonis.h.i.+ngly brilliant leaves on its one living branch, withered altogether, as well it might in the thin Irish soil where it had stubbornly held its own since the days of Queen Elizabeth.

After all, baronetcies are cheap enough in Ireland, and one more or less could make very little difference to the amenities of County Galway, where Roscarna, for all I know, may have been absorbed and parcelled out by the Congested Districts Board ten years ago. Even in clubs and places where they gossip, I doubt if the Hewishes of Roscarna are remembered, for modern memories are short, and in Gabrielle's day the ill.u.s.trated Sunday newspapers had not contrived to specialise in the smiles of well-connected young Irishwomen.

Of course the Payne episode--I'm not sure it should not rather be called the Payne miracle--had always lain stored somewhere in my literary attic; its theme was too exciting for a man who deals in such lumber to have forgotten; but that admirable woman, Mrs. Payne, had whetted my curiosity to such an extent that I weakly promised her secrecy before she told it to me. "I can't resist telling you," she said, "because it wouldn't be fair of me to deprive you: it's far too much in your line." She even flattered me: "You'd do it awfully well too, you know; but I have a sort of sentimental regard for her--not admiration, or anything of that kind, but an indefinite feeling that _n.o.blesse oblige_. In her own extraordinary way she did us a good turn, and however carefully you wrapped it up she might recognise her portrait and feel embarra.s.sed.

It's she that I'm thinking of, not Arthur. Arthur was too young at the time to realize what was happening, and if he saw your picture of two women desperately fighting over the soul or body of a boy of seventeen who resembled himself I doubt if he'd tumble to the portrait. He's a dear transparently honest person like his father. Still, I don't want to hurt her, and so, if you want the story, you must gloat over it in private, and cherish it as an unwritten masterpiece. Probably if you _did_ write it, it wouldn't be a masterpiece at all. Console yourself with that."

She told me her story--for of course I gave her the promise that she demanded--in a midge-infested corner of the garden at Overton, while Arthur, the unconscious subject of it, was playing tennis with the clergyman's daughter whom he married a year later. I think Mrs. Payne knew that this affair was coming off, and offered me the tale as a combination of oral confession and Nunc Dimittis, watching the boy while she told it to me with a sort of hungry maternal satisfaction, as somebody whom she had not only brought into the world but for whose salvation she was responsible. No doubt she had put up a hard fight for him and had every reason to be satisfied, though Gabrielle shared the honours of the mother's triumph in her own defeat. We sat there talking until all the birds were silent, but a single blackbird that made a noise in the shrubbery like that of two pebbles knocked sharply together; until the young people on the tennis court could no longer see to play, and the tall Californian poppies at the back of the herbaceous border that was her special pride shone like moon-flowers in the dusk.

"When I think of all that ... that summer," she said with a sigh, "I'm so thankful ... so thankful." And then Arthur came back with his sweater over his arm, swinging his racket, and she went straight up to him and kissed him with the sort of modesty that you would have expected in a young girl rather than a middle-aged widow.

"You dear thing, Mater," he said, kissing her forehead in return.

This is the land of digression into which memories of Overton lead one.

My only excuse is that part of the story, and indeed its emotional climax belongs to Overton, to that smoothly ordered country house with its huge sentinel elms and its peculiar atmosphere of leisure and peace. No doubt Mrs. Payne was aware of this when she kissed her son. From the lawn where we were sitting she could see the yew-parlour and the cypress hedge in the shadow of which she had stood on the tremendous evening about which she had been telling me. We walked back to the terrace, and on the way she gave me a shy smile, half triumph, half apology. She never mentioned the episode again and though the story fermented in my brain, maturing, as I hoped, like a choice vintage, and has emerged from time to time when my mind has been free from other work, I have kept my promise and have neither repeated it nor written it till this day.

Now, at last, I find myself absolved. Arthur Payne, I believe, is happily married to the fresh young person with whom he was playing tennis. Soon after their marriage they emigrated to the backs of Canada, or was it New Zealand: somewhere at any rate beyond the reach of colonial editions. Overton is now in the possession of a Midland soap-boiler.

Mrs. Payne, having fulfilled her main function in life and fearing English winters, has retired to a small villa at Mustapha Superieur, near Algiers, where, though she live for ever she is not likely to read this book. And Gabrielle, the beautiful Gabrielle, is dead.

The news came as a shock to me. For the moment I, who had never even set eyes on her, suffered the pain of an almost personal bereavement; I was moved, as poets are moved by the vanis.h.i.+ng of something beautiful from the earth. Was she then so beautiful? I don't know. But I like to persuade myself that she was a fiery, elemental creature of a rare and pathetic brilliance ... for the sake of her story, no doubt. But, for the moment, when old Colonel Hoylake, who always began his _Times_ by quotations from the obituary column--he had survived the age when births or marriages are interesting--suddenly brought out the word Hewish: Gabrielle Hewish, I was startled out of the state of pleasant lethargy into which a day's fis.h.i.+ng on the Dulas and the Matthews' beer had plunged me, and became suddenly wide awake. I had the feeling that some bright thing had fallen: a kingfisher, a dragonfly. "Hewish," he murmured again. "Gabrielle Hewish ... Well, well."

"You know the family?"

"Yes, I knew her father, poor feller," he said.

Now I was full of eagerness. It had come over me all at once that this obituary notice was, for me, a happy release. It meant that, for a month or two, all through the mesmeric hours that I should spend up to my knees in the swift Dulas, alone with the dippers and the ring-ousels and the plaintive sand-pipers, I should be able to explore, to my own content, this forbidden treasure, searching in the dark soul of Marmaduke Considine and the tender heart of Gabrielle; threading the lanes that spread in a net about the schoolhouse at Lapton Huish; brooding over the deceptive peace of Overton Manor; recalling the scene in the yew-parlour, the atmosphere, terrifically charged with emotion, of the day when Mrs.

Payne took her courage in her hands and fought like a maternal tigress for Arthur's soul. My heart beat faster as I led the old fisherman on with "Yes?"

He laid aside _The Times_ and lit one of the long Trichinopoly cheroots that he smoked perpetually, settling himself back in the comfortable hotel chair.

"Hewish," he said. "Sir Jocelyn Hewish. That was the father's name.

Lived at a place called Roscarna in the west of Ireland. He was an extraordinarily good fisherman: tied his own flies. I have some sea-trout flies in my book that he tied thirty years ago ... a kind of blue teal that he'd invented. Of course they had a fine string of white-trout lakes--many a good fish I've had there--but the remarkable thing about Roscarna was this. Right in front of the house at the bottom of the sunk fence, there ran a stretch of river,--about three hundred yards of it, clear deep slides with a level muddy bottom. One winter old Sir Jocelyn took it into his head to clean up this bit of water, and when they came to sc.r.a.pe the bottom they found under the mud that the whole bed of the stream was paved with marble slabs like a swimming bath ...

Connemara marble. They went on with the job because it looked so well, all this green, veined stuff s.h.i.+ning through the clear water. So they scoured the bottom and fixed up a banderbast for keeping the mud from coming downstream from above, and having made a sort of stewpond, put in four or five hundred yearling brownies. You'd never believe how those fish grew. In a couple of years the water was full of three and four pounders, lovely fish with a small head and pink flesh like a salmon.

Quite a curious thing! And you'll never guess the reason. No sooner had they cleared away the mud than the place swarmed with freshwater shrimps.

The yearlings throve on them like a smolt when it goes down to the sea.

That was the remarkable thing about Roscarna...."

I knew, of course, that it wasn't. The remarkable thing about Roscarna, to anyone with a ha'porth of imagination, was Gabrielle Hewish. Luckily that admirable gossip Hoylake had another interest in life besides fis.h.i.+ng stories, and one that served my purpose,--genealogy. It is an interest not uncommon with old soldiers--that is why they often write such incredibly dull memoirs--and after allowing him a number of sporting digressions in the direction of a Lochanillaun pike and the altogether admirable blackgame shooting at Roscarna, which, he a.s.sured me, was better than anything in the west except Lord Dudley's shoot on the Corrib, I played him tactfully into the deeper water that interested me and, by the end of the week, had succeeded in drawing from him a good deal of irrelevant family history and, what is more to the point, a fairly consecutive account of the last of the Hewishes, Sir Jocelyn and his amazing daughter.

As he told it to me in the parlour of the fis.h.i.+ng inn beside the Dulas, I began to realise that accidentally, and at the moment when I needed it most, I had stumbled on a fountain of curious knowledge. If I had missed meeting him, my story, fascinating as it was, would have been incomplete.

It armed me with a whole new theory of Gabrielle, suggesting causes, or, if you like, preparations for the extraordinary episode that followed.

It showed me that I had been flattering myself that I knew all about it when, as a matter of fact, I had only got hold of one--and the wrong--end of the stick. I fished the Dulas for a fortnight, hypnotised, pondering on the whole curious business, not only when the bright water rippled by me, but when old Hoylake told me stories of mahseer and tiger fish and barracuda that he had missed, when I was walking through the pinewoods under the mountain, when I was eating, and, I verily believe, when I was asleep. I had thought before that my friend Mrs. Payne was the heroine of the story. Now I am not sure that Gabrielle does not share the honours.

I

And, first of all, I dreamed of Roscarna. Partly for the sheer pleasure of reconstructing a shadowy countryside that I remembered, partly because Roscarna, the house in which the Hewish family had run to seed in its latter generations, was very much to the point. Twenty miles from Galway--and Irish miles, at that--it stands at the foot of the mountains on the edge of the tract that is called Joyce's Country, a district famous for inbreeding and idiocy where everyone was called Joyce, excepting, of course, the Hewishes of Roscarna, who were aliens, Elizabethan adventurers from the county of Devon, cousins of the Earls of Halberton, who had planted themselves upon the richest of the Joyces'

lands in the early seventeenth century and built their house in the English fas.h.i.+on of the time.

I imagine that it was the founder of the house who paved his river bed with marble slabs, smoothing the stickles into a long clear slide.

Labour, no doubt, was cheap or forced, and the Elizabethan fancy lavish.

In the mouth of the valley, where it opens on the lake, they planted a girdle of dark woods growing so near to the new house that the Hewishes, walking in their gardens, could almost fancy themselves in England and lose sight of the mountain slopes that swept up into the crags behind them. The house stood with its back to the hills and all western barrenness, looking over a level, terraced sward, past a river that had been tamed to the smoothness of a chalk stream, to homely woodlands of beech and elm that might well have been haunted by nightingales if only there had been nightingales in Ireland. There were no nightingales in Devon, so that the first Hewish was under no necessity of importing them to complete his picture. But he had his gravelled walks, his poets'

avenue of yews, that grew kindly, his sundials with their graceful and melancholy admonitions, his box-hedges and white peac.o.c.ks, and the fancy of some Hewish unknown had blossomed at last in a Palladian bridge of freestone, spanning the quiet river.

Roscarna, in fact, was a bold experiment, destined from the first to fail. Never, in all its history, could it have become the living thing that its founders dreamed, any more than the Protestant Church that they built in the village of Clonderriff could be the home of a living faith; for though they turned their backs upon the mountains of Joyce's Country, the mountains were always there, and the house itself, which should have glowed with the warmth of red brick, or one of those soft building-stones that mellow as they weather, seemed always cold and desolate, being made of a hard, cold, Connaught rock, that made the Palladian bridge look like the fanciful toy that it was, and grew bleaker, bluer, colder, as the years went by.

I think of it as one thinks of the villas that Roman colonists built above the marches of Wales, built obstinately on the Roman plan that the climate of Italy had dictated to their fathers, with open atrium and terraces protected from the sun. "What's good enough for Rome," they said, "is surely good enough for Siluria," and, s.h.i.+vering, showed the latest official visitor a landscape that might have been transported bodily from the Sabine Hills ... if only there were more sun! "But we _do_ miss the lizards and the cicalas," they would say with a sigh. No doubt the most enthusiastic built themselves Palladian ... I mean Etruscan bridges and marble stew-ponds for mullet, until, in the end, the immense inertia of the surrounding country a.s.serted itself and the natural desires of mankind led to a mingling of British blood with theirs, till the Roman of the first century became the Briton of the third.

The parallel is as near as it may be, for though the first Hewish was an Englishman, his great-great-grandson was Irish, and the only thing that was left to remind him of his ancestry was the house of Roscarna, the sullen Connaught stone fixed in an alien design, and the huge belt of timber through which the gorse and heather were slowly creeping down from the mountain and settling in the valley bottom that they had once inhabited. But the foreign woods that trailed along the sh.o.r.e of the lake were admirable for black-c.o.c.k.

The transformation was very gradual. The first Hewishes, no doubt, kept in touch with their English cousins. London was their metropolis, and to London, in the fas.h.i.+ons of their remote province, they would return with amusing tales of Irish savagery that made them good company in an eighteenth century coffee-house. Little by little they found their English interests waning, and the social centre s.h.i.+fting westwards.

Dublin became their city, and to a stately house in Merrion Square the family coach migrated in the season, until, at last, it seemed hardly worth while to cross the dreariness of the central plain, and a town-house in Galway seemed the zenith of urbanity. Galway, indeed, had risen on a wave of prosperity. In the streets above the Claddagh, merchants who had grown rich in the Spanish trade were building solid houses with carved lintels and windows of stained gla.s.s. The Hewishes invested money in these new ventures. In Galway a Hewish of Roscarna was somebody: there the family was taken for granted and, following the way of least resistance, the Hewishes settled down into the state of provincial notabilities.

Notabilities as long as the Spanish money lasted--then notorieties. For, as Roscarna, the symbol of a tradition, decayed, the men of the Hewish family developed a curious recklessness in living.

It was as though the original vigour of the tree planted in a foreign soil had been enough to keep it fighting and flouris.h.i.+ng for a couple of hundred years and then had suddenly failed, dying, as a tree will, from above downwards.

For the first half of the nineteenth century a series of dissolute Hewishes--they never bred in great numbers--lived wildly upon the edge of Connemara, drinking and fighting and gaming and wenching while the roof of Roscarna grew leaky and the long stables were turned into pigsties, and soft mud silted over the marble bottom below the Palladian bridge.

If they had lived in England the estate would have vanished field by field until nothing but the house was left; but the outer land at Roscarna was of no marketable value, and when Sir Jocelyn succeeded to the property in the year 1870, he found himself master of many worthless acres and a ruined house that he was powerless to repair. It was no wonder that he went to the dogs like his father before him, for the pa.s.sage of every generation had made recovery more difficult. Of course he should really have become a soldier; but soldiering in those days was an expensive calling. As a baronet--even as an Irish baronet--a good deal would have been expected of him, far more than the dwindling means of Roscarna could possibly supply, and since every career seemed closed to him but one of provincial dissipation he is scarcely to be blamed for having followed it.

When Colonel Hoylake knew him he was a middle-aged man and a reformed character, and the fact that he ever came to be either is enough to show that the original Hewish strain was still strong enough to put up some sort of fight. He cannot have been without his share of original virtue, but by his own account, his youth, hopeless and therefore abandoned, must have been pretty lurid. Of course he drank. His father must have taught him to do that as a matter of habit. He was equally at home with the ancient sherries, a few bins of which remained in the Roscarna cellars to remind him of the Spanish trading days, or with the liquid fire that the Joyces distilled in the mountains under the name of potheen.

Of course he gambled. He was sufficiently Irish for that: and his gaming pa.s.sion soon made Roscarna a sort of savage Monte Carlo, to which the more dissolute younger sons of the surrounding gentry foregathered: Blakes and O'fflahertys, and Kilkellys, and all the rest of them.

In the middle of the stables, at the back of the house, stood a huge deserted pigsty surrounded by a stone wall, and this place became under Jocelyn's regime, a c.o.c.kpit, in which desperate birds were pitted against one another, fighting fiercely until they dropped. Even in his later days according to Hoylake, he was not ashamed of these exploits. The gamblers invented for themselves new refinements of sport or cruelty.

Spider-racing. I do not suppose that anyone living to-day knows what spider-racing is. This was the manner of it. At night, when the big black-bellied spiders that haunted the lofts came out to spread their nets, stable-boys were sent with candles to collect them in tins, and next morning, when the gamblers a.s.sembled in the pigsty at Roscarna a piece of sheet iron, fired to a dull red heat would be placed in the centre. On this hot surface the long-legged insects were thrown.

Naturally they must run or be shrivelled with heat. And the one that ran the furthest was counted the winner. Betting on these unfortunate creatures Jocelyn and his friends spent many happy forenoons, and Jocelyn was counted as good a judge of a spider as any man in Galway. In his dealings with women he was relatively decent, relapsing, at an early age into a relation irregular, but so domestic as to be respectable, with a woman named Brigit Joyce who kept house for him and cooked potatoes and distilled potheen as well as any female in the district. I do not know if they had many children. If they did, it is probable that these found their vocation in collecting spiders in the stables, or even drifted back into the hill community from which their mother had come.

Through all his dissipations Sir Jocelyn preserved one characteristic, an unerring instinct for field-sports that no amount of drinking could impair. He could hit a flying bird with a stone, was a deadly shot for snipe or mallard, rode like a centaur, and fished with the instinct of a heron. It is probable that his consciousness of this faculty was at the bottom of his startling recovery. Possibly he was frightened to find a little of his skill failing. I only know that at the age of forty-eight, he pulled himself up short. His eyes, seeing clearly for the first time in his life, became aware of the appalling ruin into which Roscarna had fallen. He became sober for six days out of the seven, setting aside the Sabbath for the wors.h.i.+p of Bacchus, and during the remainder he devoted himself seriously, steadily to the reclamation of his estate. He repaired the roof of the house with new blue slates, cleared the attics of owls and the chimneys of jackdaws; he dredged the river and discovered the marble bottom, netted the pike and put down yearling trout.

Gradually he restored Roscarna to its old position as a first-cla.s.s sporting property; and so, having fought his way back, step by step, into the company of decent men, he married a wife.

Hardly the wife one would have expected from a Hewish, it is true. Her name was Parker, her father was a shop-keeper in Baggot Street, Dublin, and how Hewish met her G.o.d only knows. She was a sober, plain-sailing Englishwoman, a Protestant, with a religious bias that may have made the reformation of a dissolute baronet attractive to her. She had a little money, to which she stuck like glue, and an abundance of common-sense.

It speaks well for the latter that she appreciated, from the first, the value of Biddy Joyce in the kitchen, and kept her there, boiling potatoes, although she knew that she had been her husband's mistress.

Firmly, but certainly, she ordered Jocelyn's life, realising, with him, that Roscarna was worth saving, subsidising, with a careful hand, his attempts to restore the woods and waters, interesting herself in the housing of his tenants, and renewing the connection of Roscarna with the parish church of Clonderriff, of which the Hewishes were patrons. It was she who appointed Marmaduke Considine to the vacant living.

For ten years she lived soberly with Sir Jocelyn at Roscarna, hoping ardently that a son might be born to them who should carry on the family name and succeed to the fruits of her economies. In the eleventh year of their married life it seemed that her hopes were to be realised. Even Jocelyn, the new Jocelyn, appreciated the importance of the event. He and Biddy Joyce, now an old and shrivelled woman, but one unrivalled in maternal experience, nursed Lady Hewish as though the whole of their future happiness depended on it. Every Sunday young Mr. Considine dined at Roscarna with the family, and spent the evening in religious discussions with her ladys.h.i.+p. Every month the doctor rode over from Galway to feel her pulse. On a dark winter evening in the year eighteen eighty-three the child was born--a girl. They christened her Gabrielle, and a week later Lady Hewish died.

II