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At Roscarna the reputation of Jocelyn and, above all, his relations with Biddy Joyce, had saved the Hewishes from these formalities; and the great distances that separated the houses of gentlefolk in the west of Ireland would have made hospitality a more spontaneous and less formal affair in any case.
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.
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 glass. The Hewishes invested money in these new ventures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 fashion of the time.
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.
"If you could miss the way," he said, "we might go on wandering for ever in the moonlight. There never could be another night like this." But they had come already to the dark belt of woodland that the first Hewishes had planted, a darkness unvisited by moonlight, where their feet rustled a carpet of dead leaves, and shy, nocturnal creatures made another rustling beside them.
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