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Updated: May 4, 2025
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 well known that they were not on the best of terms," said her visitor discreetly. I do not know what has possessed me since I began to write this story. I have grown tired of this river, where the trout are always shy, and more tired than ever of Colonel Hoylake's fishing stories and his obituary reflections. The place is haunted for me by the tragic image of Gabrielle Hewish.
Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room enough for this accumulation of papers, so they set aside the library at Roscarna for the purpose, sorting and indexing the Hewish dossier as long as the daylight lasted. Considine worked steadily through them as though he were dealing with a mathematical calculation.
He imagined that they were bluffing and took them at their word, with the result that there fell upon Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents leases and mortgages and conveyances and post-obits all the documentary débris of a crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing days.
One can imagine that their state presented an example of the way in which people of abnormal instincts tend to drift together: Arthur, the a-moral prodigy, and Gabrielle, the last offshoot of the decayed house of Hewish, daughter of the definitely degenerate Sir Jocelyn. But I do not think that there was anything abnormal or decadent in Gabrielle's composition.
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. Her death knocked poor Sir Jocelyn to pieces.
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.
If she had been a stranger the Devonshire people would probably have watched her with a preconceived suspicion and dislike for a couple of years, but even her questionable qualities of youth and spontaneity could not dispose of the fact that she had been born a Hewish and had lately visited at Halberton House.
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.
Never in the history of Roscarna was such a tragic bride. The married couple settled down at Clonderriff in the small grey house that Considine inhabited. In his bachelor days it had been a comfortless place, but Jocelyn had seen to it that it was furnished with some of the lumber of Roscarna: the presses were filled with fine Hewish linen and the plate engraved with the Hewish crest.
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