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Updated: June 3, 2025
"Of course I mean it," she said. "I shall be very lonely without you. You're the first friend I've ever had. I wish some day," she added, "you could come to Roscarna." He told her that it was not at all unlikely that the Pennant would some day put into Galway, and she warmed at once to the idea. "How splendid!" she said. "I shall expect you. Don't forget to bring a gun with you."
Time was so short that he could not bear to miss a moment of her. So he had set out from Oughterard along the road to Clonderriff, hoping to reach Roscarna in daylight and to return with the rising moon. He had reckoned without Irish miles and Irish roads, and forgotten that a sailor who has been long afloat is out of walking trim.
He impressed the Radways as being solid and dependable and a gentleman. His capability and discretion made them feel that Roscarna was not so disreputable and outlandish after all.
I doubt if it was the experience of her marital relations with Considine that made her grow up; from the first she had tacitly disregarded them. I suppose the change was simply the result of living in a more civilised and populous country, for South Devon was both, in comparison with her lost Roscarna. The Halbertons had been very kind to them.
It seemed to him that he had a good chance of moulding her into the shape that would suit his purpose, and it was obvious that the process would be easier if she were isolated from the free and easy manners of Roscarna which had so very nearly proved her ruin, and particularly those of Biddy Joyce, who was not only a Catholic, but the possessor of an unvarnishable past in which his father-in-law had a share.
In her heart she felt an intuition that something must happen soon. She waited for it to come with a kind of hushed excitement. At the beginning of May she received a letter from Radway in which he told her that the Pennant was leaving the West Indies. Taking it for granted that he would keep his promise of coming to Roscarna she was distressed to think that the shooting season was over.
Halfway down the mountain, on a patch of shining grass, he slipped, and the weight of the game-bag overbalanced him. Gabrielle laughed as he fell, but her laugh was lost in the report of the gun. How the accident happened no one can say, but Radway had blown his brains out. The inquest at Roscarna was Biddy Joyce's affair.
The only thing that she loved of which he had deprived her was Roscarna. At first, she had felt that more than anything; but when she recovered from her illness and was able for the first time to accompany Considine on his visits to the estate, it seemed to her that her passion for Roscarna had faded.
He was sufficiently Irish for that: and his gaming passion 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 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.
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