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Updated: June 3, 2025
The details of what had happened in the interval are not very clear, but the effect of the change upon Gabrielle must have been considerable, for the Mrs. Considine who appeared to Mrs. Payne does not seem to have had much in common with the dazed, hysterical child we left at Roscarna.
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.
Often, when she felt lonely, Gabrielle would walk down the road to Clonderriff, not because she found it beautiful, as it surely was, but for the sake of its homeliness and the contrast of its gentle life to the moribund atmosphere of Roscarna.
He himself discovered the darkened dining-room at Roscarna strewn with human débris and lit with fifty candles. The candles were popish and the drinkers were pagan, so he turned on Biddy and told her more or less what he thought of her. He pointed with disgust to a couple of drinkers who lay snoring on a sofa under the window. "All the riff-raff of the country!" he said. Biddy flared up.
On their return they wrote Considine a long letter in which they thanked him for his courtesy and regretted that their son's last moments had not been rejoiced by his ghostly ministrations. It was not until the Radways had disappeared and Roscarna began to recoil into its old routine of life, that Gabrielle collapsed.
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 peacocks, 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.
She was glad, indeed, that Gabrielle did not resent these attentions, as she very well might have done. Gradually her sobbing ceased and she began to speak, clinging all the time to Mrs. Payne, herself not guiltless of a sympathetic tear, while she told her the story of her early years: of the wild life she had led at Roscarna, of Jocelyn's debauches and Biddy's rough mothering.
Gabrielle would sit on a low stool between them in the white dress that Radway loved. It made the solitude for which they were both waiting seem more precious to see her thus at a distance, pale and fragile and miraculous against the sombre background of the Roscarna oak.
For the time being Jocelyn was far too busy to bother his head about her, and Biddy dragged her up in the kitchen of Roscarna where she had suckled her half-brothers before her, Mr. Considine exercising a general supervision, pending the day when her soul should be fit for salvation and ghostly admonition.
Jocelyn had hoped, in the beginning, that Considine would forsake his village and come to live at Roscarna. He himself, he said, needed no more in his old age than a couple of rooms; his daughter and his son-in-law might take a wing to themselves and do what they liked with it. He had counted a good deal on the attraction to Considine of the Roscarna library. His offer was refused.
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