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On the eve of the wedding he gave her the contents of her mother's jewel-box, which included some beautiful ornaments of early Celtic work. He kissed her and fondled her and hoped she would be happy, but she could not smile. He dressed elaborately for the ceremony, and when he had left her behind with Considine, feasted solemnly at Roscarna until Biddy and the coachman carried him upstairs.
If ever she strayed into the forbidden lanes beyond the lodge-gates at Roscarna she lived in fear of seeing the dead-coach come round the corner: a tall coach, painted black and drawn by coal-black horses and on the box two men, black-coated with black faces, who might jump from the coach and catch her up and throw her inside it.
He apologised for his carelessness and tried to soothe her, and when she had stopped abusing him and broken down into desolate tears he picked her up in his arms, carried her to their bedroom, and sent a messenger riding to Roscarna for Biddy Joyce. She lay on the bed quivering, and Considine, white and harassed, stayed beside her.
The only thing that concerns us is the effect upon her fortunes of this real or imaginary catastrophe. All that we can say is that when she walked out of the Roscarna dining-room after her hour with Jocelyn she was subtly and curiously changed. From that moment she became, in fact, a person hypnotised, possessed by the contemplation of her approaching motherhood.
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 worship of Bacchus, and during the remainder he devoted himself seriously, steadily to the reclamation of his estate.
She knew that things were reaching a point of danger when she saw his eyes fill with tears as he told the sympathetic Lady Halberton of the loss of his wife. The achievement of sentiment in Jocelyn marked a fairly high degree of intoxication. In the middle of her description of the Roscarna black-game shooting Gabrielle stopped dead. Radway wondered what on earth had happened to her.
At the edge of the wood a bird flew out of a thorn tree. "It's a brown owl," cried Radway; but when its wings caught the moonlight they saw the band of white. "It's a magpie," she said. "One for sorrow ..." and smiled. Roscarna stood before them, the ghost of a great house with many solemn windows for eyes. It looked blank, uninhabited, lifeless.
She did not see him when he called her name, and then, still shaken like a poplar in a storm, she turned on him with eyes full of hate and let loose on him a flood of language such as she must have learned from the Roscarna stable-boys, words that she couldn't possibly have spoken if she were sane.
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.
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 ladyship.
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