laughing
sardonically and screwing up one of his bird-like eyes while, from the
other, tears escaped. He passed from laughter to tears quite easily. It
was very horrible to see one side of his childish grey-whiskered face
puckered up with crying and the other limp and blank. He finished by
making cheerful signs to them that he was sure he would be better in a
week. Of course he wasn't. Within five days his poor brain was smitten
with two more tremendous blows. The third stroke killed him, coming in
the night. It was Biddy who kissed his face and put Peter's pence upon
his eyes and folded his arms on his breast. If any woman in the world
had a right to perform this melancholy function for Jocelyn it was she.
He was hers, and when he died she was alone with him, which was as it
should have been.

Even when he was dead, Biddy had not finished with him. For many years
he had trusted her with the key of the cellar, and this privilege allowed
her to arrange a wake exceeding in magnificence anything in the memory of
Joyce's Country. They kept it up for three days, the scattered Joyces
foregathering from outlandish corners of Mayo and Connemara. Naturally
she didn't tell Considine. He himself discovered the darkened
dining-room at Roscarna strewn with human debris 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. "Riff-raff, is it? Sure it's his own sons and mine who do be
after paying respect to their own father, and him lying dead!"

But Considine was not to be beaten. He had known for many years that
Biddy was a kindly humbug. He knew that if he didn't now get rid of her
Roscarna would become nothing more than a warren in which her innumerable
relatives might swarm. He purged Roscarna of Joyces, Biddy included. He
buried Jocelyn decently according to the ritual of the Church of Ireland,
and proceeded to put his wife's estate in order as soon as her father's
remains were disposed of.

There was more work in it than he had bargained for. Even the small
immediate courtesies and formalities took time; the announcements in the
papers and short obituary notices; letters, discreetly composed,
announcing the melancholy event to Lord and Lady Halberton; an