Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land | Page 8

of my banking account.
I begin to understand and to sympathise with that pathetic striving after
beauty which one sees in the tawdry finery and exaggerated
hairdressing of a kitchenmaid--Rosamond Tallant has one who is
wonderful to behold as she mounts the area steps on her Sundays out.
Formerly I should have been horrified at that kitchenmaid. Now I have
quite a fellow-feeling with her piteous attempts to make herself
attractive to her young man, the grocer's boy or the under-footman I
suppose. Am I not at this very moment sitting with complexion cream
daubed on my face, in order that I may appear more attractive to MY
young man. I know now how Molly's maid--who is keeping company
with Luke's butler--feels when we all dine early for a theatre and
Josephine gets an evening out at the Earl's Court Exhibition with her
gentleman.
Sounds beastly vulgar, doesn't it? But that's just what I'm making
myself pretty for--dinner there this evening at the French Restaurant
with MY gentleman. It's quite proper: we are a party of four--the other
two I may add are not in Rosamond's or Molly's set.
I've been interrupted--He has telephoned. The other pair have

disappointed us. Will I defy conventions and dine with HIM alone?
Of course I will.'

CHAPTER 3

The particular sheet ended at this point. Mrs Gildea laid it down upon
the earlier ones and took another from the little pile which she had
spread in sequence for perusal. She smiled to herself in mournful
amusement. For she scarcely questioned the probability that her friend
would in due course become disillusioned of a very ordinary
individual--he certainly sounded a little like an adventurer--who for
some occult reason had been idealised by this great-souled, wayward
and utterly foolish creature. How many shattered idols had not Lady
Bridget picked up from beneath their over-turned pedestals and
consigned to Memory's dust-bin! On how many pyres had not that
oft-widowed soul committed suttee to be resurrected at the next freak
of Destiny! And yet with it all, there was something strangely elusive,
curiously virginal about Lady Bridget.
She had been in love so often: nevertheless, she had never loved. Joan
Gildea perfectly realised the distinction. Biddy had been as much, and
more in love with ideas as with persons. Art, Literature, Higher
Thought, Nature, Philanthrophy, Mysticism--she spelled everything
with a capital letter--Platonic Passion--the last most dangerous and
most recurrent. As soon as one Emotional Interest burned out another
rose from the ashes. And, while they lasted, she never counted the cost
of these emotional interests.
But then she was an O'Hara: and all the O'Haras that had been were
recklessly extravagant, squandering alike their feelings and their money.
There wasn't a member of the house of Gaverick decently well to do,
excepting indeed Eliza, Countess of Gaverick. She had been a Glasgow
heiress and only belonged to the aristocracy by right of marriage with
Bridget's uncle, the late Lord Gaverick, who on the death of his brother,
about the time Bridget was grown up, had succeeded to the earldom,
but not to the estate.
Gaverick Castle in the province of Connaught, which with the

unproductive lands appertaining to it, had been in the possession of
O'Haras from time immemorial, was sold by Bridget's father to pay his
debts. His brother--the heiress' husband, who, unlike the traditional
spendthrift O'Haras had accumulated a small fortune in business, was
able by some lucky chance to buy back the Castle--partly with his
wife's money--soon after his accession to the barren honours of the
family. His widow inherited the place as well as the rest of her
husband's property, and could do as she pleased with the whole. Thus
the present holder of that ancient Irish title, young, charming and poor,
stemming from a collateral branch, lived mainly upon his friends and
upon the hope that Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, might at her death
leave him the ancestral home and the wherewithal to maintain it.
As for Bridget's father, the last but one Earl of Gaverick, his career may
be summed up as a series of dramatic episodes, matrimonial, social and
financial.
His first wife had divorced him. His second wife--the mother of Lady
Bridget--had deserted him for an operatic tenor and had died shortly
afterwards. She herself had been an Italian singer.
Lord Gaverick did not marry again, and Mrs Gildea had gathered that
the less said about his social adventures the better. Financially, he had
subsisted precariously as a company promoter. There had come a final
smash: and one morning the Earl of Gaverick had been found dead in
his bed, an empty medicine bottle by his side. As he had been in the
habit of taking chloral the Coroner's jury agreed upon the theory of an
overdose.
Yes, Mrs