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All this had delighted the Leichardstonians, and when Sir Luke read out the congratulatory cablegrams received that morning from the Earl and Countess of Gaverick, Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, and one or two other members of the British aristocracy, the enthusiasm was great.
He noticed the silver and ivory on the dressing-table; the large silver-framed photographs an autographed one of the Queen of Wartenburg Molly Gaverick and Rosamond Tallant in Court veil and feathers, Joan Gildea at her type-writer the confusion of books, the embroidered coverlet on the large bed, the bush-made couch at its foot upholstered in rose-patterned chintz on which she had seated herself.
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.
The old man roared over the sketch, but the housekeeper bore her a grudge for it, and afterwards had not a good word for the 'Ladyship' who had slipped out of her proper sphere into the Never-Never country. There were plenty of other small adventures which would have made the hair of Lady Gaverick and her friends stand on end. A dream-drive indeed, full of sort of 'Alice in Wonderland' episodes.
He separated all such relics from the general lot, placing them, and also two or three packets of papers upon a shelf-table in the veranda it was that table where Lady Bridget had laid the cablegram from Lord Gaverick, which she had shown him the day before she had left Moongarr. Now it seemed to him an altar of sacred memories.
She read him bits of a letter from Molly Gaverick and made explanatory, satiric comments upon those impecunious, aristocratic relatives who were on the fringe of the London smart set of which Bridget herself had lately formed a yet more outside part.
Lady Bridget read the several lines of the cabled message over two or three times before the real bearings of it became clear to her fever-weakened intelligence. At last she grasped the startling fact that the cablegram was from her cousin, Lord Gaverick, and that it had been despatched from London about seven days previously. This was what it said. Lady Bridget let the blue form drop on her lap.
You DID remember that first night by the camp fire and we two just we two' she broke off sobbing. 'You saw you saw he kept saying. 'But how how did you know? Tell me, Mate. 'I saw it all in a dream at Castle Gaverick. Three times I dreamed the same dream; and I felt, inside me, that it was a prophetic warning. We're like that, you know, we Irish Celts.
I am still of opinion that Biddy might do much worse than marry Colin McKeith, though, ENTRE NOUS, the settlements or rather want of them for Mr McKeith tells us that he needs all his capital for making wells and buying cattle, and he won't injure his prospects and Biddy's by tying it up does not at all please Sir Luke, who, before he would countenance the marriage, insisted upon a cablegram being sent to the Dowager Lady Gaverick.
'But latterly, said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your doings not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after after Mr Willoughby Maule's marriage? The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you Do you know, Rosamond saw them the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met them at Shoolbred's buying furniture.
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