THE GORGEOUS COUNTESS

If, a century ago, Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, in County Tipperary, had been told that his second daughter, Marguerite, would one day blossom into a Countess, and live in history as one of the “most gorgeous” figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic, and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was one of his most amiable characteristics.

The Irish squire was a proud man—­proud of his pretty and shiftless wife, with her eternal talk of her Desmond ancestors; proud of two of his three daughters, whose budding beauty was to win for them titled husbands—­one an English Viscount, the other a Comte de St Marsante; and proudest of all of his own handsome figure and his local dignities.  But he was frankly ashamed to own himself father of his second daughter, Marguerite, the “ugly duckling” of a good-looking family, and with no gifts or promise to qualify her plainness.

But the squireen was probably too full of his own self-importance to waste much thought or regret on an insignificant, unattractive girl, though she was his own child.  He loved to strut about among his humble neighbours in all the unprovincial glory of ruffles and lace, buck-skins and top-boots, and snowy, wide-spreading cravat.  He was the king of Tipperary dandies, known far beyond his own county as “Buck Power” and “Shiver-the-Frills”; and what pleased his vanity still more, he was a Justice of the Peace, with authority to scour the country at the head of a company of dragoons, tracking down rebels and spreading terror wherever he went.  That he was laughed at for his coxcombry and hated for his petty tyranny only seemed to add to the zest of his enjoyment of life; and he saw, at least, a knighthood as the prospective recognition of his importance, and his services to the King and the peace.

Such was the father and such the home of Marguerite Power, who was one day to dazzle the world as the “most gorgeous Lady Blessington.”

As with many another “ugly ducking” Marguerite Power’s beauty was only dormant in these days of childhood; and before she had graduated into long frocks, the bud was opening which was to grow to so beautiful a flower.  If her father was blind to the change, it was patent enough to other eyes; and she had scarcely passed her fourteenth birthday when she had at least two lovers eager to pay homage to her girlish charm—­Captains Murray and Farmer, brother-officers of a regiment stationed at Clonmel.  To the wooing of Captain Murray, young, handsome, and desperately in earnest, she lent a willing ear; but when thus encouraged, he asked her to be his wife, she blushingly declined the offer, on the ground that she was yet much too young to think of a wedding-ring.  To the rival Captain, old enough to be her father, a man, moreover, whose evil living and Satanic temper were notorious, she showed the utmost aversion.  “I hate him,” she protested in tears to her father, who supported his suit; “and I would rather die a hundred times than marry him.”