But “Beau Power” was the last man to be moved from his purpose by a child’s tears or pleadings.  Captain Farmer was a man of wealth and good family, and also one of his own boon companions.  And thus, tearful, indignant, protesting to the last, the girl was led to the altar, by the biggest scoundrel in Tipperary—­a “maiden tribute” to a lover’s lust and a father’s ambition.

[Illustration:  MARGUERITE, COUNTESS OF BLESSINGTON]

The child’s fears were more than realised in the wedded life that followed.  Before the honeymoon had waned, the Captain began to treat his young wife with all the brutality of which he was such a past-master.  Blows and oaths were her daily lot; and when his cruelty wrung tears from her, her husband would lock her in her room, and leave her for days, without fire or food, until she condescended to beg for mercy.

After three months of this inferno the Captain was ordered to a distant station; and, as his wife refused point-blank to accompany him, was by no means reluctant to “be rid of the brat” by sending her back to her home.  Here, however, the child-wife found herself less welcome than, and almost as unhappy as in her wedded life; and, driven to despair, she left the home in which she had been cradled, and fared forth alone into the world, which could not be more unkind than those whose duty it was to shield and care for her.

How, or where, Beau Power’s daughter lived during the next twelve years must always remain largely a mystery.  At one time she appears in Dublin; at another, in Cahir; but mostly she seems to have spent her time in England.  Over this part of her adventurous life a curtain is drawn; though some have endeavoured to raise it, and have professed to discover scandalous doings for which there seems to be no vestige of authority.  We know that, by the time she was twenty, Sir Thomas Lawrence was so struck by her beauty that he immortalised it on canvas; but it is only in 1816 that the curtain is actually raised, and we find her living with her brother in London, where, to quote her sister,

“she received at her house only those whose age and character rendered them safe friends, and a very few others, on whose perfect respect and consideration she could wholly rely.  Among the latter was the Earl of Blessington, then a widower.”

Whatever may have been her life during this obscure period, when her charms were maturing into such exquisite beauty, it is thus certain that at its close she was moving in a good circle, and was as irreproachable as she was lovely.  Of her rascally husband she had happily seen nothing during all those years of more or less lonely adventure; and the end of this tragic union was now near.  One day in October 1817, the Captain ended his misspent days in tragedy.  He had drifted through dissipation and crime to the King’s Bench prison; and in a fit of frenzy—­or, as some say, in a drunken quarrel—­had flung himself to his death through a window of his gaol.