But now "boos" mingled with the hisses. And Ranelagh's immoderate laughter was caught up by scores of people who did not in the least know at what they were laughing.
The storm was too heavy to weather. Lumley growled an order. Down swooped the curtain, leaving the crowd booing on one side of it, and Lola raging on the other.
Which ended the one and only English theatrical experience of Lola Montez, the dreamy Andalusian dancer from County Limerick, Ireland. That night at Almack's, Lord Ranelagh told a somewhat lengthy story—a story whose details he had picked up in the East—which was repeated with interesting variations next day on Rotten Row, in a dozen clubs, in a hundred drawing rooms. There is the gist of the tale:
Some quarter century before the night of Lola's London premiere—and derniere—an Irish girl, Eliza Oliver by name, had caught the errant fancy of a great man. The man chanced to be Lord Byron, at that time loafing about the Continent and trying, outwardly at least, to live up to the mental image of himself that was just then enshrined in the hearts of several thousand demure English schoolmaids.
Byron soon tired of Miss Oliver—it is doubtful whether he ever saw her daughter—and the Irish beauty soon afterward married a fellow countryman of her own—Sir Edward Gilbert, an army captain.
The couple's acquaintances being overmuch given to prattling about things best forgotten, Gilbert exchanged to a regiment in India, taking along his wife and her little girl. The child had meantime been christened Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna; which, for practical purposes, was blue-penciled down to "Betty."
Seven years afterward, Gilbert died. His widow promptly married Captain Craigie, a solid, worthy, Scotch comrade-at-arms of her late husband's. Craigie generously assumed all post-Byronic responsibilities, along with the marriage vows. And, at his expense, Betty was sent to Scotland—later to Paris—to be educated.
At sixteen the girl was a beauty—and a witch as well. She and her mother spent a season at Bath, a resort that still retained in those days some shreds of its former glory. And there—among a score of younger and poorer admirers—two men sued for Betty's hand.
One was Captain James, a likable, susceptible, not over-clever army officer, home on furlough from India. The other was a judge, very old, very gouty, very rich.
And Betty's mother chose the judge, out of all the train of suitors, as her son-in-law-elect. Years had taught worldly wisdom to the once-gay Eliza.