As she stood there, a swift review of the past months sped before her mind, carrying something like dismay in its train.
In April she had entered upon the tenancy of her furnished flat, having already borrowed eight hundred pounds from her friend and counsellor, Lady Frances Hope; and under the auspices of this same counsellor, had began her career as a woman of fashion.
In social circles the period and the conditions of mourning become more slender every season. And nowadays, although a widow may not attend dances or large dinner-parties, there are a hundred smaller, more exclusive—and possibly more expensive—forms of entertainment at which she may appear in her own intimate set. Very quiet dinners—very small luncheon parties—even friendly bridge parties—are quite permissible, when it is a tacitly accepted fact that the mourner is, by a natural law, barely entering upon her life—that the one mourned has departed from it by an equally natural dispensation.
Under these conditions Clodagh had begun her London career; and for more than a month she had lived—in the most costly sense of the word. Her mourning had been the most distinguished that a famous dressmaker could devise; her electric brougham had possessed all the newest improvements; the flowers that filled her room had been supplied by a fashionable florist at an exorbitant cost. In a word, she had behaved like a child who has been given a pocketful of bright new pennies—and believes them to be golden coins.
Once or twice in the course of those extravagant weeks, a pang of misgiving had crossed her soul; but it had only been a pang of the moment.
The phantom of tradesmen's bills is one so easily dismissed from the Irish mind that, unless it materialises very forcibly, it may almost be considered non-existent.
On July the first she was to receive her half-yearly allowance; and towards July the first she looked with an almost superstitious confidence. A thousand pounds! It was sufficient to settle a planetful of debts; and if any remained as satellites to the planet, well—there was the first of January.
But now her confidence had been rudely shaken. In a sudden moment of pride—of bravado—she had signed away almost the whole of the anticipated half-yearly income. She stood possessed of fifty pounds, with which to dress, to eat, to exist from July to January; and in her hands was the sheaf of unpaid bills!
There is no race of people that undertakes liabilities so lightly, and that is so overwhelmed when retribution falls upon it, as the Irish race. As Clodagh gradually faced her position, panic seized upon her. For weeks she had lived upon the credit that the London tradesman gives to customers who come provided with good references; and now suddenly she had realised—first by the arrival of certain bills couched in a new and imperative strain; later by Lady Frances Hope's unexpected demand for her money—that English credit is not the lax, indefinite credit of such places as Muskeere and Carrigmore: that it is a credit demanding—insisting upon—timely payment.
And where was she to turn—where look—for the necessary funds?