There wasn't a member of the house of Gaverick decently well to do, excepting indeed Eliza, Countess of Gaverick.

She had been a Glasgow heiress and only belonged to the aristocracy by right of marriage with Bridget's uncle, the late Lord Gaverick, who on the death of his brother, about the time Bridget was grown up, had succeeded to the earldom, but not to the estate.
Gaverick Castle in the province of Connaught, which with the unproductive lands appertaining to it, had been in the possession of O'Haras from time immemorial, was sold by Bridget's father to pay his debts.

His brother--the heiress' husband, who, unlike the traditional spendthrift O'Haras had accumulated a small fortune in business, was able by some lucky chance to buy back the Castle--partly with his wife's money--soon after his accession to the barren honours of the family.

His widow inherited the place as well as the rest of her husband's property, and could do as she pleased with the whole.

Thus the present holder of that ancient Irish title, young, charming and poor, stemming from a collateral branch, lived mainly upon his friends and upon the hope that Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, might at her death leave him the ancestral home and the wherewithal to maintain it.
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.