CHAPTER II.—LORD KILPATRICK.
Four of our leading characters, including our best apology for a hero, have introduced themselves. All that remains to be explained, at least for the present, is that Dulcie Broadhaven, called by courtesy Lady Dulcie, was the youngest daughter of Lord Belmullet, who had married Lord Kilpatrick’s only sister and left her a widow with several children and heavily mortgaged estates in county Mayo; and that Dulcie was just then paying one of her annual visits to her uncle’s castle in Sligo. Here she had struck up a friendship with young Desmond, who had for years been a sort of protégé of Lord Kilpatrick. Only in the wild west of Ireland are such intimacies common or even possible, but there, where the greater and the smaller gentry still meet on terms of free and easy equality, and where the vices of more civilized society are still unknown, they excite no comment.
Mr. Blake’s abrupt and angry departure from the Castle left anything but comfortable feelings in the breasts of one or two of his late convives. Lord Kilpatrick, an elderly nobleman, whose originally feeble constitution had not been improved by early dissipation, and who was afflicted with a mysterious cardiac disorder, which caused him constant nervous tremors, was in a condition of semi-senile anger over Blake’s violation of the sanctities of his dinner-table. Mr. Feagus, Blake’s bête noire, was naturally and excusably enraged by the terms of unmeasured contempt in which the latter had addressed him. He was almost as great a rascal as Blake thought him, but he had a full measure of the commonest of Irish virtues, brute courage; and had it not been for the interference of my lord’s brother, Mr. Conseltine, his son Richard, and old Mr. Peebles, my lord’s butler, valet, general factotum, and tyrant, Blake might have had cause to regret his outrage on his host’s hospitality.
‘The beggarly bankrupt brute!’ he cried. ‘By the blood of the saints, Mr. Conseltine, if ’Twas not for the respect I owe you as my lord’s brother—ye used me ill, sir, in holding me back!’
Conseltine, a dark man of late middle age, with an inscrutable face and a manner of unvarying suavity, poured a bumper of burgundy, and held it out to the angry attorney.
‘Drink that, Mr. Feagus. ’Tis a fine cure for anger. Maybe I’ve not used you so ill as you think. Mr. Peebles,’ he continued, ‘you had better assist my brother to his room. Pray be calm, my dear Henry. The disturbance is over. If you will permit me, I will do myself the pleasure of looking in on you before retiring.’
His lordship, his face twitching, and his hands tremulous with anger, sat back in his chair, and pettishly brushed the old Scotchman’s hand from his shoulder.
‘At my table!’ he ejaculated angrily, for the sixth time.
‘Ay,’ said Peebles, with a broad, dogmatic drawl. ‘Ye should keep better company. Come awa’, my lord, come awa’. Ye’ll get nae good by sitting there glowering at folk.’
‘Hold your tongue, sir!’ snapped the nobleman. ‘How dare you address me in that fashion?’