Lady Kilpatrick. Robert Williams Buchanan
but ’tis a mighty poor substitute for the colleens.
Good luck to ye. Lady Dulcie, your obedient servant.’
He swaggered off, his recent anger quite forgotten, and a moment later the quiet evening air rang tunably with a scrap of Irish song:
‘And thin he’d reply, with a wink of his eye,
Arrah! Paddy, now can’t ye be aisy’
‘’Tis a beautiful voice,’ said Desmond, standing still to listen. ‘’Twould have been better for poor Blake, maybe, if it hadn’t been so fine; it’s just been the ruin of him.’
‘The horrid old man!’ said Dulcie.
‘I wonder uncle admits him to his table.’
‘Oh, sure, there’s no harm in poor Blake!’ said Desmond. ‘He’s nobody’s enemy but his own, and there’s no better company in Ireland, till he gets too much of the whisky inside him, or sees an attorney.’
‘What makes him hate lawyers so?’ asked Dulcie.
‘Sure he has reason,’ returned the boy, who had all an Irishman’s apparently innate detestation of law and its exponents. ‘He lost one half of his acres in trying to keep the other half, years ago, before you and I were born, and Feagus, who acted for him, played him false. That’s the story, at least, and I don’t find it hard to believe, for he’s an ugly customer, that same Feagus.’
They passed together through the ruined arch, which had been in former times the main point of ingress, through the outer wall of the Castle, the rough and ponderous stones of which had, in these later years of peace, gone to the building of stables, offices, and peasants’ cottages. The main building, a huge castellated mansion with an aspect of great age and rugged strength, contrasted strongly in its air of well-kept prosperity with most proprietorial residences in that part of Ireland. Skirting the side of the Castle, they came upon a garden and pleasaunce, bright with flowering plants and emerald turf, commanding a view of the sea, now shining with the glaring tints of sunset, which were reflected too by the bay-windows of the Castle façade.
A heavy-faced, sullen-looking young man, dressed in an ultra-fashionable dress suit, and strangling in a four-inch collar, was sprawling ungracefully on a garden seat with a newspaper on his knees and a cup of coffee on the rustic table at his elbow. He turned at the sound of footsteps on the garden gravel, and seeing Dulcie, rose clumsily to his feet.
‘His lordship has been asking for you, Lady Dulcie.’
‘Dinner is over, I suppose?’ said Dulcie.
‘Yes, dinner is over,’ said the young man, scowling, ‘and so is the fight.’
‘We’ve heard all about the fight from Blake. We met him on the rocks,’ said Desmond.
The young man took no heed of the remark, and did not even look at the speaker.
‘I’m getting pretty tired of living down here among these savages,’ he continued to Lady Dulcie, with an attempt at the accent of a certain type of London men, a drawl which struggled vainly against a pronounced Dublin brogue. ‘Bottles flying at people’s heads—it isn’t my style, you know.’
‘Sure,’ said Desmond, ‘if we’re so savage as all that, ’twould be a charity to stop here among us and civilize us. We’re willing to learn, Mr. Richard Conseltine, and willing to teach the little we know.’
The young dandy looked at him with a heavy insolence, in which there was a lurking touch of fear, but did not deign to address him.
‘His lordship’s awf’ly upset. My father’s with him, and the doctor’s been sent for.’
‘I’ll go and see him,’ said Dulcie.
‘Desmond, you might go and ask Mrs. O’Flaherty for some dinner for both of us. I’m as hungry as a hunter.’
‘I’ll follow you directly,’ said Desmond.
‘You’ll come at once, if you please,’ she said, with a pretty imperiousness.
‘Come!’
They went away together, young Conseltine following them with a deepening of his usual ill-bred, angry scowl.
‘The supercilious brute!’ said Desmond under his breath.
‘One fight a day is quite enough, Desmond,’ whispered Lady Dulcie.
‘Fight!’ said Desmond. ‘Much of a fight ’twould be. I’d——’
‘Quite so,’ Dulcie interrupted him quietly. ‘I know you’d—and as I don’t want you to, you’ll just go quietly, and ask to have some dinner laid for us, and keep out of his way for the rest of the evening.’
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