Lady Kilpatrick by Robert W. Buchanan — Read

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.