‘I can’t promise you, my dear. Peter Gill has been urging me to go over to Loughrea for the fair; and if we go, we ought to be there by Saturday, and have a quiet look at the stock before the sales begin.’
‘And are you going to be long away?’ said she poutingly, as she leaned over the back of his chair, and suffered her curls to fall half across his face.
‘I’ll be right glad to be back again,’ said he, pressing her head down till he could kiss her cheek, ‘right glad!’
CHAPTER VI
THE ‘BLUE GOAT’
The ‘Blue Goat’ in the small town of Moate is scarcely a model hostel. The entrance-hall is too much encumbered by tramps and beggars of various orders and ages, who not only resort there to take their meals and play at cards, but to divide the spoils and settle the accounts of their several ‘industries,’ and occasionally to clear off other scores which demand police interference. On the left is the bar; the right-hand being used as the office of a land-agent, is besieged by crowds of country-people, in whom, if language is to be trusted, the grievous wrongs of land-tenure are painfully portrayed—nothing but complaint, dogged determination, and resistance being heard on every side. Behind the bar is a long low-ceilinged apartment, the parlour par excellence, only used by distinguished visitors, and reserved on one especial evening of the week for the meeting of the ‘Goats,’ as the members of a club call themselves—the chief, indeed the founder, being our friend Mathew Kearney, whose title of sovereignty was ‘Buck-Goat,’ and whose portrait, painted by a native artist and presented by the society, figured over the mantel-piece. The village Van Dyck would seem to have invested largely in carmine, and though far from parsimonious of it on the cheeks and the nose of his sitter, he was driven to work off some of his superabundant stock on the cravat, and even the hands, which, though amicably crossed in front of the white-waistcoated stomach, are fearfully suggestive of some recent deed of blood. The pleasant geniality of the countenance is, however, reassuring. Nor—except a decided squint, by which the artist had ambitiously attempted to convey a humoristic drollery to the expression—is there anything sinister in the portrait.
An inscription on the frame announces that this picture of their respected founder was presented, on his fiftieth birthday, ‘To Mathew Kearney, sixth Viscount Kilgobbin’; various devices of ‘caprine’ significance, heads, horns, and hoofs, profusely decorating the frame. If the antiquary should lose himself in researches for the origin of this society, it is as well to admit at once that the landlord’s sign of the ‘Blue Goat’ gave the initiative to the name, and that the worthy associates derived nothing from classical authority, and never assumed to be descendants of fauns or satyrs, but respectable shopkeepers of Moate, and unexceptional judges of ‘poteen.’ A large jug of this insinuating liquor figured on the table, and was called ‘Goat’s-milk’; and if these humoristic traits are so carefully enumerated, it is because they comprised all that was specially droll or quaint in these social gatherings, the members of which were a very commonplace set of men, who discussed their little local topics in very ordinary fashion, slightly elevated, perhaps, in self-esteem, by thinking how little the outer world knew of their dulness and dreariness.
As the meetings were usually determined on by the will of the president, who announced at the hour of separation when they were to reassemble, and as, since his niece’s arrival, Kearney had almost totally forgotten his old associates, the club-room ceased to be regarded as the holy of holies, and was occasionally used by the landlord for the reception of such visitors as he deemed worthy of peculiar honour.
It was on a very wet night of that especially rainy month in the Irish calendar, July, that two travellers sat over a turf fire in this sacred chamber, various articles of their attire being spread out to dry before the blaze, the owners of which actually steamed with the effects of the heat upon their damp habiliments. Some fishing-tackle and two knapsacks, which lay in a corner, showed they were pedestrians, and their looks, voice, and manner proclaimed them still more unmistakably to be gentlemen.