“I’m glad to hear that,” said Micus, as he placed some faggots and turf on the fire. “Draw closer and get the benefit of the heat, and you will feel better while you are telling the story.”
“Thank you,” said Padna, as he moved his chair, and then he lit his pipe with one of the paper pipe-lights that lay on the mantel shelf.
“Is it a story of love or adventure that I am about to hear?” asked Micus.
“’Tis a story of both,” said Padna.
“Begin then,” said Micus.
“All right,” said Padna. And this is what he told:
“Once upon a time, and not very long ago either, there lived a man, a friend of mine, and known to all as one Matty the Goat from Ballydineen. He wasn’t much to look at, God help us! but he was a remarkable man, nevertheless. He always tried to live in peace and quietness, but he had two wives, and—”
“How could he have two wives in an old-fashioned country like this, might I ask?” said Micus.
“Well,” said Padna, “his first wife had a bad memory, and she forgot she was married, and one fine day she went away to Australia to see the kangaroos, and remained away so long that Matty thought she was dead, or captured by some traveling showman, to be exhibited in a circus, because she was so ugly and bad-tempered, no one else would think of running away with her. So like all men of susceptible and sentimental propensities, his affection for his first love only lasted until he met the second. Of course, when the years passed, and there were no tidings of his wife, he said to himself that he might as well marry again, and accordingly he did so. Well, lo and behold! he was only about twelve months married, and his second wife was beginning to cut down his rations from three boiled duck eggs every morning to one small hen egg that a wren would be ashamed to lay, when a great calamity befell him. His first wife came back, and she less attractive looking than ever. But to be sure she made all the excuses and apologies, as only a woman can, for her lapse of memory and thoughtlessness, and there and then she abused poor Matty for not writing to her and sending cards at Christmas and Easter, and he not knowing where to find her at all, no more than a crow could find his grandmother. But to make a long story as short as a bulldog’s temper, poor Matty nearly lost his senses between his two wives, and one only more unreasonable than the other, and the two together less reasonable than any ordinary person, who would have no sense at all. ‘So,’ ses Matty to himself, ‘what, in the name of all that’s ridiculous, am I to do now? If I’ll stay here in the town, I’ll be arrested and imprisoned for having two wives, but that itself would be better than trying to please either one or the other, not to mention both. And if I’ll run away I’ll be arrested for deserting them. And if either the law of the land, or my conscience had no power over me, and I tried to live with both, I’d be as mad as a March hare in less than a month. Anyway, ’tis a clear case of being obliterated by circumstances over which one has no control. That’s the last consolation a man always offers himself when he cannot get out of a difficulty. There is but one thing for me to do now, and that is to commit suicide by ending my life.’
“And when he made that decision he came to me and ses: ‘Padna,’ ses he, ‘I have made up my mind to take the shortest cut to the other world.’