"Will you tell me—unless you think he'd rather you didn't?" asked Marise, gazing at the badly-taken photograph of a handsome, fearless-eyed child of five or six, in funny little trousers.
"Sure, there's no reason why he should mind. The boy has nothing to blush for. It's all the contrary!" said Mothereen. "And I will tell ye. It's right ye should hear what the gossoon fought his way up from to where he stands now. Ye've heard, at the least, that the father was English?"
"I think I did hear him tell someone—not me—that his father was a Yorkshireman," Marise remembered.
"He was that, and a gentleman besides, an officer in the British Army. His name was the same as the child's—John Garth. It was an American girl he'd married, a girl from out West here. She went over to England as a kind of a nursery governess with a family of rich folks, and there was a row—a flare-up of some sort. The folks left her behind when they came home, and the girl got engaged to sing with a little concert party, tourin' the provinces. It was in Yorkshire Captain Garth saw her, and fell in love. He was always inventin' something or other, was my Johnny's dad: like father like son, and when the one child born to the pair of 'em was a toddler, the Captain had an accident with some explosive stuff he was workin' at. The poor young man's right arm was blown off, and his eyes were hurt. That meant he must leave the army, and as he wasn't wounded in the service of his country, not a red cent of pension did he get! The poor girl wife was expectin' a second child, but the shock she got by the accident brought on her trouble before its time, and she and the baby died together.
"It was nip and tuck that the Captain didn't die too. But he pulled through somehow, and there was the boy to think of. When it turned out that Government would do nothin', the poor man had a notion to come to this side of the world—his dead wife's country. She'd always been tellin' him, it seems, that those inventions of his, that the British War Office turned up its nose at, might make his fortune in the States.
"Well, he took the little money he had left, and thought to try his luck. But he was pretty well done for, poor man, and a big storm there was, crossin', just about put the finishin' touch; for he broke his leg aboard ship."
"Were you on the ship?" Marise asked.
"Not me! 'Twas many a year since I was on board a ship," said Mothereen. "Me and my man—Pat was his name—we had our honeymoon in the steerage. 'Twas out to the West we came, near to where we are now, which is why me heart is in the West always. But troubles fell on Pat in business, and a friend of his invited him to join in a new scheme, back East in New York. The fellow'd been left a house there, off Third Avenue, and with Pat to help in the expense of a start, furnishin', advertisin' and the like, accordin' to him, they could coin money takin' boarders. It sounded all right on paper, and so it might have been in practice, maybe, with Pat to manage and me to cook, if half the boarders hadn't slipped off without settlin' their bills. But that's what they did, the spalpeens. And if troubles had been black out West, they was black and blue in N'York! This was the time when Captain Garth came limpin' in out of hospital, with his boy hangin' onto his hand. He'd seen our advertisement in a paper, offerin' cheap board. The man looked like death—and he didn't look like pay. But sure, me heart opened to the pair of 'em at first sight! Ses I to meself, 'If I was to have a child, I'd want one the pattern o' that.'"
"What happened then?" Marise wanted to know, when Mothereen paused for her thoughts to rush back to the past.
"Just the things ye might suppose! We none of us had any luck. There was no more doin' for the inventions in the States than there'd been in England. The Captain left the child in my charge, and went to Washington. There he hung about the place till the last of his money was frittered away, and nothin' to show for it. But my, didn't that boy grow into me heart, those days when he was like me own? Four years old he was, and to look at him or hear him talk, you'd have said six! There came along a big wave of 'flu, the end of that hard winter, and my Pat and Captain Garth was both laid low with the sickness. Pat took it from the Captain, nursin' him—and within a week of each other they was dead. That's how me Johnny boy got to be me son."