"Oh!" with a sudden gush of sympathy, "and so it was your old home! Isn't that interring now! You must come in and sit awhile. Pat, git a chair for the gentleman, and Molly, take the baby so I can talk better. Oh, won't you come in? You'd better, now, and have a bite to eat and a sup of tea. I've some ready made." Of course, she went on, she knew the house didn't look so nice as in his day…. "It's all along of the children! Irish people can't kape so tidy, now, can they, with siven or eight, as Yankees can with one—" But it certainly was a grand house, she didn't wonder he came back to look at it. Wasn't it fairly like a palace, now, compared with anything her kin back in Ireland had, and such a fine big place for the children to play an' all.
J.M. broke in to ask a final question, which she answered, making vain attempts to button her buttonless collar about a fat white neck, and following him as he retreated toward the street, through a lively game of baseball among the older boys. No, so far as she knew there wasn't one of the Yankees left that had lived here in old times. They had gone away when the factory had come in, she'd heard said. J.M. had expected this answer, but when it came, he turned a little sick for an instant, and felt giddy with the heat of the sun and lack of food and a desolation in his heart sharper and more searching than any emotion he had known since his boyhood. Through a mist before his eyes, he saw his hostess make a wild warning gesture, and heard a yell of dismay from the crowd of boys, but before he could turn his head, something cruelly hard struck him in the side. In the instant before he fell, his clearest impression was utter amazement that anything in the world could cause him such incredible pain, but then his head struck heavily against a stone, and he lay quite still in a little crumpled heap under the old elm which had sheltered his boyhood.
II
For an instant after he opened his eyes again, all his life after leaving Woodville seemed to have melted away, for there at the foot of his bed was the little, many-paned window out of which he had watched the seasons change all through his boyhood, and close above him hung the familiar slanting roof of his own little, old room. However, when he stirred, it was not his mother but a rosy-faced Irish woman who stopped her sewing and asked him in a thick, sweet brogue if he needed anything. As he stared at her, recollecting but dimly having seen her glossy brown hair and fair, matronly face before, she exclaimed: "Ah, I'm Bridget McCartey, you know, an' you were hurted by the lads throwin' a baseball into your ribs. It's lyin' here a week sick you've been, and, savin' your pardon, the sooner you tell me where your folks live the better. They'll be fair wild about you."
The sick man closed his eyes again. "I have no family at all," he said. It was the first time in years that the thoroughgoing extent of that fact had been brought home to him.
His nurse was moved to sympathy over so awful a fate. "Sure an' don't I know how 'tis. Pat an' I left every one of our kith behind us, mostly, when we come away, and it's that hungry for thim that I get. I dare say it ill becomes me to say it, but the first thing I says to myself when I see you was how like you are to one of my father's brothers in County Kerry. It's been a real comfort to have you here sick, as though I had some of my own kin near. His name was Jerry. It's not possible, is't, that the J. on your handkerchief stands for Jerry, too?"
For the first time since he had left Woodville J.M. disclosed the grotesque secret of his initials. In the flaccid indifference of convalescence it flowed from him painlessly. "My name is Jeroboam Mordecai."
"Exactly to a hair like Uncle Jerry's!" cried Mrs. McCartey, overjoyed by the coincidence. "Except that his J. stood for Jeremiah and his M. for Michael. If you will tell me your last name, too, I'll try and lambaste the children into callin' you proper. Not havin' sorra name to speak of you by, and hearin' me say to Pat how you favored my father's brother, haven't they taken to callin' you Uncle Jerry—more shame to them!"
The mention of the children awoke to life J.M.'s old punctilious habits. He tried to sit up. "But you have so little space for all your family—you should not have taken me in; where can the children sleep?"
Mrs. McCartey pushed him back on the pillow with an affectionate firmness born of "the bringin' up of sivin." "Now lay still, Uncle Jerry, and kape yourself cool." The name slipped out unnoticed in her hospitable fervor "Wasn't it the least we could do when 'twas our own Mike's ball that came near killin' you? An' the children—the boys, that is, that this is their room—isn't it out in the barn they're sleepin' on the hay? An' that pleased with it. Pat and I were thinkin' that now was a good chance to teach them to give up things—when you've no old folks about you, the children are so apt to grow up selfish-like—but they think the barn's better nor the house, bless them, so don't you worry."