When they entered the lighted room he saw that his father seemed older—many years older—than when he had said good-bye to him two months before. His skin was very transparent, his lips were tremulous, his eyes, after the first long look at his son, shifted feebly to the fire, the table, and the floor.
‘My dear son,’ he said, ‘I thank God that I have got you safe home again. Indeed, it is good to see you again, Hyacinth, for it has been very lonely while you were away. I have not been able to do very much lately or to go out to the seashore, as I used to. Perhaps it is only that I have not cared to. But I have tried hard to get everything ready for your coming.’
He looked round the room with evident pride as he spoke. Hyacinth followed his gaze, and it was with a sense of deep shame that he found himself noticing the squalor of his home. The table was stained, and the books which littered half of it were thick with dust and grease-spotted. The earthen floor was damp and pitted here and there, so that the chairs stood perilously among its inequalities. The fine white powder of turf ashes lay thick upon the dresser. The whitewash above the fireplace was blackened by the track of the smoke that had blown out of the chimney and climbed up to the still blacker rafters of the roof. Hyacinth remembered how he, and not his father, had been accustomed to clean the room and wash the cups and plates. He wondered how such matters had been managed in his absence, and a great sense of compassion filled his eyes with tears as he thought of the painful struggle which the details of life must have brought upon his father. He noted the evident preparations for his coming. There were two eggs lying in a saucer ready to be boiled, a fresh loaf—and this was not the day they got their bread—and a small tin of cocoa beside his cup. The hearth was piled with glowing turf, and the iron tripod with a saucepan on it stood surrounded with red coals. Some sense of what Hyacinth was feeling passed into his father’s mind.
‘Isn’t it all right, my son? I tried to make it very nice for you. I wanted to get Maggie Cassidy up from the village for the day, but her baby had the chin-cough, and she couldn’t come.’
He took Hyacinth’s hand and held it while he spoke.
‘Perhaps it looks poor to you,’ he went on, ‘after your college rooms and the houses your friends live in; but it’s your own home, son, isn’t it?’
Hyacinth made a gulp at the emotion which had brought him near to tears.
‘It’s splendid, father—simply splendid. And now I’m going to boil those two eggs and make the cocoa, and we’ll have a feast. Hallo! you’ve got some jam—jam and butter and eggs, and this is the month of December, when there’s hardly a hen laying or a cow milking in the whole parish!’
He held up the jam-pot as he spoke. It was wrapped in dingy red paper, and had a mouldy damp stain on one side. Hyacinth recognised the mark, and remembered that he had seen the identical pot on the upper shelf of Rafferty’s shop for years. Its label bore an inscription only vaguely prophetic of the contents—‘Irish Household Jam.’
‘That’s right, father, you are supporting home manufacture. I declare I wouldn’t have tasted it if it had come from England. You see, I’m a greater patriot than ever.’