THE HERONS.
THE child Isla might have been twelve years old when her father died.
Giles Heron was the last man of his people, unless you counted the boy,
and no one did count him. The Herons had owned the whole island once,
but, bit by bit, it had passed away from the name, if not from the
blood; they had no gift for keeping, it was said. A roving people, the
Herons mostly died at sea, or, if women, married into families on the
main, as we call the shore that on fine days can be dimly seen from the
Island of the Wild Rocks. Giles had been a wild lad, and held himself,
as all his people had done, above the fishing-folk in the village at
the north end. Few of them knew him well; there was only Joe Brazybone,
Sculpin Joe, who from babyhood had been his humble and loving servant,
and who still clung to him, until that strange affair of the marriage.
To most of the villagers it seemed “all of a piece,” and “Heron
doings,” when Giles brought home from some foreign port a handsome
deaf-mute, a “dummy,” as a wife. Joe would have been her servant, too,
gladly enough; but, when he came shambling along the rocks to make
his first visit, the young woman turned and ran from him; and Giles
laughed, and told him he would best keep away for a time. Poor Joe did
not come again.
Giles built a house,—you might look long for it now,—at the wild south
end of the island, which still belonged to him. Neither Joe nor any one
else would visit him there, he knew, for it was considered an unlucky
place, and no one knew what things might be met with there. But Giles
loved it, and as for his wife, the Wild Rocks bounded the world for
her, once Giles told her it was her home. Here their two children were
born. The first was a daughter, and Giles named her Isla, in fanciful
remembrance of the savage island which was her birthplace and his. When
the boy came, four years later, the dumb wife would have given him his
father’s name; but Giles said “No!” It was no chancy name, and the boy
should be called Jacob, after a grandfather over on the main, who had
no Heron blood in him. “See if we can’t make him a farmer,” he said,
laughing. “There’s good farming land here; and the sea is hungry for
folks named Giles Heron.” Mary Heron yielded, as she would yield to
anything that Giles wished. She was passionately loving, in her silent
way. Her husband would have filled her world full enough, had there
been no children; she had hardly the mother look in her eyes; but the
children were his, and she loved and cared for them; most for the boy,
who should have borne his father’s name, and whom she still called
“little Giles,” in her heart.
Alas! but he bore his mother’s curse. Isla learned speech readily from
her father; but little Jacob was mute from birth. No sound came into
his quiet world, but he missed nothing; the sign language spoke for his
every need, and his eyes were filled with beauty all day long.
It was a black day for Giles Heron when he found the boy was deaf. For
the first time his heart hardened toward the woman he had chosen. She
felt the chill of his averted face, of the eyes that would not meet
hers; felt it, and cried to God in her dumbness, that He would take her
and her stricken child away, out of sight of her husband’s changed face.
But Heron was a kind man. He had wedded his wife for her wild beauty;
he had grown to love her simple goodness and truth. He smiled again,
but neither forgot; do people ever forget? He set himself busily to
teach the girl all he knew,—not much, perhaps, reading and writing,
ciphering, odd scraps of history and geography. He had a few tattered
books by him,—there were not many books on the Island in those days,
but Giles had picked them up here and there in his wanderings,—and the
two pored over these hour by hour. The dumb mother sat near, nursing
her dumb child, and longing for death; but not to her was death coming.
It was Giles Heron who, still in mid-prime, felt his strength going
from him. His people had never had the sturdy, four-square constitution
that was the birthright of most of the islanders. They were slender,
the Herons, wiry and tough as a rule, but with here and there a narrow
chest that could not answer year after year to the call for struggle
against the icy winds of winter. One March the north wind raged for
a week without ceasing. Heron never thought of staying within doors,
but he felt the cold strike deeper and deeper, till it had him by the
heart; a cough fastened upon him, and fatalism did the rest.
“I’ve got my call!” he said. “If they’ll let me stay till spring, I’d
as lief go as not.”
He turned with feverish earnestness to Isla’s lessons, and racked his
brains for forgotten rules of his school-days. Hour after hour they
sat in the still sunny cove which was their schoolroom, and he mapped
the globe and the different countries on the fine, white sand,—he had
always been a fair draughtsman,—and told her how he had visited this
city and that, and how the people looked and spoke and moved.
“I like Greece best!” said the child. “Shall we go there, Giles, when I
am big, and live in one of those white things—temples—where the roof is
broken, and the sky comes through? I hate roofs!”
“Greece is a good way off,” said Giles. “Bellton is nearer, little
girl; you shall go to Bellton. See! here it would be, not three days’
sail. I was there a couple of times; there was a place with trees, and
a pond, might be the size of this cove here. Like to go there?”
“Are there rocks?” asked the child. “Can you see the sky?”
“Well, no; not much. The people live in brick houses, joined together
in rows, this way,” and he drew a street, with neat sidewalks, and
people passing up and down.
“I’ll never go there!” said Isla with decision. “It’s like the jail you
told me of, over on the main.”
“Just!” said her father, nodding. “Only folks build these jails and
live in them, because they like ’em. Some stay in ’em all winter, I
believe, and never go out from October to May. And call that living!
I’ll take my way every time, thank you, if it is shorter.”
“Are they white folks?”
“White? yes, child! white as anybody is; whiter, too, like a
cellar-plant, because they get no sun.”
“I didn’t know!” said Isla. “I thought maybe they turned black. But
I’ll never go there.”
Her father mused; then he drew a larger building at the end of the
street, with towers and pinnacles.
“Here’d be a church!” he said. “You’d like that, Isla. There’d be
music, an organ, likely, and lots of singing. The windows are coloured
red and blue, and the light comes in like sunset all day.”
“That’s pretty!” the child nodded, approvingly. “What do they do there,
Giles?”
“Like a meeting-house; say prayers, and preach, and sing hymns and
things.”
“Oh!” she paused, and the brightness passed from her face.
“Do you think He likes that, Giles?”
She nodded upward. Her father made no reply. He was not a religious
man, but had thought it right to tell the child that there was some
one called God, who lived above the sky, and who knew when people did
wrong.
“He has all outdoors,” Isla went on. “I should think He would hate a
house, even if it was big. Do you suppose they try to fool Him with the
coloured windows, Giles?”
Giles thought this unlikely; perhaps they supposed He might feel more
at home where ’twas coloured and pretty, he added, trying to fall into
the child’s mood.
The girl was silent. “Is He dumb, Giles, do you think?” she asked
presently.
“I don’t know,” said Giles. “He never spoke to me. What are you
thinking of, Isla Heron?”
“Oh—only I hear like voices sometimes in the wind, and down by the
shore more times; and I wondered, that was all. Do you suppose ever He
would speak to a girl, Giles?”
“Sooner than any one else!” said Giles Heron.
“He’s good, you’re sure?”
“Yes, they all say He’s good.”
Then Giles made the sign for silence, for his heart seemed to lie cold
and beat heavily; and Isla fell a-dreaming, feeling the stillness as
home.