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.