My father was not the same as he had been. He was like a man become a child again—interested in little things, dreaming much, wondering more: conceiving himself, like a child, an object of deepest interest to us all. No longer, now, did he command us, but, rather, sought to know from my sister (to whom he constantly turned) what he should do from hour to hour; and I thought it strange that he should do our bidding as though he had never been used to bidding us. But so it was; and, moreover (which I thought a great pity), he forgot that he was to kill the mail-boat doctor when the steamer put into our harbour on the southward trip—a purpose from which, a week before, Skipper Tommy Lovejoy could not dissuade him, though he tried for hours together. Ay, with his bare hands, my father was to have killed that man—to have wrung his neck and flung him overboard—but now there was no word of the deed: my father but puttered about, mildly muttering that the great ship had been wrecked five days too late.
I have said that my father loved my mother; it may be that he loved her overmuch—and, perhaps, that accounts for what came upon him when he lost her. I have since thought it sad that our hearts may contain a love so great that all the world seems empty when chance plucks it out; but the thought, no doubt, is not a wise one.
The doctor whom I had found with my father in my mother’s room was not among the folk who babbled on the roads and came prying into the stages with tiresome exclamations of “Really!” and “How in-tres-ting!” He kept aloof from them and from us all. All day long he wandered on the heads and hills of our harbour—a melancholy figure, conspicuous against the blue sky of those days: far off, solitary, bowed. Sometimes he sat for hours on the Watchman, staring out to sea, so still that it would have been small blame to the gulls had they mistaken him for a new boulder, mysteriously come to the hill; sometimes he lay sprawling on the high point of Skull Island, staring at the sky, lost to knowledge of the world around; sometimes he clambered down the cliffs of Good Promise to the water’s edge, and stood staring, forever staring, at the breakers (which no man should do). Often I was not content with watching him from afar, but softly followed close, and peered at him from the shelter of a boulder or peeped over the shoulder of a hill; and so sad did he seem—so full of sighs and melancholy attitudes—that invariably I went home pitying: for at that time my heart was tender, and the sight of sorrow hurt it.
Once I crept closer and closer, and, at last, taking courage (though his clean-shaven face and soft gray hat abashed me), ran to him and slipped my hand in his.
He started; then, perceiving who it was, he withdrew his hand with a wrench, and turned away: which hurt me.
“You are the son,” said he, “of the woman who died, are you not?”
I was more abashed than ever—and wished I had not been so bold.
“I’m Davy Roth, zur,” I whispered, for I was much afraid. “My mother’s dead an’ buried, zur.”
“I saw you,” said he, “in the room—that night.”