“No, sir. My mother said I brought the first with me. She said I told them—I don’t remember myself—that my name was Clare.”
The captain drove back the words that threatened to break from his lips in spite of him. His boy’s name was Clarence, but his mother, whose dearest friend was a Clara, called her child always Clare!
“I mean my second mother, sir,” explained Clare; “my own mother is in the dome of the angels.”
A flash lightened from the captain’s eyes, but he seemed to himself to have gone blind. Clare saw the flash, and wondered.
Again the dome of the angels! The words burst into meaning. Out of the depths of the world of life rose to his mind’s eye the terrible thing that had made him a lonely man. Again he stood with his head thrown back, looking up at the Assumption of the Virgin painted in that awful dome; again the earthquake seized the church, and shook the painted heaven down upon them. He knew no more. His little boy had been standing near him, holding his mother’s hand, but staring up like his father!
He had to force the next words from his throat.
“Where did the good people who gave you their name find you?”
“Sitting on my mother—my own mother. The angels fell down on her, and when they went up again, she had got mixed with them, and went up too.”
Some people thought my friend Skymer “a little queer, you know!” I leave my reader to his own thought: he will judge after his kind. Clare’s father no longer doubted his perfect faculty.
All through Clare’s life, as often as the old, vague, but ever ready vision brought back its old feelings, with them came the old thoughts, the old forms of them, and the old words their attendant shadows; and then Clare talked like a child.