The stern, sorrowful man hid his face in his hands.
“Grace,” he murmured—and Clare knew somehow that he spoke to his wife, “we have him again! We will never distrust him more!”
His frame heaved with the choking of his sobs.
Then Clare understood that the grand man was his father. The awe of a perfect gladness fell upon him. He knelt before him, and laid his hands together as in prayer.
“Why did you distrust me, father?” said the half-naked outcast.
“It was not my child, it was my father I distrusted. I am ashamed,” said sir Harry, and clasped him in his arms.
The boy laid his blood-stained face against his father’s bosom, and his soul was in a better home than a sky full of angels, a home better than the dome itself of all the angels, for his home was his father’s heart.
How long they remained thus I cannot tell. It seemed to both as if so it had been from eternity, and so to eternity it would be. When a thing is as it should be, then we know it is from eternity to eternity. The true is.
The father relaxed at length the arms that strained his child to his heart. Clare looked up with white, luminous face. He gazed at his father, cried like little Ann, “You’re come!” and slid to his feet. He clasped and kissed and clung to them—would hardly let them go.
All this time the officers on the quarter-deck were wondering what the captain could have to do with the beggarly stowaway. The panther stood on his feet, anxiously waiting, his ears starting at every sound. He was longing for the boy with whom he had played, panther cub with human infant, in the years long gone by. The sweet airs of his childhood were to the panther plainly recognizable through all the accretions that disfigured but could not defile him. The two were the same age. They had rolled on floor and deck together when neither could hurt—and now neither would. For the animal was perfectly harmless, and chained only because apt to be unseasonably frolicsome. When they let him loose, it was a season of high jinks and rare skylarking. Then the men had to look out! He had twice knocked a man overboard, and had once tumbled overboard himself. But he had never killed a creature, was always gentle with children, and might be trusted to look after any infant.