“You’s got an angel, and he stands just so, and tells you what to do,” she said.
She stood on tiptoe, showing a pink and white face beside his, and two tiny hands on his shoulder. Then, with a bewitching laugh, she ended her pantomime, and ran back to her mother.
Charlie did not take it well. “I haven’t got any old angel,” he said doggedly. “My mother tells me where to go, and Ave Sanctissima takes care of us nights.”
A vivid red shot across Clara’s face as she drew the boy to her. “It is true, Charlie, and I will tell you all about it soon,” she said.
Should Edith’s child, should any other mother’s child, go guarded by angels, and upheld by a religious trust, and her son be like a heathen? All she had taught him had been such as pleased her fancy only. Sanctissima had been but a beautiful object to paint and sing, not a real being to whom honor was due. “I’ll have Father Rasle baptize this child before he is a week older!” she resolved.
Edith held out her hand to the boy, and looked at him with a beaming smile. “Come, darling, and tell me about Sanctissima,” she said.
“I’ve no objection,” Captain Cary said later that night, when his wife asked his permission to have their child baptized by a priest. “But you needn’t fret, Clara, at the boy’s speaking so. It is more natural that a little yellow-haired girl should take to religion, than that a great bouncing boy should.”
Father Rasle, it should be said, was at this time the pastor of a city church.
This little scene ended, “I am glad to see, Clara,” her father said, “that in what you write lately, you employ less pure color for your men and women, and use secondaries and tertiaries more. There is, of course, a vast difference between the good and bad; but in this life, whatever they may become in the next, all are human.”
“And yet,” she replied, “I am sometimes criticised for putting spots on the sun, and giving an amiable trait to my villain. The pretext for the criticism is that perfect examples and perfect warnings are wanted. I think, however, that the spots on the sun give most offence.