A Rough Shaking
Home - George MacDonald - A Rough ShakingChapter LXV.
At home.
Clare followed, wondering, but nowise anxious. He saw nothing to make
him anxious. The captain looked a good man, and a good man was a
friend to Clare! But when he entered the state-room, and saw himself
from head to foot in a mirror let into a bulkhead, he was both
startled and ashamed: how could the captain take such a scarecrow into
his room! he thought. He did not reflect that it was just the sort of
thing he did himself. He had indeed felt dirty and disreputable, and
been aware of the dry, rasping tongue of the panther on many patches
of bare skin, but he had had no idea what a wretched creature he
looked. Not one of the garments he saw in the mirror was his own, and
they were disgracefully torn. His hair was sticking out every way, and
his face smeared with blood. His feet were bare, and one trouser-leg
rent to the knee. His enemies had done their best to ensure prejudice,
and frustrate belief. They did not see in his look what no honest man
could misread. Innocent as he knew himself, he could not help feeling
for a moment disconcerted. But his faithfulness threw him on the mercy
of the man before him.
The captain turned and sat down. The boy stood in the doorway, staring at his reflex self in the mirror. The captain understood his consternation.
"Come along, my poor boy," he said. "How did you get into this mess?"
"I think I know," answered Clare, "but I'm not sure."
"You must have been drunk," sighed the captain.
"Oh, no, sir!" returned Clare, with one of his radiant smiles. "I've had but one glass of beer in my life, and I didn't like it."
The captain smiled too, and gazed at him for several moments without speaking.
"It seems to me," he said at last, but as if he were thinking of something quite different, "you must be in want of food."
"Oh, no, sir!" answered Clare again, "I'm used to going without."
Like a child the sport of an evil fairy, he was again the boy of the old wanderings, in the old, hungry times. But did he ever look so lost as in the mirror before him? he wondered.
"You haven't told me----" said the captain, and stopped short, as if he dreaded going further.
"I will tell you anything you want to know, sir. Please ask me."
"You say you did not come on board the frigate: what am I to understand by that?"
"That I was brought, sir, in my sleep. It wouldn't be fair, would it, sir, to mention names, when I don't know for certain who they were that brought me? I never knew anything till I opened my eyes, and thought I was in----"
He paused.
"_Where_ did you think you were?" asked the captain eagerly.
"In the dome of the angels, sir," answered Clare.
The captain's face fell. He thought him an innocent, on whom rascals had been playing a practical joke. But that made no difference! If he were a simpleton, he might none the less be----! Was her boy left to----?
He shuddered visibly, and again was silent.
"Tell me," he said at length, "what you remember."
He meant--of the circumstances that immediately preceded his coming to himself on board the Panther; but Clare began with the first thing his memory presented him with. Perhaps he was yet a little dazed. He had not got through a single sentence, when he saw that something earlier wanted telling first; and the same thing happening again and again within the first five minutes of his narration, sir Harry saw he had before him a boy either of fertile imagination, or of "strange, eventful history." But either supposition had its difficulty. If, on the one hand, he had had the tenth part of the experiences hinted at; if, for one thing, he had been but a single month on the tramp, how had he kept such an innocent face, such an angelic smile? If, on the other hand, he was making up these tales, why did he not look sharper? and whence the angelic smile? Did the seeming innocence indicate only such a lack of intellect as occasionally accompanies a remarkable individual gift? He must make him begin at the beginning, and tell everything he knew, or might pretend to know about himself!
"Stop," he said. "You told me you did not quite know your name: what did they call you as far back as you can remember?"
"Clare Porson," answered the boy.
At the first word the captain gave a little cry, but repressed his emotion, and went on. His face was very white, and his breath came and went quickly.
"Why did you say you did not quite know your name?"
"My father and mother called me by their name because there was nobody to tell them what my real name was."
"Then they weren't your own father and mother that gave you the name?"
"No, sir. I'm but using theirs till I get my own. I shall one day."
"Why do you think so?"
"Don't you think, sir, that everything will come right one day?"
"God grant it!" responded the captain with a groan, self-reproached for the little faith beside the strong desire.
"Do you think it wrong, sir, to use a name that is not quite my own?" said Clare. "People sometimes seem to think so."
"Not at all, my boy! You must have a name. You did not steal it. They gave it you."
The look of the boy when he thus answered him, completely restored sir Harry's confidence in his mental soundness, while both the mode and the nature of his answer to every question he put to him, bore the strongest impress of truth.
"If the boy be a liar," he said to himself, "I will never more trust my kind. I will turn to the wild-beasts, and believe in panthers and hyenas!"
"They did, sir," answered Clare. "Mr. Porson gave me his own name, and he was a clergyman. So I thought afterwards, when I had to think about it, that it couldn't be wrong to use it."
But how could sir Harry palter so with himself? He might have got at the necessary facts so much quicker!
Sir Harry shrank from seeing his suddenly wakened hope, dead for many a year, crumble before his eyes. He dared not yet drive question close.
"Did Mr. Porson give you both your names?" he asked.
"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.
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.
Sir Harry raised his son, kissed him, set him on his own chair, and retired into an inner cabin.
A knock came to the door. Clare said, "Come in." The quartermaster entered. Instead of sir Harry, he saw the miserable stowaway, seated in the captain's own chair. He swore at him, and ordered him out, prepared to give him a kick as he passed.
"Out with you!" he cried. "Go for'ard. Tell the bo's'n to look out a rope's end. I'll be after you."
"The captain told me to sit here," answered Clare, and sat.
The officer looked closer at him, begged his pardon, saluted, and withdrew.
The father heard, and said to himself, "The boy is a gentleman: he knows where to take his orders."
He called him into the inner cabin, and there washed him from head to foot, rejoicing to find under his rags a skin as clean as his own.
"Now what are we to do for clothes, Clare?" said sir Harry.
"Perhaps somebody would lend me some," answered Clare. "Mayn't I be your cabin-boy, father? You will let me be a sailor, won't you, and sail always with you?"
"You shall be a sailor, my boy," answered sir Harry, "and sail with me as long as God pleases. You know to obey orders!"
"I will obey the cook if you tell me, father."
"You shall obey nobody but myself," returned sir Harry; "--and the lord high admiral," he added, with a glance upward, and a smile like his son's.
For that day Clare kept to the captain's state-room; the next, he went on deck in a midshipman's uniform, which he wore like a gentleman that could obey orders.