And she saw it was true: for his tone was so earnest as to tell of pain.
Making what haste she could, kissing her boy a hundred times, and recommending him to the special care of his nurse and of his father during her absence, she drove with her husband to the station, and was just in time for a train. Mr. Hamlyn watched it steam out of the station, and then looked up at the clock.
“I suppose it’s not too early to see him,” he muttered. “I’ll chance it, at any rate. Hope he will be less suffering than he was yesterday, and less crusty, too.”
Dismissing his carriage, for he felt more inclined to walk than to drive, he went through the park to Pimlico, and gained the house of Major Pratt.
This was Friday. On the previous Wednesday evening a note had been brought to Mr. Hamlyn by Major Pratt’s servant, a sentence in which, as the reader may remember, ran as follows:—
“I suppose there was no mistake in the report that that ship did go down?—and that none of the passengers were saved from it?”
This puzzled Philip Hamlyn: perhaps somewhat troubled him in a hazy kind of way. For he could only suppose that the ship alluded to must be the sailing-vessel in which his first wife, false and faithless, and his little son of a twelvemonth old had been lost some five or six years ago—the Clipper of the Seas. And the next day (Thursday) he had gone to Major Pratt’s, as requested, to carry the prescription for gout he had asked for, and also to inquire of the Major what he meant.
But the visit was a fruitless one. Major Pratt was in bed with an attack of gout, so ill and so “crusty” that nothing could be got out of him excepting a few bad words and as many groans. Mr. Hamlyn then questioned Saul—of whom he used to see a good deal in India, for he had been the Major’s servant for years and years.
“Do you happen to know, Saul, whether the Major wanted me for anything in particular? He asked me to call here this morning.”
Saul began to consider. He was a tall, thin, cautious, slow-speaking man, honest as the day, and very much attached to his master.