“How should you know, when I don’t know myself?” answered the Scotchman. “In earnest now, Tom Newcome, I think your boy is as fine a lad as I ever set eyes on. He seems to have intelligence and good temper. He carries his letter of recommendation in his countenance; and with the honesty—and the rupees, mind ye—which he inherits from his father, the deuce is in it if he can’t make his way. What time’s the breakfast? Eh, but it was a comfort this morning not to hear the holystoning on the deck. We ought to go into lodgings, and not fling our money out of the window of this hotel. We must make the young chap take us about and show us the town in the morning, Tom. I had but three days of it five-and-twenty years ago, and I propose to reshoome my observations to-morrow after breakfast. We’ll just go on deck and see how’s her head before we turn in, eh, Colonel?” and with this the jolly gentleman nodded over his candle to his friend, and trotted off to bed.
The Colonel and his friend were light sleepers and early risers, like most men that come from the country where they had both been so long sojourning, and were awake and dressed long before the London waiters had thought of quitting their beds. The housemaid was the only being stirring in the morning when little Mr. Binnie blundered over her pail as she was washing the deck. Early as he was, his fellow-traveller had preceded him. Binnie found the Colonel in his sitting-room arrayed in what are called in Scotland his stocking-feet, already puffing the cigar, which in truth was seldom out of his mouth at any hour of the day.
He had a couple of bedrooms adjacent to this sitting-room, and when Binnie, as brisk and rosy about the gills as chanticleer, broke out in a morning salutation, “Hush,” says the Colonel, putting a long finger up to his mouth, and advancing towards him as noiselessly as a ghost.
“What’s in the wind now?” asks the little Scot; “and what for have ye not got your shoes on?”
“Clive’s asleep,” says the Colonel, with a countenance full of extreme anxiety.
“The darling boy slumbers, does he?” said the wag; “mayn’t I just step in and look at his beautiful countenance whilst he’s asleep, Colonel?”
“You may if you take off those confounded creaking shoes,” the other answered, quite gravely; and Binnie turned away to hide his jolly round face, which was screwed up with laughter.
“Have ye been breathing a prayer over your rosy infant’s slumbers, Tom?” asks Mr. Binnie.
“And if I have, James Binnie,” the Colonel said gravely, and his sallow face blushing somewhat, “if I have, I hope I’ve done no harm. The last time I saw him asleep was nine years ago, a sickly little pale-faced boy in his little cot, and now, sir, that I see him again, strong and handsome, and all that a fond father can wish to see a boy, I should be an ungrateful villain, James, if I didn’t—if I didn’t do what you said just now, and thank God Almighty for restoring him to me.”
Binnie did not laugh any more. “By George, Tom Newcome,” said he, “you’re just one of the saints of the earth. If all men were like you there’d be an end of both our trades; there would be no fighting and no soldiering, no rogues and no magistrates to catch them.” The Colonel wondered at his friend’s enthusiasm, who was not used to be complimentary; indeed what so usual with him as that simple act of gratitude and devotion about which his comrade spoke to him? To ask a blessing for his boy was as natural to him as to wake with the sunrise, or to go to rest when the day was over. His first and his last thought was always the child.