AT HOME IN MY NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE.

Touchtone woke as the clock struck nine. The farm-house was as silent as ever. He dressed himself hurriedly and made an observation outside. The garden lay peaceful in the morning sunshine. Towzer and the large white cat that had suddenly appeared, and was on the easiest of social terms with Towzer, came about his legs on the door-sill. Sails in plenty shone in the blue sea distance, but no craft was heading for the island. He discovered a group of white dots and dashes stretching along at one remote point of the shore.

“Chantico, for sure!” he thought. “We must start for there to-morrow, at the latest. It wont do to put it off an hour longer than is necessary.” Then came into his mind their weary indifference to the position of the boat. It gave him a disagreeable start. If they had only been somewhat less exhausted and impatient! But he would go down to the cove and get a[180] look at the boat in course of an hour, at the furthest.

He lighted the kitchen fire and surveyed that appetizing stock of eatables on which they had made some inroads the night before. Audacity and a notion of a more breakfast-like meal for Gerald inspired him. He found the coffee in a caddy, and descended into the cellar to plunder its stores a little. Then, arrayed in a violently green calico apron that hung behind the entry door, he proceeded to find out if he could not concoct as decent a breakfast in a farm-house that didn’t belong to him as in a forest camp that did. Mr. Marcy had often declared, “Phil, you’re a born cook! When the chef of the Ossokosee strikes for higher wages, you’d better apply to me.” So he beat an omelet vigorously and then went to call Gerald.

“H-m-m?—y-e-s—what’s—what’s the matter?” asked the boy, confusedly, lifting his head from the pillow and uttering a round dozen of sleepy sentences before consciousness came back—a specially slow process with him.

“Breakfast is ready,” laughed Touchtone.[181] “Only ourselves to eat it. Come. It’s a stunning day. How do you feel?”

“O, I’m all right.”

But his flushed face and unduly bright eyes and hot hands made Touchtone uneasy. He pronounced the breakfast indeed a quite surprising masterpiece, but hardly took the practical interest in it that Philip expected. When he got up from the table, yawning, he suddenly declared that he felt “too tired to walk.” Even his concern for this remarkable situation, and his eagerness to have it changed for the better, seemed slight. He moved listlessly about the rooms and door-ways while Touchtone cleared away the table.

“I guess I’m too much used up to care about the Probascos, or the house here, or how to get word ashore, or—well—any thing,” he declared apologetically. Touchtone was not surprised, nor relieved. Alone he went down to the cove, Towzer at his heels, taking a short cut that saved the long walk by the road. In dismay, he realized what he had feared—that the boat was indeed gone, drifted out to sea, likely, or along toward the coast with the turning of the tide.

[182]

“How abominably careless of me!” he exclaimed, appreciating that every thing must be at a completer stand-still because of this loss. He could not find another boat about the Probasco’s dock nor stored in the one or two deposits of miscellanies, nautical and agricultural.

“We’ve got to wait, with a vengeance!” he said to himself. Curiosity as to his hosts gave place to angry impatience at his having taken things so for granted and at his own heedlessness; came, too, greater anxiety for Mr. Marcy’s and Mr. Saxton’s enlightenment. “They may have had our funerals, Towzer; given us both up for dead!” he exclaimed, addressing the attentive representative of the absent farm-house folk. Towzer seemed resolved that nothing should be done without his notice, and trotted at Touchtone’s heels every-where.

He was dismayed when he crossed the threshold of the farm-house. Gerald had gone back to bed with a throbbing headache and what Philip rightly judged would prove a fever. It gained perceptibly. By noon the younger boy was tossing in a restlessness that hinted at coming delirium. Now and then, as he dreamed, he muttered to imaginary people, or, awakened[183] again, he would ask Touchtone questions that were pitiful in their sudden intensity and unanswerableness. Philip knew that a new care and suspense had come.

“He’s very ill—very! And he’s likely to go on and become worse.” This great fear made Philip forget every thing else that was to be worried over. What should he do? How add the knowledge and care of a doctor and a nurse to the burden already on his shoulders? “If he does get downright sick, I don’t know enough to fight the thing. I’ll do the best I can to keep him comfortable. But, O, if any body could only come! What on earth would I best begin with?” He felt his own self-dependence giving way.

He ran over various necessities. Taking advantage of an hour when Gerald all at once became perfectly quiet, in an unrestful doze, he went out and quickly collected a pile of brush and kindling-wood in the space behind the garden. By throwing some kerosene oil and then water on the blaze he started a dense smoky column that he hoped should attract notice aboard some one of the vessels that glided far out. He came to the conclusion that[184] there must be an uncertain and dangerous chain of reefs and shoals that made it necessary for vessels to give the little place a wide berth. He distinguished a light-house. “To those who know any thing about these Probasco people it will seem like only the farmer burning up some litter on the place, of course. Nobody will think twice about the smoke, unless the farm-folk themselves get sight of it”—which was precisely the case.

The fire smoldering successfully, he set to rummaging in the Probascos’ stock of books for one the title of which had happened to catch his eye a little earlier. He found it, a flashy-backed little volume, “presented” by a patent medicine company, giving some simple directions for taking care of the sick without a doctor. This guide-book showed its chief signs of wear and tear and agitated consultation on the pages devoted to “Rheumatism” and “Influenza,” hinting in what particular emergency it had been oftenest consulted. Devoting himself to one or two dark chimney-cupboards, he unearthed a limited and dingy stock of family medicines. Bottles were half filled and empty. Luckily, one or two of them[185] were called for by Dr. Bentley’s Ready Guide aforesaid. Gerald was too weak to refuse the dose that could be ministered. “For my sake, old fellow. It’s the best I know how to do for you,” Philip said, apologetically; and Gerald, half in stupor, opened his lips. Then, after he had given the younger boy the last teaspoonful prescribed, and had sat beside his pillow a long time with a heavy and more and more fear-shaken heart, he sat down beside the window.

He wrote Mr. Saxton and Mr. Marcy the dispatch and the letter that ought to be ready for any opportunity. When that might arrive, of course, he could not reckon. At any moment communication with the world might be opened to them; it might not be for hours yet, possibly for days. He had given up speculating what had called away their hosts so suddenly, ceased fancying the cause of their absolutely inexplicable delay to return to their home and to the care of house, live stock, and garden. No ordinary accident probably lay at the bottom of the riddle. Now he could think of nothing besides the fact that he and Gerald were here, shut up in this singular asylum together, waiting for its owners and a deliverance to “turn up,”[186] and that Gerald lay there in the broad bed before him lapsing into a fever, now and then into a light-headedness. That topped the list of the anxieties and sufferings of the past week. But he must just take things as they came.

“I never knew before now,” he ended his letter to Mr. Marcy, “what it was to feel a hundred years older, simply because what has happened in a few days has been of a kind to make one feel so. It seems as if it has been as long as that since we were all at the hotel, as gay as larks, and I with no more to worry me than Gerald had. I don’t see how there has been time for so much.” And verily, the Philip Touchtone laughing, rowing races on the lake, playing tennis before the Ossokosee House piazza, and riding about in Mr. Marcy’s light wagon seemed like an insignificant sort of creature who had known nothing of life.

“And to think that I would be—well—that other fellow, that old Philip Touchtone, this minute if Gerald had not happened to come up to the Ossokosee to spend the summer!” he reflected, as his eyes turned upon the sick boy’s flushed face. “But I don’t believe that there[187] are many things in life that happen.” And it is to be concluded that there are not.

Speculations as to Belmont were not left out of his thoughts. Truly there was something more and more malevolent in the man’s conduct, however explainable. But he hoped that that chapter of their experience was ended as abruptly as it had begun.

He induced Gerald to take a light luncheon, feeding him, and coaxing down mouthful after mouthful and sip after sip with the gentleness and persistency of a hospital nurse. (That is, a hospital nurse of a certain kind. There are differences in hospital nurses, decidedly.) Gerald lay quiet for an hour or so afterward. But about three o’clock, when Philip returned from a stolen absence from his bedside (for the sake of their smoldering beacon and for a reconnoiter), he found the sick boy excited, though clear-headed, and needing any cheerfulness and detraction Philip’s sitting down near him could bring.

“Nothing heard from them yet, these—Probascos?” he asked, rolling about on his pillow.

“Not yet. They may march in on us any time before tea.”

[188]

“What on earth will they think? O, Philip, I’m so sorry to lie here and do nothing and have you plan and look out for every thing. But I feel too sick even to fret.”

“Depend on it, they will think that we have had good common sense and certainly the best of reasons for taking the hint that this big open house of theirs gave us. O, I’m not afraid of the Probascos!” he returned, in honest unconcern. “One can see what sort of people they are. I’m only too anxious for the pleasure of their acquaintance. As for your lying there, why, there’s nothing for you to do if you had six legs and could walk on all of them! And I am certainly glad if you don’t ‘worry.’ What’s the use of worrying?”

“Are those letters you spoke of written?”

“All ready; and two telegrams with them, to send by the first hand that comes along. (Fancy a hand coming along by itself! I don’t think I’d care to shake it.)”

But Gerald’s imagination could not be interested. He mused. Then he murmured, “Poor papa!” with another nervous turn of his body. “Give me another swallow of water, please, Philip.” He drank thirstily. “Cold, isn’t it?[189] I guess papa has found out by this time that I’m rather more to him than the yacht or his new racing team.”

He did not speak bitterly. It was evidently not a complaint with him that his father, and only near relative in the world, seemed to regard him so carelessly. He was used to it. He neither compared the portion of affection that fell to him in life with that given to others nor with his due.

“O, stuff!” returned Philip, shaking up the spare pillow. “He’s not to find that out now, take my word for it! You’ve always been a great deal more to your father than you’ve given credit for. He’s like lots of other city men. He keeps his soft side inside, a little too much, perhaps. More than the new racing team! ............