Left to Themselves/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
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 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. "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.
"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 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 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 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," 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 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 distraction 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."
"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? 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! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"
"You don't know my father," returned Gerald.
"And you, old fellow, don't understand him. From what you tell me I'm pretty sure he's exactly one of those fathers who can't say half what he wants to any son. I've heard of them before."
"I suppose there is that sort," responded Gerald, "but it's not—not the most—satisfactory kind to have, I think."
"You may think differently some day," Touchtone answered. "Why, I once knew a man who just about worshiped his son—a fellow, I believe, not much older than you. He was as proud as you please of him—of his looks, his cleverness, the way people took to him, every thing. But he didn't often stop to realize it himself; and when he did stop he might have been dumb for all the knack he had to tell his boy what he thought. You and your father will find each other out, so to speak, some day, depend on it. Come, now, try another nap, like a good fellow. Shall I give that pillow a shake?"
He wanted to end this or any other conversation and encourage his patient toward quiet and sleepiness. But Gerald would talk. So long as he did not increase his fever too decidedly perhaps it was just as well to humor him. Meditations on Mr. Saxton presently turned his thoughts to some of Philip's early experiences. The conversation in the summer-house at the Ossokosee, the overhearing of which had so brought them together, came back to him, as it often had.
"Philip," he asked, languidly, "do you remember what you said that night at the hotel about some day being able to prove that—that your father wasn't what—he was believed to be?"
"And didn't do what it was decided by the most of people that he did?" answered Touchtone, in the peculiar sort of tone that always came with any reference to or even thought of his life's disgrace and of his life's hope. "Certainly. What of it?"
"What did you mean by our being able to prove it together?"
"I meant that I'm in a hurry to grow up to be a man able to take care of myself. When I can turn over—well, two or three stones that haven't been touched, I think I'll find my father's good name, all right, under one of them."
He paused a moment. Belmont's taunt came into his head. Ah! he had a new link, possibly, if he met him again—alone. "And by the time I can start into this job you, may be, can lend a hand at it too. That's all."
"If I ever can I will. Be certain of that," the younger boy rejoined, earnestly.
He turned so as to look Philip in the face affectionately. Philip saw nothing but wakefulness in it; but it was a clear and not too excited look, after all."
"You see," Touchtone continued, "the men—some of them—who did the burglary are probably living. They might be willing to tell more truth about it now than then. Or they might not. There always was more to get at; I know that." There was a pause. "Did I ever tell you about the night my father died?" he asked, solemnly.
"No. Go on, please."
"I was only a little fellow like you at the time. But father meant I should remember, and I have remembered perfectly. It had been an awfully cold day in January. My poor mother was almost worn out with anxiety, for father all at once sank terribly fast about nine o'clock, though the doctor had no idea that he wouldn't last till morning. Did I ever drive you around by that cottage that we rented of Mr. Marcy, where we lived those years after we came? I dare say not; I'm not fond of the road. Well, father had mother bring me into the room where he was. I sat by the bed, just as I sit by yours this minute, letting him hold my hand and one of mother's. Mr. Marcy was in New York. O, how tired and hollow-eyed and dying he looked. But he smiled a little at seeing us two there together beside him.
"That's right,' he said softly; 'always keep with your mother, Philip, and remember, Hilda, nothing ought to separate you two but death. Philip,' he went on, 'you're going to grow up to be a man, I hope and expect. I suppose that the best thing I can wish for you is that you may never hear the people you will meet talk of me, nor even read my name in a newspaper. But I want to say to you to-night (for I'm afraid I sha'n't have many words to spare by morning) that I, your father, under the stain to-day of a crime, and believed by almost every body I ever knew in the world, or that you may know, to be a felon—am as innocent as you of what's laid to my charge. Remember, I say this to you on what I believe is my dying-bed, and going before the great God who judges all the world, and who is sometimes the only Knower of what is the right and what the wrong of things, great or small.'
"I began to cry. My mother pressed my hand and said, firmly, 'No; listen carefully to father, Philip! You will be glad of doing so some day.' So I bit my lips and swallowed my sobs as well as I could, and kept my eyes on his in spite of the tears.
"'It's hard to have to ask such a young lad as you to go through a scene like this, Phil (he often called me Phil, and that's the reason I never want any body to do it nowadays), and to stuff your head with such unhappy thoughts as may come. But it's best. You're my boy, and my name, good or bad, is yours. I was discharged and traduced and convicted almost altogether on the evidence of two men. One was Laverack, the ringleader of the thieves; the other, the watchman of the bank, Samuel Sixmith. Will you remember that—Laverack and Samuel Sixmith?'
"I nodded my head. Father went on: 'Some day you can read all the falsehoods that Laverack and Sixmith swore to. Never mind them now. Only do not forget that I give to you, my son, once more, my dying word of honor that they were falsehoods; and that, besides Laverack's having a reason of revenge to attack me as he did, there must have been some conspiracy between himself and the watchman, Sixmith. Possibly you may light on it before you die. I commit it to you and to God. If you do, you will clear my character before the world; and although it might come so late that the world will have little interest in it, still do it, if God opens the way, Phil. I believe that it will be opened by and by. I hope for your sake and your mother's that it may not be long shut.'"
It is to be feared that Touchtone had forgotten Gerald's fever and almost every thing else, in his story. The younger boy lay there looking at Philip in admiration and sympathy; and if his hot pulse could not but run higher at such a bit of his friend's history, compassion and regret may have kept mere physical and mental excitement within a certain check.
"He talked a little more to me," continued Philip, "and bade me recollect always that my mother and I would have a friend in Mr. Marcy. Then we all said the Lord's Prayer together, and my father kissed me on the forehead and told mother to take me into the next room. She left me with our servant. Poor old Biddy Farrelly! I wonder if she's alive now? She'd been crying as if her heart would break. I guess she'd been listening at the door a bit. Mother went back to father, and I was told to go to bed. I was too excited to sleep much in the first part of the night, and I lay there thinking over all that father had said. I haven't forgotten a word of it, names or any thing, Gerald, and I never shall. Besides, mother and I often talked it all over quietly together; and she told me more that she knew about my father's trial. I didn't see him again. He died in the night, and wouldn't allow me to be called. 'I have bidden Phil good-bye,' he said, 'and I do not want him to forget what I said to him through any other farewell now.' Poor father!"
There was a pause. The clock struck four. It was almost a home-like sound to them now. This solemn story of the past had unconsciously blunted the sharpness of present troubles.
"Laverack and the watchman, Sixmith," repeated Gerald, slowly. "Those two. What became of them? Have you ever seen them or had any chance to speak with them?"
"No," answered Touchtone. "Laverack served his term with the other four, and I dare say has had dozens of other names since, if he still lives in this country or anywhere. Sixmith was discharged from the bank at once, I believe, but father never heard what became of him."
"Did Mr. Marcy ever try to clear up the matter any further, for your mother's sake and yours?" asked Gerald.
Touchtone blushed and replied, awkwardly, "Yes—that is, no. He couldn't try much. There was so little ground to start from," he added, in apology for his protector; "and Mr. Marcy has done so much for us without it. He seldom speaks of that."
"But he believes, as you do, that your father wasn't guilty?" persisted Gerald, raising himself on one elbow and staring hard at Touchtone.
"Yes—yes," Philip returned slowly, and then more slowly still, "but not so much, I'm afraid, as I do. I tell you, we very seldom talk about it. I—I—don't know."
That answer told a plain story. Gerald did not pursue the inquiry.
"Well, if we get out of here and see papa you must tell him every thing. He's a first-class one to help any body in any thing. You can take my word for it. Between us all we may bring the truth to light—for every body, Mr. Marcy included. I can't tell you how I thank you for letting me hear all about this. I believed as you do from the first, you know."
"Yes, I know you did," said Touchtone. "It seemed so odd and unexpected. I was glad. But come, we wont talk any more now. You must try to get to sleep. I've been awfully thoughtless. Does your head ache as hard as it did?"
"Not nearly; and instead of being as hot and as miserable as I was I believe I'm better." His hands and temples were cooler, and after a few moments of silence Philip thankfully noticed that he dozed. The doze became a slumber.
Philip made the room less light. He was thinking of the patient cow and wondering whether he could safely go to her. Suddenly the sound of the dog's barking came into the windows. It did not waken the sick boy. Noiselessly he hurried from the room into the kitchen and around the corner of the house, where Towzer appeared to be standing in some sudden fit of vigilance.
A man and a woman were coming up from the dock, where a large cat-boat was moored. They were looking toward the farm-house and at the smoke in the garden in evident perturbation. At the sight of his own figure hastening toward the gate to meet and admit them their haste and surprise doubled. On they came. They were loaded with a couple of large carpet-bags and innumerable bundles. They were middle-aged people. The man was low-statured, smooth-faced, and a little stout; the woman tall and angular. Their shrewd, puzzled faces were kindly, and the man waved an unknown reply to Philip's gesture of recognition. He could hear them exchanging ejaculations and queries.
"The Probascos, for certain—at last!" he exclaimed. Advancing toward the couple outside the gate, bareheaded, he bowed and repeated the name interrogatively, "Mr. and Mrs. Obed Probasco, of this place, I believe?" as they came up.
The farmer dropped his belongings and answered in a bewilderment that had nothing of ill-nature, "The same, sir, at your service, sartin sure. An' who might I have the pleasure of addressin'?"