“Good fellow!” exclaimed Philip, walking up the path and holding out his hand. “Changed your mind, have you? You don’t think I look like a thief, eh? I should think I did—very much.”
The dog jumped on him, whining curiously. He pursued the path toward the front porch, which was shaded with roses, carefully trained. The asters and geraniums on all sides showed recent care, and on a strip of grass near the porch lay a row of clean pans; and two white aprons lay bleaching, and several fat hens were scratching comfortably together under a lilac-bush. The front window-shutters, with the exception of the furthest one—faded gray-green affairs, all of them, with half-moons cut in their broad, wooden expanses—were shut. Touchtone rapped at the front door, letting the iron knocker do its duty smartly. No footsteps replied. The dog stared at him very intently. Impatient of delay, he hurried around the corner of the house.
A walk of cinders bordered with clam-shells and china-pinks and zinnia led him toward it, past what he presumed was the sitting-room or dining-room, and two of the windows were open. Nobody was to be seen or heard yet, outside or in. He leaned over a window and peered inside. A tall, white-covered bed, with four posts and towering pillows, and various articles of furniture that his eyes glanced at in his bold inspection, loomed out in the cool dimness.
“The spare chamber, of course,” he at once concluded. “Empty—in good order for unexpected company—like Gerald and me.”
He slowly passed on, turning his head to left and right. The dog preceded him, whining and making sure that Touchtone followed. A well, with its arbored trellis, was on the left. He drank and was on the point of turning back to relieve Gerald’s thirst, but thought it better to go on. Upon a grass-plot more aprons and some towels were bleaching, and a row of red crocks were sunned on an unpainted bench by the back door. He reached the kitchen. It was open.
“Holloa, here!” he called again before the door, peering into the cool room then and once more turning to survey the garden-beds, in which more poultry strayed.
By this time the fatigues of the past few hours were half-forgotten in a certain new excitement.
“Well, Towzer, if your people are all away and are willing to leave their house and home open and unprotected, in this free and easy sort of fashion, pirates must be out of date with a vengeance! I don’t know what strangers coming to them for charity can do except to do what Mrs. Wooden calls ‘act according to their best lights’—eh?” The dog had trotted into the kitchen behind him, and now stood wagging his tail and barking a sharp note, here and there, beside an empty platter that rested on the hearth.
“Cold? Yes, and there hasn’t been a fire in that stove for hours and hours,” exclaimed Philip, examining; “nor have you been fed, Towzer, I begin to suspect, within the same time, have you? That’s what’s the matter with you. Whoever lives here has gone off on some errand or other away from the island. What sort of errand can it be that has made the family stay so much longer than they must have expected to stay?” Vague, disagreeable feelings crossed Touchtone’s mind. It was strange. “I must be certain of things in the place before I go back to Gerald. What if there should have been some plague, some awful accident on the premises?”
He began to wonder, almost to dread, what might come under his eyes any minute. Suppose that this lonely house would not prove the shelter for them at all. Various reasons for the silence and desertion of the dwelling, despite all signs of recent occupancy and peaceful daily life, came thronging.