He paused a moment, leaning against a clean kitchen-table whereon were set several pieces of china ready to be laid upon the shelves around the walls—another task mysteriously postponed. The dog he had christened Towzer now whined and fawned on him hungrily. Philip whistled loudly, once, twice, half a dozen times. Then he opened the door in front of him and proceeded deeper into the dwelling.
Its central hall was before him, lighted cheerfully by a good-sized fan-light over the front entrance. The hall was of rather uncommon width and height of ceiling, carpeted with a faded but unworn green ingrain and with several antiquated rugs. Philip looked quickly into the front chamber on his right. It was the large, well-furnished bedroom he had glanced into from the garden-walk. The bed was made. He noticed a hat-rack beside the hall entrance on which depended a huge straw hat, a woman’s sun-bonnet and a straw bonnet, and two umbrellas; and a wide-open closet near by contained various water-proofs, boots and shoes, and two or three pairs of clean blue overalls. He turned the knob of the parlor door and withdrew it, murmuring,
“Locked, I declare! Regular New Englanders, whatever else they are—believe in saving the parlor for Sundays and their own funerals.”
The sitting-room on the other side was full of the usual simple furnishings of such living-rooms. The pictures were old revolutionary scenes, besides President Lincoln and his family and an engrossed copy of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments, in photograph. Up in one corner hung two highly elaborate samplers, framed in an old-fashioned, heavy style. On one of these “MARY ABIGAIL JENNISON, August, 1827,” was stiffly worked under the claws of a red and yellow bird of paradise; on the other he read, “SARAH AMANDA JENNISON, August, 1827,” who boasted for her finer art the alphabet and the numerals arranged in rows around a red book and a green willow-tree.
“Old, those,” Philip thought. “I guess the Jennison ladies must be pretty well tired out with housekeeping if they are the heads of this establishment at present.”
There were sundry photographs on the walls, that he had not time to examine closely, of elderly men and women with plain, hard-featured New England faces.
The door into the room behind the sitting-room stood open. It was quite light, each shutter turned back. This appeared considerably more of a living-room than its fellows, with a sewing-machine, a big table with stockings, hickory shirts, and coarse mending, a cracked looking-glass with a comb and brush in front of it, and a quantity of miscellaneous articles distributed about. Suddenly Philip perceived a pile of very modern-looking, paper-covered books and a heap of newspapers.
“At last!” he ejaculated. He caught up several numbers of a weekly religious magazine. On the yellow label he read, “Obed Probasco, Chantico,” and the name of the State. On other copies of the Knoxport Weekly Anchor he found scrawled by the newsdealer the same name. Some new numbers of the Ladies’ Own Monthly were directed, “Mrs. Obed Probasco, Chantico.” The paper-covered novels, three or four agricultural hand-books, and half a dozen recipe-books were neatly marked in similar fashion.
A last assurance that these were at least the ruling spirits throughout this lonely island, whose nearest post-office on the main-land was, doubtless, the town of Chantico, lay between the covers of a family Bible. On the fly-leaf of this was written, in a faded ink, “To Obed Probasco and Loreta, his Wife—a Wedding-Gift from their affectionate pastor, William Day, May 17, 1850.”
“So then our hosts—that are to be—are this Obed Probasco and Loreta, his wife,” Touchtone decided. “Elderly people, of course. No children living with them, as far as I can guess. And they stay out here alone on this island, and either own it or farm it. Where on earth have they gone to just now? When did they expect to come home, pray?” His knees fairly were failing under him. He saw what duty and necessity directed his doing for himself and Gerald. For some hours at least this lonely, inexplicable old house was deserted, and they must make themselves at home in it. He must get Gerald up at once and provide food and drink and quarters for the night, unpermitted and unasked.