“We certainly have,” said Touchtone, half seriously, half smiling.
Gerald slept. Philip added a few lines to his letters, and, now that their situation was so happily determined, his anxiety for their being dispatched came upon him with double force. Not an hour longer must needlessly intervene.
It was impossible for him to guess what conclusion Mr. Marcy and Gerald’s father could have or could not have arrived at by this. According to Probasco’s account there had been plenty in all the newspapers about the steamer—“Folks had done nothing else but read an’ talk about it”—although Obed’s “plaguey turn o’ the wust sort o’ rheumatism” had kept himself, his wife, and their Chantico relatives in too much excitement for reading news, to say nothing of the funeral at the house. In his last writing Philip told Mr. Marcy and Mr. Saxton that within as few hours as possible for Gerald and himself to leave the Probascos they would go to Chantico, and thence down to Knoxport. There they would wait for instructions from one or the other gentleman. In view of the absolute ignorance of affairs it seemed to Philip unwise to hurry straight back to New York by railroad, and much less advisable to think of continuing their Halifax journey, of course. There was a chance, too, that at this very minute Mr. Saxton, Mr. Marcy, or both, were lingering in Knoxport, hoping for news from some quarter, unwilling to quit the point nearest to the late accident.
Fortunately, he did not know that a body declared to be his own, drowned and disfigured, had been duly “identified” days before by a coroner’s jury, and that the fate of the boat had been decided by every opinion brought to bear on it, and that, while he sat there writing, Mr. Marcy, with as heavy a heart as a man can ever bear in his breast, was packing his own and Mr. Saxton’s valises and preparing to fairly drag away the distracted father from the Knoxport House on the journey that he hoped might quiet his friend’s nerves, and for which Marcy had generously suspended all his own affairs.
The letters sealed, Philip felt more at rest. As the evening wore on, more excited than tired, he and Mrs. Probasco and Obed sat within ear-shot of the sick-room. In low voices they went into new particulars on both sides, discussed his plans for himself and Gerald together, and weighed this and that. Hospitable, shrewd, warm-hearted folk! Could you and your charge, Philip, have fallen into more tender or more willing hands? How interested they became in the life at the Ossokosee that had made this friendship begin, and in the thousand little or greater incidents which had perfected it and so suddenly laid such responsibilities on Touchtone’s shoulders! How carefully both, the man by silence, the good woman by tactful turns of the conversation, avoided intruding on matters that they surely would have relished understanding better, but into which they would not pry!
It seemed beautiful to Mrs. Probasco’s inmost heart, which one already will have divined was nothing like as unromantic as her features, this friendship between these two lads, this devotion of the elder lad to the younger.
“There never was any thing prettier than the way you an’ him have been keeping together,” she ventured once to remark, ungrammatically but earnestly. “It’s like a book.”
“But there never was any body else like Gerald—in or out of a book,” Touchtone answered, simply, blushing. For if facts were on his lips his inner sentiments, as a general thing, were not.