What Timmy Did Part 22

"What d'you mean?" cried Jack fiercely. "I insist on your telling me what you mean!"

Janet Tosswill told herself with Scotch directness that she had been a fool. But if Jack was--she hardly knew how to put it to herself--so--so bewitched by Mrs. Crofton as he seemed to be, then perhaps, as they had got to this point, he had better hear the truth:

"Mrs. Crofton made herself very much talked about in the neighbourhood of the place where she and her husband settled after the War. She was so actively unkind, and made him so wretched, that at last he committed suicide. At least that is what is believed by everyone who knew them in Ess.e.x."

"I suppose a woman told you all this?" he said in a dangerously calm voice.

"Yes, it was a woman, Jack."

"Of course it was! Every woman, young or old, is jealous of her because she's so pretty and--so--so feminine, and because she has nothing about her of the clever, hard woman who is the fas.h.i.+on nowadays! The only person who does her justice in this place is Rosamund."

"I disapprove very much of Rosamund's silly, school-girlish, adoration of her," said Janet sharply.

She was just going to add something more when she saw Timmy slipping quietly back into the room. And all at once she felt sorry--deeply sorry--that this rather absurd scene had taken place between herself and Jack. She blamed herself for having let it come to this pa.s.s.

"I daresay I'm prejudiced," she exclaimed. "Take this note, Jack, and tell Mrs. Crofton that Flick shall be securely shut up."

"All right." Jack shrugged his shoulders rather ostentatiously, and disappeared through the window, while Janet, with a half-humorous sigh, told herself that perhaps he was justified in condemning in his own mind, as he was certainly doing now, the extraordinary vagaries of womankind.

She turned back to her writing-table again. However disturbed and worried she might feel, there were the weekly books to be gone through, and this time without Nanna's shrewd, kindly help.

Suddenly she started, for Timmy's claw-like little hand was on her arm: "Mum," he said earnestly, "do tell me what Colonel Crofton was really like? Did that lady--you know, I mean the person Jack thinks is jealous of Mrs. Crofton--tell you what he was like?"

"No--yes--oh, Timmy! I'm afraid you must have been listening at the door just now?"

"I didn't like to come in," he said, wriggling uneasily. "I've never heard Jack speak in such an angry way before. He was in a wax, wasn't he?

But, Mum, do tell me what Colonel Crofton looked like--I do _so_ want to know."

She put down her pen, and turning, gazed down into the child's eager, inquisitive little face.

"Why should you wish to know, Timmy?" She spoke rather coldly and sternly.

She was sorry indeed now that she had been tempted to repeat what was perhaps after all only the outcome of Miss Pendarth's unconscious jealousy of the woman who had made a fool of the man she had loved as a girl. It was unfortunately true that Olivia Pendarth had an unconscious prejudice against all young and pretty women.

"I want to know," mumbled Timmy, "because I think I do know what he was like."

"If you know what he was like, then there is nothing more to say."

"I want to be sure," he repeated obstinately.

"But how absurd, Timmy! Why should you want to know about a poor old gentleman who is dead, and of whom you are not likely ever to hear anything? I have often told you how horrid it is to be inquisitive."

Timmy paused over that remark. "I want to know," he said in a low mumbling voice, "because I think I have seen him." He did not look up at his mother as he spoke. With the forefinger of his right hand he began tracing an imaginary pattern on the blue serge skirt which covered her knee.

She looked around apprehensively. Yes, the door was shut. She remembered that Dr. O'Farrell had told her never to encourage the child's confidences, but, on the other hand, never to check them.

"I first saw him the evening she came to supper," Timmy mumbled. "They were walking together down the avenue. I thought he was a real old gentleman. There was a dog with him, a terrier exactly like Flick, only a little bigger. Of course I thought it was a real dog too. But now I know that it wasn't. I know now that it was a ghost-dog. It is _that_ dog, Mum, that frightens the other dogs who meet them--not herself, as she's come to think."

"Oh, Timmy,"--Janet felt acutely uncomfortable--"you know I cannot bear to think that such things really happen to you. If you really think them I'd rather know, but I'd so much rather, dear boy, that you didn't think them."

But Timmy was absorbed in what he was saying. "I know now that it was Colonel Crofton," he went on, "because I've seen an old photograph of him, Mum. Mrs. Crofton brought a tin box full of papers with her, and there were some old photographs in it. There was one of an officer in uniform, and it had written across it, 'Yours sincerely, Cecil Crofton.'

She tore it up the day after she came here, and threw it in the waste-paper basket, but her cook took it out of the dustbin, and that's how I saw it."

"How disgusting!" exclaimed his mother, feeling herself now on firm ground. "How often have I had to tell you, Timmy, not to go into other people's kitchens and sculleries? No nice boy, no little gentleman, would do such a thing. Of course it was seeing that photograph made you believe you saw Colonel Crofton's--"

She stopped abruptly, for she never, if she could help it, used the word "ghost," or "spirit," to the child.

"Up to now I've always supposed that animals had no souls, Mum, but now I know they have. I know another thing, too," but there was a doubtful note in his voice. "I suppose that ghost-dog hates Mrs. Crofton because she was so unkind to his master. That's why he makes the other dogs fly at her, I expect--or d'you think it's just because they're frightened that they do it?"

Janet Tosswill was an unconventional woman, also she was on terms of very close kins.h.i.+p with her strange little son. Still, she reddened as she drew him closer to her and said: "Look here, Timmy, I want to tell you something. I'm sorry now I said what I did say to Jack about Mrs.

Crofton. I ought not to have said it--I'm ashamed of having said it! It was told me by someone who is rather fond of repeating disagreeable, sometimes even untrue, things."

Timmy had also grown very red while his mother was making her little confession. He took up her hand and squeezed it impulsively, as an older person might have done.

"I think I know who you mean," he said. "You mean Miss Pendarth?"

"Yes," said his mother steadily, "I do mean Miss Pendarth. I think it quite possible that poor little Mrs. Crofton was never really unkind to Colonel Crofton at all."

"But you wouldn't like Jack to marry her, Mum, would you?"

Janet felt a shock of dismay go through her. There flashed into her mind that sometimes most disturbing text--"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...."

"I shouldn't like it at all," she exclaimed, "and I think you're old enough to understand that such a thing would be impossible. Jack won't make enough money to keep a wife for years and years." She hesitated, and then added, speaking to herself rather than to Timmy, "Still, I hope with all my heart that he won't get foolish about her."

"He _is_ foolish about her," said Timmy positively. "Even Nanna thinks"--he waited a moment, then said carefully--"that he is past praying for. She said yesterday to Betty that there were some things prayers didn't help in at all, and that love was one of them. She says that Jack's heart has gone out of his own keeping. Isn't that a funny idea, Mum?"

"It is a terrible idea," and, a little to her own surprise, tears rose to Janet Tosswill's eyes. Timmy, looking up into her face, felt his heart swell with anger against the person who was causing his mother to look as she was looking now.

He moved away a little bit, as if aware that what he was going to say would not meet with her approval, and then he said in a peculiar voice, a defiant, obstinate voice which she knew well: "I do wish that Mrs.

Crofton would die--I do hate her so!"

Janet Tosswill looked straight into her little son's face. She felt that she had perhaps made a mistake in treating Timmy as if he were grown up.

"My dear," she said very gravely, "remember the Bible says--'Thou shalt not kill.'"

"Of course I know _that_,"--he spoke with a good deal of scorn. "Of course I want her to die a _natural_ death."

CHAPTER XVI

"No, you mustn't come in; I'm tired. Besides, I've got someone coming to tea."

The ready lie slipped easily off Enid Crofton's tongue, as Jack Tosswill looked down into her face with a strained, pleading look. They were standing in the deserted road close to the outside door set in the lichen-covered wall of The Trellis House. It was already getting dusk, for they had been for a long walk.

"I shall never, never forget to-day!" He gripped her hand hard as he spoke, and she looked up and down the empty road a little apprehensively.

But no one was coming or going, and the group of little old cottages opposite The Trellis House held as yet no twinkling lights.

"I shall never forget it, either," she said softly. "But I really _must_ go in now--you know we are meeting this evening?"