I went to Tintinnabulum’s bedchamber and told him I could not rest until
I knew what he had been doing to that lady. In the days of Neil it had
been a room of glamour, especially the bed therein, where were performed
nightly between 6.15 and 6.30 precisely, the brighter plays of
Shakespeare, two actors, but not a sign of them anywhere unless you
became suspicious of the hump in the coverlet. Never have the plays gone
with greater merriment since Mr. Shakespeare made up “A Midsummer
Night’s Dream” in his Judith’s hump.
No glamour of course in the room of a public schoolboy, unless it was
provided by his discarded raiment, which lay like islands on the floor.
However, I found Tintinnabulum in affable humour, sitting tailor-like in
bed, dressed in half of his pyjamas, reading a book and eating an apple.
He had doubtless found the apple or the book just as he was about to
enter the other half of his night attire.
“What could I have been doing to her?” he asked invitingly. (He likes to
be hunted.)
The robing of him having been completed, I said with humorous intent,
“You may have been luring her into matrimony against her better
judgment.”
“She is nuts on him,” Tintinnabulum said, taking my remark seriously.
“But you can’t have had anything to do with it?”
He nodded, with his teeth in the apple.
“Of course this is nonsense,” I said, though with a sinking, “you don’t
know her.”
“I didn’t need to know her for a thing like that.”
I tried sarcasm. “I should have thought it was essential.” He shook his
head.
“I heard W. W. say to-day,” I continued in the same vein, “that she is
spending the honeymoon on the Riviera; you are not implying, are you,
that it was you who sent her there?”
“At any rate, if it hadn’t been for me,” he replied, taking a good bite,
“she wouldn’t be on the Riviera and there wouldn’t be a honeymoon.”
I became alarmed. “Take that apple out of your mouth and tell me what
you mean.”
The mysterious boy of the so open countenance, as he told me the queer
tale in bed that night, was superbly unaware of its queerness, and was
more interested in standing on his head to see how far his feet would
reach up the wall. He far exceeded the record that had been left by
Neil.
“I wasn’t the one who made her fond of the chappie,” he said by way of
beginning. “She did that bit herself.”
“Very generous of you to give her that amount of choice,” I conceded.
“But she stuck there,” said he. “It was W. W. who told me how she had
stuck. W. W. has a sister called Patricia. Their mother’s name is
Mildred. That is all I know about her,” he added with great lightness of
touch, “except that I worked the marriage.”
This was the first time I had heard of W. W.’s having a sister.
“He doesn’t speak about her much,” Tintinnabulum explained, “because
they are twins. I say, don’t let on to him that I told you he was a
twin.”
So far as I can gather, W. W. keeps the existence of his girl twin dark
from boys in general in case it should make them think less of him.
“He didn’t ask me to help him out till things were in an awful mess at
home, and then he showed me some of Patricia’s letters.”
“If I were cross-examining you,” I pointed out, “I should say that your
statement is not quite clear. Tell the Jury what you mean, and don’t
blow the apple pits at the portrait of your uncle the bishop.”
“I bet you I get him in the calves twice in three shots,” he said.
“An ignoble ambition,” I told him; “answer my question.”
“Well, you see, Patricia had found out all about her mother’s being fond
of the man. His name begins with K, but I forget the rest of it.”
I ventured to say that the least he could do for a man whose life he had
so strangely altered was to remember his name.
“W. W. will know it,” he said with the carelessness of genius.
“Even now,” I pressed him, “I don’t see where you come in. Did Patricia
object to Mr. K.?”
“Oh, no, she thinks no end of him. So does W. W.” He added handsomely,
“I wouldn’t have let her get married if they had shied at it.”
“In that case——”
“It wasn’t Patricia that was the bother,” he explained, running the
apple up and down his arm like a mouse, “it was Mrs. Daly. You know how
funny ladies are about some things.”
“I do not,” I said severely.
“Well, it was about marrying a second time. Mrs. Daly couldn’t make up
her mind whether it would be fair to W. W. and Patricia. She knew they
liked him all right, but not whether they liked him as much as that.”
“Tell me how Patricia found all this out, and don’t bump about so much.”
“She was watching,” he replied airily. “She is that kind. I daresay the
thing wasn’t difficult to find out if all the stuff she said in her
letters to W. W. was true. They were awful letters, saying her mother
was in anguishes about what was the best thing to do for her progeny.
One letter would say, ‘Mr. K. made a lovely impression on mother to-day
and I don’t think she can resist much longer.’ Then the next would say,
‘I fear all is up, for they have been crying together in the
drawing-room, and when he left he banged the door.’”
“Their mother hadn’t a notion,” Tintinnabulum assured me, making an
eye-glass of the apple, “that they knew there was anything in the wind.”
“Nor would they have had any such notion,” I rapped out, “if they had
been children of an earlier date.”
“I suppose we are cleverer now,” he admitted. He became introspective.
“I expect the war did it. It’s rummy what a difference the war has made.
Before the war no one could hold two eggs in his mouth and hop across a
pole. Now everyone can do it.”