Rosie moved reluctantly away down the landing. She had not spoken a word. Carpentaria closed the portal softly and retired to his chair.
“You have my attention,” he remarked significantly to Mr. Jetsam.
“Well,” said Jetsam, after a moment’s pause. “It goes back a very long time, this affair does, Mr. Carpentaria. It certainly began before you were born—down at Torquay. Torquay, according to what they tell me, was not the place then that it is now, not by a considerable distance; but it was fashionable. It had got a bit of a name as a good place to go and get fat in. Perhaps that was why a certain soda-water manufacturer went there to spend a year or so. He was a very wealthy man, and he rented a villa there. It’s one of those villas on the top of the hill between Union Street and the sea, and it still exists. His age was about fifty, and he was supposed to be worth half a million or so—all made out of gas and splutter, you see. Being supposed to be worth half a million or so, of course he soon had the entire population of Torquay knocking at his door and throwing cards into his card-basket. He made a wide circle of friends in rather less than no time, and being a simple, decent creature, though not faultless, he was pretty well pleased with himself. Now among the friends that he made was a certain widow, age uncertain—but in the neighbourhood of thirty, and her name was Kilmarnock.”
At this time Mr. Jetsam stood up, and bending over Mrs. Ham’s bed with his smile so ruthlessly cruel, he repeated, staring at the invalid:
“Her name was Kilmarnock, wasn’t it?”
Mrs. Ilam made no sign. Mr. Jetsam resumed his chair.
“A pretty woman, I believe she was, with magnificent black eyes; the most wonderful eyes in the West Country, people said,” Mr. Jetsam proceeded. “Husband dead some little time. Anyhow, she had gone out of mourning, and her dresses were the amazement of the town. They’d look pretty queer nowadays, I reckon, because that was before 1860. However, her dresses have got nothing to do with it, especially as the soda-water manufacturer—have I happened to mention that his name was Ilam?—especially as Mr. Ilam couldn’t see them very well. Mr. Ilam was beginning to suffer from a cataract; both his eyes were affected, and the disease was making progress rapidly. You must remember that oculists didn’t know as much about cataract then as they do now. Well, Mr. Ilam was himself a widower—a widower with one child, aged three years. He had been a widower for two years when he first met Mrs. Kilmarnock. He liked Mrs. Kilmarnock. She seemed to have in her the makings of a good nurse, and one of the things that Mr. Ilam wanted was a faithful, loving nurse. He was certainly in an awkward predicament. He also wanted a mother for his child; and Mrs. Kilmarnock took a tremendous fancy to the child—a simply tremendous fancy. He was a man who talked pretty freely and openly, Mr. Ilam was, and he made no secret of the fact that, though he preferred to marry a widow, he would never permit himself to marry a widow who had children of her own. And one day he said to Mrs. Kilmarnock that, since he had never heard her mention a child, he assumed that she had no children.
“She replied that his assumption was correct, and that she continually regretted being childless, as she adored children, and felt very severely the need of something to give her a real interest in life. A month later Mr. Ilam asked Mrs. Kilmarnock to marry him, and she consented like a bird. Three months later they were married. Everybody said kind things; for you must know that Mrs. Kilmarnock was not penniless herself. Oh, no! She lived in very good style in Torquay, and gave dinners that Torquay liked. And Torquay is a good judge of dinners. Her husband had been a Scottish writer to the Signet, she said. So the marriage was celebrated amid universal plaudits, and there was quite three-quarters of a column about it in the Western Morning News.”
At this juncture Carpentaria ventured to interrupt the speaker.
“You appear,” he said, “to be remarkably well informed about matters which occurred long before you were of an age to take an intelligent interest in them. At the time of this marriage you surely were not in the habit of reading newspapers?”