“I was not,” answered Jetsam drily. “I had attained the mature age of three years. If I am well informed it is because I have taken the trouble to inform myself. You see, I was interested, and I have spared no pains during this last year or two to acquire all the circumstantial details of the case.”
“I perceive,” said Carpentaria. “But how were you interested?”
“You will understand presently,” said Jetsam. “To continue. This Mrs. Kilmarnock, whom we must now call Mrs. Ilam, used, both before and after her second marriage, to pay visits to the town of Teignmouth, and these visits were, not to put too fine a point on it, of an extremely discreet nature; they were, in fact, strictly secret. Mrs. Ilam fell into the habit of telling her husband that she was going to Exeter to shop, but instead of going to Exeter she went only as far as Teignmouth. She was always dressed very simply indeed for these Teignmouth visits. She used to walk through the town from the station, and, having taken the ferry across the Teign, she walked up the right bank of the river till she came to a cottage that stood by itself in the marshy land thereabouts. At the cottage an old man and woman and a little boy would meet her. And the strange thing was that the old man spoke French; he could not speak English. You may possibly not be aware that onion-boats from the coast of Brittany are constantly arriving at the smaller Devonshire ports, such as Torquay and Teignmouth. The old man was a Breton peasant, with all the characteristics of a Breton peasant, who had arrived at Teignmouth once in an onion-boat, and forgotten to go back again because he fell in love with an Englishwoman—a Devonshire lass with a soft drawling accent. So Mrs. Ilam used to talk to the Breton peasant in French, and to his wife in English, and to the boy in baby language. She would cover the boy with kisses; she would call him by pet names, and she saw him at least once a week.”
“He was her son?” Carpentaria put in interrogatively.
“You have naturally guessed it,” Jetsam responded. “He was her son.”
“But if she was really a widow, and this was really her son, why did she——”
“Oh,” cried Jetsam, “I think she was really a widow, and there is not the slightest shadow of doubt that this was really her son. Perhaps she kept him a secret from Torquay because she felt that he might prove an obstacle to the achievement of her desires in Torquay. Anyhow, she loved him passionately. Her son was, beyond question, the greatest passion of her life.” He turned abruptly again to the old woman, “Wasn’t he?” he demanded.
And the aged creature’s burning eyes were filled with tears.
“I think perhaps it might be as well to leave Mrs. Ilam out of the conversation,” suggested Carpentaria.
“Impossible to leave her out of the conversation,” said Jetsam quickly, “because the conversation is almost exclusively about her. However, I will not trouble her any more for confirmation of what I say. Well, for nearly a year after her second marriage these clandestine visits of Mrs. Ilam to the cottage on the banks of the Teign continued with the most perfect regularity, and then something extremely remarkable happened.”