“I’ll tell you,” Jetsam recommenced. “It was like this. The boy was not dead.”
“Not dead?”
“No. He had run away. He had had a pretty hard time before the death of the peasant’s wife. Afterwards, his existence was a trifle more exciting than he could bear. He was starved and he was beaten. But that was not all. On board fishing boats he was forced to accept dangers and risks of such a nature that the continuance of his life was nothing less than a daily miracle. So he ran away. He was aged nine, and he had a perfect knowledge of two languages as his stock-in-trade.”
“But the legal proof of his death?”
“Nothing simpler. The foster-father was a great friend of the village schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster, as you may know, is always the secretary of the mayor in a French village. He it is who makes out all certificates, and transacts every bit of the routine business of population-recording. The foster-father suggested to the schoolmaster that in exchange for a certificate of the boy’s death, the schoolmaster should receive a note of the Bank of France for a thousand francs. This was more than half a year’s salary to the schoolmaster, and the result was that the foster-father got the certificate. No fear of discovery! None knew of the issue of the certificate except these two men. And the lady for whose benefit the certificate was issued would be extremely unlikely to visit a remote French fishing village.”
“And what occurred to the boy?”
“The principal thing that occurred to the boy is that he is now sitting here and telling you his story,” said Jetsam, calmly.
“I guessed it,” said Carpentaria, with equal calmness, “as soon as you mentioned that the boy was not dead.”
Josephus Ilam maintained a stony silence.
“I knocked about for nine or ten years,” continued Jetsam, “both in England and France, chiefly fishing. Then I suddenly became respectable. I got a place in a house-agency in Cannes, chiefly on the strength of my knowledge of French and English. Of course, that only lasted during the winter season. But my employer had a similar agency in Ostend during the summer. It was in Ostend that I became gay. I joined a theatrical troupe. I travelled a great deal. I did everything except make money. And after ten years of that I settled down again as a house-agency clerk. I really was rather good at that, much better than as a music-hall performer with revolvers, for instance. And in various ‘pleasure cities’ of Europe I acted as a clerk for over twenty years. Think of it—twenty years! And me growing older and narrower and more gloomy every year in the service of ‘pleasure.’ I never saved any money to speak of, even though I remained single, perhaps because I remained single. And then one day, finding myself at St. Malo, I thought I would go and have a look at that fishing village which I had fled from over thirty years before. My delightful foster-father was, of course, dead; so was the schoolmaster; but one or two people remembered me, and among them was an old woman who had been a charming young girl when I left. It appeared that my old foster-father had fallen deeply in love with her in a senile way, and at her parents’ instigation she had married him for his money. He had confided to her, once when he thought he was dying, the secret of the substitution on Exeter platform. And now she told me. She had always liked me. You should have heard her pronounce ‘Exeter.’ It was the funniest thing.”