"Married?" enquired Madame. "How? Native fashion, sans ceremonie?"
"Unhappily, no. His marriage was celebrated and registered at the Melanesian Mission's station on Thursday Island. It was—I repeat unhappily—as legal a contract as your own marriage."
"You shock me," said Madame primly, though she struggled against laughter. "Would you have had the Hon. William Toppys live—in sin—with a native woman?"
"I would," shouted Gatepath.
Madame covered her face with her hands and her silks—her businesslike silks—rustled with emotion.
"It pains me to express sentiments which you must regard as immoral"—the silks went on rustling—"but I must look at that fatal marriage from the point of view, the just point of view, of the ancient family of Toppys."
"Pronounced Tops," whispered Madame, as she came up to breathe.
"The Hon. William Toppys sent us word of his marriage. That was nearly twenty years ago. He also, with unparalleled effrontery, communicated to his brother, the late Lord Topsham, the dates of birth of his son and his two daughters. Those births were all registered in due form at Thursday Island. If the Hon. William Toppys had designed to humiliate, to outrage, the most ancient and honourable Family in Devon—save only that of the Courtenays—he could not have gone about the business more thoroughly or systematically. He is dead. He died in 1912. But I cannot speak good of the dead. He committed a crime, a series of crimes. He lawfully married a Melanesian woman and he lawfully begat a son and heir!"
"What about the two daughters?" whispered Madame in throes of suffocation.
"The daughters don't matter," said Gatepath. "He could have had a dozen if he pleased. The Barony of Topsham descends to heirs male, not to heirs general."