This, put in short, is what I heard from him.  He did not willingly tell me all that I tell you here.  I drew some of it from him by persuasion and some of it by questions.  I was determined to have all the truth, and I believe I got it.

He knew no more than any one else of what the state of things really was between his father and mother till after his mother’s death.  Then his father confessed it, and promised to do what he could for his son.  He died having done nothing—­not having even made a will.  The son (who can blame him?) wisely provided for himself.  He came to England at once, and took possession of the property.  There was no one to suspect him, and no one to say him nay.  His father and mother had always lived as man and wife—­none of the few people who were acquainted with them ever supposed them to be anything else.  The right person to claim the property (if the truth had been known) was a distant relation, who had no idea of ever getting it, and who was away at sea when his father died.  He had no difficulty so far—­he took possession, as a matter of course.  But he could not borrow money on the property as a matter of course.  There were two things wanted of him before he could do this.  One was a certificate of his birth, and the other was a certificate of his parents’ marriage.  The certificate of his birth was easily got—­he was born abroad, and the certificate was there in due form.  The other matter was a difficulty, and that difficulty brought him to Old Welmingham.

But for one consideration he might have gone to Knowlesbury instead.

His mother had been living there just before she met with his father—­living under her maiden name, the truth being that she was really a married woman, married in Ireland, where her husband had ill-used her, and had afterwards gone off with some other person.  I give you this fact on good authority—­Sir Felix mentioned it to his son as the reason why he had not married.  You may wonder why the son, knowing that his parents had met each other at Knowlesbury, did not play his first tricks with the register of that church, where it might have been fairly presumed his father and mother were married.  The reason was that the clergyman who did duty at Knowlesbury church, in the year eighteen hundred and three (when, according to his birth certificate, his father and mother ought to have been married), was alive still when he took possession of the property in the New Year of eighteen hundred and twenty-seven.  This awkward circumstance forced him to extend his inquiries to our neighbourhood.  There no such danger existed, the former clergyman at our church having been dead for some years.