I

“Janet Ferrol to the bar!”

At Oriol, before the war, in the dining-room of the Hôtel des Bains where I sat, memory had raised a latch and, from behind it, echoed that cry.

Without were the Côtes d’Or, the golden slopes of meridional France. Within was the simple comfort of the room, which was practically deserted at the time, and from which, a moment previous, a guest had gone.

At table he had sat opposite me. I could have sworn that I had seen him before. Yet where? For information I turned to the waiter.

“Léopold, who was that?”

Léopold rubbed his hands.

“A M. Bundy.” He paused and concisely added: “From the Americas.”

Bundy! That was it. At once a curtain had risen. The waiter, the dining-room, the Côtes d’Or, everything had vanished. In my quality of reporter, I was assisting again at the trial of Janet Ferrol, whom Bundy had defended.

That was in New York, four years ago. Previously Mrs. Ferrol had been currently quoted “among those present.” The fashion magazines supplied her picture. You saw her at Palm Beach, at Belmont Park, at Tuxedo. She was shown on the sands, on the ice, at the races. People who did not know better fancied her a widow. Of Ferrol there was no accompanying picture, no mention, and many must have concluded that if he were a man of the world, it was of a world other than this.

They would not have been far wrong, either. Hall Ferrol moved and had his being in the world of thought⁠—a region perhaps unexplored by the lady who lived so palpably in the newspapers. Then presently her husband, whom they had ignored, created just a little ripple in them. He died, and you learned of his existence only through hearing that he was dead.

That was the ripple. It was followed by a lull, which was succeeded by a roar. Mrs. Ferrol was arrested, charged with his murder.

It was ridiculous, I told myself, for not long before I had interviewed this man, who was occupied⁠—of all things!⁠—with alchemy. Ordinarily I would have carefully avoided both him and it; but about that time an English scientist, Sir William Ramsay, had announced that with a certain combination of cathode rays and vacuum tubes the dream of the alchemists could be realized.

The subject was one on which the city editor had no erudition to conceal and none to display. But he felt that the man in the subway might relish a stick or two about it, and so, precisely as I was later told off to report the trial, I was then told off to get those sticks.

The task was not herculean. In the office encyclopedia I looked up “alchemy,” and found there that Hall Ferrol had written about it; looked up his address; went to Park Avenue, where, in a duplex apartment which for all I know to the contrary may have been triplex, I bearded him in his den. This was a great, bare room, totally devoid of any necromantic paraphernalia, in which he presented the melancholy spectacle of a rich man trying to be richer and, while he was at it, looking like a dentist.

I stated my errand. The tone in which I put it may have lacked seriousness, for he said, civilly enough, as if remarking about the weather:

“You don’t believe in alchemy.”

“Oh,” I answered, “I have three hundred and sixty-five beliefs, one for every day in the year. I am willing to add to them. In leap-year a belief in alchemy may come in handy.”

The inanity of that he ignored.

“You have practised it ever since you became a reporter. A wad of paper and an ounce of ink you transform into banknotes. What is that but alchemy? The transformation of metals is only a trifle more elaborate. As for Ramsay, it is infantile of him to say that it can be accomplished. It has been, and without any of his tubes or rays, either.”

I was amused at this attitude, which, however, all specialists exhibit to a trespasser in their vineyard, and I asked if he had accomplished it.

He nodded.

“Practically. Though I have nothing yet to show for it, I shall have, as others have before me.”

With that he gestured. A moment before he had suggested a dentist; it was a seer that he resembled then. Upon his face there came an expression rapt and vatic. Visibly he was astride, careering on his hobby.

In common, no doubt, with many others, I had ignorantly supposed that the easiest way to make money is to earn it. I was promptly undeceived.

He told me that there is a way easier still, a process for extracting something out of nothing, a solvent which turns lead into bullion, a secret called the alkahest⁠—concerning which, by the way, Balzac wrote a novel that I never could read. Ferrol said that over it⁠—over the secret, I mean, not the novel⁠—the world went mad.

The madness seemed to me very rational. According to Ferrol, behind the process was mystery, about it romance, and above a golden chimera. That was the witchery of it. If you could snare and choke the chimera, she stammered the secret.

He admitted that all this happened a long time ago, and I thought that probably it never happened at all. In any event, the chimera flew away, as chimeras will. The secret went with it. But, as Ferrol put it, its fading memories still haunted the minds of men. They hallucinated the Middle Ages. They enthralled the Renaissance. They fascinated even Bacon.

Here I was on surer ground. Bacon, I was aware, knew all that was going and a lot that was not. He knew, for instance, that the world in which he lived was passing poor. He also knew that there had been an epoch when the world was just the reverse. He knew that the Babylonian satraps built at will cities fairer than the uplands of dream, palaces more luminous than the signs of the zodiac.

But Bacon’s knowledge was not universal. He did not know that the value of the treasure piled on the pyre of one of these satraps equaled eighty-four thousand millions of our money, which is a sum not much inferior to the total wealth of the United States.

Bacon did not know that, for the excellent reason that no one else did, until it was demonstrated by excavated and attesting tablets of imperishable brick. None the less, Bacon wondered what magic had created the magnificence that had been, and concluded, perhaps sagely, that a thread had been dropped from the scheme of things, that something, somewhere, was missing.

The deduction seems logical. At the beginning of the present era the total amount of money in circulation was less than that which in earlier days a single satrap⁠—or even a married one⁠—squandered. Moreover, poverty continued and increased until Columbus put down an idea, borrowed a boat on it, and brought back a world.

Things then began to look up. But, as Ferrol pointed out, just prior to the eruptions of gold from Mexico and Peru Europe was peopled with alchemists. Everywhere crucibles, alembics, and aludels were at work. Everyone was chasing the chimera.

“Everyone” is perhaps an exaggeration; but at least so many were at it that if there be a word of truth in history⁠—which, in moments of faithlessness, I sometimes doubt⁠—the game was actually quarried, the chimera was caught, the secret wrung from her. Kings and emperors had a finger in the pie. In the seventeenth century, with gold alchemistically obtained, Ferdinand III struck, not oil, but medals, some of which, attesting the miracle, were on view in the Vienna mint before the war. In the next generation the alchemistic successes of Augustus of Saxony were so much to his taste that, lightly, he gave a lady a supper-party that cost six millions.

Whatever the value of history may be, these instances and others like them are recorded in it. So also are mysterious stories of mysterious persons who provided the solvent by which the gold was obtained⁠—the solvent, but not the secret; the alkahest, but not the process by which it was achieved.

That was the patent of the Rosicrucians, a society of adepts who got it from the Cabalists, a sect that originated among the Chaldean magicians, who in turn received it from no less a light than Azrael, angel of mysteries, and who, with it, taught the Babylonian monarchs what’s what.

That, of course, may not be true. Ferrol himself was a bit skeptical about it. But from indications which he supplied I afterward found the legend repeated and confirmed by all the great necromancers, by Paracelsus, Nostradamus, Albertus Magnus⁠—and who am I to question them?

Besides, even if the story is not true, that does not detract from its charm; on the contrary, it adds to it. To sensible people, fairy tales are the most interesting of all. And anyway, and however the subject be regarded, it seemed probable that there had been a secret which now, by hook or by crook, Ramsay had nailed.

I said as much to Ferrol, who Johnsonianly addressed me.

“Sir, to recover that secret men invoked the aid of the planets, they invoked Satan himself, when it would have been simpler⁠—” He hesitated, waved at something, and continued: “But when they got it they turned lead into bullion as readily as you turn paper into copy, as readily as I shall presently produce gold myself!” On a table before him he pounded. “Yes, sir, just as readily, and without any rubbish from Ramsay’s scrapheap either. Vacuum tubes indeed! Cathode rays! Why not vaseline and a candle?”

II

Ferrol was mad as a hatter, I thought as I thanked him. Afterward I wondered whether it could have been in a lucid moment or in a fit of abstraction that he had married the woman who was charged with his death.

But the trial enlightened me, and now, in the dining-room at Oriol, the panorama of it returned. I was seated again at the press table and heard the ominous command:

“Janet Ferrol to the bar!”

Into court the woman limped and shrank, rather than sat, in a chair just beyond me.

Never have I seen a face so spectral. It was not guilt that it expressed, nor was it innocence. It was horror. Her skin was white as white paper, and that whiteness was accentuated by her weeds and by her eyes, which were black and burning. In the fashion magazines she had seemed very beautiful, slightly disdainful, sure of her charm. On that charm horror had dropped like a veil.

Beside her was Bundy, a large man, quite stout, with a face like a brandied cherry. Adjacently was another man with a gravely virile air and, for her, a look of extreme solicitude. His name, a brother reporter whispered, was Asher, and he had come up from Virginia to befriend her.

At the moment I had no time for further consideration of either of these men. Melvale, the district attorney, a dramatic person with the face of an elderly demon, was up and at it.

“May it please the court⁠—Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury!”

With three bows and this ritual he opened for the State, and began at once outlining the case for the people.

According to his account of it Ferrol was a wealthy recluse, and the defendant a woman insatiable of pleasure who, in pursuit of it, hesitated at nothing, not even at crime. Among her effects was a bottle containing muscarin, and with this poison she had rid herself of Ferrol and inherited his estate.

Melvale wheeled.

“This Brinvilliers killed her husband sordidly, for his money.” He paused and dramatically added: “And passionately, for another man!” As Melvale spoke, he pointed. “There he sits!”

He was pointing at Asher, who, with an air of contempt which seemed to me enormous, looked him up and down.

“Who was Brinvilliers, and how do you spell it?” a brother reporter asked.

But now Bundy was on his feet.

“I object to the district attorney prejudicing the jury against the lady, my client.”

The objection was not sustained.

“And I except to your honor’s ruling,” Bundy, with a bulldog look, threw up at the bench.

Melvale continued.

“There, gentlemen, is the crime; there, too, the motive. To finish the picture, evidence will be produced.”

As I sat in the dining-room I could see the picture, the frame as well⁠—the court, vast, high-ceiled, close-packed, filled with spectators who had begged or badgered their way there; with men and women whom you would recognize as first-nighters, with others whom you would not recognize at all. For it is great sport to see a woman tried for her life. Yet when you have known her, or known of her, what more could you decently ask, except to have her convicted? That she would be, everyone was convinced. The sight of her spectral face was enough.

But public opinion is a wave that thinks, changes its mind, thinks again. As the trial proceeded, no one was quite so sure. It is true, that spectral look had vanished.

On the stand, meanwhile, witnesses succeeded one another. Already the muscarin had been admitted in evidence and marked “Exhibit A.” “Exhibit B” was a certified copy of Ferrol’s will. “Exhibit C” was a bundle of Asher’s letters.

Concerning the muscarin, toxicologists for the State swore that it leaves no traces. In rebuttal, toxicologists for the defense swore that it does. The usual jest circulated. The mendacious were subdivided into liars, damned liars, and expert witnesses. Meanwhile it was shown that reagents employed at the autopsy had determined slight discolorations, which, it was also shown, might be attributed as well to natural causes as the reverse. Between the two you could pick and choose. It was a great privilege.

Ferrol’s will was different. It was very plain sailing. By it he devised all his property, of whatever kind, nature, and description, and wheresoever situated, to his wife and her heirs and legal representatives forever. Nothing could have been clearer.

As regards Asher’s letters, it was generally felt that no self-respecting woman should have preserved them. They were too alarmingly dull.

Additional testimony was supplied by servants, one of whom testified to having seen Ferrol in a state of great excitement two or three hours before his death, which, it was shown, had occurred shortly after midnight.

Where was the defendant at the time? It was Bundy who asked the question, it was the defendant who answered it. Bending to her, Bundy had requested her to take the stand.

It was then that the spectral look fell from her. Yet that was perhaps only natural. It is the fear of danger that affrights; but on the firing-line, while there may be death, fear and depression are gone.

Janet Ferrol displayed neither. Her face still was very pale; but to it, as the examination proceeded, gradually its former charm returned. Color diffused it, and once she smiled, very disdainfully and at Melvale, but the smile was there. It lighted her up for what she was⁠—a rarely beautiful creature.

III

“Mrs. Ferrol,” Bundy began, extending one ample hand at her, the other at the jury, “will you be good enough to tell these gentlemen how Exhibit A, alleged to contain poison, came in your possession?”

With lifted eyes, in a clear, level voice, she answered:

“I removed it from Mr. Ferrol’s study.”

Bundy bowed.

“Thank you. Now the district attorney has given these gentlemen to understand that you benefited substantially by your husband’s death. Will you please tell them the value of the estate which you inherited from him?”

“Except for the furniture in our apartment and what money he had in the bank, I inherited nothing. There was no estate.”

Bundy started and stared.

“What? Nothing, you say? No estate?” Apparently he had never been so much surprised in all his life. “Then from what, may I ask, was his income derived?”

“From an annuity that died with him.”

In a crescendo of bewilderment which, though feigned, was well acted, Bundy lifted his hands.

“And did you know of this beforehand?” he asked.

“I knew of it before we were married,” the witness replied.

Bundy mopped his red face.

“Dear me! Dear me! Who would have supposed that my learned opponent, the district attorney, could be so grievously in error?”

Yet at once, in mitigation of that error, in obvious sympathy, too, he threw out:

“But there is Exhibit B, there is the will! Can you tell me why your late husband so elaborately devised to you nothing whatever?”

“Mr. Ferrol believed that through experiments in which he was engaged, he might at any moment become very wealthy.”

“Ah! And what was the nature of these experiments?”

“Alchemy.”

“Alchemy!” You would have thought that Bundy’s eyes were going to pop from his head. “So he was an alchemist! And was it the elixir of life that he was seeking?”

“No⁠—the transmutation of metals.”

“Oho! That was it, was it? And do you recall anything that he may have said on the subject?”

“He said that when the experiments were concluded he would project gold as a hose projects water; that we would wade in it.”

“And did Mr. Ferrol say what was necessary to bring about a result so⁠—er⁠—remarkable?”

“He said that the blood of a human being was indicated.”

“Ah! And did he tell you how he proposed to procure this⁠—er⁠—this ingredient?”

“He said he might carve up Sir William Ramsay.”

Blandly Bundy rubbed his hands and as blandly remarked:

“Mr. Ferrol being at the time in this city and Sir William in England?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say that there would be any preliminaries to the carving?”

“He said he would first dose him with muscarin.”

“And you feared that it was himself he might dose?”

“Precisely.”

“And it was for this reason that you removed it?”

“It was.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Ferrol. One question more⁠—in regard to this gentleman, Mr. Asher. Is he a relative or connection of yours?”

“Mr. Asher is my second cousin.”

“Ah! Quite so. And prior to your husband’s death, did you see him often?”

“Since my marriage, I have seen him but twice⁠—once yesterday, in the Tombs, and again today in court.”

Much as a nurse might look at an ill-treated child, Bundy cocked an eye.

“Did Mr. Ferrol object to your seeing him?”

The defendant, who thus far had held herself as if, in the vast room, she and Bundy were alone, seemed at the moment transiently aware that others were present.

“So far as I was concerned, Mr. Ferrol objected to nothing and insisted on but one thing.”

“And what was that?” asked Bundy, who at once clapped a hand to his mouth as if now he had put his foot in it.

“That I should have my way in everything.”

Bundy looked up at the ceiling. Where else could a nature so rare have gone? Then, leisurely returning to earth and his client, he shifted.

“Mrs. Ferrol, it has been shown that just before your husband’s death he was greatly excited. An alchemist is not supposed to be an excitable person. Can you tell these gentlemen what he was excited about?”

“He told me that after many disappointments he had recovered the alkahest, snared the chimera, got the secret of the transmutation of metals, and that with it he would make me the richest woman in the world.”

“And when you left him he was elated over that prospect?”

“Very much so indeed.”

“But you knew that until results were obtained there would be nothing but his annuity?”

“Yes.”

“Then you had nothing to gain by your husband’s death?”

The defendant, her eyes two disks of flame, bent forward.

“Say rather that I had everything to lose⁠—perhaps even my life, which is now in jeopardy.”

Gravely Bundy considered it. Then, mopping his face, he smiled⁠—smiled at the press table, smiled at the jury, smiled at her.

“Do not, I beg of you, Mrs. Ferrol, distress yourself on that account. The district attorney would have these gentlemen believe that you poisoned your husband, sordidly, for his money, and passionately, for another man.” Bundy coughed, gestured, and added: “I think I have very thoroughly disposed of my learned friend’s contentions. I⁠—”

Severely the court interrupted:

“Reserve anything of that kind for your summing up!”

Bundy bowed. He had scored a point, and just when it would have the greatest effect. Conscious of which, he became a compound of irony and good humor, Falstaff and Mercutio in one.

“I am deeply grateful for your honor’s instructions.” He turned to his client. “Thank you, Mrs. Ferrol!” He turned to Melvale. “Your witness! And, by the way, let me beg of you, don’t go at this witness as you did at the last, like a common scold.” He turned to his client again. “I apologize in advance for any rudeness on the part of the district attorney.”

Meanwhile, from behind the bar, objections had exploded like shell from a rapid-fire gun; but through the running fire of them Bundy held to his own, held to his trench, extracting bit by bit this curious story, which I could see interested even the judge. Benevolently over and down at the defendant he looked, and from the look I could divine the tenor of his coming charge.

Probably Melvale divined it also⁠—if not then, at any rate after he had finished with the cross-examination, during which he fished but one item of reportable interest. It was to the effect that the defendant had been engaged to Asher, and that owing to a misunderstanding on her part the engagement had been broken; after which she had married Ferrol, who was old enough to be her father.

Melvale, smoothing what hair he had left as if it were some costly fur, threw out:

“Was your husband aware that you corresponded with Asher?”

Then it was that the defendant smiled. The smile lit her face, brought out its beauty.

“Mr. Ferrol was a gentleman.”

Melvale twisted.

“That is not an answer to my question!” he said sharply.

Again she smiled.

“To your question, yes, it is an answer, but not, perhaps, to your understanding. Mr. Ferrol did not concern himself with his wife’s correspondence. Some men do, I believe, and I dare say you are one of them; but they are not gentlemen.”

Fumingly the district attorney turned toward the judge.

“I ask that that be stricken out!” Then, fuming still, he got back at her. “You are in love with Asher now, are you not?”

She gave him one look, her fashion-magazine look, the look slightly disdainful. With that, and decently enough, it seemed to me, she answered:

“You are seeking to take my life, but my soul you cannot take, nor shall I reveal it to you.”

Then eventually, through the testimony of other experts, Bundy adduced their belief that Ferrol had died of heart failure, which his demonstrated neurosis and excitability had caused.

After the summing up, the charge followed, and the jury filed out. It was idle to wait, perilous as well⁠—at any murder trial you run the risk of being talked to death, if nothing worse⁠—and I went on to the office where I was employed, and where I later learned of Janet Ferrol’s acquittal.

IV

Now, as I sat in the dining-room of the Hotel des Bains, I wondered what had become of her. Long since her name had passed from the newspapers, and it seemed to me that I had heard⁠—yet what does one not hear?⁠—that Bundy had passed from the courts.

Then at once I realized why I had not immediately recognized him. In court his face had had the hue of a brandied cherry. That hue had gone, supplanted by pallor. In addition, he was very much thinner. In New York he had suggested Falstaff. It was Hamlet whom he resembled now.

“From the Americas,” Léopold, rubbing his hands, resumed. “The gentleman arrived today. Mme. Bundy is awaited shortly.”

The next morning I rather looked for him at the baths and in the gardens, but it was not until night that I spotted him, and then in the restaurant, where he appeared to have supped, and where he sat moodily, a glass of Pommard before him.

Seating myself, I threw out:

“Mr. Bundy, I believe. My name is Jones. Some years ago I reported the trial of Janet Ferrol, whom you so admirably defended.”

At the moment he was raising his glass. As I addressed him, he started, his hand shook, a little of the red contents spilled, he stared.

“Ah! You are a reporter, are you?” With that he abruptly got up and left the room.

Before the war people went to Marienbad for obesity, to Carlsbad for gastritis. These resorts were full of men without livers and of women without hearts. Oriol lacked that distinction. The pomps of fashion ignored it. Those who came to its woodland balms and baths were in search of relief from nerves overtaxed, of anodynes for neurasthenia. It was a little refuge for those whom Lombroso catalogued, and very inanely, as mattoids, for it were far simpler to have labeled them cranks.

Anywhere else Bundy’s conduct might have perplexed me; though, to be sure, the vocation of reporter is not always a source of welcomings. But at these baths to which, having stumbled in the newspaper harness, I had been shipped by my chief, I accepted Bundy’s abruptness as a matter of course. He, too, has been under some strain, I told myself. In the same breath I told Léopold that I also had no valid objection to Pommard.

Yet whether because Bundy and I were compatriots or, more reasonably perhaps, because we sat opposite each other at table, during the next day or two our acquaintance so far progressed that we exchanged platitudes and the time of day. Then it so happened that a patient committed suicide, as patients have sometimes done at Oriol, and that evening the subject swam up.

“Were you ever drawn that way?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered; “but two things have always restrained me⁠—a mad passion for political economy and a fear of getting hurt.”

At that his mouth twitched, it widened, he threw his head back and laughed very loudly, not at me or the stupidity of my antique jest, but at something else, something of which he alone could have been aware.

And still he laughed. Then, abruptly, on a high note, the laughter ceased. It was as if it had been suddenly nipped. His Hamlet air returned. Gravely he considered me.

“What were you saying?”

“Nothing. But you were speaking of assassination driven in, which suicide is.”

“Yes, yes, to be sure. Well, Janet had it in reserve.”

“And that’s the best place for it.”

Bundy sketched an unheeding gesture.

“From what appeared in court, you will appreciate that she counted on Ferrol’s experiments. None the less, she had planned to leave him.”

“Because of Asher?” I inquired. Impatiently Bundy shifted.

“Asher? No! She had conceived another love, a love that is unique, one which, when evolved, transcends every other, which saps the veins of youth, drains the heart of age, which has made fathers destroy their sons and daughters betray their mothers, that love which never relents and never releases, that love which once was worshiped as a god, which today rules New York, that love, her master⁠—and perhaps yours⁠—was⁠—”

“Gold!” I threw at him.

Bundy nodded.

“It was because of it that she married Ferrol. He had told her that he would make her the richest woman in the world. Ostensibly to encourage him, but privately for another reason, she assisted at every one of his experiments. It was in the course of them that, believing he would not succeed, she planned to leave him. Then, one day, suddenly, before her eyes, he turned the trick; he had snared the chimera; he had got it!” Bundy paused, contemplated his fingers, and added: “That night he died.”

“Yes,” I broke in. “The gist of it all appeared at the trial.”

Bundy nodded again.

“You have been good enough to commend my part in it; but at the time I believed absolutely in her innocence.”

I stared at him.

“You don’t mean that she actually killed that lunatic?”

Bundy blinked and winced. The simple words I had uttered seemed to choke him. For a moment he struggled with them. Then, rallying, he coughed.

“Ferrol was not a lunatic. No man with a creative mind ever is. The genius is normal. It is the ordinary individual, with his stupid thoughts and uncreative mind, that is abnormal. Ferrol was a genius. He had hit on a process by which electricity can turn lead into gold. You may doubt it; but if with carbon and an electric furnace⁠—that is to say, with heat equal to four thousand degrees centigrade, which must be the temperature of the throne of Satan⁠—if with that you can manufacture diamonds, as Moissan did, why not gold? The matrix of both is heat.”

“But,” I got in, “at the trial it was not electricity which your client testified about. It was blood; the blood of a human being⁠—Ramsay’s, for choice.”

“She made it all up.”

“The carving process and the preliminary poison?”

“Every word of it.”

I sat back.

“And you knew of this?”

Bundy twisted.

“Were you in court when the verdict was rendered? You were not? Then you missed an instructive moment. Janet crumpled and fell. She had fainted. Innocent people don’t faint when they are acquitted. They expect acquittal. It is relief at the unexpected that crumples the guilty up. Only a moment before she had determined to kill herself. It was afterward that I learned of it.”

I did not know of all this. I told him so, and looked about for Léopold and more Pommard; but the waiter was nowhere visible.

“Well,” Bundy was saying, “it was long before she recovered⁠—I don’t mean consciousness, but health, her charm, and that beauty of hers which had been under an eclipse. The Tombs, the preliminaries, the trial, yet chiefly, perhaps, a vision of the chair⁠—these things had prostrated her; but finally, not alone because of her youth, but also because of the golden chimera and its secret, which Ferrol had revealed to her⁠—finally, issuing from that prostration, she put her hand in mine.”

“What?” I had been awaiting almost any climax but that; yet, though I did not then suspect it, there was another and a more surprising one in store. “What?” I repeated.

Bundy emptied his glass.

“I knew, and she knew that I knew. It was for protection that she put her hand in mine, and we were married.”

“I never heard of that,” I interrupted.

Indifferently he shrugged a shoulder.

“Oh, very quickly, without any publicity. Meanwhile I had abandoned my profession, and she had nothing. For a time we suffered atrociously. Inasmuch as Janet had the alkahest, you may wonder why; but, believe me, a vision of the electric chair can be very obliterating. During the trial, and the terror of it, she had forgotten one of the main factors of the process. The golden chimera had again escaped. It was a year before she recovered it. That year put its mark on her and on me, Both of us suffered atrociously. But that is always the way⁠—to get to paradise there is always a desert to cross!”

“Yes?” I proddingly put in, for he had stopped and looked absently away.

Presently, as if returning from some inordinate distance, he got back to it.

“The Czar, I understand, is rather well off. He has a million a day, though whether the million is in dollars or rubles I have forgotten. In any event, it is improbable that he has to count the copecks. Janet and I won’t have to, either. We will be richer than he, rich as the satraps of Babylon!”

He had been speaking quietly in a colorless monotone, but with that he sprang up. I thought he was going to say good night, but he shouted:

“Yes, rich as the satraps of Babylon! Not Azrael, angel of mysteries, not the arcanum of the Cabalists, not the abracadabra of the alchemists, not Ramsay’s tubes and rays, not these, or any of them, but the riddle of the ages, which Ferrol solved, will put us on a plane with the great figures that Sardanapalus and Semiramis were⁠—eh?”

“Pardon, monsieur!”

I turned. Bundy wheeled. Unobserved by either of us, Léopold had approached and was rubbing his hands at him.

“Madame desires to speak to monsieur,” the waiter said.

At that, without a word, without a look, Bundy, as if hypnotized, stalked from the room.

I watched him go. A dozen questions had occurred to me⁠—a story as well. I took it for granted that Janet had arrived during the day, and I wondered whether he might not return with her. The privilege of sitting at table with a young, beautiful, and mythologically opulent murderess was one that I had never experienced. It would, I thought, be not dissimilar to that of contemplating some fabulous monster conveniently displayed.

Yet somehow the picture of her which he had silhouetted did not in the least correspond with my idea of the woman whom I had admired in court. I wondered if, like him, she also had changed. But it was late, fully ten o’clock. I, too, had come to Oriol for my nerves; and reflecting that, for the night at least, they had sufficiently supped on surprises, I postponed until the morrow any additional adventures in criminal plutocracy, and ambled off to bed.

V

The next day Bundy was not in his accustomed seat. It was occupied by a woman with a worn, patient face, who glanced at me as I sat down before her.

Motioning to Léopold, I asked after Bundy. In a whisper he told me that M. Bundy was not very well. Bending a little as he poured me a glass of wine, he added that Mme. Bundy was seated opposite.

“Nonsense!” I mentally retorted.

Janet was young; this woman was old. Moreover, Janet’s hair was black as a truffle, and hers was gray as November. It might possibly be a wig, I thought; but even so⁠—

“You were inquiring about my son, I believe,” she was saying in a low, gentle voice.

I wondered whom she had addressed, until I saw that her eyes, which seemed very pathetic, were fixed on me.

“Excuse me,” I answered. “Except the waiter and the doctor, the only human being that I know here is a man named Bundy.”

“That is my son,” she replied.

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I beg your pardon. From something the waiter said, I knew that a Mrs. Bundy was expected, but I supposed it was his wife.”

She shook her gray head.

“My son is not married. He never has been.”

Thoroughly flabbergasted, I sat back.

“Not married! But⁠—but only last evening he was telling me about a Mrs. Ferrol, whom he once defended. I thought⁠—but perhaps you knew her?”

Sadly, with her pathetic eyes, she considered me⁠—considered, too, perhaps something else. Then she sighed.

“Yes; I used to go to her in the Tombs.”

“Did you?” I lamely got out. “And how did she impress you?”

“Like an angel in a cell.”

Dazed and uncertain, I took it up.

“You believed in her innocence?”

For a moment, as if picturing it, she closed her eyes. They opened, and in her low voice she answered:

“It was hardly a question of belief. No one could see her in that prison and not be convinced. Friendless, alone, charged with a crime at which her young soul revolted, the sight of her would have been heartrending had it not been sublime. She accepted everything not only without a murmur, but with the air of that great lady who, during the Terror, went to the guillotine smelling a rose. Did you know Mrs. Ferrol?”

“No,” I hesitatingly answered. “No; I merely reported her trial.” Again I hesitated and then got down to it. “But, afterward, did she not marry?”

Wanly, over that worn face, passed the wraith of a smile.

“Yes, after the year of widowhood she married her second cousin, Paul Asher, a Virginian who had been in love with her ever since he was a boy. They are very happy, I believe. Well, she deserved to be happy.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed in mounting bewilderment, through the apogee of which, however, a gleam of understanding shot. “Oh, indeed! Your son, I regret to hear, is not very well.”

“Ah! If he were,” she pathetically answered, “what would he be doing at Oriol? But you do not seem to be very well yourself. Forgive me for asking, but do you, too, imagine things? The doctor says⁠—”

Whatever it may have been that the doctor said, I did not hear. I was lost in what I had heard. Another curtain had risen. I saw that in the course of this lady’s remarks I had been assisting at a second trial, at which Janet had again been acquitted.

Then, as that curtain fell, at once another parted. The significance of Bundy’s irrational laughter, of his shouts, of his fantastic tale, was clear. With a smile at my own stupidity⁠—a smile which his mother must have construed into a leer as lunatic as any that he could display⁠—I decided that my nerves had got all they could out of Oriol.

But food was before me, so also was wine.

“Sic transit gloria Bundy!” I mumbled as I drank it.

Yet in that obituary of the living, while there was immense pity for him, there was relief, too, and as great, at Janet’s second acquittal.

Presently, the meal finished, after bowing to the poor wretch’s mother, I left the room to pack my things, realizing that once more the chimera had escaped, and this time doubtless forever.