“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:
