“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
