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.
The Verdict
I
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Then begin at the end.”
The advice that Ten Eyck Jones gave Philip Rochester was entirely professional. Rochester was a man of what is snobbishly known as position. So was Jones, but his position was that of “bestseller.” Hence the professional quality of the advice. In life, as in letters, there is nothing like getting to the point.
Rochester, indicating a chair, dropped into another.
The chair that he indicated stood next to a table, which, heaped with costly futilities, had a cover that extended to the floor. The room itself—large, wide, furnished gravely with infinite taste, and lighted by two shaded lamps—was somber and, at the moment, soundless. The windows, high and draped, gave on one of the quietest streets in the metropolitan bedlam.
Jones, seating himself, got out a cigarette-case and looked about for a match, wondering, as he did so, what was up.
Fifteen minutes earlier, as he was rising from dinner at his club, Rochester had telephoned, begging him to come at once; and it was in response to that hurry call from a man whose college pal he had been that the novelist was then with the millionaire. That something was wrong with his friend Jones had already noted, though the shaded lamps did not reveal the fact that Rochester’s face was ashen.
“You tell me to begin at the end,” Rochester resumed. “I will. Nina is dead.”
Jones sat back. In the surprise of the announcement his cigarette-case slipped from him.
Nina was—or now, more exactly, had been—Rochester’s wife. Only the day before Jones had seen her on Fifth Avenue; yet, as always, in seeing her, he omitted to admire. She was amazingly pretty, but behind her cameo features he had divined the shrew.
Rochester half raised a hand, glanced at it, let it fall. Still under thirty, he had an ascetic face and dense, black hair. As usual with him, he was dressed in a threadbare fashion which, for a man of large means, is eminently correct.
Jones’s appearance was less fastidious. Though a novelist, he did not look it. He looked like a man of the world to whom much is absurd and nothing important. None the less, the surprise of the announcement shook him a little. In an effort
