“You’re the nicest man in the world.” She caught one of my hands and rubbed her cheek into it, then dropped it quickly, frowned her face out of shape, and said: “Except! You sat there this noon and deliberately tried to make me think you were in love with me.”
“Well?” I asked, trying to keep my face straight.
“You hypocrite. You deceiver of young girls. It would serve you right if I made you marry me–or sued you for breach of promise. I honestly believed you all afternoon–and it did help me. I believed you until you came in just now, and then I saw–” She stopped.
“Saw what?”
“A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you’re in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and– What’s the matter? Have I said something I shouldn’t?”
“I don’t think you should have,” I said. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t trade places with Fitzstephan now–if that big-eyed woman with the voice was part of the bargain.”
“Oh, dear!” she said.
XXIII. The Circus
Owen Fitzstephan never spoke to me again. He refused to see me, and when, as a prisoner, he couldn’t help himself there, he shut his mouth and kept it shut. This sudden hatred of me–for it amounted to that–had grown, I supposed, out of his knowing I thought him insane. He wanted the rest of the world, or at least the dozen who would represent the world on his jury, to think he had been crazy–and did make them think so–but he didn’t want me to agree with them. As a sane man who, by pretending to be a lunatic, had done as he pleased and escaped punishment, he had a joke–if you wanted to call it that–on the world. But if he was a lunatic who, ignorant of his craziness, thought he was pretending to be a lunatic, then the joke–if you wanted to call it that–was on him. And my having such a joke on him was more than his egotism could stomach, even though it’s not likely he ever admitted to himself that he was, or might be, actually crazy. Whatever he thought, he never spoke to me after the hospital interview in which I had said he was legally entitled to escape hanging.
His trial, when he was well enough to appear in court some months later, was every bit of the circus he had promised, and the newspapers had their happy convulsions. He was tried in the county court house for Mrs. Cotton’s murder. Two new witnesses had been found, who had seen him walking away from the rear of the Cotton house that morning, and a third who identified his car as the one that had been parked four blocks away all–or all the latter part of–the previous night. The city and county district attorneys agreed that this evidence made the Cotton case the strongest against him.
Fitzstephan’s plea was _Not guilty by reason of insanity_, or whatever the legal wording was. Since Mrs. Cotton’s murder had been the last of his crimes, his lawyers could, and did, introduce, as proof of his insanity, all that he had done in the others. They made a high, wide, and handsome job of it, carrying out his original idea that the best way to prove him crazy was to show he had committed more crimes than any sane man could have. Well, it was plain enough that he had.
He had known Alice Dain, his cousin, in New York when she and Gabrielle, then a child, were living there. Gabrielle couldn’t corroborate this: we had only Fitzstephan’s word for it; but it may have been so. He said they concealed his relationship from the others because they did not want the girl’s father–for whom Alice was then searching–to know that she was bringing with her any links with the dangerous past. Fitzstephan said Alice had been his mistress in New York: that could have been true, but didn’t matter.
After Alice and Gabrielle left New York for San Francisco, Fitzstephan and the woman exchanged letters occasionally, but with no definite purpose. Fitzstephan then met the Haldorns. The cult was his idea: he organized it, financed it, and brought it to San Francisco, though he kept his connection with it a secret, since everyone who knew him knew his skepticism; and his interest in it would have advertised it as the fake it was. To him, he said, the cult was a combination of toy and mealticket: he liked influencing people, especially in obscure ways, and people didn’t seem to like buying his books.