“Miss Ballau!” she repeated. “She ... she was arrested.”
The old woman’s shoulders fell and tears rolled over her thin cheeks.
“Miss Ballau was released last night,” De Medici said softly. “She’s quite all right now....”
“Thank God!” Jane nodded.
He walked toward the crowded room. He would talk to her later. Florence had induced her to perjure herself. He recalled Donovan ... a woman screaming and Ballau arguing with her. Yes, maybe Jane could help out....
In the library he took his place unobtrusively on the edge of the scene. His preoccupation filmed the excitement for him.... The visitor with the dagger. And, worse, her laugh as he lay presumably dying, stabbed to death.... Mania—no question of that. And Hugo had didactically pronounced her normal. He was thinking of Florence. His mind played deliberately with his emotions.
“Florence, mad,” he stood thinking. “It’s interesting to think of someone I know and love being mad. It produces fear—delightful fear. Hm, love is the ornamental curtain behind which all the pathologies disport themselves clownishly.”
He studied the scene. A throng of varied hats, chattering faces. The light was dim.
“Half drawn curtains,” De Medici mused. “Meyerson stages it well. The drama of mystery lends a tantalizing value to the objects under his hammer. The talk is low-pitched. Eyes glance furtively around. Yes, this is the sort of thing that appeals to the normal imagination. Melodrama—the melodrama of externals. They look and see a conventional room, conventional walls, drapes and ceiling. Commonplace things in an uncommonplace light ... the familiar decks in a lurid symbolism. And they thrill at the thought that murder and mystery lurk behind the uninteresting masks of convention.
“Fear,” he continued to himself, “is the most seductive of the emotions. It prostrates itself deliciously before all unknown things. In its grip one rises to mysticism. And these people shiver and revel in the thought that they are part of something more enigmatic than the transparent routine of commerce and society ... part of a melodrama which tiptoes gaudily in the corners of this dimly lighted room.”