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Updated: June 15, 2025
She rose up and came swiftly down to the beach. Reaching the caves she found La Touche opening a tin. It was dinner-time. "What has become of Bompard?" she asked. "Have you seen him since he went off this morning over those rocks?" "Bompard," replied the other, "Mon Dieu! How do I know? No, I have not seen him, he is big enough to take care of himself."
Then, looking into the men's cave, she saw La Touche lying on his back asleep, his pipe beside him and his arm flung across his eyes. Where was Bompard? He ought to have been back by this, and as she turned and looked up and down the beach a vague uneasiness came upon her. It was as if for the first time she had recognized the value of Bompard in their small society.
The spool of wire seemed to her a fruit suddenly born from her words; she had accomplished something, it was perhaps the first real accomplishment in her life. "Where did you get it from?" asked La Touche. "The forward locker," replied Bompard. "Are there any other things in the locker?" asked the girl. "Oh, Mon Dieu, yes," replied the old fellow. "There's a lot of truck, but it's no use to us."
The value of such experiments with a woman as mischievous and untruthful as Gabrielle Bompard must be very doubtful. No trustworthy instance seems to be recorded in which a crime has been committed under, or brought about by, hypnotic or post-hypnotic suggestion, though, according to Moll, "the possibility of such a crime cannot be unconditionally denied."
Bompard shifted the helm, and the boat, heading for the shore and no longer running before the wind, moved less easily, shipping an occasional dash of spray. The change of movement, the dash of spray, the altered course were to the girl like the turning of a corner. Running with the wind and with a parallel shore the boat was the world and the coast and island a panorama.
"Ay," said Raft, "there's not much use sticking here." She said nothing for a moment, she felt disturbed. Since her recovery she had fallen into a state of quietude. She who had been the leader of Bompard and La Touche, she who had fought and worked so determinedly for existence had now no ambition, no desire for anything but rest.
He learnt that he was a married man, forty-six years of age, once a distiller at Sevres, recently commission-agent to a bankrupt firm, that he had left France suddenly, about the time of the disappearance of Gouffe, and that he had a mistress, one Gabrielle Bompard, who had disappeared with him. Instinctively M. Goron connected this fugitive couple with the fate of the murdered bailiff.
This hare is well known. He has been given a name. He is called "Speedy". He is known to live on land belonging to M. Bompard... which, by the way, has doubled or even tripled its value. No one has yet been able to catch him, and at the present time there are not more than two or three fanatics who go after him.
You may call to mind that amusing passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in which Bompard makes Tartarin and therefore also the reader to some slight extent accept the idea of a Switzerland choke-full of machinery like the basement of the opera, and run by a company which maintains a series of waterfalls, glaciers and artificial crevasses.
If she had examined her own mind she would have found that the death of Bompard, of which she felt certain, affected her far less than it would have done some days ago, that her desire to escape to the islands was caused by the hatred of La Touche more than by fear of the future with him.
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