IT was out! She knew!
What was I to say, how evade her impulsive cross-examinations. I fell
back upon evasions.
‘Why do I want to know?’ she echoed, ‘because I choose to! I hated him.
He took a walk, I took a walk, and I had taken something before I took a
walk. If we met, I was bound to have words with him. Basil, did I dream
it, or read it long ago in some old penny dreadful of the past?’
Philippa occasionally broke into blank verse like this, but not often.
‘Dearest, it must have been a dream,’
I said, catching at this hope of soothing her.
‘No, no!’ she screamed; ‘no--no dream. Not any more, thank you! I can
see myself standing now over that crushed white mass! Basil, I could
never bear him in that hat, and I must have gone for him!’
I consoled Philippa as well as I could, but she kept screaming.
‘_How_ did I kill him?’
‘Goodness only knows, Philippa,’ I replied; ‘but you had a key in your
hand--a door-key.’
‘Ah, that fatal latch-key!’ she said, ‘the cause of our final quarrel.
Where is it? What have you done with it?’ she shouted.
‘I threw it away,’ I replied. This was true, but I could not think of
anything better to say.
‘You threw it away! Didn’t you know it would become a _pièce
justificatif?_’ said my poor Philippa, who had not read Gaboriau to no
purpose.
I passed the night wrestling in argument with Philippa. She reproached
me for having returned from Spain, ‘which was quite safe, you know--it
is the place city men go to when they bust up,’ she remarked in her
peculiarly idiomatic style. She reproved me for not having told her all
about it before, in which case she would never have consented to return
to England.
‘They will try me--they will hang me!’ she repeated.
‘Not a bit,’ I answered. ‘I can prove that you were quite out of your
senses when you did for him.’
‘_You_ prove it!’ she sneered; ‘a pretty lawyer _you_ are. Why, they
won’t take a husband’s evidence for or against a wife in a criminal
case. This comes of your insisting on marrying me.’
‘But I doubt if we _are_ married, Philippa, dear, as we never could
remember whether you were wedded under your maiden name or as Philippa
Errand. Besides----’ I was going to say that William, the White Groom
(late the Sphynx), could show to her having been (as he once expressed
it) as ‘crazy as a loon,’ but I remembered in time. William had,
doubtless, long been speechless.
The sherry must have done its fatal work.
This is the worst of committing crimes. They do nothing, very often, but
complicate matters.
Had I not got rid of William--but it was too late for remorse. As to the
evidence of her nurses, I forgot all about _that_. I tried to console
Philippa on another line.
I remarked that, if she had ‘gone for’ Sir Runan, she had only served
him right.
Then I tried to restore her self-respect by quoting the bearded woman’s
letter.
I pointed out that she had been Lady Errand, after all.
This gave Philippa no comfort.
‘It makes things worse,’ she said. ‘I thought I had only got rid of
my betrayer; and now you say I have killed my husband. You men have no
tact.’
‘Besides,’ Philippa went on, after pausing to reflect, ‘I have not
bettered myself one bit. If I had not gone for him I would be Lady
Errand, and no end of a swell, and now I’m only plain Mrs. Basil South.’
Speaking thus, Philippa wept afresh, and refused to be comforted.
Her remarks were not flattering to my self-esteem.
At this time I felt, with peculiar bitterness, the blanks in Philippa’s
memory. Nothing is more difficult than to make your heroine not too mad,
but just mad enough.
Had Philippa been a trifle saner, or less under the influence of
luncheon, at first, she would either never have murdered Sir Runan at
all (which perhaps would have been the best course), or she would have
known _how_ she murdered him.
The entire absence of information on this head added much to my
perplexities.
On the other hand, had Philippa been a trifle madder, or _more_ under
the influence of luncheon, nothing could ever have recalled the event to
her memory at all.
As it is, my poor wife (if she _was_ my wife, a subject on which I
intend to submit a monograph to a legal contemporary), my poor wife was
almost provoking in what she forgot and what she remembered.
One day as my dear patient was creeping about the _patio_, she asked me
if I saw _all_ the papers?
I said I saw most of them.
‘Well, look at them _all_, for who knows how many may be boycotted by
the present Government? In a boycotted print you don’t know but you may
miss an account of how some fellow was hanged for what I did. I believe
two people can’t be executed for the same crime. Now, if any one swings
for Sir Runan, _I_ am safe; but it might happen, and you never know it.’
Dear Philippa, ever thoughtful for others! I promised to read every one
of the papers, and I was soon rewarded for the unparalleled tedium of
these studies.