CHAPTER IX. – Saved! Saved!
GLORIOUS, wonderful Alhambra! Magical Cuadrado de Leicestero! Philippa and I were as happy as children, and the house was full every night.
We called everything by Spanish names, and played perpetually at being Spaniards.
The foyer we named a patio– a space fragrant with the perfume of oranges, which the public were always sucking, and perilous with peel. Add to this a refreshment-room, refectorio, full of the rarest old cigarros, and redolent of aqua de soda and aguardiente. Here the botellas of aqua de soda were continually popping, and the corchos flying with a murmur of merry voices and of mingling waters. Here half through the night you could listen to —
The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies.
With such surroundings, almost those of a sybarite, who can blame me for being lulled into security, and telling myself that my troubles were nearly at an end? Who can wonder at the cháteaux en Espagne that I built as I lounged in the patio, and assisted my customers to consume the media aqua de soda, or ‘split soda,’ of the country? Sometimes we roamed as far as the Alcazar; sometimes we wandered to the Oxford, or laughed light-heartedly in the stalls of the Alegria.
Such was our life. So in calm and peace (for we had secured a Tory chuckerouto from Birmingham) passed the even tenor of out days.
As to marrying Philippa, it had always been my intention.
Whether she was or was not Lady Errand; whether she had or had not precipitated the hour of her own widowhood, made no kind of difference to me.
A moment of ill-judged haste had been all her crime.
That moment had passed. Philippa was not that moment. I was not marrying that moment, but Philippa.
Picture, then, your Basil naming and insisting on the day, yet somehow the day had not yet arrived. It did, however, arrive at last.
The difficulty now arose under which name was Philippa to be married?
To tell you the truth, I cannot remember under which name Philippa was married. It was a difficult point. If she wedded me under her maiden name, and if Mrs. Thompson’s letter contained the truth, then would the wedding be legal and binding?
If she married me under the name of Lady Errand, and if Mrs. Thompson’s letter was false, then would the wedding be all square?
So far as I know, there is no monograph on the subject, or there was none at the time.
Be it as it may, wedded we were.
Morality was now restored to the show business, the legitimate drama began to look up, and the hopes of the Social Science Congress were fulfilled.
But evil days were at hand.
One day, Philippa and I were lounging in the patio, when I heard the young hidalgos– or Macheros, as they are called – talking as they smoked their princely cigaritos.
‘Sir Runan Errand,’ said one of them; ‘where he’s gone under. A rare bad lot he was.’
‘Murdered,’ replied the other. ‘Nothing ever found of him but his hat.’
‘What a rum go!’ replied the other.
I looked at Philippa. She had heard all. I saw her dark brow contract in anguish. She was beating her breast furiously – her habit in moments of agitation.
Then I seem to remember that I and the two hidalgos bore Philippa to a couch in the patio, while I smiled and smiled and talked of the heat of the weather!
When Philippa came back to herself, she looked at me with her wondrous eyes and said, —
‘Basil; tell me the square truth, honest Injun! What had I been up to that night?’
CHAPTER X. – Not Too Mad, But Just Mad Enough
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.
CHAPTER XI. – A Terrible Temptation
I HATE looking back and reading words which I have written when the printer’s devil was waiting for copy in the hall, but I fancy I have somewhere called this tale a confession; if not, I meant to do so. It has no more claim to be called a work of art than the cheapest penny dreadful. How could it?
It holds but two characters, a man and a woman.
All the rest are the merest supers. Perhaps you may wonder that I thus anticipate criticism; but review-writing is so easy that I may just as well fill up with this as with any other kind of padding.
My publisher insists on so many pages of copy. When he does not get what he wants, the language rich and powerful enough to serve his needs has yet to be invented.
But he struggles on with the help of a dictionary of American expletives.
However, we are coming to the conclusion, and that, I think, will waken the public up! And yet this chapter will be a short one. It will be the review of a struggle against a temptation to commit, not perhaps crime, but an act of the grossest bad taste.
To that temptation I succumbed; we both succumbed.
It is a temptation to which I dare think poor human nature has rarely been subjected.
The temptation to go and see a man, a fellow-creature, tried for a crime which one’s wife committed, and to which one is an accessory after the fact.
Oh, that morning!
How well I remember it.
Breakfast was just oyer, the table with its relics of fragrant bloaters and terrine of paté still stood in the patio.
I was alone. I loafed lazily and at my ease.
Then I lighted a princely havanna, blaming myself for profaning the scented air from el Cuadro de Leicester.
You see I have such a sensitive aesthetic conscience.
Then I took from my pocket the Sporting Times, and set listlessly to work to skim its lengthy columns.
This was owing to my vow to Philippa, that I would read every journal published in England. As the day went on, I often sat with them up to my shoulders, and littering all the patio.
I ran down the topics of the day. This scene is an ‘under-study,’ by the way, of the other scene in which I read of the discovery of Sir Runan’s hat. At last I turned my attention to the provincial news column. A name, a familiar name, caught my eye; the name of one who, I had fondly fancied, had: long-lain unburied in my cellar at the ‘pike. My princely havanna fell unheeded on the marble pavement of the patio, as with indescribable amazement I read the following ‘par.’
‘William Evans, the man accused of the murder of Sir Runan Errand, will be tried at the Newnham Assizes on the 20th. The case, which excites considerable interest among the élite of Boding and district, will come on the tapis the first day of the meeting. The evidence will be of a purely circumstantial kind.’
Every word of that ‘par’ was a staggerer. I sat as one stunned, dazed, stupid, motionless, with my eye on the sheet.
Was ever man in such a situation before?
Your wife commits a murder.
You become an accessory after the fact.
You take steps to destroy one of the two people who suspect the truth.
And then you find that the man on whom you committed murder is accused of the murder which you and your wife committed.
The sound of my mother’s voice scolding Philippa wakened me from my stupor. They were coming.
I could not face them.
Doubling up the newspaper, I thrust it into my pocket, and sped swiftly out of the patio.
Where did I go? I scarcely remember. I think it must have been to one of the public gardens or public-houses, I am not certain which. All sense of locality left me. I found at last some lonely spot, and there I threw myself on the ground, dug my finger-nails into the dry ground, and held on with all the tenacity of despair. In the wild whirl of my brain I feared that I might be thrown off into infinite space. This sensation passed off. At first I thought I had gone mad. Then I felt pretty certain that it must be the other people who had gone mad.
I had killed William Evans.
My wife had killed Runan Errand.
How, then, could Runan Errand have been killed by William Evans?
‘Which is absurd,’ I found myself saying, in the language of Eukleides, the grand old Greek.
Human justice! What is justice? See how it can err! Was there ever such a boundless, unlimited blunder in the whole annals of penny fiction? Probably not. I remember nothing like it in all the learned pages of the London Journal and the Family Herald. Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Braddon never dreamed of aught like this. Philippa must be told. It was too good a joke. Would she laugh? Would she be alarmed?
Picture me lying on the ground, with the intelligence fresh in my mind.
I felt confidence, on the whole, in Philippa’s sense of humour.
Then rose the temptation.
Trust this man (William Evans, late the Sphynx) to the vaunted array of justice!
Let him have a run for his money.
Nay, more.
Go down and see the fun!
Why hesitate? You cannot possibly be implicated in the deed. You will enjoy a position nearly unique in human history. You will see the man, of whose murder you thought you were guilty, tried for the offence which you know was committed by your wife.
Every sin is not easy. My sense of honour arose against this temptation. I struggled, but I was mastered. I would go and see the trial. Home I went and broached the subject to Philippa. The brave girl never blenched. She had no hesitations, no scruples to conquer.
‘Oh! Basil,’ she exclaimed, with sparkling eyes, ‘wot larx! When do we start?’
The reader will admit that I did myself no injustice when, at the commencement of this tale, I said I had wallowed in crime.