Ch. 10: 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