Much Darker Days

Yes, disagreeable associations might be revived.

My second thought was that, if Mrs. Thompson kept her word, we might as well go home at once, without bothering about the Soudan. The White Groom, I felt certain, had long been speechless. There was thus no one to connect Lady Errand with the decease of Sir Runan.

Moreover, Philippa’s self-respect was now assured. She had lost it when she learned that she was not Sir Runan’s wife; she would regain it when she became aware that she had made herself Sir Runan’s widow. Such is the character of feminine morality, as I understand the workings of woman’s heart.

I had reached this point in my soliloquy, when I reflected that perhaps I had better not tell Philippa anything about it.

You see, things were so very mixed, because Philippa’s memory was so curiously constructed that she had entirely forgotten the murder which she had committed; and even if I proved to her by documentary evidence that she had only murdered her own husband, it might not help to relieve her burdened conscience as much as I had hoped. There are times when I almost give up this story in despair. To introduce a heroine who is mad in and out, so to speak, and forgets and remembers things exactly at the right moment, seems a delightfully simple artifice.

But, upon my word, I am constantly forgetting what it is that Philippa should remember, and on the point of making her remember the very things she forgets!

So puzzled had I become that I consoled myself by cursing Sir Runan’s memory. De mortuis nil nisi bonum!

What a lot of trouble a single little murder, of which one thinks little enough at the time, often gives a fellow.

All this while we were approaching Paris.

The stains of travel washed away, my mother gave a sigh of satisfaction as she seated herself at the dinner table. As any one might guess who looked at her, she was no despiser of the good things of this life! That very night we went to the Hippodrome, where we met many old acquaintances. My own Artillery Twins were there, and kissed their hands to me as they flew gracefully over our heads towards the desired trapeze. Here, also, was the Tattooed Man, and I grasped his variegated and decorative hand with an emotion I have rarely felt. Without vanity I may say that Philippa and my mother had a succès fou.

From the moment when they entered their box every lorgnette was fixed upon them.

All Paris was there, the tout Paris of premières, of les courses, the tout Paris of clubsman of belles petites, of ladies à chignon jaune. Here were the Booksmen, the gommeux, they who font courir, the journalists, and here I observed with peculiar interest my great masters, M. Fortuné du Boisgobey and M. Xavier de Montépin.

In the intervals of the performance tout le monde crowded into our loge, and I observed that my mother and Lady Errand made an almost equal impression on many a gallant and enterprising young impresario.

We supped at the Cafe Bignon; toasts were carried; I also was carried home.

Next morning I partly understood the mental condition of Philippa. I had absolutely forgotten the events of the later part of the entertainment.

Several bills arrived for windows, which, it seems, I had broken in a moment of effusion.

Gendarmes arrived, and would have arrested me on a charge of having knocked down some thirty-seven of their number.

This little matter was easily arranged.

I apologised separately and severally to each of the thirty-seven braves hommes, and collectively to the whole corps, the French army, the President, the Republic, and the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde. These duties over, I was at leisure to reflect on the injustice of English law.

Certain actions which I had entirely forgotten I expiated at the cost of a few thousand francs, and some dozen apologies.

For only one action, about which she remembered nothing at all, Philippa had to fly from English justice, and give up her title and place in society! Both ladies now charmed me with a narrative of the compliments that had been paid them; both absolutely declined to leave Paris.

‘I want to look at the shops,’ said my mother.

‘I want the gommeux to look at me,’ said Philippa.

Neither of them saw the least fun in my proposed expedition to Spain.

Weeks passed and found us still in the capital of pleasure.

My large fortune, except a few insignificant thousands, had passed away in the fleeting exhilaration of baccarat.

We must do something to restore our wealth.

My mother had an idea.

‘Basil,’ she said, ‘you speak of Spain. You long to steep yourself in local colour. You sigh for hidalgos, sombreros, carbonados, and carboncillos, why not combine business with pleasure?

‘Why not take the Alhambra?’

This was an idea!

Where could we be safer than under the old Moorish flag?

Philippa readily fell in with my mother’s proposal. When woman has once tasted of public admiration, when once she has stepped on the boards, she retires without enthusiasm, even at the age of forty.

‘I had thought,’ said Philippa, of exhibiting myself at the Social Science Congress, and lecturing on self-advertisement and the ethical decline of the Moral Show business, with some remarks on waxworks. But the Alhambra sounds ever so much more toney.’

It was decided on.

I threw away the Baedeker and Murray, and Ford’s ‘Spain,’ on which I had been relying for three chapters of padding and local colour. I ceased to think of the very old churches of St. Croix and St. Seurin and a variety of other interesting objects. I did not bother about St. Sebastian, and the Valley of the Giralda, and Burgos, the capital of the old Castilian kingdom, and the absorbing glories of the departed Moore. Gladly, gaily, I completed the necessary negotiations, and found myself, with Philippa, my mother, and many of my old troupe, in the dear old Alhambra, safe under the shelter of the gay old Moorish flag.

Shake off black gloom, Basil South, and make things skip.

You have conquered Fate!

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.

CHAPTER XII. – Judge Juggins

WE got down to Newnham, where the ‘Sizes were held, on the morning of September 20th. There we discovered that we had an hour or two for refreshment, and I may say that both Philippa and I employed that time to the best advantage. While at the hotel I tried to obtain the file of the Times. I wanted to look back and see if I could find the account of the magisterial proceedings against the truly unlucky William Evans.

After all, should I call him unlucky? He had escaped the snare I had laid for him, and perhaps (such things have been) even a Newnham jury might find him not guilty.

But the file of the Times was not forthcoming.

I asked the sleepy-eyed Teutonic waiter for it. He merely answered, with the fatuous patronising grin of the German kellner: —

‘You vant?’

‘I want the file of the Times!’

‘I have the corkscrew of the good landlord; but the file of the Times I have it not. Have you your boots, your fish-sauce, your currycomb?’ he went on. Then, lapsing into irrelevant local gossip, ‘the granddaughter of the blacksmith has the landing-net of the bad tailor.’

‘I want my bill, my note, my addition, my consommation,’ I answered angrily.

‘Very good bed, very good post-horse,’ he replied at random, and I left the County Hotel without being able to find out why suspicion had fallen on “William Evans”.

We hailed one of the cabs which stood outside the hotel door, when a heavy hand was laid on my shoulder, and a voice, strange but not unfamiliar, exclaimed, ‘Dr. South, as I am a baronet – ’

I turned round suddenly and found myself face to face with

Sir Runan Errand!

My brain once more began to reel. Here were the real victim and the true perpetrators of a murder come to view the trial of the man who was charged with having committed it!

Though I was trembling like an aspen leaf? I remembered that we lived in an age of ‘telepathy’ and psychical research.

Sir Runan was doubtless what Messrs. Myers and Gurney call a visible apparition as distinguished from the common invisible apparition.

If a real judge confesses, like Sir E. Hornby, to having seen a ghost, why should not a mere accessory after the fact?

Regaining my presence of mind, I asked, ‘What brings you here?’

‘Oh, to see the fun,’ he replied. ‘Fellow being tried for killing me. The morbid interest excited round here is very great. Doubt your getting front seats.’

‘Can’t you manage it for me?’ I asked imploringly.

‘Daresay I can. Here, take my card, and just mention my name, and they’ll let you in. Case for the prosecution, by the way, most feeble.’

Here the appearance, handing me a card, nodded, and vanished in the crowd.

I returned to Philippa, where I had left her in the four-wheeler. We drove off, and found ourselves before a double-swinging (ay, ominous as it seemed, swinging) plain oak door, over which in old English letters was written —

CRIMINAL COURT.

I need not describe the aspect of the court. Probably most of my readers have at some time in their lives found themselves in such a place.

True to the minute, the red-robed Judge appears. It is Sir Joshua Juggins, well known for his severity as ‘Gibbeting Juggins.’

Ah, there is little hope for William Evans.