The Detective Club: Dark Days & Much Darker Days

by Hugh Conway

  Yet, on second thoughts, would not this conjunction of names rather set people asking questions?

  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 anyone 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 Café 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 châteaux 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 our 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 h
ad 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’s he 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 anyone 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 over, the table with its relics of fragrant bloaters and terrine of pâté 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 Leicestero.

  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.