‘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.
‘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.