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 _chateaux en Espagne_ that I built as I lounged in the _patio_, and a.s.sisted 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) pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed. 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 ma.s.s! 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 _piece justificatif?_" said my poor Philippa, who had not read Gaboriau to no purpose.
I pa.s.sed 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.