Sometimes an awful fascination led me along the road where I had found the broken, battered mass. I fancied I could see the very drift where the thing lay, and a dreary temptation (dating probably from the old times when I had some wild beasts in the exhibition) urged me to ‘stir it up with a long pole.’ I resisted it, and, bitterly weeping, I turned away towards Philippa’s bedside.
‘Forgiveness is a Christian virtue,’ I answered evasively.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘and try to understand. If I thought she hated him, I would tell her something. If she thought you hated them, he would tell me something. If ye or you thought he hated her, I would tell him something. I will wait and see.’
She left me to make the best (which was not much) of her enigmatical words.
I felt that she was mixed up in Sir Runan’s early life, and that we were mixed up in Sir Runan’s early death--in fact, that everything was very mixed indeed.
She came back. ‘Give me your name and college,’ she said, ‘not necessarily for publication,’ and I divined that she had once been a proctor at Girton. I gave her my address at the public-house round the corner, and we parted, Mrs. Thompson whispering that she ‘would write.’
On reaching home I leaped to Philippa’s apartment.
I became at once a prey to the wildest anxiety.
The difficulties of my position for the first time revealed themselves to me. If Philippa remained insane, how was I to remove her from the scene of her--alas! of her crime? If Philippa had become sane, her position under my roof was extremely compromising. Again, if she were insane, a jury might acquit her, when the snow melted and revealed all that was left of the baronet. But, in that case, what pleasure or profit could I derive from the society of an insane Philippa? Supposing, on the other hand, she was sane, then was I not an ‘accessory after the fact,’ and liable to all the pains and penalties of such a crime?
Here the final question arose and shook its ghostly finger at me: ‘Can a sane man be an accessory after the fact in a murder committed by an insane woman?’
So far as I know, there is no monograph on this subject, or certainly I would have consulted it for the purpose of this Christmas Annual.