Andrew Lang - Much Darker Days

Turning from Mrs. Thompson’s, I felt the snow more sharply on my face. Furiously, blindly, madly it whirled here and drifted there.

Should I go for Sir Runan? Should I wait where I was? Should I whistle for a cab? Should I return to the ‘pike?

Suddenly out of the snow came a peal of silvery laughter. Philippa waltzed gracefully by in a long ulster whitened with snow.

I detected her solely by means of my dark lantern.

I rushed on her, I seized her. I said, ‘Philippa, come back with me!’

‘No, all the fun’s in the front,’ shrieked Philippa. ‘My quarter’s salary! Oh, my last quarter’s salary!’

With these wild words, like bullets from a Gatling gun rattling in my ears, I seized Philippa’s hand.

Something fell, and would have rattled on the hard high road had it not been for the snow.

I stooped to pick up this shining object, and with one more wild yell of ‘My quarter’s salary!’ Philippa waltzed again into the darkness.

Fatigued with the somewhat exhausting and unusual character of the day’s performances, and out of training as I was, I could not follow her.

Mechanically, I still groped on the ground, and picked up a small chill object.

It was a latch-key! I thrust it in my pocket with my other keys.

Then a thought occurred to me, and I chucked it over the hedge, to serve as circumstantial evidence. Next I turned and went up the road, springing my rattle and flashing my bull’s-eye lantern on every side, like Mr. Pickwick when he alarmed the scientific gentleman.

Suddenly, with a cry of horror, I stopped short. At my very feet, in the little circle of concentrated light thrown by the lantern, lay a white crushed, cylindrical mass.

That mass I had seen before in the warm summer weather – that mass, once a white hat, had adorned the brows of that masher!

It was Sir Runan’s topper!

YES, the white hat, lying there all battered and crushed on the white snow, must be the hat of Sir Runan! Who else but the tigerish aristocrat that disdained the homely four-wheeler and preferred to walk five miles to his victim on this night of dread – who else would wear the gay gossamer of July in stormy December?

In that hat, thanks doubtless to its airy insouciant grace, he had won Philippa; in that hat he would have bearded her, defied her, and cast her off! The cruelty of man! The larger and bulkier crumpled heap which lay on the road a little beyond the hat, that heap with all its outlines already blurred by snow, that heap must be the baronet himself!

Oh, but this was vengeance, swift, deadly vengeance!

But how, but how had she wreaked it? She , already my heart whispered she!

Was my peerless Philippa then a murderess?

Oh, say not so; call hers (ye would do so an she had been an Irish felon) ‘the wild justice of revenge,’ or the speedy execution of the outraged creditor.

Killed by Philippa!

Yes, and why? The answer was only too obvious. She must have gone forth to meet him, and to wring from him, by what means she might, that quarter’s salary which the dastard had left unpaid. Then my thoughts flew to the door-key, the cause of that fierce family hatred which burned between Philippa and her betrayer. That latch-key she had wrested from him, it had fallen from her hand, and I – I had pitched it into space!

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