THE HOUSE AT HAMPTON COURT
Three months had gone by.
The hunchback Routh and his ward were back at home at The Myrtles, a
pretty, rose-embowered cottage situated at the end of a garden that
ran down to the picturesque Thames close to Cookham.
It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning, and Elsie, the stout
maid-of-all-work, had placed the breakfast on the table of the cosy
old-world sitting-room. Sibell, looking charming in her cotton gown,
sat in the deep window-seat reading a letter she had just had from
Brinsley Otway while she waited for her guardian to return from his
morning walk.
Besides the letter from her lover the girl had received a second
letter from a firm of solicitors, Harrington, Bailey, Marsham & Keys,
of Bedford Row, London, informing her that by that post they had
written to Mr. Gordon Routh and that he would inform her of the
contents of their letter.
The letter in question she had placed beside old Mr. Routh’s plate.
A few minutes later the hunchback came in with a cheery greeting, and
before he sat down to breakfast tore open the letter and read it.
“My dear Sibell!” he gasped. “Think of it! Your old Uncle Henry has
died in Brisbane, and has left you the whole of his fortune and all
his property!”
The girl stood staring at him, scarce believing the truth.
“Poor Uncle Henry dead!” she cried. “Why, I’ve heard it said that he
had twenty thousand a year!”
“Quite. His property was a very valuable one. Besides, he inherited
your Aunt Henrietta’s money also. But the lawyers say that according
to his will, dated two years ago, all is left to you. By Jove, Sibell!
you’re the luckiest girl in England!” added the old man.
“Well, if I am to have Uncle Henry’s money, I won’t forget you,”
declared the pretty girl affectionately. “You’ve been a father to me
ever since I was a tiny tot, and I know after you lost all your money
how difficult it has been to make both ends meet. This place, for
instance, is pleasant enough in summer--but it isn’t like Curzon
Street.”
Gordon Routh read the letter again, and said enthusiastically:
“Well, after this good news let’s have breakfast and run up to town
and see these lawyers. They ask you to call upon them as soon as
convenient. They were your father’s lawyers, and I know old Harrington
very well.”
They ate their meal hurriedly, and Sibell rushed upstairs, changed
into a town kit, and at eleven o’clock they alighted from a taxi in
Bedford Row, that broad street of dismal lawyers’ offices in the
vicinity of Gray’s Inn.
Without ceremony they were ushered into the private room of Mr.
Alexander Harrington, a white-haired old solicitor, head of the
well-known firm, who greeted them, and, producing a file of papers,
addressed Sibell, saying:
“No doubt my letter came as a surprise to you, Miss Dare. My late
client, Mr. Henry Dare--who, as you know, has lived abroad for some
thirty years or more--died on June 10th last at Brisbane, and I have
his will here, by which you are sole legatee under a certain condition
which I think you will not find very irksome. The estate is a very
considerable one, consisting of railway securities, a quantity of
valuable house property in the West End of London, the family estate
at Coningsby, near Wotton-under-Edge, and the old Guest House at
Hampton Court.”
“I’ve heard that the place has been closed for about thirty years,”
remarked Sibell’s guardian.
“Yes,” replied Mr. Harrington. “According to the terms of the will,
the contents can be sold, and Miss Dare has to refurnish the house and
live in it.”
“Why?”
“Who knows?” asked old Mr. Harrington, arching his grey brows. “My
late client was a somewhat eccentric man. Possibly you know the
romance and tragedy connected with the Guest House?”
Sibell declared that she was in ignorance.
“Well, when I was a young man,” said the old solicitor, “Mr. Beeforth
Dare, a client of my father, met with a fatal accident in the hunting
field early in 1895, and his son Henry, aged twenty-one, succeeded
him. The Guest House at Hampton Court, together with its original
Elizabethan furniture, was left to him as one of the ancestral homes
of the Dares, and just at that time your Uncle Henry fell in love and
became engaged to marry Mary Forrester, one of the Forresters of
Glencree. A week before the date fixed for her marriage she went down
to Hampton Court to stay with her fiancé’s mother, when, while out
walking in Bushey Park, she was suddenly taken mysteriously ill, was
carried back, and died within an hour. An autopsy was held, and the
poor girl’s death was declared to be due to heart disease.
“This so upset your Uncle Henry that he had the house at once closed,
just as it stood, without moving anything. His mother went to live in
London, while he went abroad to his brother John who, after a somewhat
disgraceful career, had gone out to the Malay States as an
assistant-manager of a rubber plantation. For three years my client
lived in Singapore. Then he travelled from place to place for over
twenty years, never returning to England, and he has unfortunately
died in Australia. Two years ago he called me to Paris, where, at the
Hôtel Continental, I executed his will.”
“Then, according to its terms, I am compelled to live at the Guest
House?” asked the girl, naturally much interested.
“That is so. If you fail to do so, one third of my late client’s
property goes to the London Hospital, one third to the Middlesex, and
the remainder to your guardian, Mr. Gordon Routh,” said old Mr.
Harrington. “When he was making his will I queried the clause, but he
said he intended to see you and explain his reasons why he wished you
to live at the Guest House. He has unfortunately died before he could
do so.”
“But as he hated the place himself it is hardly fair to expect my ward
to live there, is it?” exclaimed the hunchback in his shrill voice.
“I admit, it is not. But the house, when reopened, will be found to be
a very quiet and pleasant residence. It must, of course, be very dirty
and neglected at present. The door has never been opened for about
thirty years. The furniture is antique, and no doubt in a very bad
state. If it were mine I should sell it all by auction, and have the
place redecorated and refurnished.”
“That’s what I must do,” Sibell said.
“Very well. Then I will give the matter over to the firm of estate
agents who have had it in hand, and you can go and inspect the place
and pick out anything you wish to keep. At the same time, I will take
steps to prove the will immediately, as all the formalities have been
observed in Australia.”
“The place was the scene of the great blow which befell my Uncle
Henry. I hope its possession will not be harmful to me,” remarked the
happy girl, with a nervous laugh.
“Why should it be?” asked the old solicitor. “The death of my late
client’s fiancée was a natural event, and might, of course, have
taken place anywhere.”
That same afternoon Sibell and her guardian took a taxi through
Hammersmith and Richmond to Hampton Court, where they had no
difficulty in finding the ancient red-brick mansion, an old Tudor
place built at the same time as Hampton Court Palace itself, standing
back behind rusted railings in its neglected grounds, with great
spreading oaks and chestnuts. The roomy old house, with its mullioned
windows and high chimneys, was half covered with ivy, which had so
climbed that in one part it overspread the roof. The windows were
mostly boarded up, the carriage-drive overgrown with bushes and weeds,
and the broad stone steps leading to the portico were deep in moss and
lichen.
From two windows on the ground floor the boards had rotted and fallen
away, disclosing ragged holland blinds that were once yellow, but now
black and stained; while the huge, rusty padlock and chain on the gate
told their own tale.
They of course could not enter the place, but even on that bright
autumn afternoon its exterior looked terribly neglected, depressing,
and mysterious, though the view afforded of Bushey Park, its deer and
its famous avenue of chestnuts, was most picturesque and charming.
In the immediate vicinity were several other old-world houses, all of
them prosperous-looking and well kept, but the Guest House, the scene
of that broken romance of long ago, presented a sorry appearance of
neglect, a derelict in that quiet, peaceful backwater of modern life.
“When it is put into order, repainted and redecorated, it will be a
very fine residence,” declared old Mr. Routh, looking through the gate
into the weedy wilderness that was once a garden.
The girl standing at her guardian’s side reflected. The falling leaves
of the great trees were stirred in the golden autumn sunset, and from
somewhere came a sharp bugle call from the barracks in the vicinity.
Her eyes were fixed upon the heavy oak door, grey and weather-beaten,
that door which had not been opened for thirty years to admit light
and air to the deserted place.
What did that house of mystery contain for her? It was her possession,
hers by right, and in order to secure her splendid inheritance she
must live within those time-mellowed, red-brick walls.
The fair-haired girl in jumper and skirt drew a long breath.
Something--she knew not what it was--warned her of some sinister
influence that was exercised there. She was no believer in psychic
forces. Many of her silly companions had attended séances and
believed in spiritualism, but she, a level-headed, intelligent girl,
had never believed in what she termed the “bunkum” of it all. There
were, she admitted, certain secrets of Nature hidden from mankind, but
discovered in modern times--the mysteries of steam, of electricity, of
the internal combustion engine, aeronautics, submarine navigation,
wireless communication, and radio-television. But the supernatural she
had always ruled out, even though the Countess of Wyndcliffe, to be up
to date and in the swim, was essentially “psychic”--as the term is
known in Society--and she had been compelled to follow her.
That night the old gambler and his protégée returned to Cookham,
naturally elated at the day’s surprises. Sibell, instead of a needy
girl dependent upon the old gambler’s slender means, was now a
considerable heiress and her own mistress, hence she sat down and
wrote to her lover, Otway, a brief résumé of the good news and of
her day’s doings.
In the issue of the _Richmond and Twickenham Times_ on the following
Saturday there appeared a letter above the signature “Scrutator”
headed “The Guest House, Hampton Court,” which created a good deal of
local interest, and a cutting of which Mr. Harrington sent to Sibell.
The letter read:
“It is understood that the Guest House at Hampton Court is at last to
be reopened, after being closed by its former owner, Mr. Henry Dare,
thirty years ago. The house was built in 1541 for the reception of
visitors who could not be entertained in the Royal Palace, but
tradition has it--and the facts have been recorded by the
archæologists Emberley and Wright--that certain curious phenomena
were observed there during the eighteenth century.
“According to the earliest record, preserved in the Record Office in
London, it was purchased in 1595 by a French nobleman, the Marquis
D’Aire of Aire, a town in Gascony, who was French Ambassador to Queen
Elizabeth--whose descendants afterwards anglicised their name to Dare.
From time to time at least two sudden and mysterious deaths took place
within its walls, culminating in the tragic death of the fiancée of
the late owner, a pretty girl of twenty-one named Mary Forrester, who
one day in October 1895 was taken suddenly ill while on a visit when
walking in Bushey Park, and died in a chair in the drawing-room in her
lover’s arms.
“A very similar incident occurred in the house in question in 1784, on
a day when George III drove down from London to Hampton Court to
receive one of the Spanish Princes. On that day, after leaving the
Palace, the Marquis Henri D’Aire, in whose possession the house was
then, was taken suddenly ill on descending the stairs, and expired two
hours later from causes which the doctors could not ascertain.
“To archæologists and others the reopening of this house of mystery,
after having been closed for so many years, will be of considerable
interest, as it is known to contain much valuable Tudor furniture and
many objects of art brought from France by the ancestors of its late
owner, to whom its possession brought the great tragedy of his life.”
On receipt of the cutting Sibell went up to London and showed it to
Brinsley Otway, whom she found in his surgery in his small corner
house at Golder’s Green. The dark-haired, clean-shaven, alert young
man who had distinguished himself at Guy’s and been fully qualified
about three years before, stood in his rather shabby consulting-room
and read it over carefully.
“It is most interesting,” he said. “We must find the writer, who no
doubt can give us some further information.”
That afternoon he gave over his work to a friend, and a visit to the
editor of the newspaper at Richmond revealed the fact that the writer
was a Mr. Geoffrey Sharp, long a resident at East Molesey, on the
opposite bank of the Thames to Hampton Court, and a well-known local
antiquary.
That same evening Sibell and her tall, athletic lover called upon the
white-haired old gentleman, who, as soon as Sibell had introduced
herself as the heiress of the late Mr. Henry Dare, at once became
communicative.
“The Guest House is of great interest in many respects,” declared the
old man, peering at her through his steel-rimmed spectacles as he sat
in his book-lined den. “It is mentioned by several authorities as the
scene of several--well--accidental and unaccountable deaths.”
And he showed them two large volumes by noted antiquaries in which
mention was made of the place and the mysterious occurrences.
“But, my dear young lady,” he added, “of course there are many other
houses around which evil tradition has arisen. Much of it has been due
to ill-natured reports spread long ago by neighbors who, disliking the
owners of the premises, invented all sorts of stories in order to
depreciate the value of the property.”
“Have there been any other stories regarding the place?” inquired the
girl eagerly.
“Er--well--nothing that has ever been substantiated except the sudden
deaths which were probably mere coincidences,” replied old Mr. Sharp.
“Therefore, if I were you, I would not allow the matter to worry you
in the least. When the place is cleaned and redecorated it will no
doubt prove a most delightful old-world residence, and I, for one,
hope you will one day marry and enjoy it.”
The girl exchanged glances with her lover, blushed, and thanked the
old man for his good wishes. Then, later on, they left.
On the following morning Mr. Herbert Gray, junior partner in the firm
of Shalford, Stevens & Gray, the well-known estate agents and
auctioneers of Kingston-on-Thames, arrived at the rusty iron gate of
the Guest House, accompanied by three men, namely, two of his clerks
and a local locksmith. The great old padlock was so rusty that it
could not be opened, hence the steel chain had to be filed and broken,
an operation which took nearly an hour.
Then the quartette of explorers mounted the moss-grown steps leading
to the portico, but after thirty years of neglect the key would not
turn in the lock. So with a crowbar the grey old oak door was forced,
and from the dingy interior came a dank, mouldy whiff of stale air.
Everywhere in the hall hung great blankets of dusty cobwebs which
swayed in the wind admitted through the open door.
The place was in semi-darkness, therefore the workman, aided by the
two young clerks, opened the shutters and windows of room after room,
admitting light and air, and revealing the hopelessly neglected
condition of the house, with its marvellous collection of Elizabethan
furniture, the upholstery of which, like the tapestry and carpets, was
ragged and decaying. Through the dirt-encrusted windows of ancient
green glass set in lead, the weak autumn sunshine tried to struggle,
falling instead upon the moth-eaten carpets.
In the big dining-room there still remained upon the long table with
great carved legs a cloth that had once been white, and whereon stood
blackened silver bowls that had once contained fruit, an empty
champagne bottle, and three dusty glasses. Everything had been left
just as it was on the day of the death of Henry Dare’s poor little
Victorian fiancée, Mary Forrester.
“By Jove!” remarked the auctioneer to one of his clerks. “What a
chance for collectors! A lot of this must go to Christie’s. Look at
that tallboy yonder, that fifteenth-century credence, and that
Carolean day-bed!”
Half-an-hour or so, with their coats off, they spent opening the
ground-floor rooms and examining the dusty contents, getting their
hands and faces covered in dust and dirt. Now and then they heard the
sounds of scurrying rats behind the old oak panelling, while ever and
anon great wreaths of cobwebs, swaying in the wind, were torn away and
fell.
For them all, even used as they were to enter old houses, it was a
strange experience. As a connoisseur of antique furniture, Mr. Herbert
Gray realized the considerable value of certain “museum pieces,” as
they are called in the trade. He saw that more than one piece of Tudor
and Elizabethan furniture would be welcomed in the national collection
at South Kensington, and his business mind anticipated a fat
commission from the sale of “the valuable contents” of the ancient
house.
From the spacious, stone-flagged entrance-hall ran a broad oaken
staircase with low steps, worn thin by the tread of generations of the
D’Aires. Up them the all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey himself, and
afterwards Thomas Cromwell, the arch-enemy of the Papists and
destroyer of monasteries, had often ascended to visit the Ambassador,
the Marquis Louis D’Aire, in the long withdrawing-room on the first
floor. And up those same stairs went the auctioneer and his assistants
on their journey of investigation.
The junior partner of the firm led the way, examining with
deliberation some fine family portraits by Kneller, Romney, and Sir
Peter Lely as he went, and upon the wide landing came to an open door
leading into a great dark apartment.
Very soon the five long windows of the huge room were unshuttered,
revealing the spacious withdrawing-room, the walls of which were
covered with ancient tapestry, which hung ragged, forlorn, and
rotting, some magnificent old furniture, including an early satinwood
spinet of genuine Louis XIV and some George I chairs, with carved
cabriole legs, a lacquer screen inlaid with jade, soapstone, and
agate, and a quantity of dusty but valuable old china. For the first
time for thirty years the light of day fell into that apartment, and
the sickly beams of the sun gave it an aspect of dismal bygone glory,
of an age long past and forgotten.
“What a magnificent room!” remarked Mr. Gray, as he crossed it and,
standing at one of the windows, gazed round in admiration upon some
exquisite pieces of Elizabethan furniture, all original and
unrestored, as they all were, also three Chinese vases with covers of
the Yung Cheng period.
For a second he paused, and, placing his hand upon his chest, he
glanced out of the dingy window into the neglected garden below, a
tangle of bushes and weeds.
Then of a sudden, before anyone could approach him, he was seized by
an inexplicable faintness, and, staggering across the room, sank into
an old arm-chair upholstered in faded crimson velvet.
“I--I’m ill!” he managed to gasp to his three companions. “Oh! the
pains--pains--around my heart! Oh! It’s agony!”
“Get a doctor--quick!” cried one of the clerks, while the other dashed
out to the nearest telephone, leaving the locksmith and the chief
clerk at his side.
The pair endeavored to rouse him, but his face had gone as white as
paper, and, staring fixedly, he lay back inert and motionless in the
chair. Once he drew a long breath, convulsions shook his frame, and
then he remained white and still.
Within ten minutes an elderly doctor, who arrived in a car, was at his
side, but after a brief examination he raised his head to the three
anxious men, and said:
“A very serious heart attack! I hope it may not prove fatal. But,
gentlemen, I cannot conceal from you the fact that he may not
recover!”