REJUVENATION
Spring was lengthening into summer, and already the spacious garden
of the Guest House, now so well kept after so many years of neglect,
was full of bright flowers, while the ancient trees, including a rare
“strawberry-tree,” threw a welcome shade on a sunny day.
Sibell and her boon companion, Edith Pearman, had already installed
themselves for over three weeks, living quietly and comfortably,
though in the long hours the girl’s thoughts were ever of her lost
lover--the love of her life. The servants, under the trusted old
cook-housekeeper, carried on well, but in place of the obedient
Ashe--who, at the last moment, made excuses not to enter Miss Dare’s
service--an erect, rather smart, and narrow-faced youngish man, named
Charlesworth, had applied for the post and obtained it.
At their first interview Sibell felt just a faint suspicion that she
had seen the young man before, but after long cogitation, and
examining the excellent credentials from a peer who had recently died
which he presented to her, she had engaged him. The fact was that they
had met before, but the girl could not recall the circumstances.
Ashe had at first been most anxious to become butler to his
ex-mistress’s niece, but, having talked it all over in his room in St.
James’s with the former, he declared himself too nervous to live in
that house.
“Remember what happened to our dear departed Rupert after you had
taken him to see the place,” he said to her. “No, my dear girl, I’m
not going to risk it! Are you?”
Hence, Ashe having withdrawn, Charles Charlesworth became installed in
his place.
Sibell had allowed herself the luxury of a new and expensive car, with
a good-looking young chauffeur named Budd; therefore, when old Gordon
Routh came to his ward’s house as visitor for a week, she took him for
pleasant runs down to Brighton, Bournemouth, and Guildford.
With a big bank balance and quite a new set of friends growing up
around her, Sibell Dare would have been intensely happy had she still
possessed the affection of the one man whom she adored.
Alas! his silence remained unbroken. He was living with his mother in
the North, a disappointed, disillusioned misanthrope, from whose heart
all the zest of life had been crushed.
Gussie Gretton had driven down to call. His visit had been a mere
formal one to look her up, and both were careful to avoid any
discussion concerning the past.
One bright afternoon he called a second time, being admitted by the
quiet-mannered Charlesworth.
“Well, Sibell!” he cried cheerily as he entered the long, handsome
drawing-room. “Going on all right? No spooks or devils, or that kind
of unholy influence, now that all the cobwebs have been cleared away,
eh?”
“Nothing,” answered the girl, laughing merrily. “I’m beginning to
think, Gussie, that those various affairs were all mere coincidences.
Some enemy of our family gave the place a bad name, and it has stuck
to it. That’s the opinion I am beginning to form, and Mr. Routh thinks
so, too.”
“Well, it really seems so,” agreed her visitor, taking the cigarette
she offered him. “People have declared this place to be a house of
death, and some fussy old men, who call themselves antiquaries, have
professed to have dug out all sorts of weird stories of its past. All
uncanny, I admit; but how can people possibly come here and be
affected by some evil influence which causes illness, and in more than
one instance, actual death? It’s all bunkum, I say!” Then, as an
after-thought, he added, “By the way, have you heard yet from Otway?”
The girl shook her head sadly in the negative, and in an instant he
saw that he had approached the most painful subject in her heart.
“Do forgive me, Sibell. I’m awfully sorry that I should have referred
to the past!” he hastened to say, laying his hand tenderly upon her
shoulder. “I don’t forget that it was all my fault, and now I frankly
tell you, my dear Sibell, that if ever I can help you in any way
whatever in the future, you have only to count upon me as your
friend.”
She sat up in her chair and looked into his eyes, half believing him.
At that moment the well-set-up young butler, Charlesworth, entered,
carrying the big Georgian silver tea-tray, and, having arranged it,
left silently and closed the door after him.
“Do you really mean that?” she asked.
“I honestly do,” he answered. “And do you know why, Sibell?” And he
paused. “Well, strictly between ourselves, I believe that you’ve been
the victim of some vile, damnable conspiracy, which has something to
do with your inheritance. More, I do not know. That is my distinct and
unalterable suspicion.”
“But why?” cried the blue-eyed girl excitedly. “Why should anyone plot
against me? Surely, in all my life, I haven’t done a soul any harm!”
“Those who are innocent always suffer where greed of money is
concerned,” the man replied. He had assumed a friendly and kindly
attitude towards her. “That there is a plot, Sibell, I feel
convinced,” he said, recollecting the vile proposition concerning
commission that Lady Wyndcliffe had put to him one night at Ciro’s
eighteen months before. He, as one of the most eligible bachelors in
London, was reflecting upon a phase of life that he knew.
Open your morning paper and glance at the simpering Society brides in
their little lace caps edged with orange blossom, smiling on the arms
of their bridegrooms as they leave West End churches. Then, for a
moment, reflect upon those who grace the dinner-tables of Mayfair, and
reap their harvest of fat commissions each London season.
“Fewer marriage-mongers, fewer divorces,” said a candid judge in the
Divorce Court not so very long ago. In the papers the Society divorce
equals in attraction the Society marriage, until the commonplace would
become staggered by the matrimonial chessboard of _Who’s Who_.
Gussie Gretton, awkward, as is every man, sat with his well-toasted
tea-cake upon his lap and drank his China tea, and then, excusing
himself to Sibell and to Edith, who had come in late after a walk over
to Molesey, he rose, and was handed into his car by the ever-ready
Charlesworth.
Sibell went to her room. She wanted to be alone to think. Already,
after those few weeks, the big house, which smelt so strongly of fresh
enamel and the odor of new carpets, had begun to pall upon her.
She cast herself into a soft chair, and in the dull twilight thought
over Gretton’s curious suggestion that there was some desperate and
most insidious plot against her in order to compel her to leave the
house and refuse to live there.
Her lawyers had made it entirely plain to her that in such case, under
the terms of her Uncle Henry’s will, she would have no alternative but
to relinquish all claims to its benefits. She realized, too, that the
only person to derive profit would be her hunchback guardian, old
Gordon Routh.
That night she dined early with Edith, and afterwards went up to town
in the car to a new play at Wyndham’s. Budd, the smart chauffeur, in
his dark-green livery and polished gaiters, had been in the service of
a queen of the variety stage, and was most polite and attentive in the
wrapping of warm wraps. He had good wages and full licence to go
hither and thither, save when he was wanted to drive, therefore he
naturally regarded his mistress with the same solicitude as he had
done the alert little lady of the music-halls who had married a peer’s
son.
When the theatres had “burst”--that time-signal known to every London
chauffeur or taxi-driver--he carried his charges speedily back to
Hampton Court, though the night was misty.
It was late when the car drove in, but the alert Charlesworth was up
to serve the girls with their cups of tea before retiring.
On the table in the dining-room lay a wire from Sibell’s aunt, which
read:
“Returning to town to-morrow. Can I stay with you next Thursday for
the week-end?”
The girl showed it to her companion, and agreed that they would both
be delighted to have Lady Wyndcliffe as guest. Only a week before, in
the London gossip of the _Daily Sketch_, there had been a brief
paragraph that “Sadie Dexter, daughter of Issy Dexter, the great
real-estate millionaire of Detroit, has been placed beneath the social
wing of Lady Wyndcliffe, whose intimate circle of bright young people
is so well-known, and who gives such exclusive dances in the season.
Miss Dexter is a relation of Colonel Frank Dexter, who was the chief
adviser to General Hughes during the Great War.”
Etta’s press-agent had been at work. He was a small, withered little
old journalist who lived in a single room out at Balham and whose
old-fashioned landlady took pity upon him. And yet in Fleet Street his
name was one to conjure with. He made or marred reputations, because
he knew exactly how to distribute dope to his pals in the various
Fleet Street inns.
He could always slip a Treasury note into the hands of an outside
gossip-writer on a daily newspaper, wrapped up in a paragraph. Thus
who could tell of the “graft” when next day the important journal
appeared with a photograph of a nobody who was being secretly boomed?
So it is that, in this age of publicity, nobody of any note, and
nobodies of any note, as well as the somebodies who count, from the
highest to the lowest, can afford to neglect the offers of a
press-agent.
In our present age of advertising, real worth hardly counts, and merit
is valueless in any walk of life without a Press boom behind it, until
the best-hated man or woman now becomes the most talked of and
popular. Hence one dismisses most of the social gossip of the
newspapers as mere inconsistent twaddle, which interests illiterate
suburbia and benighted country cousins, who to-day are not so
benighted as the directors of our Press seem to think. Once the Press
created public opinion, but, thank heaven! the public nowadays thinks
for itself--the public of whatever political views.
Sibell read the paragraph about Etta’s latest capture and smiled
inwardly, wondering how much it had cost the ambitious American
father. It was no affair of hers, for she had known such cases each
season. After all, the title “Countess” covers such a multitude of
judgment summonses and “orders of the Court.”
Nevertheless Sibell was ignorant that, though she led such a quiet,
uneventful life, with Edith Pearman as her companion, very often the
dark figure of a man would be in the vicinity of the Guest House after
dark, waiting for hours sometimes, even from early evening, and often
through the long dark watches of the night. The figure would draw back
and conceal itself when any constable chanced to come along after
midnight, yet the man was often there, watching the windows of Miss
Dare’s room as though keeping a constant vigil upon the old-world
house.
It was a haunting shadow, but it was there always--the shadow of evil
or of good.
But those who lived in the newly-decorated house were completely in
ignorance of that keen pair of eyes which kept an ever-vigilant watch.