CHAPTER XXXI.

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Hence, Ashe having withdrawn, Charles Charlesworth became installed in his place.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.