CHAPTER IV.

THE SIGN OF EVIL

At eleven o’clock on the following morning Brinsley Otway, having arranged with a fellow-doctor named Tarrant, living in the Finchley Road at Golder’s Green, to look after his practice for the day, met Sibell at Paddington, crossed to Waterloo by tube, and took train to Hampton Court, where they lunched at the old-world “Mitre” and afterwards went on to the Guest House.

“Ugh! What a place!” exclaimed the fair-haired, well-dressed girl as she entered the front door, which was open to admit sunshine and air. “How dreadfully mouldy it smells, and look at all the cobwebs!”

“Only what one must expect after being closed so long,” remarked the dark-faced young doctor beside her.

Farmer, the caretaker, and two of the auctioneer’s men in green baize aprons were in the dining-room, raising a terrible dust in their futile endeavor to clean up the place, so that they might catalogue its contents prior to the sale, and allow a few days’ private view.

As Sibell stood in the doorway of the great old room, she could scarcely see across it for clouds of dust. Through the open windows came the pale autumn sunlight, which showed up the general shabbiness and decay of the place, the damp-rotted carpet and hangings, the moth-eaten tapestry, and the heavy Tudor furniture.

“I could never live in this dreadful place, Brin,” she declared, using the pet name she had bestowed upon him. “Isn’t it horribly dull and depressing?”

“It is. But it is very interesting to be in an atmosphere of centuries ago,” her lover said. “The world has progressed, while this house has remained just the same. Successive owners have never altered it. It has been their creed. Apparently they held, for centuries, the same idea of keeping it just as its original owner had it. The place reminds me of the old house of Plantin, the Flemish patrician and printer in Antwerp, who started to print in 1576, and his business has been carried on uninterrupted till to-day. His house and furniture have never been altered. It is the same here in the Guest House, which should be preserved as a museum!”

“If I am compelled to live in it I want everything quite modern,” declared the girl. “I will have everything cleared out and sold.”

“Won’t you keep anything?” asked the young doctor. “I would certainly retain something of your ancestors--if I were you, dearest.”

“Perhaps I will when I’ve seen everything. But isn’t the place in a terrible state?”

It certainly was.

No word had reached either of them regarding the mysterious attack from which Mr. Gray had suffered on the previous day, or the fact that he was still confined to his bed with his doctor in attendance. Mr. Gray had ordered his staff to keep the mysterious affair a complete secret, being afraid to frighten the young lady into whose possession the Guest House had so suddenly passed. As a man of business he hesitated to be any party to the sensational tradition of sinister happenings in the place. His firm had had the house under its charge for half a century, and he naturally felt that he should not encourage any undue interest that might be derogatory to the value of the estate.

Only that morning he had again telephoned from his bedside ordering that not a word should leak out to Miss Dare.

From room to room Sibell and her lover wandered, examining the dusty, neglected home of the D’Aires, finding each room filled with furniture and objects of art which any museum would be proud to possess.

Upon the panelled walls of several rooms hung time-mellowed family portraits by great painters of the past, including one of a pretty little daughter of the ancient French house, Gabrielle D’Aire. Sibell admired it, and said she would retain it. Not till afterwards did she learn that it was one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s hitherto unknown pictures, nor that the larger one which hung beside it was a Rembrandt. Indeed it was not until a fortnight after, when the art dealers were allowed to inspect the house, that the treasures were identified.

Through the dismal, dust-laden house the lovers wandered from room to room. Everywhere the autumn sunlight fell across the faded carpets through those old leaded windows of green glass, many panes of which were broken. Over everything lay the decay of thirty years--the brilliant, prosperous days of Victoria the Good, the height of Britain’s world-power.

Together they entered a small room at the rear, the windows of which overlooked the tangled garden, where the golden leaves of autumn were fluttering down from the high elms which overshadowed the house. The little room was lined from floor to ceiling with heavy books, the leather bindings of which smelt close and stuffy--the eighteenth-century room of a studious man, which had probably been neglected ever since the accession of George the Third. The writing-table was a little narrow one like a bedside table, and the chairs were all Carolean, cane-seated and cane-backed.

“This seems to be one of the cosiest rooms,” Sibell remarked. “It shall be your own little den, Brin. You can fit it up as a laboratory, so that you can study all your germs, or ‘bugs,’ as you call them.”

Her lover, who had his hand already clasped in hers, for they were alone, kissed her upon the lips, and replied:

“My darling, any room will do for my research work. It is best upstairs in the attics, so as to be out of the way.”

“But, my dear Brin, I insist that you have a nice room, dearest,” she said, looking up into his face with eyes full of the lovelight. “This room will be quite handy for everything.”

She gazed into his face with wondering eyes--those big eyes which always held him beneath her spell, so that he could never look upon another woman with any other feeling than as a doctor would towards his female patients.

“Only if we marry, Sibell.”

“Marry? Of course we shall!” she cried. “I am yours, if you will only accept me! Did we not decide that long ago?”

“You were poor then. Now you are rich, my darling. A penniless doctor like myself is but a poor husband for you.”

“My darling Brin. How very foolish you are! What are you talking about?”

“Only that I think Gretton would make a far better husband for you. Your guardian doesn’t care for me--neither does Lady Wyndcliffe. I feel it always. I am only a mere hard-working suburban doctor, with nothing except the fees I earn in the poor but respectable neighborhood of the Finchley Road, and without even a single public appointment. Each one I seek is always given to somebody else. And yet in bacteriology and toxicology I earned honors at my examinations.”

“Don’t worry, my dear old Brin. I am yours--and you know it. I want no other man and will have no other,” declared the girl sweetly, as she drew his head towards her.

He hugged her to his breast and kissed her fondly upon the lips, for they were alone in that dingy room, nobody being near. Her words gave him the greatest comfort and encouragement any man could receive, for he realized that he loved her with that great, all-absorbing affection which, alas! comes to few men, love, alas! being so often a mere passionate pretence in order to secure sympathy, companionship, or, more often, fortune. As it has ever been through all the ages, so it is to-day, every woman of every country is open to the flattery of a man who seeks her, not from any love of her, but for his own self-advancement in finance, in the higher social scale, or the puny one of suburban or provincial bridge-parties.

The onlooker who travels the world over, and whose heart is hidebound, sees so much that is amusing, on board liners, on expensive tours, and in hotels-de-luxe from end to end of Europe or America, that he begins to wonder if there really exists any real love commencing with the capital L.

This is the note of this present romance of the writer’s observation--the love between the poor but pretty, neat-ankled girl who suddenly inherited a fortune, and with it a house of evil repute as residence, and a hard-working suburban London doctor, whose modern knowledge was equal to many great specialists in Harley Street, and--though he did not know it--his name had already been placed upon the list of Home Office experts to be called upon to analyse and fix the culprit in the next case of any fresh mystery of crime submitted by Scotland Yard.

As an ordinary hard-working practitioner in Golder’s Green he had given evidence at the Old Bailey, six months before, in a most complicated case which concerned the introduction of germs of a fatal disease into the whiskey-and-soda nightcap of a man who had motored a friend and his wife home from the Palace Theatre. Otway had, with unerring knowledge, fixed the guilt upon both the accused, who were convicted for attempted murder, Scotland Yard having afterwards sent him their thanks.

Through that trial Otway had been marked out for advancement on the lines followed by Pepper, Willcox, and the select list of Home Office pathologists whose word is law to a jury in any criminal court.

Though the pair were unaware of it, the room in which they stood had been the study of the great lawyer Sir Geoffrey Dare, who was famous in the early days of King George III, and whose name has been handed down in legal history as the prosecutor in the famous case of the Durrants, husband and wife, whom he proved to have poisoned a family of six persons in order to secure their inheritance. In that room many conferences had been held with witnesses in the famous trial, which resulted in both prisoners being hanged at Tyburn. Sir Geoffrey, who was the most famous criminal lawyer of his time, was brother of John Dare, the traveller who first explored the Areg region of the Sahara.

Otway took from one of the shelves a heavy, parchment-bound tome, and found it to be an old treatise on Roman law, while next to it was an early folio edition of Shakespeare. As a lover of books, sight of them appealed to him, and he said:

“Before these are sold I would love to go through them. This Shakespeare, though not the first folio, is evidently of considerable value.”

“You’ll be choked with dust, darling,” she replied. “Wait until they clean down the place. Isn’t it awful? Look at the cobwebs.”

They took a final glance around the dingy little room, where the light struggled in through the dirt-encrusted windows, which could not be opened because their frames had rotted. Hence the place smelt close and musty.

“When cleaned and redecorated it will be most charming,” her lover reassured her. “I can’t think what has given rise to the belief that this is a house of evil. It certainly has been neglected, and, as in many other houses all over the country, people have died suddenly here, but the evil is, I feel certain, only imaginary--the result of some ill-natured local gossip that has grown into tradition.”

Had he known of the sudden and unaccountable manner in which Mr. Gray had been attacked he would certainly not have expressed such an opinion. But happily for the lovers, the occurrence was being kept a profound secret.

They ascended the broad oak staircase, on which the thick-pile carpet still remained, though it was in holes in many places, showing the wood beneath. In the great drawing-room the lovers found much to interest them as they made a tour of inspection of the spacious apartment. At once they saw that the furniture, though sadly out of repair, was genuinely antique, and that the pictures were of considerable value. Near the centre of the room stood the ancient armchair upholstered in faded crimson velvet to which Mr. Gray had staggered when he had been so mysteriously seized with illness, and the young doctor, knowing nothing of the occurrence, remarked upon the handsome Renaissance carving of its short, bulbous legs.

Together the pair stood at the dingy, weather-stained old windows gazing down upon the big, neglected garden, where the weeds grew breast high and the leaves were floating down from the ancient trees. By its successive owners that room had been kept practically the same as it was in Henry the Eighth’s time, except that the carpets and some of the furniture had been renewed by the father of the last owner on his marriage; an apartment full of objects of art, the atmosphere of which was that of the days of the Great Cardinal and possibly one of the most carefully preserved rooms in the whole Kingdom.

From room to room they passed, ascending to the bedrooms and servants’ quarters just as Mr. Gray and his assistants had done. They saw the ancient four-poster bedsteads, with their hangings of faded and time-stained chintz, the genuine Chippendale washstands and mirrors, the old fire-screens of needlework, and cushions worked in colored wools by hands that had crumbled to dust two centuries ago.

Wherever they went they raised dust, causing Sibell to sneeze violently, and by each thing they touched their hands became blackened, the girl remarking that her gloves were already ruined.

After nearly a couple of hours they descended, and, having chatted with the fat caretaker Farmer--who made no mention of Askew’s experience on the previous night, as he treated it as mere imagination--they left and returned to London, where, after dining together at the Trocadero, Otway saw his sweetheart off to Cookham from Paddington.

Next day the young doctor, having arranged with his friend Tarrant to look after his practice, set out early for the Guest House and spent the whole of the day in the great lawyer’s close-smelling library going through his books. Already an expert from a well-known West End dealer in rare books was there at the invitation of the auctioneers, a snuffy, white-bearded old gentleman named Ebenezer Tewe, and together they dusted and examined the title-pages and condition of volume after volume.

Some of them Mr. Tewe set aside as valuable, and others which took Otway’s fancy he, in turn, put away from the others. One treasure Otway found, which Mr. Tewe agreed was extremely valuable, was a vellum-bound volume of copies of the secret archives of Venice under the Doges concerning unknown poisons, how they were concocted, how they were used to remove the enemies of the ancient Republic of Venice, and the fees paid by the Republic to the secret assassins.

As a research worker in the field of toxicology, Brinsley Otway seized upon it, while Mr. Tewe agreed that it was one of the most unique and valuable of all the volumes in the library.

“There are only three copies extant,” said the snuffy old bibliophile. “One is in the Bodleian, the other in the French National Library, and the third is in private hands in America. It was sold at Sotheby’s for £6,300, and unfortunately went across the Atlantic. The compilation of it must have meant a lifetime of delving into the faded parchments in the archives of Venice.”

“The old Italian language will puzzle me, but the Latin part is quite easy,” Otway said, highly delighted with his fortunate find.

Throughout the day the two men worked together in the close little room, regardless of the half-inch of dust everywhere. Mr. Tewe identified several rare early printed books from the Nüremberg and Venetian presses, while with them was a file of _Punch_, from its earliest number down to 1883, together with the first six years of the issue of _The Times_, bound in calf, in a dozen volumes.

But the majority of the books were out-of-date law treatises, practically worthless to-day, though among them was a manuscript book upon English heraldry, with illuminated coats-of-arms, written in the crabbed and faded hand of Sir William Segar, Garter King of Arms in the reign of James the First.

Without thought of lunch, so absorbed were they, they continued their investigations until the light faded, and then Otway, having packed up the precious volume of Venetian archives, together with two or three other books, ascended the broad staircase to speak with the auctioneer’s representative, who was in the upper drawing-room.

Afterwards he left and hurried back across London to the small, red-brick, corner house of jerry-built type in the Finchley Road where he carried on his practice.

Old Mrs. Mobbs, his housekeeper, handed him several telephone messages from patients which she had given over to Dr. Tarrant, who lived farther up the road and who was going on a fortnight’s holiday, during which time Otway had promised to look after his practice.

In the cosy little bachelor sitting-room his modest dinner was laid, a single cover, for he usually ate a chop at nine o’clock, when the last of his suburban patients had left the surgery.

He was in the act of eating a peach, which he had taken from a plate on the sideboard, after untying the parcel of books which he had brought from the Guest House, when he was suddenly seized by an unusual faintness.

For a few seconds he stood rigid. The peach fell from his nerveless fingers. Then, crossing to the mahogany sideboard, he poured out unsteadily some brandy and swallowed it. It burned his throat. At the same moment he was seized by a violent fit of shivering. Convulsions shook his strong frame, while excruciating pains shot through his extremities. He stood as one transfixed, when a sudden spasm shot through his heart, and the glass fell from his fingers and was smashed to fragments.

Instantly he realized that the symptoms were such as he had never observed before. He held his breath and set his teeth. Then, with a supreme effort, and his eyes starting from his head, he managed to utter a sharp cry which brought his old housekeeper hurriedly into the room.

“I--_I’m very ill_!” he gasped. “Fetch Dr. Tarrant! Quick! Tell him that--that--I----”

But, alas! the sentence remained unfinished, for the poor fellow reeled and fell senseless upon the carpet, yet another victim of that mysterious evil influence which pervaded the long-closed house at Hampton Court.