CHAPTER I. A SOUL FOR SALE

“You must be firm, Gordon. It doesn’t matter in the least whether Sibell loves him or hates him. She must marry him, otherwise we shall both find ourselves in the cart. So there must be no argument. Don’t you agree?” asked the woman.

“Of course I agree, my dear Etta. But my ward is stubborn and absolutely refuses to see him again,” replied the bald-headed, deformed man who stood at Lady Wyndcliffe’s side at the window of her private sitting-room overlooking the golden sands and summer sea at the Grand Hotel on the Digue at Knocke, on the Belgian coast.

“It’s all rot! She must be made to see reason!” replied the slim, dark-haired, good-looking woman in a flimsy blue-striped frock, which mutely spoke of the Parisian couturière. “Young Otway is all very well, but he hasn’t a penny, while Gretton inherited over half a million from his father, who made a satisfactory deal in wool during the war and by it became Mayor of Bradford. Gussie’s a bit of an ass, but all the better for us. We both want money very badly. And I’ve so far worked the cards so that he is madly in love with her. Only we must at all hazards get rid of Otway. A penniless young doctor is no good for Sibell.”

“I agree with every word you say,” replied the queer old hunchback, Gordon Routh, in his high-pitched, squeaky voice. “You and I have had many deals which have been mutually satisfactory, and now is it not strange that we should be bartering away the girl’s future?”

“Oh, hang sentiment!” laughed the Countess. “We must have funds at any cost. Gussie Gretton is rich, and if Sibell marries him we must squeeze enough out of him to keep us in all we want of this world’s goods.”

“The Bank of England wouldn’t be sufficient for you, my dear Etta,” laughed the man. “You’d spend it all, and then try and get an overdraft. You’re the most extravagant woman I know.”

“What about your own losses at Monte—eighty thousand pounds in one year—eh?” remarked Lady Wyndcliffe. “I’ve been an infernal fool at the tables also, I admit. I lost forty thousand francs at the Casino last night, and have given an IOU to the accommodating old bean who runs the show.”

“Like myself, you broadcast the handy little slips, scatter them all over Europe, and they are accepted because of your high title, and the ingenuity of your press-agent,” remarked the bald-headed, bead-eyed little man whose humorous smile lit up his countenance always. Then he looked at her admiringly, and added: “I wonder, my dear Etta, what the world really thinks of you?”

“I don’t care a Belgian franc what the devil it thinks,” she laughed. “The public know that the Countess of Wyndcliffe moves in the best society and is seen everywhere—at Court, at Epsom, at Cowes, at Deauville, at St. Moritz, and at Monte Carlo. Her photographs look out upon the suburban buyers of the sixpenny illustrated weeklies, and she has always one, or perhaps two débutantes under her wing. She is what the good people of Hampstead, Watford, Richmond, or Felixstowe term ‘in Society.’ ”

“And thank heaven I’m out of it now,” the man laughed.

His companion drew a long sigh, and her well-arched brows contracted.

“I only wish I were. It’s a wearing life this, with lots of friends, lots of limelight, and no money. Wyndcliffe is getting quite impossible nowadays. Billesdon is let to a retired straw-hat maker from Luton, and I can hardly make enough, or save enough, to live.”

Etta Wyndcliffe—or, to give her her full title from Burke, Countess of Wyndcliffe of Billesdon Hall, Rutland; Cloyne Castle, Aberdeenshire; 112A West Halkin Street; and Villa Mon Aise, Cannes—was one of the many bright young Society women of to-day who lead a reckless, hectic life with the fees they earn by introducing daughters of rich commoners into the fringe of Society.

Watch your newspaper, and you will often see in the season that Lady So-and-So gave a dance at Claridge’s for the daughter of Mrs. Fitz-Allan Smith. It is Mrs. Fitz-Allan Smith who pays Lady So-and-So heavily for the privilege of shaking hands and dancing with her guests who go there to obtain a champagne supper gratis.

Etta Wyndcliffe was one of the great crowd of impecunious aristocrats, with a wide circle of friends, some of whom nowadays open shops, while others breed dogs, others keep beauty-parlors, and still others manage to pay their way by taking the womenfolk of parvenus under their wing, and sometimes presenting them at Court. Etta was young for her age, slim, refined, with handsome features, dark, penetrating eyes, and a fine complexion. Though thirty-three, she did not look more than twenty-five, while she danced and played tennis or golf as actively as any young girl. She was the second wife of old Wyndcliffe, who went through Carey Street about a year after he married her, and she had had to shift for herself ever since.

She lived in West Halkin Street, and managed somehow to scrape along upon funds provided by the parents of girls whom she chaperoned. The hectic, adventurous life she led in London during the season, and at the Continental resorts out of it, had caused her to become greedy and unscrupulous, for she drove hard bargains with mothers of marriageable daughters, whom she hawked around in the hope of finding them husbands. Her enemies—and she had many—said very hard things of her—how, having grown tired of one particular friend, a hard-up ne’er-do-well named Eustace Power, she had induced a wealthy American girl whom she was chaperoning to marry him, and they had actually split the commission.

As she stood at the hotel window that August morning, the Countess of Wyndcliffe looked little more than a girl, with a face so innocent and charming that it gave no index to her insatiable mania for gambling, or of the fast and vicious circle in which she moved.

“You really can’t be so horribly broke,” the man said. “You got three thousand when the Clements girl was married in June.”

“And I worked terribly hard for it, I assure you. I also had the vinegar man’s girl on my hands, as well as Sibell.”

“You got nothing for Sibell, and she’s cost you a lot in lunches, theatre-tickets, and dances, I know. It was very good of you, Etta, to take her.”

“And now, just when we’ve played our cards discreetly, the infernal little hussy—excuse me calling her that, even though I am her aunt—refuses to see Gussie Gretton again.”

“He hasn’t the best of reputations, she says.”

“What man has until after he’s sown his wild oats?” she asked.

“Well, according to all accounts, Gretton has sown a pretty heavy crop. He’s already narrowly escaped being cited in two divorce cases,” said Sibell’s guardian.

“That makes the women run after him all the more,” declared the irresponsible Countess. “Sibell ought to be proud that he, with all his wealth, wants to marry her. She’s a darned little idiot. I tell you, Gordon, I’m fed up to the teeth. Gretton is so infatuated that he has promised me five thousand on the day he marries her, and I’m ready to split it with you. Then you’ll split with me anything we get afterwards,” she said, discussing the sale of the girl’s soul as she would a business deal.

“I’ll try and do my best. But she’s over head and ears in love with that young Otway.”

“Love! Bah! There’s really no such thing as true love nowadays. Smart frocks, a pretty face, and proper environment, and girls think that men fall in love. The idea of real love disappeared with the hansom cab.”

“But, really, Etta, there is surely some affection left in the world!” piped the deformed old gambler.

“Among the common folk, I suppose. Not among us. Marriage nowadays merely means the uniting of money and poverty, or vice versa. The modern girl does not begin to know what life is until she’s divorced.”

“And to you, my dear Etta, a neat little secret commission comes in from both sides!”

The pretty Society adventuress grinned.

“Well, when one has to live on one’s wits—as I have, alas! because Wyndcliffe is such a fool—one must not be too particular with whom one mixes. Heaven knows! I have sometimes to lunch and dine with most fearful crooks and howling dagoes. Only a fortnight ago in Paris I found myself in debt forty thousand francs at ‘chemmy’ at the Bel Air. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I only had fifty francs in the world to pay my taxi to the hotel. Old Ducocq, the director, a decent sort of paternal crook, took my IOU, but next day he came to the hotel and demanded as the price of its return that I should entertain at dinner at the Ritz a pair of American financiers whom I knew to be clever crooks, and two innocent Englishmen, their ‘pigeons,’ whom they were inducing to put money into some rotten scheme. In return for the bit of paper I signed, I had to carry out their demand, and I read in the next day’s Paris Daily Mail that I had asked the pair of share-swindlers to dinner. No, my dear Gordon, I’m not sailing in smooth waters, just now, I can assure you.”

“My dear Etta, you’re like me! We are merely gipsies in the world. When our hats are on, our roofs are on. We live for to-day, and to-morrow may take care of itself. The tables are my curse, just as they are yours. You’ll admit that?”

“Certainly I do. I’ve nothing to hide from you, my dear old Gordon. Do you remember that night in the Cercle Privé in Monte, when I was broke to the world and you helped me out with three billets de mille. I took to you from that moment, and I even tried to save you from plunging as you did. But you wouldn’t hear me. I don’t blame you, my dear Gordon. Why should I? I listen to nobody myself. That’s why we are both so damnably hard up and are kindred spirits—eh?”

“Hard up! Why, at this moment I have only a couple of hundred francs to my name,” said the hunchback, who had run through a fortune. “I don’t see how I’m going to pay my hotel bill.”

“I’m in just the same box,” replied her smart little ladyship. “We must raise it from somewhere even if I have to get a little loan from Gussie.”

“A bit on account of commission, eh?” laughed the man.

“If you go to the tables you can always ask a friend for a loan, making a run of bad luck the legitimate excuse. It doesn’t then look as though you really are hard up—only temporarily embarrassed,” said the Countess, pulling a wry face. “But,” she added, “I’m chronically affected that way.”

Suddenly the door opened and a bright-faced, fair, shingled-haired girl in a flimsy summer frock burst gaily into the room, greeting her guardian, and then turning to her aunt, she said:

“You’re up early, auntie! Why, it must have been nearly three when we left Roberts’. I went for a walk by the sea after that. It was simply gorgeous.”

“With Gussie?”

“No. With Leonard Capel. We’re entering for the tango competition at the Memling to-morrow night.”

The Countess and the hunchback exchanged glances.

“I don’t think, Sibell, you should go for nocturnal rambles with a stranger,” said the Countess reprovingly.

“Why not, auntie? Several other girls went for walks with their dancing-partners,” remarked Sibell. “Besides, it isn’t any worse than dancing in a night-club with some dago you’ve never set eyes upon before and allowing him to pay for your supper,” she added meaningly.

Etta knew at what the girl hinted. They had both danced with a rich young Argentine, whose name they did not know, at the Florida Club in London one night a month before, and he had paid sixteen pounds for supper for the three.

But Lady Wyndcliffe led a hectic life paid for by those she took beneath her aristocratic wing, and, after all, in the course of her butterfly career she had done much more risky things than that.

Sibell Dare was extremely pretty, with a sweet, intelligent countenance, big, wondering eyes of childlike blue, a small mouth with full, red lips that required not the application of lip-stick, and a slim, supple figure the grace of which had been improved by constant dancing. After Cheltenham College, she had been two years in Paris, and now she was as smart and attractive a girl as could be found in all London. Her aunt, the Countess, had taken her from Routh’s home at Cookham and introduced her into Society, where she had many admirers, of whom Augustus Gretton was the most ardent.

She, however, cared for none of them, being devoted to Brinsley Otway, a struggling young doctor practising out at Golder’s Green. They had met at the house of a married school-friend up at Hampstead two years before, and had been lovers ever since.

“Leonard Capel wants me to go to Ostend to spend the day. I’m going,” said the girl, feeling somehow that she had interrupted a conversation between her deformed guardian and the Countess.

“My dear child! Why, you hardly know the man!” Etta chimed in quickly. “If you want to go to Ostend, why not accept Gussie’s invitation to motor you there? I heard him ask you yesterday.”

“Well, just because Gussie doesn’t interest me at all. He’s such a he-haw, superior person that I have no patience with him. I tell you frankly he bores me stiff, for he regards himself as very superior, and, after all, his father only started life as a cheap tailor. My father was, at least, a man of independent means.”

“I’m glad you are proud of your birth, child,” said the old man in his curious voice. “But nowadays you must remember that men are judged only by their pockets, not by their ancestry. Personally, I think Gussie a very excellent and worthy fellow.”

“When I have a husband—if that time ever comes—I shall want him all to myself, uncle, and not share him with half a dozen women, as Gussie’s wife must,” replied the high-spirited girl frankly.

“A man, when he marries, gives up all his feminine entanglements,” declared Etta. “Look at old Lord Ushaw, one of the worst roués in all Mayfair. He married little Ena Urquhart, to whom I introduced him, and now there’s no happier pair in all England.”

“An exception does not make the rule,” laughed the girl. “But I want you both to be reassured upon one point—that I shall never marry Gussie Gretton—even if there isn’t another man in the world.”

The Countess pursed her thin carmine lips at the girl’s open defiance, while her guardian turned away to conceal his annoyance.

“Well, I think you’re a little idiot!” declared Etta, who always spoke her mind to the girls she chaperoned. “You may never have the chance to marry such a charming and wealthy man. Brinsley Otway is not to be compared with him; besides, he has only the few guineas he earns by doctoring. It wouldn’t buy you your shoes.”

The girl paused for a few moments, and, noticing her guardian’s head turned away towards the sunlit sea, exclaimed:

“Well, auntie, we shall never agree upon the point, so why discuss it further? I’ll be back to dinner. We’re lunching at the Continental in Ostend, and going to the Casino afterwards. Bye-bye, uncle! Cheerio!”

And the girl went out, closing the door after her.

“That seems farewell to all our hopes, Etta, doesn’t it?” remarked the old hunchback despairingly.

“I don’t know,” replied the well-dressed woman in a hard, determined voice. “We must assume different tactics. I, for one, don’t intend to be beaten, and I’m sure Gussie doesn’t.”