CHAPTER II. 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!”