Poison shadows

“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.