Chapter XVIII: The Emeute at Lubeck

At the Stadt Hamburg Sir Carnaby and his bride probably secluded themselves in their own apartments on the day after the unpleasant rencontre related in Chapter XIV.; at least Trevor Chute saw nothing of them at the _table d'hôte_, which was filled by its usual frequenters, officers of the garrison, German Jews and Jewesses, and those whose names inevitably figure on the board in the hall as 'Grafs, Herrs, Rentiers, and Privatiers.'

Avoiding the hotel--on consideration, Chute saw no reason why _he_ should change his quarters--he had 'done' all Lubeck, seen the Dom or Cathedral, a huge red-brick edifice of the twelfth century, with its wonderful screen, stone pulpit, and brass font; the Marien Kirche, with its astronomical clock, where daily the figures of the seven Electors pass in review, and bow before the Emperor; the wonderful old Rathhaus; and the stone in the marketplace whereon 'the Byng' of Lubeck, Admiral Mark Meyer, was judicially murdered for not fighting a Danish fleet; the wood carvings in the Schusselbuden Strasse; and the famous letter of Sir William Wallace to the Hans cities--the first 'free trade' document the world ever saw; and when evening was come again he found himself seated, somewhat weary and almost alone, at the long board of the _table d'hôte_ in the great dining-room.

A tempestuous sun was setting in the west, against the crimson glow of which the black kites, like flies amid wine, seemed to float above the trees of the Linden Platz; and the waters of the Trave and the Wakenitz were reddened, as they flowed past the timber-clothed ramparts, the copse woods and turfy moors, towards the sea.

Something portentous seemed in the air, the sky, and even in the manner of the people of Lubeck that evening. Trevor Chute observed that the Prussian officers who were at the table, or smoking under the verandah outside the windows, all talked confidentially of something that was expected--he could not make out what, and the military eye of Chute observed that, since noon, double sentinels had been posted at the Burg Thor, the Rathhaus, and elsewhere.

The thoughts of Trevor Chute went back over the many stirring events of his past life since he had known Clare and been rent from her--events full of sporting excitement, of military peril, and Indian adventures, of rapid change by land and sea, of aimless wanderings like the present, of wet night marches and wild gallops, amid the scorching heats of the Punjaub, when men fell by the wayside, stricken and foaming at the mouth with sunstroke, or writhing with the deadlier cholera, and he knew not why all this retrospect occurred to him. Was he on the eve of any great danger? It almost seemed so.

The evening closed in dark and gloomy, and though the atmosphere was stifling, Chute perceived that the lower windows of the hotel were being all closed and barricaded. He was then informed by the _Ober Kellner_ that a serious riot was expected by 'His High Wisdom, the Senior Burgomaster,' among the tradesmen and working population, who were all 'on strike,' and hence the doubling of the guards on the town house and at the city gates.

Sounds of alarm from time to time, shouts and other noises, were heard in the echoing streets, then followed the tolling of an alarm bell, and the beating of the Prussian drums, while flames began to redden the sky in one quarter, thus indicating that the houses of some persons obnoxious to the rabble had been set on fire outside the Holstein Thor.

Despite the advice of the landlord and the waiters, Trevor Chute remained on the steps at the hotel door, enjoying a cigar, and determined to see what was going on, though but little was visible, as in the streets the rioters had turned off the gas. Ere long he could make out something like the head of a great column debouching over the open space before the hotel.

For a moment nothing could be distinguished but that it was a crowd, shadows moving in the shade, but accompanied by a roar of sounds, cheers, hoarse hurrahs, oaths and imprecations in German, with the patois of Schleswig and of Holstein. The rabble, consisting of many thousands, were in readiness to commit outrage on anyone or anything that came in their way, and were now in fierce pursuit of an open droski that was brought at a gallop up to the door of the hotel, and out of which there sprang, looking very pale and bewildered, Sir Carnaby Collingwood and Lady Evelyn, whom the crowd had overtaken when returning from a visit to one of the three Syndics. Above the heads of the grimy rabble seven or eight torches were shaking like tufts of flame, and by their uncertain glare added much to the terror of the scene, for a madly infuriated mob has terrors that are peculiarly its own, and the simple circumstance that Sir Carnaby and Lady Evelyn were the occupants of a hired vehicle was sufficient to make all these half-starved and tipsified boors--tipsy with beer and fiery corn-brandy--turn their vengeance on them.

Even while rushing alongside the fast-flying wheels--for the driver lashed his horses to a gallop--they could see that Sir Carnaby was an aristocrat, an _hochgeboren_, or well-born man; that was enough to ensure insult and ridicule, or worse, and all the more when they discovered that he was an Englishman--and, like a true Englishman, the baronet, with all his folly and shortcomings in many ways, did not want a proper amount of pluck.

All that passed now seemed to do so with the quickness of lightning.

Sir Carnaby, highly exasperated by what he had undergone, and the terror of Lady Evelyn, instead of retiring at once into the hotel, unwisely turned and struck the foremost man in the crowd a sharp blow across the face with his cane.

The voices of the crowd now burst into one united roar of senseless rage, and a piercing and agonising shriek escaped Lady Evelyn, as she saw him seized by many hands, torn from her side, and dragged violently along the streets, amid shouts of 'To the Trave!--to the Trave!'

She did not and could not love this old man--she was, perhaps, incapable of loving anyone--but she loved well the position her marriage gave her, though a viscount's daughter, with the luxury and splendour in which she was cradled when at home. She had been used since childhood to obedience; to be followed and caressed; to have every wish gratified, every caprice supplied; to see every doubt and difficulty cleared away; to feel neither pain nor illness, not even the least excitement about anything; and now--now, the man with whom she had linked her fate was at the mercy of an infamous and brutal foreign mob; and with her shriek there came a cry to Chute to save him; but Trevor never heard her, for the moment hands were laid on Sir Carnaby, followed by Tom Travers, his servant, he had plunged into the moving and shouting mass, which went surging down the street; then Lady Evelyn saw the three disappear in the obscurity; out of which there came the roar of mingling shouts, the gleam of cutlasses as the night-watch attacked the rioters; and then followed the red flashes and the report of musketry, as the Prussian guard at the Rathhaus opened fire upon them; and Lady Evelyn, unused, as we have said, to any excitement, especially the sudden and unwonted horrors of an episode like this, fainted, and was borne senseless into the hotel.

Meanwhile, amid the wild whirl of that seething mob, how fared it with Trevor Chute and him whom he sought to save or rescue?

In all his service in India--service so different from the silk and velvet dawdling tenor of life in the Guards--dread of death had been unknown to Trevor Chute, and never felt by him, even when he knew that he was supposed to be dying of fever or a wound, or when he lay in the dark jungle, where the thick and rank vegetation ran riot, as it were; where the Brahminese cobra had its lair, the tiger and the cheetah, too; where, heavy, hot, and oppressive, the vapour rose like steamy clouds about the stems of the trees, while his life-blood ebbed away, and he had the knowledge that, if undiscovered, he might die of thirst, of weakness, under the kuttack dagger of a mountain robber, or by the feet of a wild elephant, for oblivion thus clouded the end of many a comrade who was reported 'missing,' and no more was known; so Chute was not to recoil before a German rabble now.

He knocked down by main strength of arm and sheer weight of hand the two who had hold of Sir Carnaby, and were dragging him helplessly along the street; and then, with the aid of Travers, he assisted him towards an archway which opened off the street, while the rabble closed in upon them, showering blows and execrations, but impeding each other in their mad efforts; thus man after man of them, uttering groans and shouts, went down before the regular facers, dealt straight out from the shoulder by Chute and Travers into the eyes and jaws of their assailants, who had a wholesome Continental terror of 'the art de box,' as the French name it, while breathless, bewildered, and certainly appalled to find himself so suddenly become the sole victim of a dreadful mob, Sir Carnaby stood between his two defenders, his polite and deprecatory gestures (for voice he had none), and the elegance of his delicate white hands, as seen in the torchlight, exciting only the ridicule of the unwashed rabble.

Through the archway, which was narrow, they conveyed Sir Carnaby, and by their united strength succeeded in closing the door, and by an iron bar that was behind it completely excluding the crowd, who continued to shout and rave without as they surged against it and beat upon it with sticks and stones. Anon the crash of glass was heard, and then the cries of women, as the house itself was assailed.

Infuriated to find that their victim or victims, whom many of them now supposed to be some of their wealthy and oppressive monopolists, had escaped them, the blows upon the door were redoubled, but its strength baffled them.

'It is me they want, Chute, because I struck that rascal at the hotel,' said Sir Carnaby: 'leave me--they will tear you to pieces to get at me, the German brutes!'

'Leave you, Sir Carnaby! Never! If, even were you a stranger, I should stand by you, how much more am I bound to do so when you are the father of Clare Collingwood! And if I cannot by main strength save, I shall die with you--game, an Englishman to the last!'

They were in a court which had no outlet. From it an open stair led to a species of ancient gallery overlooking the street; it was a species of balcony, with pillars and arches carved of stone, like those in front of the wonderfully quaint Rathhaus, which was not far from it, and was built in the middle of the fifteenth century.

Their appearance in this place elicited a roar from the mob some fifteen feet below them, and hundreds of dirty hands were shaken clenched towards them, and hundreds of excited and upturned faces were visible in the red, uncertain glare of the torches that were held still by five or six of the rioters. But matters now began to look very serious; for the crowd was seen to part like the waves of the sea as a ladder was borne through it and planted against the wall. Then five or six men began to mount at once, while others pressed forward to follow, determined to visit the fugitives by escalade.

Travers looked bewildered, and Sir Carnaby still more so; but Trevor Chute, by habit, profession, and nature, had all that coolness in front of immediate peril, and utter indifference of personal risk, which made him renowned in his regiment and the idol of the soldiers, and he had been in many critical situations, where caution and decision had to be combined with instant action.

The head and shoulders of the uppermost man on the ladder had barely appeared above the front of the balcony when Chute seized the former by its two uprights, and thrust it fairly outward from the wall. For a moment it oscillated, or seemed to balance itself, and then, describing a radius of about thirty feet or more, fell back among the crowd with its load of ruffians.

Then shrieks and the rattle of musketry were heard, as the Prussian guard arrived from the Rathhaus, and by orders of a burgomaster poured in a volley of some twenty muskets or so, on which the mob took to flight, and dispersed in all directions, leaving behind two or three dead men and the maimed wretches who had been on the upper portion of the ladder.

So ended this episode of excitement and peril, after which the three Englishmen, to whom every species of apology was tendered--after due explanation given--were conducted by the armed night watch back to their hotel, and once more quietness settled over the little city of Lubeck.