Chapter XII: The Plot Thickens

Finding that his visits were fast making Ellinor seriously ill, Sir Redmond, at the request of Herr Wyburg, did not intrude upon her for a day or two, yet he called and left a sham message concerning his continued inquiries for Mrs. Deroubigne.

'Where are the friends of the Fraulein?' asked Herr Wyburg, twisting his coarse, red moustache; 'in England?'

'No, I rather think not,' replied Sir Redmond.

'Where, then?'

'They were in Altona last, I believe,' said the other, unguardedly.

'Altona! In Altona! _Ach Gott!_ Then she is the Fraulein for information concerning whom, alive or dead, such rewards were offered by placards in the Bourse and in the _Hamburger Nachtrichten_.'

'Nonsense,' said Sleath, discovering that the admission was a mistake.

'It is no nonsense,' exclaimed Wyburg, trying to remember the amount of the reward offered, his cupidity at once excited by the consideration whether or not it was worth his while to betray his employer.

After the latter departed, he remembered the cunning and avaricious gleam that came into the watery grey eyes of the German, and a suspicion of his fidelity began to assume tangible shapes in the tainted mind of Sleath.

The chances that after all his trouble, care, cunning, and expense she might be delivered from his snares, taken from his power, an exposé made, and doubtless an appeal to the police of the city, to the British consul and the four burgomasters, before his intrigue had been successfully developed and Ellinor's voice silenced, filled him with exasperation; and cursing his own imprudent admission to Herr Wyburg, into whose hands he had thus put himself, he drank so deeply at his hotel that night that, between his passion for Ellinor, and fierce suspicion of his German tools, his mind became inflamed to a dangerous degree, and he resolved that before the church bells tolled midnight he would visit the persecuted girl, for the purpose of making assurance doubly sure with her and his two paid creatures.

'Yes,' he hiccupped, with an oath, as he was taken in a droski across the Adolphs-brucke and the Nuerwall, 'I'll end it all, or know the reason why! I have played the whining fool too long. Am I to pass my days in slaving to study her whim-whams?--to overcome her prudery and sham scruples? Am I a fool or a boy? Of what or of whom am I afraid? I will now listen only to the dictates of my own mind.'

He muttered much more to the same purpose aloud, and, quitting the droski at the corner of the Grosse Bleichen, thrust a double-mark into the driver's hand, and, without thinking of change, proceeded on foot to the house of Herr Wyburg.

A mass with three pointed gables, and each storey overhanging the other on beams of timber, rose before him. All was dark in and around it when he approached the door, and, tipsy though he was, he could hear--he thought--the beating of his heart, and for a moment--but a moment only--an emotion of timidity, even of shame, came over him.

'Pshaw!' he exclaimed, with a malediction, and rang the bell.

After some delay and parleying, he was admitted by the drowsy Lenchen, who surveyed him with more annoyance than respect in her visage; but he strode past her without a word, and ascended to Herr Wyburg's sitting-room.

He found that worthy attired in his grotesque _Reiter-Diener_ costume, with his steeple-crowned hat and toledo on the table beside him. He was asleep in an easy-chair, and, after being at a funeral, had drank and smoked himself into a state of partial insensibility.

'I wish to see the Fraulein,' said Sleath to Frau Wyburg, who glanced at him inquiringly.

'She must be asleep,' was the answer.

'I must see and speak with her.'

'Ah, you have found her friends, then?' said Frau Wyburg, with one of her detestable leers.

Sleath made no reply, but, snatching a candle from the table, proceeded at once towards the apartment of Ellinor, with a strange pallor in his face, his bloodshot eyes aflame, and his steps unsteady.

He hesitated a moment, and then turned the handle of the door. It was locked on the inside, and refused to yield.

He might naturally have expected this; but it served to surprise and exasperate him, for at that moment he was in the mood to fight with his own shadow.

'Ellinor, rouse yourself--I have news for you--news at last!' he exclaimed, and knocked on the door-panels more noisily than respectfully.

But there was no response from within. He applied his ear to the keyhole; there was not a sound to be heard, and, as he had been given to understand that young girls generally slept lightly, it was impossible he could fail to waken her.

He knocked more loudly again, but failed to elicit the slightest response. Then he heard the mocking laugh of Frau Wyburg, who was listening at the foot of the staircase, and, believing that already he was being deluded, a gust of fury seized him, and applying his foot to the door, and as it was old and worm-eaten, he dashed it open with ease, and entered the darkened room.

It was empty, and no cry of alarm or consternation followed his furious irruption into it. The upheld candle showed him in a moment that its occupant was no longer there. Ellinor was gone!

Her bed had been unslept in; her hat and the jacket she had got on board the _Flying Foam_ were lying on it.

Where was she? Where hidden away?

That double villain Wyburg had deceived him after all, was Sir Redmond's instant thought, and, impressed by the rewards offered in the _Hamburger Nachtrichten_ and elsewhere, had 'sold' him and given her up to Mrs. Deroubigne.

Though infuriated with rage and disappointment he became sober in a moment, and turned to confront Wyburg and his wife; and, to do them justice, their astonishment, incredulity, and alarm had not the least appearance of being simulated, but were genuine.

She was concealed from him perhaps in some other apartment.

Frau Wyburg emphatically denied that she was.

'Silence, hag!' exclaimed Sir Redmond; 'had you lived three centuries ago, you would have been burned before the Rathhaus as a witch!'

Her black eyes gleamed dangerously at this injurious remark, and on Sir Redmond turning away to prosecute a search elsewhere in defiance of the palpable evidence that the door had been locked on the inside, and that the key was still in the lock, Herr Wyburg, who was mad with consternation and drinking, roughly barred his way.

On the second finger of his right hand Sir Redmond wore a cluster of diamonds; so prominent and sharp were they that they cut through his tightly-fitting kid glove. These brilliants, as he dealt Wyburg a facer, laid his cheek completely open and nearly tore his left eye out, thus a terrible and most unseemly brawl ensued.

Wyburg was a man of enormous strength, and for whom the enervated baronet was no match in any way. Maddened by pain, the sight of his own blood flowing freely, by absinthe and _eau-de-vie_, inspirited by revenge and greed together, he resolved to make Sleath a victim now, and, though suffering from what the French call the _folie paralytique_ which the two compounds referred to produce, he was simply savage, yet methodical, in his proceedings.

Rushing upon Sleath like an infuriated bull, he closed with him, and hurling him down the staircase flung him in a heap, bleeding and senseless, at the bottom.

When he recovered, Sleath found himself, secured in an attic of Wyburg's house, a prisoner, bound securely with ropes, stiff, sore, and bruised, his face and shirt front all plastered with blood.

Mr. John Gaiters, all the subsequent day, and indeed the day after, was sorely perplexed by the non-appearance of his master at the Hotel Russie, especially as the yacht of Mr. Dewsnap was now ready for sea.

Frau Wyburg assured him that they had seen nothing of Sir Redmond for several days, and as the young lady had gone he had most probably accompanied her; and with this perplexing intelligence the valet was compelled to content himself.

This story or suggestion seemed to receive a certain corroboration when Gaiters, who was well-nigh at his wit's end, on pursuing his inquiries at Herr Burger's bank in the Gras Keller, where Sir Redmond had letters of credit, found that a cheque, duly signed by him, had been presented there on the preceding day and cashed for a pretty large sum.

Meanwhile, unable to communicate with the external world, Sir Redmond remained, bound hand and foot, a wretched prisoner in the power of the Wyburgs, one of whose first measures was the extortion of the cheque in question as the price of his freedom; but, though the money was duly paid, they still kept him in their hands, being somewhat doubtful whether to release or destroy him.

He knew not whether they had actually betrayed him and given over Ellinor to her sister and chaperone, Mrs. Deroubigne, and in some respects he cared not now. In his innate selfishness of heart, he cursed her bitterly as being in one sense the cause of his present predicament, and he longed with a savage energy to be free that he might turn his back on Hamburg for ever.

He strove with all his strength and energy to burst his bonds, while the veins in his forehead swelled and the perspiration poured over it, but strove, in vain, while Herr Wyburg, with his hideous visage tied up in a blood-stained cloth, sat mockingly in his chair, smoking his meerschaum, and sipping absinthe from time to time out of a green cup-shaped German glass.

The care with which the cheque had been executed and cashed induced Herr Wyburg and his spouse to extort at all risks another, for their greed and cupidity were thoroughly awakened now, and they had the miserable man completely in their power; and the circumstance that the funerals of one or two opulent burgers--one of them actually that of a senator of the city--were taking place, in which the Herr with his battered visage could take no part, and consequently pocket no fees, made him the more resolved on extortion; and, if the worst came to the worst, there were the waters of the Fleethen below the windows of the house.

'You'll never see that girl again unless you sign this other little cheque,' said Frau Wyburg, with grim decision.

'I don't care a doit about the girl; keep her,' replied Sleath through his clenched teeth. 'For God-sake,' he added, imploringly, 'give me something to drink; I am perishing of thirst.'

'Well, perish, then, if you won't sign this paper--it is stamped and ready; but, till you sign it or die, the water remains in this flagon,' replied Wyburg, placing a tall German beer-jug full of sparkling water in tantalising proximity to the wretched man's lips, and then putting it on the table, while madame looked on approvingly, her black eyes gleaming, her pale face radiant with malice and greed, her jaw looking more square, and her tiger mouth more tigerish than ever.

Somehow the words of Wyburg seemed to introduce a practical and reasonable, if intensely obnoxious, element into what seemed the phantasmal horror of a prolonged nightmare to Sir Redmond Sleath.

'What is the sum?' he asked, huskily.

'Three hundred pounds English money.'

He groaned with rage at this renewed extortion; but, if money is precious, life is more precious still, and these Wyburgs he knew to be wretches without an atom of scruple, so he signed the cheque, which the Herr, who knew his autograph perfectly well, folded and handed to his better-half with a smile of grim satisfaction.

'Unbind me now,' said Sleath, faintly.

'Not if I know it, yet awhile,' replied the ruffian, who, though he acted so methodically, was half mad with revenge for his gashed visage, and the imbibing of absinthe and Danish corn-brandy.

'What are you about to do with me?' asked Sleath, imploringly, and with mortal fear in his face and accents.

Wyburg made no reply, but proceeded with great deliberation to bore two holes in the wainscot of the attic, and, passing through them the ends of the ropes which bound his prisoner, told him that they were being secured by the Frau to a little cask of powder on the other side of the partition, and inserted in which there was a loaded and cocked revolver, and that the instant he moved or attempted pursuit or flight the tension of the ropes would cause an explosion that would blow him and the house to pieces!

Herr Wyburg had made that which to him was a small fortune out of Sir Redmond, and dared not face any inquiry in case of that individual escaping and appealing to law; he was far in arrear with his house rent; he had sold his furniture twice over to different Jews in the Scharsteinweg, and now resolved to quit Hamburg for purer air; and, inspired by malice and revenge, he and his wife took their immediate departure, leaving the wretched Sleath minus watch, purse, and rings, and, as we have described, face to face with a miserable death, if he attempted to escape!