Chapter IX: A New Snare

In detailing the adventures of Leslie Colville and Robert Wodrow in the distant land where fate and the fortunes of war had cast them together, we have somewhat anticipated the time and the troubles brought upon Ellinor by the daring of her unscrupulous abductor.

The snares that had been laid for her, the loyal heart she had lost and now believed to be cold in the grave--all came before the girl with painful vividness, and she loathed herself for ever having listened, as she had done at Birkwoodbrae, to the artful wretch who from first to last had sought to lure her to destruction by so many specious falsehoods; for, in many ways, the baronet had now become so degraded in character that, so far as truth went, he was like the man mentioned by Mark Twain, who had such a sacred regard for truth that he never by any chance used it.

Sooth, however, to say, prudence and weariness at times suggested to Sir Redmond the abandonment of his enterprise and designs regarding Ellinor; at other times, obstinacy, distorted pride, and, more than all, inflamed passions and her apparent helplessness, spurred him on in his schemes. He felt now that, if these were unsuccessful, they could only be relinquished at peril and _exposé_ to himself.

Her inertia provoked and alarmed him. He would have preferred some of her former desperate energy, even though accompanied by undisguised repugnance of himself.

He knew that now, with Mary Wellwood, the luckless Ellinor must be numbered with the dead; the last despairing advertisements he had seen in the _Hamburger Nachrichten_ and other journals led him to infer that such must be the case, and that the sorrowing sister had no doubt left Altona in a state of grief, for which he cared not a jot.

He knew also that Ellinor was ignorant of Mary's precise whereabouts, whether she was still in Altona or had gone back to London or Birkwoodbrae; that she could not communicate with her, even by letter, save through him, and was thus completely in his power, as a baby or a bauble might have been; and he vaguely thought that if he could get her away, on any pretence, to Brussels or some quiet little village in the Netherlands, she would be still more so, and for the contingencies of the future he drew heavily on his bankers through Herr Burger, in the Gras Keller.

For the future--let the future take care of itself! He had broken with English society, if not with the police. Who was there, as a relation, to call him to account, and who had the right to do so? he asked of himself.

As he was not without fears or suspicions of his friend Mr. Adolphus Dewsnap, he resolved to get her away from the yacht.

'Tears--always tears!' said he, angrily, on the day after the _Flying Foam_ was moored alongside the jetty in the Binnenhafen. 'I daresay, like your sister, you are sorry for that fellow Colville--your "cousin" as he called himself--a good joke that! Very terrible, of course--cut off by the Cabul niggers, and so forth; but we can only die once. Hope he was duly prepared, as the devil-dodgers say, and all that sort of thing.'

In furtherance of his plan to get her away from the yacht, he said, quite deliberately,

'Your friend Mrs. Deroubigne has left Altona.'

'Left it--gone!' exclaimed Ellinor, in a weak voice, and grieved but not surprised.

'Yes.'

'For where?'

'To another residence in Hamburg, whither I shall shortly take you and leave you to relate your own adventures, for I am deuced tired of this kind of work.'

A gush of joy, but joy without the least gratitude, welled up in the heart of Ellinor, and she prepared with wonderful alacrity to accompany him, never suspecting that he was cajoling her and meant to put her in the hands of Frau Wyburg, who for a sum paid down had promised to keep her safely till he made other arrangements.

He could not take her to the _Kron Prinzen, L'Europe_, or any of the great hotels, for there she would have claimed and found protection, and for him she would, he knew, be quite helpless in the hands of Frau Wyburg and her husband; thus he resolved to keep his own counsel on leaving the yacht as to where he was taking her; but Mr. Dolly Dewsnap and Kingbolt too had shrewdly their own ideas on the subject.

'Sorry we are not to have your company to the coast of France, Miss Ellinor,' said Dewsnap, as he pressed a glass of wine upon her ere she departed.

'I don't think you'll miss much,' said Ringbolt, as the pale girl made no reply. 'There you get sour wine, and they call it _vin ordinaire_, and all kinds of offal cooked with fine French names, so that I defy you to tell whether you are eating a bird of the air or a fish of the sea. Ah, there is no place like Old England.'

Mr. Dolly Dewsnap was about this time, as his subordinate Kingbolt said, 'three sheets in the wind,' even before going to a late dinner at _Hotel de Russie_ in the Jungfernsteig, and he was propping himself against the cabin table while sipping his sherry, and regarding Ellinor with a leering expression of admiration.

'Won't you have a cigarette, Miss Ellinor?' said he, suddenly producing his cigar-case.

'Scotch girls, and English ones too, don't smoke,' said Sleath, angrily.

'Why not?' responded Dewsnap, sharply; 'by Jingo, I knew a Russian Princess--the Princess Wroguenoff--who always smoked Turkish tobacco in a Manzanita pipe; and a charming woman she was.'

'So you don't know her now, Dolly?'

'How do you know?' asked the other, who was disposed to be quarrelsome just then.

'You speak of her in the past tense.'

'The droski waits, sir,' said Gaiters, suddenly appearing in the companion-way.

Sir Redmond gave his hand to Ellinor, who was ready, hatted and shawled, and barely gave a bow of farewell to Dewsnap, as she ascended to the deck, and bade adieu to her Vierlander attendant.

Evening had fallen now, and the gas-lamps were reflected in the murky and muddy waters of the Binnenhafen, as she stepped ashore, and entered a close droski (as those cabs are named which ply for hire in all the principal thoroughfares of Hamburg) unnoticed by any but some dock porters, and an organ-grinder with a monkey 'appropriately dressed in Highland costume,' as Sleath remarked while putting his head out of the window, and telling Gaiters, who was seated beside the driver, where they were to go.

The vehicle proceeded slowly, and Ellinor, while in a fever of impatience, and without hearing what Sir Redmond was saying to her, looked forth from the windows alternately, and recognised the church of St. Nicolai as they passed through the Hopfen Market, the street called the Gras Keller, and the long and stately Neuerwall, after which they seemed to traverse streets that were unknown to her, old, mean, and dirty.

'Need I urge upon you how strangely our paths seem to cross each other--how strangely our lives seemed linked together, Ellinor?' said he, attempting to take one of her hands caressingly.

This roused her, and she withdrew it sharply.

'Still perverse!' he resumed, with knitted brows. 'Fate has thrown us together for a third time. You escaped me twice; but the third time mine you shall be, so sure as you hear me speak!'

She made not the slightest response, and surveyed with surprise the network of canals and wet ditches the droski crossed by a succession of iron bridges.

'Ellinor,' said Sir Redmond again, 'you are over-excited; you have not recovered from the terror of your accident--the sickness and storm at the river mouth.'

Her face was pale and rigid; her eyes alternately flashing fire at the prospect of freedom, and then growing cold as steel with indignation.

To her it began to seem impossible that Mrs. Deroubigne and Mary could have left their pretty and airy villa at Altona, on the grassy bank of the Elbe, to dwell in such a locality as that in which she found herself when the droski stopped.

'Here we are, sir,' said Gaiters, jumping down and touching his cockaded hat.

A bell that emitted a dismal sound resounded to the downward pull of the iron handle, and a large door--but all the doorways are large in Hamburg--unfolded, showing a gloomy porch, lighted only by the oil-lamp that burned feebly before a madonna perched on the wall to give the house an external air of respectability.

After a conference with some one within, Gaiters reappeared at the droski window.

'Madame Wyburg,' he said, 'tells me that Mrs. Deroubigne has left this place two days ago, and gone, she believes, to Brussels.'

'To Brussels!' exclaimed Ellinor, sick with disappointment and dismay, as she sank back on her seat. 'I cannot go there vaguely in search of them----'

'Of course not; so what then?'

'Oh, let me get back to London--to Grosvenor Square!'

'You are too ill to travel just now, and must remain with kind Madame Wyburg for a few days till the exact address of Mrs. Deroubigne is found,' said Sleath, in the most persuasive tone he could adopt; 'but here comes the master of the house,' he added, as a very singular figure appeared.

A man short in stature, but thick-set and powerfully built, with leery grey eyes, dissipated and bloated features, and a ragged red moustache, wearing a quaint garb, entirely black, with a plaited ruff round his neck, a wig curled and powdered, a short Spanish cloak, and a long Toledo sword, with a Mother Hubbard hat on his head, sharply pointed, and about two feet high.

This strange apparition of the sixteenth century doffed his steeple-crowned hat to Ellinor, who after a time discovered that the Herr Wyburg, among various other less respectable avocations, whereby to eke out a living, was one of the sixteen _Reiten-Diener_, or hired mourners, who--instead of the friends of the deceased--attend funeral processions in Hamburg, carrying out Charles Dickens's well-known definition of such a ceremony as 'a masquerade dipped in ink.' He had just come from having a 'deep drink' with his comrades after an interment at the _Begrabnissplatze_, or grand cemetery, outside the Ulricus Bastion, for in their ways these fellows are precisely like the human carrion crows we may see daily perched on the top of London hearses returning from Kensal Green, Brompton, or elsewhere, in a state of hat-band, jollity, and gin.

He also bowed low and leeringly to Sir Redmond Sleath.

This was not the first of the baronet's acquaintance with these people. He had been aided by the Frau Wyburg in more than one nefarious intrigue, the victim of which had dropped out of society, and by her husband in more than one shady gambling transaction in a 'hell' of the Adolphus Platze, ere he succeeded to the title his father's shady politics had won; so the trio knew each other thoroughly.

Ellinor, conceiving that she must be safer in the care of one of her own sex than on board the yacht, agreed to remain with Frau Wyburg till she proceeded to London or Brussels, and from that moment found herself more than ever a hopeless prisoner.

The frau was a pale, little woman, with black hair, wicked dark eyes, a square and resolute-looking jaw, a cruel mouth, and a face generally on which, after a time, Ellinor could not look without a shudder when the woman's real character became known to her; but as yet she was disposed to cling to her as a friend--a protector--in her helplessness and excessive debility after all she had undergone, and she gratefully accepted at her hands a cup of hot coffee in her cosy parlour, with its gay chintz curtains and polished oak floor, while her husband, with an eye to monetary business, drew Sir Redmond aside to another apartment.