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.