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.