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!