Chapter XI: In Hamburg Still

Ellinor was altogether unlike any other girl on whom the evil eyes of Herr Wyburg had rested, in Hamburg at least. Her face was so clearly cut, with pride in its contour, a dreamy thought its eyes, and something almost angelic in its purity--as Tennyson has it,

'A sight to make an old man young.'

The three days' unexpected absence of Sir Redmond rather alarmed Herr Wyburg. He knew not how to account for it, and mightily, with all his ruffianism, dreaded the gendarmes; thus he was genuinely glad when, in the dusk of the third day, the baronet presented himself at his house and inquired for his charge.

'She is silent and dull as usual, and anxious for the address of a lady friend,' replied Wyburg. 'I don't understand all this,' he added, in a growling tone; 'have you made a fool of this girl or of yourself?'

'Of myself as yet, I think,' replied Sleath, with an oath.

'Every man does so, once in his life at least, and generally oftener,' said the German; 'but I thought you were too wide awake for that now. With her sadness and her tears this girl is a profound bore to us, even if paid for! I wish you would take some means to cheer her--to please her--if you can.'

'Don't talk to me about the idiotic vagaries of a girl!' snapped Sir Redmond.

'I do not wish to do so, mem Herr; but what would you have me say?' replied Wyburg. 'Look here--it is all stuff and gammon about the Fraulein being your wife. I lived too long in England not to have my eyes opened.'

'Well?'

'You love her in your own fashion, I suppose?'

'And she?'

'Seems to hate you,' replied the German, with a grin.

'Perhaps she is not the first of her sex who has said no when she meant yes.'

'You don't mean to marry her, I suppose?'

'I have a wife, already,' replied Sleath. as he carefully manipulated and prepared a cigar.

'Der Teufel!' said Herr Wyburg, puffing out a cloud from his huge meerschaum, 'but such things will happen.'

'I have been engaged in many a lark and scrape, as you, Wyburg, know well enough, but never in one so peculiar as this. The girls who eloped with me before were always willing enough.'

'She may turn ill--downright ill--on our hands unless some change is brought about, and may have to be sent to the Krankenhaus; and then--what then?'

Sleath had not thought of this contingency, so he became alarmed and asked to see Ellinor.

On his entrance she rose at once and came towards him, her eyes dilated with hope or expectation and her lips parted, but without offering him a hand.

'You have news for me at last?' she said.

'News--about what--about whom?'

'Mrs. Deroubigne and Mary.'

'I have sent or gone daily to the post-office in the Post Strasse, but neither by telegraph nor inquiry can I discover their whereabouts in Brussels,' he replied, unblushingly: 'and even if we went there--'

'There! that is not to be thought of. I shall take the steamer for London,' exclaimed Ellinor, looking round her as if she would start that moment.

'No, you won't, my dear girl--yet a while, at least.'

'I shall go mad--mad if I am kept here prisoner for another day!' exclaimed Ellinor, wildly, as she wrung her hands and then pressed them on her temples, while Herr Wyburg looked with a kind of gloomy scorn from one to the other.

He had many experiences in his career, but this was to him one somewhat new.

Ellinor was so painfully agitated that Sir Redmond was fain to resort to the most specious falsehoods to soothe and calm her; he promised most solemnly to write or telegraph to the British Ambassador at Brussels, to the postal authorities there, and so forth; and, with intense anger and mortification in his heart at his bad success, he left her to rejoin Dewsnap, and have a 'deep drink' at the Hotel Russie, and perhaps a turn into the Schweitzer Pavilion, feeling inclined on one hand--all inflamed as he was with her beauty and helplessness--to force her in some way to love him; and on the other, to sail away with his friend in the _Flying Foam_, and leave her to her fate in the hands of Herr Wyburg!

He did neither for a day or two yet, but showered presents upon her; he ransacked the Neuer Wall and the Alster Wall for all kinds of pretty things, and bought up the best bouquets of the Vierlander flower-girls by the score; and Frau Wyburg only looked forward to the time when she could appropriate all the presents, when the girl was away or--dead.

All his presents and pretty trifles, over which Lenchen went into ecstasies, remained, as he saw, untouched in their cases or packing paper.

'You disdain all these things which I feel such delight in offering you,' said he, reproachfully.

She wrung her interlaced fingers, but made no reply.

A red gleam shot out of Sleath's eyes; he bit his lip, and the Frau Wyburg laughed, while her black orbs glittered mischievously, and her mouth wore its cruel expression more unpleasantly than usual.

But for his early entanglement with his mother's maid--Seraphina Fubsby, whose absurd name he loathed now--an event which too probably had warped his whole life, he felt at times--but at times only--that he would gladly have offered his hand and all he possessed to the sweet and gentle Ellinor; and, though he knew how she shrank from him, and loathed him, he could not help trying to play the old game he had begun at Birkwoodbrae, by urging again and again that his marriage was untrue, illegal, that he would prove it so, and also urging his wild, blind passion for herself, on the plea of her wonderful beauty, as Richard of England did his passion for the Lady Anne, having rarely found an appeal to a woman on _that_ score fail him.

But he might as well have spoken to a statue now, and as she could extract no tidings of her sister or Mrs. Deroubigne from him, she thought only of escaping from the house of his odious friends. She was now aware that she had been entrapped by a specious story, and that neither Mary nor Mrs. Deroubigne would seem to have resided with them after leaving Altona, as Frau Wyburg and her husband, though 'coached' by Sleath and Gaiters, evidently knew nothing about them save their names, and a new dismay seized the unhappy girl.

Escaping--but how? The avenues to the street were too closely secured, and the window of her room was too high above the water of the Fleethen to afford the least chance of escape there; while the only boats that passed were those of the Vierlander people, laden with vegetables, pulled swiftly along at rare and distant intervals.

To appeal to the Wyburgs she knew would be vain. Her pure, pale face with its dreamy eyes, into which there now came a hunted expression, failed to win either their pity or commiseration; but escape she must, or die!

Ellinor knew now that in Sleath the animal nature predominated, and that she might have to suffer from his cruelty and violence if she remained in his power.

But how was she to escape without money, without a knowledge of the language, of the very locality in which he had placed her, without bodily strength, and with only intense horror and aversion to nerve and inspire her?

On whom could she cast herself?

Certainly not the repulsive Frau Wyburg, with her wicked black eyes and square, resolute jaws, or her equally repellent husband, with the leering eyes and ragged red moustache? What had she done that Fate should have cast her into such unscrupulous, and to her altogether inconceivable, hands?

'She grows paler, if possible, every day,' said Wyburg to Sleath. 'If this sort of thing goes on, it will be an affair for the Krankenhaus,' he added, in a growling voice, referring to the great public hospital in the suburb of St. George.

Dewsnap's yacht was getting ready for sea, and was now anchored by the dolphins, outside the Binnenhafen, and Sleath was resolved to end his affair with Ellinor in some fashion or other, for the hints of Wyburg alarmed him.

So he recommended to Ellinor a drive in an open droski, attended, not by himself--he was too wary for that--but by the Frau Wyburg and Gaiters, who was to have a seat on the dickey. He thought there was little to fear in this, as Ellinor knew not a word of German, and Gaiters was a careful fellow.

Indeed, Mr. John Gaiters--though to all appearance a thoroughly well-bred English serving-man, automaton-like in movements, reserved, and when it suited him most civil in speech, and without an atom of scruple--had one redeeming bull-dog feature in his character, and that was intense fidelity to his dissolute, yet liberal, master.

The afternoon was beautiful and sunny. The drive along the Jungfernsteig and Alster Damm was charming enough to rouse even Ellinor from her lethargy, but not to still her resolution to escape, if she could.

The scene, after all she had undergone of late, proved a gay and enchanting one--the rows of stately mansions; the quadruple lines of trees in full leaf; the deep blue of the Binner Alster, its bosom studded by pretty pleasure-boats, tiny steamers, and flocks of snow-white swans; and the German bands playing before the great hotels, which were all gaily decorated with the flags of various nations, as if for a holiday. But ere long there occurred that which to her was a crushing episode.

While Frau Wyburg stopped the droski to listen to a band that was playing amid a group of people before the great Kron Prinzen Hotel, Ellinor perceived a handsome open carriage close by, and in it were seated an elderly gentleman and two ladies, who had their eyes fixed on her.

The trio were Lord and Lady Dunkeld with their daughter, Blanche Galloway!

Ellinor started from her seat, as they were quite within earshot, and in their power lay succour--help--rescue!

'Lady Dunkeld--Lady Dunkeld--Mrs. Deroubigne!' she exclaimed, wildly; 'you can doubtless give me her address? You know me--you know me--Ellinor Wellwood!'

They all heard her; but Lord Dunkeld looked steadily askance, showing only the facial angle which he thought so like that of the Grande Monarque, while the two ladies gazed with wonder at first, and then with frigid hauteur; and Blanche, who, we have said, was strong in love, ambition, and hate, said something to the coachman, who drove away at once, while the usually imperturbable Gaiters, in some alarm, took the droski in an opposite direction, and Ellinor sank back despairing on her seat, as she was conveyed at a galloping pace back to the gloomy house overlooking the Bleichen Fleet. The deadly and sickening surmises of what these cold-hearted people thought, of what the world might say, think, or suspect, seemed now to take a tangible form, and the soul of the girl seemed to die within her.

It was so fated, however, that the secret of her adventures was never to be made known to the world of Mrs. Grundy--by the lips of Sir Redmond Sleath, at least.

While this daring and extraordinary conspiracy against the freedom and peace of Ellinor was in progress in that obscure and gloomy house, among the damp and miasmatic districts of the Fleethen, her sister Mary and Mrs. Deroubigne were still in the pretty villa at Altona.

The former was now in deep mourning--so deep that it was almost the same as the weeds of a widow, for she felt herself a widow in heart, indeed; and by the double loss she had endured the girl thought that Fate was very cruel to her.

She had received a pleasant, a delightfully-soothing letter from old Dr. Wodrow, condoling with her on the sad news from Cabul, all ignorant as he was yet of the escape of his son amid the new calamity in that fatal city--fatal to Britons, at least.

'Any place in which we are perfectly happy is a place we glorify and transform,' says a writer: and in the joy of her engagement to Leslie Colville, notwithstanding the perils he had to face, Mary had glorified their pretty abode by the Elbe at Altona.

That was all ended and over, and now the place had become to her one of double gloom, and associated with a double sorrow.

'Ah, Madame Deroubigne,' said the young Baron Rolandsburg, 'your charming villa has now not unnaturally become to you a place of calamitous associations--most unhomely,' he added. '_Ja-ja!_ it is always so after misfortunes come.'

And now as Altona had become so repugnant--a place of such horror to both Mary Wellwood and Mrs. Deroubigne, the time was fast approaching when they were to take their departure for London.