Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  And the stranger was but one of several. Men sprang, a crowd of them from the doorway, came hurrying across the floor, ran towards us, like hounds in view of their quarry. Waechter saw them and saw the pistol, but coward as he was, he was desperate. With the bar raised above his head he leapt on the leader. I looked to see the fellow, a small man, shoot him down.

  Instead, the stranger jumped nimbly aside, evaded the blow, then springing in like a wild-cat, he clubbed Waechter mercilessly on the head with the butt of his pistol. The brute staggered back, dropping the bar, sought blindly to recover his footing, fell. In a trice three men were on him, binding him, while their leader drove back the gaping, mouthing dwarf, whose sluggish senses had not kept him abreast of the scene.

  When — but not before — he, too, had been overpowered, and tied up, the man with the pistol took up the lanthorn and turned to me. And without surprise, for by this time I was beyond surprise, I saw, that my rescuer was Grussbaum.

  “Gott im Himmel!” he exclaimed, as he viewed my state, “What in the world were they doing to you, Excellency?”

  I smiled feebly, but I could not speak. I did not faint, though I suppose I came near to it. But words were beyond me, and with a grunt of dismay Grussbaum shifted the lanthorn and looked at the girl. She was leaning against a post, one of those that supported the roof, leaning, her strength all gone, and weeping as if her heart would break.

  With rough kindness, he patted her on the shoulder. “No fear now, Fraulein. No fear now, and no harm. But if you’d wept five minutes ago instead of jumping on that brute’s back there might have been harm! There, there, it is all over! It is all over. But—” turning the light once more on me, and speaking in a tone of wonder, “what the devil were the knaves doing to him? And why, as that brute had the bar and his chance, didn’t he knock out your brains, mein Herr, and have done with it? Instead of — but a knife,” addressing one of his posse. “A knife, man. Cut these cords and set the gentleman on his feet.”

  Two men came forward and while one separated the cords the other severed them one by one. But when they lifted me, still speechless and smiling foolishly, to my feet, I could not stand. The men had to hold me up until something on which I could sit was brought; and the pain that followed, as the blood began again to run freely in my hands and feet almost unmanned me.

  “Pheugh!” Grussbaum muttered, holding the lanthorn once more to my face. “What the devil were they doing to him? Run, you, Stattler, to the Coffee House and bring some wine. And hurry, man, hurry. The young lady, too, will be the better for some.”

  But when the man had gone for the wine I found my tongue. “They were going — to drop me,” I whispered, “through the trap — to the cellar!” And such a shudder — though the danger was over — seized me, as again caught away my voice.

  “Ho! ho! So that was it!” Grussbaum exclaimed, with the relish of a connoisseur adding a rare piece to his gallery. “That was it!” And going, with the light, to where I had been found he examined the trap-door and the bolt. “Here!” he said to one of the men. “Fetch the bar and knock this out!”

  The man obeyed and under the second blow, the trap fell with a hideous clatter — hideous at any rate to me. Grussbaum peered into the black hole, playing the light to and fro. “The next floor is open,” he muttered. “I can’t see farther. Do you,” to the man, “go down and see if it is open to the cellar.” Then to Waechter, “You devil!” he said, “I wish I had the right to drop you down! I’d knock out the bolt with pleasure.”

  “He murdered Herr Ellis,” I muttered. “He’s buried in the cellar — below this. She” — I nodded weakly towards the girl— “she knows. They told her.”

  “Ha! Well — I thought so!”

  “You did!” I stared at him, the power to think gradually returning to me. “Why?” And then, remembering Frau Waechter, “ But the woman? Have you the woman? “ I cried.

  “Neck and heels!” he replied, licking his lips. “We were on the point of forcing the door when she came out and we took her. Gott! If she had not come out we should have made a fine mess of it!”

  “You would have been too late,” I said with a shudder, and overcome by the thought I closed my eyes.

  But the wine came, and refreshed by the draught, I stood up, leaning on his arm. “We’ll go now,” he said, looking round complacently. “ You’ll be better in your bed. But first I must give some orders. The three to the jail!” he continued briskly, in a voice of authority, “ and see them well fettered. They’ll be food for the Reichsrichter. And you, Hogner, go to the Governor and tell him that the job’s done here, and all’s safe — say, with my compliments that I was right about Herr Ellis and I’ve proof.

  “But I’ll be round with him in an hour, when I’ve seen His Excellency comfortable. And the young lady? To be sure, order a room and a warmed bed at the Coffee House and a woman to see to her. Do that first as you go. And let two men stay on guard here until to-morrow — we’ll do what is necessary in the cellar then. That is all, I think. And now,” turning to me, “ if you can walk, mein Herr, we are ready.”

  “The Fraulein first,” I muttered, drawing back. “And get a doctor for her,” I added. “And some soup or something — at once. She has been in their hands a week.”

  “The devil she has!” he replied. “Well, the Grand Duchess will be satisfied now. Her Highness has sent to Berlin about her, and driven Herr Justus wild with her inquiries. I had an express about her yesterday and orders to search along the road. But come, mein Herr, come. The sooner you are out of this place, the better for your sleep to-night.”

  But I would not go until I had stammered a word of thanks to her, and seen her out. Then, more lights having been brought, we formed a slow procession down the narrow, steep, worm-eaten staircase, and so through that hateful mildewed doorway, and out into the pure air of the night.

  I looked up in reverent thankfulness, not without a pitiful thought of Perceval as I saw in the narrow slit of sky above us, a single star, shining calm and clear. Thence, we proceeded, dazzled by the smoky light of flares and pressed on by a hundred curious gazers, across the corner of the Shoe Market, to be welcomed on the threshold of the inn by an astonished landlord, who beamed upon us more benignantly than ever.

  But when they were going to lead me to my old bedroom on the second floor I recoiled. “ Not there!” I exclaimed, “anywhere but there!” For the room seemed to me to be pervaded by poor Ellis’s presence, and I shrank from the thought of lying sleepless below the window which had witnessed that bloody scene. “Give me another room! Any other room!’

  “Certainly, certainly, as the gentleman pleases,” agreed the complaisant host. “And this room — the young lady may have it.”

  “No! No!” I protested, more strongly than before. “Rather I than she!”

  “Well, good, good,” the landlord agreed. But he looked his surprise. “ We will manage somehow. Hurry,” to a chambermaid, “and warm another bed, two beds — come and I will show you. In a minute, mein Herr, all shall be ready. In a minute!”

  “In the meantime,” said Grussbaum, “you won’t want me, Excellency. You are in good hands now.”

  “On the contrary I do want you,” I replied testily, relapsing with a sigh of relief on a chest in the passage. “ I want to know who you are, Herr Grussbaum.”

  He smiled. “ Well, not Herr Grussbaum,” he rejoined slyly. “ Though as a travelling name it was very well. I am Herr Lieutenant Platen, assistant to Herr Gruner.”

  “Then all that at the barrier — about your sick wife and your poverty—”

  “Was an old dodge,” with smiling complacency.

  “And the object?”

  “That I might watch over you, unsuspected by anyone.

  Excellency — even by you. You see Herr Justus was sure that either the persons you were in search of had fled the place long ago; or that if they were still in Perleberg, and you by chance came on them, they would know more of you than
you of them. In that event it was by an attempt on you that they would be most likely to betray themselves, and I was sent, not only to be on the look-out for that and the evidence it might furnish, but also to see to your safety.

  “For the authorities had no mind to face the trouble that the disappearance of another Englander would cause. But I had to watch you, unsuspected even by you, and to that end we could devise nothing better than the little rumpus at the barrier. You took me up in the presence of fifty travellers, to half of whom I had already applied.”

  “And suppose one of them had taken you in?” I said. “There was an officer at the barrier, who would have said I was a rogue and driven me off — for the time.”

  “But how did you know,” I asked curiously “that I should take you up?”

  He looked at me, smiling — and no man could have been less like the sneaking, white-faced, down-trodden Grussbaum whom I had befriended. “Well, you were English,” he answered frankly. “And we thought that we had taken the length of your foot, Excellency. And you see we were right.”

  “And that was why,” I exclaimed suddenly enlightened, “the police let you go at that place by the water.”

  “Yes. But you see I dared not give myself away in public even to the police — stupid fellows! I had to see the Chief alone. Then it was simple.”

  “I see,” I replied. “ It puzzled me at the time.”

  “Yes, I had to tell you a little fiction — to quiet you.” I nodded. “And when did you begin to connect the Waechters — with the murder?” I asked.

  “To-day only! This very afternoon, mein Herr, and not an hour earlier. But I had seen pretty quickly that they were blackbirds, gaolbirds; and to put them off their guard, should they have any designs on you, I left you the moment we arrived here. But I only drove out a stage and in again by another road. Within three hours I was back in Perleberg, had had the roads watched, and had made arrangements to have you shadowed wherever you went.

  “Then to-day I got some scent of the murder, through a story a chambermaid told me of a woman and a girl who slept here the night Herr Ellis disappeared. I thought the story louche — queer, you understand, and I fancied that the woman and the girl smacked of the two in the Waechters’ party. It had vexed me when you turned off the road to follow what I thought was none of your business. But when I had listened to the chambermaid’s story, and had turned it over every way, I saw—”

  “That I was not so foolish after all!” I said, colouring a little — for I knew that it was no thought of Ellis that had sent me after them.

  “No, not quite that,” he replied with a gleam of humour in his eye, “but that you had shot at a pigeon and killed a crow, mein Herr. Which happens once in a thousand times. Unfortunately I took a little walk to turn the matter over, and see how it fell in with what I had seen of the young lady and the Waechters; and, meantime, the foolish fellow who had shadowed you to that devilish place next door hesitated to break in the door until I could be found.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “And now,” briskly, “to bed! To bed, Excellency! And I should recommend a doctor’s draught, or you will be falling through that flap till daylight! I’ll send him to you, and I must go myself to the Governor. He’s been on tenter-hooks lest something should happen to you. It would have made things unpleasant for him, you see.”

  He went, and presently the doctor came in his place, an old man in a cauliflower wig, who sat and propped his double chin on the gold knob of his cane, and gazed on me with owlish sagacity; so that I could have fancied myself back again at Zerbst, with the portrait of the girl on its easel and glimmering at me out of the twilight of the curtained room.

  And this it was no doubt that switched my thoughts once more to her — to her sufferings, ended now, thank God! and her courage, that courage which had saved my life, and in all her actions, now I came to trace them, peeped through the helplessness, and the weakness of the woman; that courage which had nerved her to long silence, to endurance, to an incredible stubbornness, and in the upshot had saved my life and hers.

  She had been for long but a face limned on canvas; a face piquant and haunting but no more than this — just a portrait that had stirred my feelings. Then, a shadow to be followed, an enigma to be answered, a phantom elusive and perplexing, always in the van of me, always at a distance, rather glimpsed than seen. And again, at the most and last, an appeal, a creature crying out of helplessness to strength, out of weakness for succour — a debt, a task, a burden imposed on chivalry, and to be paid, if paid reluctantly.

  Now, in a moment, a woman, slender, soft, of flesh and blood, desirable, my equal. I dwelt on her, and thought new and tingling thoughts of her — thought of her with a tenderness that brought me, shaken and overwrought as I was, to the verge of tears. And she was English, she was a stranger, and lonely and unprotected in this troubled, this foreign land.

  On that reflection I rose up in bed; and before I would swallow the old fool’s potion, though Heaven knows I needed it for my brain was in a fever, I must question the doctor, I must send again to inquire how she did, and learn that all was well with her. For I had anxious, terrifying fancies about her. She might collapse, sink, die, while I lay here! And it was not until I was assured that she had taken food and sunk into the dead sleep of exhaustion that I would consent to take my own medicine.

  Still for an hour I turned and tossed, seeing ugly things, the cellar, Ellis; falling a score of times as Platen had said I should through that hideous flap. I rose and lay down again. I cursed the doctor and all his futile works I reached for the bell. And then — I slept.

  Dreamlessly, as far as I know. At any rate none of the dreams remained with me when I opened my eyes to the morning light, stared in wonder about the unfamiliar chamber, and slowly and with an aching head, recalled the things of yesterday. No longer feverish, I lay awhile, thinking them over in detail, reviewing them in cold blood, but certainly in no thankless, no ungrateful spirit.

  I passed the story through my mind, I saw whither I had so nearly slid, and I had time to think with remorse of Perceval — of poor Perceval, whom none had interposed to warn or save, who had been so cruelly and foully murdered in his duty. Ay, in his duty. And suddenly, as suddenly as if a pistol had been fired beside my ear, I sat up.

  The despatches!

  Heavens! How had I failed in my duty! From the moment of my rescue I had never given a thought to them! Absorbed in the peril I had escaped, accablé presque jusqu’á en mourir by the rush of events, and caught on the rebound by the girl, I had let their very existence and their hiding place pass from my mind.

  After that not a moment, not an instant must be lost if I was to rest. I dared not, and would not, trust any one! I leapt out of bed, I huddled on some clothes. I sallied out, and, heedless of an astonished maid whom I overset in the passage, I flew up the flight of stairs that separated my present chamber from my old one. Without delay, without a second’s hesitation, caring not who might be in the room, I knocked at the door.

  I got no answer, and it was no time for ceremony. I opened the door. Joy! The room was empty, though an unmade bed showed me that it had been occupied. I took three steps to the window, that tragic window which had played so great a part in the story, and leaning from which I had had that strange monition of Ellis’s presence. I flung it open — no thought of monitions now — and thrust out my arm. I could reach the eaves with ease, and with a beating heart I felt between wall and roof, first on one side of the window and then on the other.

  But my hand, far in as, leaning recklessly out, I thrust it, encountered no packet, no foreign body, nothing! Then with a pang of misgiving, I began a systematic search. From the one side, foot by foot, I passed my hand to the other. But the result, though I feverishly repeated the search, repeated it more than once, the result was the same. I found nothing. Nothing!

  The despatches were gone!

  CHAPTER XXV

  FOUND

  THEY
were gone, beyond doubt or question, and stunned by the discovery, I sank back on the bed and stared at the blank wall. And how I cursed my stupidity! How I cursed my negligence! Why had I not, the moment that I entered the house, made for the hiding place and secured the papers? Or failing that, and making allowance for the shock I had sustained, why had I been so astoundingly silly as to refuse to return to my old room — the room, where my presence, though it did no more, would have made it difficult for another to lay hands on the packet?

  And excuse I had none. Not a jot, not a tittle. Out of my own mouth I must stand condemned. For would any one believe, could I plead to any reasoning creature, that I had forgotten the despatches? Forgotten the very soul and essence of my mission at the moment when it became most important? For with poor Perceval dead, and his slayers arrested, what remained?

  What of import half so high as the recovery of the papers for which he had given his life, the papers which so many had sought, for which so many had died or were to die, which Klatz, the French, the Waechters, all had hunted with so blind, so furious a persistence? And which only fortune and a girl’s courage had preserved, so that for a brief hour they had lain under my hand, to take or leave?

  And I had left them. I had left them!

  I spent some bitter moments, thinking the matter over, and dwelling not only on the trouble which might ensue between the Chancelleries — which depended, of course, on the hands into which they had fallen — but on the effect this must have on my own career. Men are judged, and nowhere is this more true than in the Office, by results.

  With the despatches in my care, saved at my risk and by my exertions, I might have hoped that my unfortunate parting from Ellis — though I must ever in my heart recall it with sorrow — would be overlooked. But if I returned empty-handed, without the despatches, then most certainly I should be placed on my defence, and I should be hard put to it to make out a case. Nay, I knew well that I could make out no case that would satisfy the Chief.