How could he hit upon her track? The old woman--the last person who had seen her--was exhausted and pumped out, and had told next to nothing. Was there no one who could help him in this strait?--no one who could make some suggestion as to the best mode of discovering the fugitive? Yes!--a sudden brilliant thought struck him--the man who had discovered him when, as he thought, he lay so closely hid,--the detective, Inspector Stellfox.
He had given a handsome present to the inspector when he came into his kingdom--how long ago it seemed!--and he had seen him several times since on public occasions,--at the Opera, at Chiswick Flower-shows, at the Derby, and similar popular resorts. He had the inspector's address somewhere,--at some police-station down in the City; and he went to his desk, and turned over a heterogeneous collection of papers, and found it. Then he sent Banks down to the station-house; and that evening Inspector Stellfox was shown into Sir Charles's study, and placed by him in possession of the facts.
The inspector went to work in his own special way. It was a peculiar job, he said, and not too easy to work out; but he had hopes. He went back to the station-house, and communicated as much as he chose to tell to two of his best men. Then all three went to work. They found out the cabman who had taken Mrs. Hammond to the South-Eastern Railway; they found the porter who had taken the boxes off the cab, and the luggage-labeller who had marked them; they found the tick-clerk who had registered them "in transit," and whose book showed not merely the number of pounds' weight, but the name in which they were entered. They were booked for Cologne,--one could not in those days register any farther,--and for Cologne Sir Charles started immediately. There he picked up the trace. Two French ladies had arrived by the Ostend train, and gone--not to any of the grand hotels bordering the Rhine, but to a second-rate house, yet quiet and thoroughly respectable for all that--the Brüsseler Hof, kept for the last thirty years by Anton Schumacher. Were they recollected there? Of course they were. Anton Schumacher's eldest son Franz had been rather fetched by the trim appearance of the younger lady, and had gone down with them to the boat, and seen them on board the Königin Victoria, and recommended them specially to the care of the conducteur, who was a great friend of his. Where did they take tickets for? Why, at his advice, they took them for Cassel, on the left bank of the river. They were going, as he understood, to Baden-Baden, and he had advised them to sleep at Barth's--a right clean comfortable hotel in Cassel--and then post on to Frankfurt, where they could spend the afternoon and the night, and so get on right pleasantly to Baden the next day.
To Baden! Sir Charles Mitford's heart sunk within him as he heard the words. Baden! That was where Laura had been so talked about for her desperate carrying on with Tchernigow nearly three years ago. And she was gone there now, and Tchernigow had disappeared from London!
Doubtless they had arranged it all between them, and he was thrown overboard and sold. His mind was at once made up: he would follow her there or to the end of the earth; what did it matter to him? He told Banks to pack a small travelling valise; he called at Bligh's on his way to the station and gave him certain instructions, and he was off. Not a word of farewell to Georgie; not a look of kindness; not a kiss of love for that poor child lying broad awake and listening to his footsteps as he stole through the house at early morning! What could he have said to her?--he, going in search of his paramour, who had thrown him over,--what could he have said to the wife whom he had so cruelly treated, so recklessly betrayed?
So Sir Charles Mitford, after long and tedious days of travel, arrived at Baden, as we have seen; and the first person he encountered, ere he had scarcely put foot in the hall of the Badischer Hof, was Mr. Aldermaston. He had known him in London, and was perfectly aware of his qualification for news. There was no reticence in Sir Charles Mitford now; no coming delicately to the subject; no beating about the bush: all that had vanished long since. Besides, if there had been any delicacy remaining, Mr. Aldermaston was scarcely the kind of man for whom it would have been employed. So Sir Charles said at once, and hurriedly:
"How do, Aldermaston? Been here long?"
"Ah, Sir Charles, how do you do? Just arrived, I see. Yes; I've been here--O, three weeks about."
"Then can you tell me? Is Mrs. Hammond here?"
"There's no such name in the Fremdenblatt-- the Gazette des Étrangers, you know." His little eyes twinkled so, that even Mitford's dull comprehension was aroused.