A haunted life

by James Grant

Sounds of alarm from time to time, shouts and other noises, were heard in the echoing streets, then followed the tolling of an alarm bell, and the beating of the Prussian drums, while flames began to redden the sky in one quarter, thus indicating that the houses of some persons obnoxious to the rabble had been set on fire outside the Holstein Thor.

Despite the advice of the landlord and the waiters, Trevor Chute remained on the steps at the hotel door, enjoying a cigar, and determined to see what was going on, though but little was visible, as in the streets the rioters had turned off the gas. Ere long he could make out something like the head of a great column debouching over the open space before the hotel.

For a moment nothing could be distinguished but that it was a crowd, shadows moving in the shade, but accompanied by a roar of sounds, cheers, hoarse hurrahs, oaths and imprecations in German, with the patois of Schleswig and of Holstein. The rabble, consisting of many thousands, were in readiness to commit outrage on anyone or anything that came in their way, and were now in fierce pursuit of an open droski that was brought at a gallop up to the door of the hotel, and out of which there sprang, looking very pale and bewildered, Sir Carnaby Collingwood and Lady Evelyn, whom the crowd had overtaken when returning from a visit to one of the three Syndics. Above the heads of the grimy rabble seven or eight torches were shaking like tufts of flame, and by their uncertain glare added much to the terror of the scene, for a madly infuriated mob has terrors that are peculiarly its own, and the simple circumstance that Sir Carnaby and Lady Evelyn were the occupants of a hired vehicle was sufficient to make all these half-starved and tipsified boors—tipsy with beer and fiery corn-brandy—turn their vengeance on them.

Even while rushing alongside the fast-flying wheels—for the driver lashed his horses to a gallop—they could see that Sir Carnaby was an aristocrat, an hochgeboren, or well-born man; that was enough to ensure insult and ridicule, or worse, and all the more when they discovered that he was an Englishman—and, like a true Englishman, the baronet, with all his folly and shortcomings in many ways, did not want a proper amount of pluck.

All that passed now seemed to do so with the quickness of lightning.

Sir Carnaby, highly exasperated by what he had undergone, and the terror of Lady Evelyn, instead of retiring at once into the hotel, unwisely turned and struck the foremost man in the crowd a sharp blow across the face with his cane.

The voices of the crowd now burst into one united roar of senseless rage, and a piercing and agonising shriek escaped Lady Evelyn, as she saw him seized by many hands, torn from her side, and dragged violently along the streets, amid shouts of 'To the Trave!—to the Trave!'

She did not and could not love this old man—she was, perhaps, incapable of loving anyone—but she loved well the position her marriage gave her, though a viscount's daughter, with the luxury and splendour in which she was cradled when at home. She had been used since childhood to obedience; to be followed and caressed; to have every wish gratified, every caprice supplied; to see every doubt and difficulty cleared away; to feel neither pain nor illness, not even the least excitement about anything; and now—now, the man with whom she had linked her fate was at the mercy of an infamous and brutal foreign mob; and with her shriek there came a cry to Chute to save him; but Trevor never heard her, for the moment hands were laid on Sir Carnaby, followed by Tom Travers, his servant, he had plunged into the moving and shouting mass, which went surging down the street; then Lady Evelyn saw the three disappear in the obscurity; out of which there came the roar of mingling shouts, the gleam of cutlasses as the night-watch attacked the rioters; and then followed the red flashes and the report of musketry, as the Prussian guard at the Rathhaus opened fire upon them; and Lady Evelyn, unused, as we have said, to any excitement, especially the sudden and unwonted horrors of an episode like this, fainted, and was borne senseless into the hotel.

Meanwhile, amid the wild whirl of that seething mob, how fared it with Trevor Chute and him whom he sought to save or rescue?

In all his service in India—service so different from the silk and velvet dawdling tenor of life in the Guards—dread of death had been unknown to Trevor Chute, and never felt by him, even when he knew that he was supposed to be dying of fever or a wound, or when he lay in the dark jungle, where the thick and rank vegetation ran riot, as it were; where the Brahminese cobra had its lair, the tiger and the cheetah, too; where, heavy, hot, and oppressive, the vapour rose like steamy clouds about the stems of the trees, while his life-blood ebbed away, and he had the knowledge that, if undiscovered, he might die of thirst, of weakness, under the kuttack dagger of a mountain robber, or by the feet of a wild elephant, for oblivion thus clouded the end of many a comrade who was reported 'missing,' and no more was known; so Chute was not to recoil before a German rabble now.