"Why don't you look where you are going, my friend?" inquired the other, with a somewhat foreign accent. "Have you no eyes in your head?"
Then he uttered a cry of surprise, and next moment was running down the street as fast as his legs could carry him.
"That was an unmannerly fellow," I said to Bertram, who was standing on the pavement watching the other's receding figure.
To my surprise, however, he did not answer. When he turned his face to me again, dark though it was, I could see that there was a look of extreme astonishment, if not of almost consternation, upon it.
"What is the matter?" I inquired, I fear a little sharply. "Why do you look like that?"
"That man," he answered. "I must be mistaken, and yet----"
"And yet what?" I inquired. "Come, my friend, tell me the reason of your extraordinary behaviour."
Bertram hesitated again before he replied.
"I only caught a glimpse of his face," he said at length, "and yet I feel almost certain that the person who ran into me, and who bade me look where I was going, was none other than Rodriguez, one of the men who accompanied us on that fatal journey to the diamond fields in Brazil."
For a moment, for some reason that was not quite apparent to me, he seemed almost beside himself. He must have communicated this feeling to me, for I remember taking him by the arm and laughing loudly, though, Heaven knows, I was not in the humour to laugh at anything.
"Have you taken leave of your senses?" I inquired scornfully, as soon as I had somewhat recovered my self-control. "How could he be here now, and why, since he was then in South America, should he be in Zaarfburg, of all places in the world?"
But Bertram did not answer. For the moment it looked as if the shock he had received had been too much for him. Whoever, or whatever, this man Rodriguez may have been, it is quite certain that the mere thought of meeting him again was sufficient to exert a powerful influence over Max's faithful friend. In silence we resumed our walk, and presently reached the house in which I had, for the time being, taken up my residence. Two hours later my poor brother's coffin was conveyed from the clockmaker's house to the city hall, the great council chamber of which had been converted into an impromptu _chapelle ardente_. A guard was placed upon it, while additional sentries were posted at the outer doors.