After a conference with some one within, Gaiters reappeared at the droski window.
'Madame Wyburg,' he said, 'tells me that Mrs. Deroubigne has left this place two days ago, and gone, she believes, to Brussels.'
'To Brussels!' exclaimed Ellinor, sick with disappointment and dismay, as she sank back on her seat. 'I cannot go there vaguely in search of them——'
'Of course not; so what then?'
'Oh, let me get back to London—to Grosvenor Square!'
'You are too ill to travel just now, and must remain with kind Madame Wyburg for a few days till the exact address of Mrs. Deroubigne is found,' said Sleath, in the most persuasive tone he could adopt; 'but here comes the master of the house,' he added, as a very singular figure appeared.
A man short in stature, but thick-set and powerfully built, with leery grey eyes, dissipated and bloated features, and a ragged red moustache, wearing a quaint garb, entirely black, with a plaited ruff round his neck, a wig curled and powdered, a short Spanish cloak, and a long Toledo sword, with a Mother Hubbard hat on his head, sharply pointed, and about two feet high.
This strange apparition of the sixteenth century doffed his steeple-crowned hat to Ellinor, who after a time discovered that the Herr Wyburg, among various other less respectable avocations, whereby to eke out a living, was one of the sixteen Reiten-Diener, or hired mourners, who—instead of the friends of the deceased—attend funeral processions in Hamburg, carrying out Charles Dickens's well-known definition of such a ceremony as 'a masquerade dipped in ink.' He had just come from having a 'deep drink' with his comrades after an interment at the Begrabnissplatze, or grand cemetery, outside the Ulricus Bastion, for in their ways these fellows are precisely like the human carrion crows we may see daily perched on the top of London hearses returning from Kensal Green, Brompton, or elsewhere, in a state of hat-band, jollity, and gin.
He also bowed low and leeringly to Sir Redmond Sleath.
This was not the first of the baronet's acquaintance with these people. He had been aided by the Frau Wyburg in more than one nefarious intrigue, the victim of which had dropped out of society, and by her husband in more than one shady gambling transaction in a 'hell' of the Adolphus Platze, ere he succeeded to the title his father's shady politics had won; so the trio knew each other thoroughly.