Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. Janet Lewis
had not taken her eyes from the face of the one-armed man during this long recital. He had spoken with a slowness which in its way testified to his honesty, for he seemed never to have made this speech before. Indeed, it might have been surmised that he had avoided the subject even in his thought, turning his back upon it whenever it had edged into his conscious vision. When he had finished speaking, she stared at him unmoving for a long full minute and then dropped her face into her hands and began to weep. She wept as women do who have restrained their tears for a long time. She wept as if her heart would break. Judge Thorwaldsen also dropped his head in his hands, as if struck with a mighty contrition. Only Pastor Juste, whose head had been bent above his paper, laid down his quill, lifted his head, and, leaning back in his chair, stared at the beggar with eyes unclouded by sorrow but so intent that they might have run him through with their sharp light. The beggar, looking in surprise from the bowed head of the magistrate to the shielded face of Vibeke, brought back his eyes to the eyes of Juste, but could not sustain the narrowed steady gaze. His eyes faltered, turned aside; he sat looking at the floor. Suddenly Pastor Juste slapped his hand upon the table. He cried:
“But this man is a murderer!”
“Oh no,” said the beggar, looking up quickly. “The corpse was a suicide. I swear to you it was a suicide. We never killed it.”
“Fool, fool,” said Juste, “the suicide is of no importance. This man is the murderer of Sören Qvist.”
The beggar actually stood up at this, then, his knees giving way, sank slowly back upon his stool. “No, Pastor, no!” he said. “Morten never touched Pastor Sören. Nor I, neither. Pastor was sleeping in his bed. Morten only took the dressing gown.”
“Is it conceivable,” said Judge Thorwaldsen, lifting his bowed head from his hands and showing to the beggar a face so pale and strained that the man was frightened before he heard Tryg’s words, “is it possible that you do not understand what befell Pastor Sören because of Morten’s little trick with the corpse?”
“He was going to frighten Pastor, that was all,” said the beggar.
“Oh, fool, fool,” said Thorwaldsen, like Juste. “Morten buried the corpse in the garden. Then Morten accused the pastor of your death, and Pastor Sören Qvist was, God forgive us all, convicted of your murder and executed for it.”
His words and the anguish in his voice had an appalling effect upon the beggar. He fell upon his knees, struck his breast with his one hand, then clutched at the table’s edge as he fell forward, like a drowning man.
“But I did not kill Parson,” he cried. “I never thought to kill him. Morten said it was just a trick. I am not a murderer. I would never have tried to kill him. Master Tryg, Master Tryg, protect me. I am not a murderer.”
“Get up,” said Thorwaldsen with iron in his voice. “Sit there on your stool, and be still.”
The beggar let go of the table and fell to the floor, his hand before his face, crouching at the feet of the judge and shaking violently.
“Get up,” said Tryg.
Still shaking, and slavering with terror so that the spittle ran down into the black stubble of his chin, the beggar rose slowly to his knees, then crept to his stool and sat there, his arm clasped about his knees, his head bent, but his little, terrified eyes still fastened upon the judge from beneath his heavy brows.
Tryg said to Juste, “It is true that this man is not the murderer of Sören Qvist. The murderer of Pastor Sören died rich, and in his own bed. This man is the tool, the spade, the damned soul, he is indeed the dead and mindless body that was used against his master. What becomes of him is not half so much my concern as how to clear the name of Sören Qvist from this black shadow.”
It was now Vibeke’s turn to exclaim. She said, “I knew all along that there was something strange about the corpse. Indeed, I thought it was something bewitched. If not a cat, then a wax baby, such as the Swedes buried before Kalmar to bring disaster on the King’s men. But if it was only an honest corpse, but the wrong man, then the witchcraft was elsewhere. Indeed and indeed, there must have been a spell upon the pastor. Indeed, I’m sure there was. He never let me bring the flying rowan into his room.”
Tryg Thorwaldsen moved his right hand gently back and forth in a slow gesture of negation. “No,” he said softly, “no, there was no spell upon the parson.”
“But why,” began the beggar, who had sat quietly through these two speeches, shaking only intermittently, like a man in the grip of a heavy chill, “why,” he repeated, “did Parson let them kill him? He knew quite well that he did not murder me.”
Five
The man who painted the sign of the Red Horse Inn at Vejlby was a realist rather than a theorist. He painted what he saw, like an artist, rather than what he knew, like a child or a farmer. Therefore the red horse of the sign stood with his forelegs close together, one obscuring the other, and his hind legs properly apart, as had stood the model for the sign. It was something of a joke in the surrounding country, but the painter had long since gone his wandering way, and even had he been at hand when the criticism began to accumulate, the owner of the inn would not have cared to spend more money to add another leg to his horse.
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