locked me up until midnight. This was at Ingvorstrup. Then he came, and he gave me a spade to carry. We went out toward Revn, and beyond, as well as I could tell, but we stopped at a crossroads. There was a suicide buried, not many days before. Morten said dig, and I dug, but Morten pulled the body out of the ground. I was frightened. I had not been a soldier then. I was not used to such things. Neither had the suicide been exorcised.” He shuddered, and Vibeke crossed herself.
“We made the earth smooth again, and tramped on it to make it just as it had been. He hid the body in a beechwood, and we went back to Ingvorstrup. The sky was already getting light when we reached home. Then Morten locked me up again. The next night he came and fetched me, and took me to the beechwood. There he made me undress. Then he undressed the corpse. I tell you, I was frightened, and I asked him what he thought he was going to do, and he told me he was going to play a little trick on Pastor Sören, and that I should ask no more questions. Then he made me dress in the clothes of the suicide. That I did not like. And he dressed the body in my clothes, with everything I had been wearing, even to my earring. I had only one earring. Even that he took.
“Then he struck the dead man in the face with the spade two or three times, and once on the crown of the head, and he said, laughing, ‘That is to make him look more like you.’ Then he put the body in a sack that he had brought with him, and he said to me, ‘Carry the sack.’ ‘No,’ I said, but I had to carry it all the same.”
The beggar paused and looked into the mug, which was empty, and no one offered to refill it.
“I had to carry the sack all the way to Vejlby to the road that runs east of the pastor’s garden to Tolstrup. I tell you, it was heavy. But Morten carried the spade. There we went into the wood that is on the hillside overlooking the garden, and we waited, and watched the road and the parsonage for some time. It was moonlight and we could see very well. But everything was still. No one came on the road. By and by Morten said to me, ‘Go down to the house, to Parson’s room, and bring me back his nightcap and his dressing gown.’ But that he did not make me do. I was too frightened. I should have fallen on my knees before the hedge if I had tried to do that.
“Then Morten said, ‘I will go myself,’ and he left me, with the sack alone in the woods. I swear to you, I wished that I had never seen my brother Morten. I cursed him and I cursed the hour. But he came back after a little while, and he was wearing the dressing gown and the nightcap, and never a cat had heard him. He was clever, oh, he was. He reached into his pocket, then, and took out a little leather bag. I heard it go clink.
“He untied the bag, and he poured out on the ground a little pile of silver. No, a big pile of silver. I had never seen so much money all at once before—no, nor since. Then he made me hold the bag, and he counted the money back into it, a piece at a time. There were one hundred rix-dollars. The moonlight came through the leaves and shone on every piece, so that he knew I could see that they were all good.
“He said, ‘I am going to play a little trick on Pastor Sören, and you talk too much. You must go out of Jutland. I will give you that bag which you hold in your hands, but if you ever so much as show your nose in Jutland again, I will say that you stole the money, and have you hanged for it. Go now, and remember, my word against yours, and I am much cleverer than you.’ Such a brother he was.
“I went that night as far as I could. I slept by day, and traveled by night, until I was in South Jutland. At first it was not so bad. When the money was gone, I joined with Wallenstein. After I lost my arm it was worse. I have had a bad time of it, all told, but now I shall be rich. He laughs best who lives longest, eh? This time I am cleverer than Morten, for I am still alive.” He looked again into the pewter mug, then turned it upside down upon the table and waited, grinning hopefully.
Vibeke 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
