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Cases of Circumstantial Evidence

Swallow Press books by Janet Lewis

The Wife of Martin Guerre

The Trial of Sören Qvist

The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron

Good-Bye, Son and Other Stories

Poems Old and New, 1918–1978

Selected Poems of Janet Lewis

Cases of Circumstantial Evidence

The Wife of Martin Guerre

The Trial of Sören Qvist

The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron

Janet Lewis

Introduction by Kevin Haworth

Swallow Press

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio

Swallow Press

An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Swallow Press / Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

Introduction

The three Janet Lewis novels that together make up Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, gathered here in one edition for the first time, were originally published over the course of almost two decades. But together and separately, they explore themes consistent with their author’s long and notable career. From the French countryside of The Wife of Martin Guerre, the most famous of Lewis’s novels, to The Trial of Sören Qvist, drawn from the tragic story of a parson well known in its native Denmark, to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, set in Louis XIV’s Paris, the three novels range widely in their historical settings but share essential questions of devotion, curiosity, and above all, the troubled intersection of the law and human morality.

Lewis’s Cases of Circumstantial Evidence novels build on her previous writing, particularly that of her first novel, The Invasion, set in America during the early nineteenth century and based on stories she heard in Michigan as a girl. In The Invasion, Lewis hewed closely to actual historical events and people for the skeleton on which to build her world—a pattern she would follow in all her historical writing. Her allegiance to the real-life people and events was not born of mere convenience; the reclaiming and redeeming of seemingly minor figures in history, particularly women, was a key component of Lewis’s interest in writing. Part of the pleasure in reading these books is to discover why people act as they do within the complexities of their circumstances. “You know what happens and to whom it happens,” Lewis explains in an interview with the Southern Review, speaking of the plots of her books and their basis in actual events. “But why it happens, you don’t know until you can get inside these people.”1

The characters and the respective legal entanglements of the three novels collected here are inspired most directly by Samuel March Phillips’s 1874 legal casebook Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, given to Lewis by her husband, the poet Yvor Winters. But Lewis may also have been motivated by a case closer to home: the 1933 trial of David Lamson, a sales manager for Stanford University Press, for the murder of his wife in their home in Palo Alto. The Lamson trial galvanized the Stanford community of which Lewis and Winters were a part, with Yvor Winters taking an active role in Lamson’s defense through both public advocacy and consultations with Lamson’s lawyers. With no witness to the crime, the case hinged on numerous readings of circumstantial evidence, from blood spatter to furniture layout to rumors of an affair. (Lamson was initially convicted but was later freed after multiple trials and appeals.2) During that time the Phillips casebook made its way into the Lewis/Winters household, possibly as research for Lamson’s defense. A few years later, Lewis began work on The Wife of Martin Guerre.

Of the three novels, Martin Guerre remains the best known, widely admired for its power and its concision. Writers such as Evan S. Connell (who called it “one of the greatest short novels”3) and Larry McMurtry (“a short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other”4) have placed the book alongside the finest examples of the form. Over the years, the other two novels have found their champions as well. Of The Trial of Sören Qvist, Lewis scholar Fred Inglis writes, “Probably it is the most perfect of Janet Lewis’ novels, and among the most perfect of any novels.”5 Another Lewis scholar, Donald Davie, claims The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron as his favorite, lauding the book for its combination of precise language and multiple layers of plot and calling it a “consummate performance.”6 The diversity of the three books emerges from these competing claims, even though the novels share a common focus and source of inspiration. Collected here in one volume for the first time, they represent a distinguished writer at the height of her imaginative powers.

The Life and Legacy of Janet Lewis

Janet Lewis was born in Chicago in 1898 and attended high school in Oak Park, where she and schoolmate Ernest Hemingway both contributed to the school literary magazine. Like Hemingway, she spent many youthful summers “up in Michigan,” a place that figures prominently in her short stories, much as it does in his. But whereas her more famous classmate is associated with hard living, literary stardom, and an early, self-inflicted death, Janet Lewis embodies a very different path.

She attended the University of Chicago, where she majored in French, and after her graduation left for Paris (“without waiting to pick up her diploma,” one biographer notes), residing there for six months, not quite long enough to become enmeshed in the expatriate literary scene with which the city is so strongly associated.7 Shortly after returning home she contracted tuberculosis, the disease that felled so many artists and nearly killed her as well. (Many years later, she told an interviewer, “There was a moment, be cheerful or die. You take your choice.”)8

Despite the life-threatening illness in her youth, she went on to live an impressive ninety-nine years, most of those years in the same house in the hills of Northern California where she and her husband, the poet Yvor Winters, raised their two children. Her ability to balance her domestic life—by all accounts, she enjoyed a remarkably happy marriage—with decades of literary output gives her an image that is simultaneously traditional and feminist. In her book Silences, Tillie Olsen cites Lewis as a clear example of a talented woman writer whose literary production was inhibited by her obligations to family and to a more famous husband. Lewis acknowledged the challenges of balancing her familial responsibilities with her writing. “I do think those women who have turned out an enormous amount of work were generally not women who had children,” she allowed in an early interview.9 But at the same time she publicly and explicitly rejected Olsen’s characterization of her, perhaps unwilling to see her family and her writing in conflict. “Being a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children,” she told an interviewer in 1983.10 The remark is Lewis distilled. She foregrounds her marriage and her family. Beyond that, everything is about her writing.

As a poet, she met early success, publishing a four-poem sequence called “Cold Hills” in Poetry in 1920, before she had even finished college. A couple of years later, she moved into prose as well, publishing her first story in another influential magazine, The Bookman. Her first book of poems, The Indian in the Woods, was published in 1922 by the short-lived imprint Manikin, whose entire publishing history consists of three books: one by Lewis, one by William Carlos Williams, and one by Marianne Moore. It was just the beginning of a lifetime of close association with literary greatness, both personally and professionally.

A decade after her first book of poems, a period during which she got married and she and Winters both recovered from tuberculosis, she published her first novel, The Invasion, her first foray into historical fiction. Subtitled A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary’s, it is set in the Great Lakes region and tells the story of an Irish immigrant who marries an Ojibway woman.

Almost ten years after that, she published her acknowledged masterpiece, The Wife of Martin Guerre, marrying her eye for history with the peculiarities of the legal system that would give her the platform from which to explore powerful questions of morality and personal responsibility that fuel the three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence.

To European critics, Lewis seems quintessentially American. To American critics, her fondness for European settings leads to comparisons as expected as Flaubert and as unusual as the Provençal writer Jean Giono. The New York Times compared her to Melville and to Stendhal. Another critic sees her, based on The Invasion and some of her short stories, as a definitive voice in Western regional writing. In some ways, Lewis’s writing remains elastic, allowing other writers to see in her a powerful reflection of their own interests. Novelists claim her novels as her best work. Poets are drawn again and again to her diverse body of poetry, which attracts new requests for reprinting in anthologies every year. In short, as with all the best writers, her work and her decades-long career defy simple categorization or comparisons.

Despite Lewis’s resistance to easy definitions, her many literary admirers, including Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stegner, and so many more, agree on two things: that her writing, particularly the poems and the historical novels, is first-class; and that she deserves a much wider readership. It is for exactly this reason that Swallow Press has created the present edition.

But if Lewis herself felt neglected as an author, there is no evidence of it. In person and in published comments, she championed graciousness. She sent thank-you notes to our publishing offices here in Ohio upon receiving her yearly royalty check. Late into her nineties, she charmed literary pilgrims who found their way to her house in Los Altos, serving them tea and apologizing for the self-described “laziness” that led her to sleep until the late hour of 8:30 in the morning, and for the periods of quiet introspection that meant she would sometimes go for many years without publishing new work, only to pick up again in startling new directions, be it in writing opera libretti (she wrote six, including adaptations of her own Wife of Martin Guerre and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans), or in poems quite different from the Imagist work with which she began her career.

Her disarming modesty, about her own character as well as her writing, is the most constant theme in interviews and profiles. This exchange, in the Southern Review, is characteristic:

Interviewers: Many writers and critics—Evan Connell and Donald Davie, to name a couple—admire your work greatly. Yet, you are not widely known. What is your reaction to this?

Lewis: I think I’ve had as much recognition as I need and probably as much as I deserve.11

She stated that her goal in writing her Cases of Circumstantial Evidence was equally modest: to stay as close to the history as possible and to let the characters and the facts speak for themselves. She demonstrated a similar sense of duty to her husband, the man who gave her the book that made these novels possible. For the thirty years that she outlived him, she kept their home in Los Altos much the way that it had been when he was alive, with his name on the mailbox and his writing shed maintained as if he might return, any moment, to use it.

It would have been impossible to predict the success of this modest professor’s daughter, born at the very end of the nineteenth century. But her first poem in Poetry, which appeared at the height of modernism and when she was only twenty years old, seems to anticipate both her long life and the way her work stands on its own, just outside the literary canon. She writes,

I have lived so long

On the cold hills alone . . .

I loved the rock

And the lean pine trees,

Hated the life in the turfy meadow,

Hated the heavy, sensuous bees.

I have lived so long

Under the high monotony of starry skies,

I am so cased about

With the clean wind and the cold nights,

People will not let me in

To their warm gardens

Full of bees.

Swallow Press is honored to be the bearer of Lewis’s literary legacy, not just the three great novels but her collection of short stories and her books of poems—a lifetime of close witness to the public and the private, and a deep appreciation for the human condition.

Kevin Haworth

Executive Editor

Swallow Press

The Wife of Martin Guerre

Swallow Press

An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

Printed in the United States of America

Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are

printed on acid-free paper ƒ™

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.

The wife of Martin Guerre / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth ; afterword by Larry McMurtry.

pages ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8040-1143-3 (pb : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4053-2 (electronic)

1. Guerre, Bertrande de Rols, active 1539–1560—Fiction. 2. Guerre, Martin, active 1539–1560—Fiction. 3. Impostors and imposture—Fiction. 4. France—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3523.E866W55 2013

813'.52—dc23

2013016158

Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition

I first came upon the story of the wife of Martin Guerre in a collection called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. This volume contained, together with an essay, The Theory of Presumptive Proof, by Samuel March Phillips (1780–1862) (who in 1814 with the publication of his book Phillips on Evidence superseded Chief Baron Gilbert as an authority on the English law of evidence), many historic accounts of the failure of justice because of undue reliance on circumstantial evidence. Some of the cases presented occurred after the death of Phillips, and there is no way of knowing who recorded them, or from what sources. The trial of Martin Guerre, however, is described and discussed by the famous French jurist, Estienne Pasquier (1529–1615), in his extraordinary and encyclopedic work, Les Recherches de la France. Pasquier says: Maître Jean Corras, grand Jurisconsulte, qui fût rapporteur du procès, nous en representa l’histoire par escrit, avec commentaires pour l’embellir de poincts de droict. (Master Jean Corras, great jurist, who was the recorder for the trial, has presented us with the written story, with commentaries to embellish it in points of law.) It is reasonably certain that whoever wrote the story for the Famous Cases had recourse to the work of Maître Corras. It is said that Corras later became a famous judge, and that he was hanged in his scarlet robes after the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the excitement which spread from Paris to the provinces, and which died away only in October of that year, 1572, almost twelve years to a day after the execution of Arnaud du Tilh. I have been told, also, that Michel de Montaigne refers in one of his essays to the curious case of Martin Guerre, his contemporary. I regret that I cannot cite the number of the essay. Still, between Pasquier, Montaigne, and Maître Jean Corras, we can be sure that such a trial indeed took place; and in retelling the story of Bertrande de Rols I have tried to be as faithful to the historical events as the distances of time and place permit. The account of the trial by Pasquier is briefer than that in the Famous Cases, but contains a few interesting details not given in the latter. He concludes his account by these words: Mais je demanderois volontiers si ce Monsieur Martin Guerre qui s’aigrit si âprement contre sa femme, ne maritoit pas une punition aussi griefve qu’Arnaut Tillier, pour avoir par son absence esté cause de ce mesfait? (But I would willingly ask you if this Monsieur Martin Guerre who became so embittered toward his wife, did not deserve a punishment as severe as that of Arnaud Tillier, for having been by his absence the cause of this wrong-doing?)

J.L.

[1947]

I. Artigues

One morning in January, 1539, a wedding was celebrated in the village of Artigues. That night the two children who had been espoused to one another lay in bed in the house of the groom’s father. They were Bertrande de Rols, aged eleven years, and Martin Guerre, who was no older, both offspring of rich peasant families as ancient, as feudal and as proud as any of the great seignorial houses of Gascony. The room was cold. Outside the snow lay thinly over the stony ground, or, gathered into long shallow drifts at the corners of houses, left the earth bare. But higher, it extended upward in great sheets and dunes, mantling the ridges and choking the wooded valleys, toward the peak of La Bacanère and the long ridge of Le Burat, and to the south, beyond the long valley of Luchon, the granite Maladetta stood sheathed in ice and snow. The passes to Spain were buried under whiteness. The Pyrenees had become for the winter season an impassable wall. Those Spaniards who were in French territory after the first heavy snowfall in September, remained there, and those Frenchmen, smugglers or soldiers or simple travelers who found themselves on the wrong side of the Port de Venasque were doomed to remain there until spring. Sheep in fold, cattle in the grange, faggots heaped high against the wall of the farm, the mountain villages were closed in enforced idleness and isolation. It was a season of leisure in which weddings might well be celebrated.

Bertrande had not spoken to Martin in all her life until that morning, although she had often seen him; indeed she had not known until the evening before that a marriage had been arranged. That morning she had knelt with Martin before his father and then had walked with him across the snow, dressed bravely in a new red cape and attended by many friends and relatives and by the sound of violins, to the church of Artigues where the marriage ceremony had been completed. She had found it quite as serious an affair as first communion.

Afterwards, still to the music of the violins, which sounded thin and sharp in the cold air, she had returned to the house of her husband where a huge fire of oak logs garnished with vine-trimmings roared in the big fireplace, and where the kitchen, the principal room of the house, was set with improvised tables, long boards laid over trestles. The stone floor had been freshly strewn with broken boughs of evergreen. The sides and bottoms of the copper pans flashed redly with the reflection of the flames, and the air was rich with the good smell of roasting meat and of freshly poured wine. Underfoot the snow from the sabots melted and sank beneath the trodden evergreens. A smell of humanity and of steaming wool mingled with the odors of the food, and the room was incredibly noisy with conversation.

It was a gay, an important event. Everyone was intensely jubilant, but the small bride received very little attention. After the first embraces and compliments, she sat beside her mother at the long table and ate the food which her mother served her from the big platters. Now and again she felt her mother’s arm steal warmly about her shoulders, and felt herself pressed briefly against her mother’s breast, proudly and reassuringly, but as the feast proceeded her mother’s attention became more engrossed with the conversation of the curé, who sat opposite, and of the groom’s father, who sat upon her other side, and Bertrande, immune from observation in the midst of all this commotion which was ostensibly in her honor, looked about the room at her ease, and fed pieces of hard bread dipped in grease to the woolly Pyrenean sheep dog with the long curly tail who nosed his head into her lap from his place beneath the table. By and by, when the dishes of soup and roast had given way to the boiled chestnuts, cheese, honey and dried fruits, she slipped from her place and began quietly to explore the room.

Behind the table where she had been sitting the beds were ranged, end to end, the curtains of yellow serge drawn close, each one an apartment in itself. The child brushed between these curtains and the stout backs of the merrymakers, moving slowly toward the nearer corner of the room, where she stood, her back against a tall cupboard, and surveyed the scene. Across from her the blackened fireplace occupied at least a third of the wall, and the brightness of the leaping flames left the corners on either side in confused semi-darkness. In the middle of the wall to the right, however, she spied a door, and toward that she gradually made her way. It proved to be the entrance to a long cold corridor, from which doors opened into storerooms, rooms for the shepherds, and lighted only by a small window of which the wooden shutters were closed. Another person had taken refuge from the festivities in this corridor, and was intent upon undoing the bolts of the shutters. The half of the shutter folded back, a flood of sharp snowy sunlight fell into the corridor, and in its brightness she recognized Martin. She made a step forward, uncertainly, and Martin, hearing it, turned and advanced upon her, his hands outstretched and a fearsome expression on his long, young face. He had disliked being married, and, in order to express his dislike of the affair, and also to express the power of his newly acquired sovereignty, he cuffed Bertrande soundly upon the ears, scratched her face and pulled her hair, all without a word. Her cries brought a rescuer, her mother’s sister, who rebuked the bridegroom and led the bride back into the kitchen, where she remained beside her mother until the hour when she was led by her mother and her mother-in-law into the Chamber, the room on the opposite side of the kitchen, where stood the master’s bed, now dedicated to the formalities of the wedding.

Bertrande was disrobed and attired in night garments and a bonnet-de-nuit. Martin was brought in and similarly attired, and the two children were put to bed together in the presence of all the company. In deference to the extreme youth of the bridal couple, however, the serge curtains were not pulled, and a torch, fastened to the wall, was left blazing.

The company remained in the room for a time, laughing at jokes of a time-honored nature, while the two children lay very still and did not look at each other. By and by the merrymakers drifted into the kitchen, and last of all the father of Martin Guerre paused in the doorway to wish his children a formal goodnight. Bertrande saw his features, exaggerated in the flare of the torch, bent in an expression of great seriousness, and the realization that henceforth her life lay beneath his jurisdiction came suddenly and overwhelmingly to the little girl. The door closed behind him. The unglazed window was also closed, but between the leaves of the shutter a draft came which shook the flame of the torch. Otherwise the air was still and dead. The floor was bare, and the room was unfurnished save for a row of carved chests against the wall and the great bed in which she lay. She was tired and frightened. She did not know what Martin might not take it into his head to do to her. Presently she felt him stir.

“I am tired of all this business,” he said, turning on his side and burrowing his head into his pillow. Soon his breathing became regular, and, without daring to move her body, Bertrande relaxed. She was safe. Her husband was asleep.

From her high pillow she watched the torch, as the flame wavered, and little particles of blazing lint detached themselves and fell, smoking, to the stone floor. One was long in falling; it clung, a blazing thread, making the flame of the torch irregular and smoky. Then it too dropped. The warmth of the flock bed began to enclose the small thin body in something like security, a feeling almost as good as that of being home again. The light of the torch seemed to go out. The child began to doze.

An hour or so later the door opened and a large figure entered, substantially clothed in ample folds of brown wool and coifed in white linen, and bearing a tray; and crossed with leisured tread to the bedside. Whether it was merely the sense of being observed, or whether the stone floor had resounded or the silver rattled a little on the tray, Bertrande awoke and, opening her eyes, looked up into the square, benevolent face and the pleasant brown eyes of a woman whom she recognized dimly as a part of the house of Guerre. But it was not the face of her mother-in-law, no, it was the face of the servant who had stood at the doorway as the bridal party had returned from the church.

“You are awake. That is well,” said the woman, smiling. “I warrant, if the boy were eight years older he would not be sound asleep at such an hour.”

She rested the tray on the bed, and, reaching across the body of Bertrande, shook Martin by the shoulder.

“Surely it is not already morning,” said Bertrande.

“No, my dear, it is réveillon. I have brought you your little midnight feast.”

“Oh,” said Bertrande, “they forgot to tell me about it.”

She sat up, looking a little dazed and worried. Without instruction she might not know what to do, she might do the wrong thing. Martin, roused, also sat up, and together they surveyed the tray.

“It is not a bad idea at all,” said Martin, his voice foggy with sleep, and, strangely enough, perfectly good-natured.

“Eat,” said the woman, beaming upon them. “You have had all the rest of the affair—you may as well enjoy now your little feast, just the two of you. I prepared it myself.”

Thus urged, the children rubbed their eyes and fell to, while the woman stood by, her hands on her well-draped hips.

“It is all kinds of an affair, this getting married,” she said as she watched the children. “Don’t overlook the custard—it is my specialty. And by and by you will appreciate all that your parents have done for you. And meanwhile what peace there is and what friendship in the village of Artigues! You are a pretty little girl, Madame, a little thin, perhaps, but with the years the limbs grow rounder. A little more flesh and you will be altogether charming. And you have a fine, bright color in your cheeks. Look at her, Martin. She is even prettier now than she was at the church, when she was so pale with emotion.”

Bertrande ate gravely, licking the yellow custard from the large silver spoon. This was more attention than she had received all day, and, moreover, it was the sort of attention that she could understand. The woman continued in a rich, comfortable voice:

“Take Martin now. He will not be a pretty man, but he will be very distinguished, like his father. There is a kind of ugliness which is very fine in a man. For the rest, I doubt not but that he will be capable of all that is required of a man.”

She smiled upon them with no intention of hurrying them, and continued:

“Also, Martin, look at your wife—she has the lucky eyes, the two-colored eyes, brown and green, and the lucky people bring luck to those they love.”

They finished everything upon the tray, even dividing amicably the last bit of pastry between them, and the servant departed with a final word of commendation. Madame Martin Guerre, born Bertrande de Rols, comforted by the inward presence of pastry and custard and by the wholesome unconcern of her husband, fell into a deep untroubled slumber. In the morning she returned to the house of her parents, there to await an age when she should be more fitted to assume her married responsibilities.

So began for the wife of Martin Guerre the estate which was to bring her so much joy and also such strange and unpredictable suffering.

For the present, life went on as usual. She had not gained in personal importance or in liberty by becoming the wife of Martin Guerre; indeed she had not expected to do so. Advantages there were, certainly, from the marriage, but for the present they were all for the two families of Guerre and de Rols; later, Martin and Bertrande would profit from the increased dual prosperity. The solemn ceremony in the church, the recollection of awakening at night to be served royally with delicacies shining on the family plate of les Guerre, receded, overshadowed by the multiplicity of the daily tasks that were her education.

The union of the house of de Rols and that of Guerre had long been considered. It had appeared to three generations as almost inevitable, so many were the advantages for both families to be expected from such an alliance. Three generations ago the matter had been practically settled, until a remark by the great-grandfather of Bertrande de Rols upset the plans of the great-grandfather of Martin Guerre.

“I have a nice little granddaughter whom I’m keeping for you,” said the ancestor of Martin to old de Rols, affably, at the close of a conversation which had covered the extent of the mutual benefits which might result from a union between the two families.

“If you wish to keep her well,” said the great-grandfather of Bertrande, humorously, “if you wish to keep her very well, my friend, you have only to salt her.”

The great-grandfather of Martin regarded de Rols for a moment without speaking, but he was no longer affable.

“You wish to imply then, that she will be easy to keep. You imply that the suitors will not be many. You imply that I may salt her and cover her with oil, like the carcase of a chicken, and she well keep, eh, she will keep indefinitely!”

“My friend, I imply nothing of the sort,” said the other old man, patiently. “I only like to have my little joke.”

“Your joke,” replied Martin’s great-grandfather, “your joke is an insult.” And he spat in the face of Bertrande de Rols’ ancestor.

The negotiations for the marriage were discontinued, and not only that, but great-grandfather Guerre and all his mesnie, that is to say, his sons and daughters and their families, his uncles and aunts and their families, and all the servants whose families had been accustomed to serve these families of the house of Guerre, conceived and maintained an intense hatred of the mesnie of the house of de Rols, which was continued until the birth of Bertrande. Then, since the house of Guerre had rejoiced in the birth of a son but a short time previous, it occurred to the descendants of the jesting and offended great-grandfathers that the best and only way to end a feud of such long standing was to affiance the infants in their cradles. This was accordingly done, and peace was restored.

One should not judge too harshly the pride of the grandfather who was insulted by so mild a jest. As head of his family, the cap d’hostal, he carried great responsibilities; the safety and prosperity of all his household depended largely upon the strict obedience and reverence which he could demand from his children, his wife and his servants. From great responsibility arose great pride. No one questioned his right to be offended and no one hesitated to follow his example in hating the offender—offenders, one should say, because the deed of one man became immediately the deed of his family. It is perhaps surprising, however, that the feudal structure should have been maintained so strictly and upon so large a scale by these peasants of Artigues, for these peasants were closer to the seigneur campagnard whom the close of the sixteenth century saw coming into prominence than they were to the average peasant of the lowlands, whose families were sprung from the emancipated serfs of the middle ages. The crags and valleys of the Pyrenees were the cause of their prosperity and of their pride.

The hot mineral baths in the valley of Luchon, it is true, were on one of the direct routes from Spain into France, and it is said that the soldiers of Caesar stopped there to soak their battle-weary limbs in the muddy sulphur pools, but the court of Navarre neglected Luchon. The Marguerite of Princesses took her entourage to Cauterets, nearer Pau. Neither was Artigues upon the direct way through the valley of Luchon to the valley of the Garonne. It stood nearer to a small tributary to the Neste in a higher fold of the mountains. It was on the way to no other village. No one visited Artigues who had not business there. And so from generation to generation, while the lowland villages were plundered and burned and their fields laid waste by the religious wars which swept southern France through the thirteenth century and down to the middle of the sixteenth, Artigues enjoyed its isolation and its lack of fame, and actual gold accumulated in the coffers of its more prosperous families. The feudal feeling maintained its value also, as strong as in the earlier centuries, although Francis the First had been for twenty-one years upon the throne of France and although Languedoc had belonged to the French crown almost three hundred years.

When she was fourteen years of age, perhaps a little earlier than might have been the case had it not been for the death of her own mother, Bertrande de Rols went to live finally with the house of Guerre. One deceptively warm autumn forenoon, attended by the servant who had brought the réveillon to the young bridal couple, she crossed the courtyard, barefoot, dressed quite simply in her usual workaday clothes, and found herself on the threshold of the big kitchen. Her mother-in-law kissed her on both cheeks, and led her to the hearth. The wooden coffers which contained her personal effects and the linen and silver of her dowry were carried in and set against the wall, her mother-in-law indicated to her the large bed with the curtains of yellow serge which was to be hers and Martin’s, and, without too great haste, she was set to grinding meal in a big stone mortar. Martin and his father were in the fields. Her own father had ridden off to oversee the vintaging. None of the field-workers returned until nightfall. But meanwhile she had time to become familiar with the kitchen, with Martin’s four sisters and the servants, with the dogs and cats and with the feathered inhabitants of the basse-cour. She had not visited the house since the day of her wedding, but the scene was much as she had remembered it. The big table on trestles had been removed; there remained only a square table near the hearth, for the family, and a long one beside it for the workers. The floor was strewn only with dried grass, and the walls were not garnished with evergreen; but festoons of garlic and onions, the long stems braided together, hung from the rafters, together with bunches of dried elder blossoms and linden flowers. Bunches of dried rosemary, mountain thyme, and parsley were there also; and, in the hood of the chimney, meats and sausages were freshly hung to benefit from the resinous smoke.

Not again for a long time did Bertrande enjoy as much of her mother-in-law’s attention as she did that afternoon, but the leisured kindness and interest which Madame Guerre bestowed upon her son’s young wife threw a long warm shadow which extended forward for many days. She showed Bertrande the farm in detail, the stables, the granary, low stone buildings roofed with tile, like the house, set to the right and left of the courtyard before the house; showed her the room used for the dairy, the storerooms with their pots of honey and baskets of fruit, baskets of chestnuts, stone crocks of goose and chicken preserved in oil, eggs buried in bran, cheeses of goat’s milk and of cow’s milk, wine, oil. In the Chamber she showed her wool and flax for the distaff, the loom on which the clothing for the household would be woven. She showed her the garden, now being set in order for the early frost, the straw-thatched beehives, the sheepfold of mud and wattles, and last of all, returning to the Chamber in which the marriage bed had been dressed, Madame Guerre opened certain chests filled with bran and showed the young girl the coats of mail of the ancestors, thus preserved from rust. She did all this, as Bertrande well knew, that the young wife might understand the household which she would one day be called upon to direct. At no season of the year could she have summarized more happily all that the labors of the spring and summer were working to achieve.

The dusk came early with a chill that presaged winter. It was fully dark before the men began to assemble from the fields and pastures. The tables were set, and fresh bundles of vine trimmings were flung on the fire. The cattle were driven home and stabled, as was necessary every night in the year because of the depredations of bears. The sheep came next, their voices filling the courtyard with a high prolonged babble. The shepherd and the cowherd, entering the kitchen, brought the smell of the beasts into the room. The swineherd came next, and the men who were, turn and turn about, waggoners, vine dressers, or harvesters of grain. Last of all came the head of the family, Martin’s father, squired by his son. His wife met him on the threshold with a cup of warmed wine, which he drank before he entered the house. He removed his cape and gave it to one of his daughters. He seated himself at the head of the table. The eldest daughter brought him a bowl of water and a napkin. He washed and wiped his hands, and then, searching the room with his eyes, found Martin’s wife and signaled her to approach.

“Sit here, my daughter,” he said, indicating a place beside him. “Tonight you shall be waited on. Tomorrow you shall have your own share of the labors of the house.”

He did not smile, but the deed and the voice were kind. Bertrande, gazing cautiously into his face as his attention was directed elsewhere, now to the conversation of the shepherd, now toward the blazing hearth, remembered the severe paternal countenance as she had seen it by torchlight from the high pillow of the marriage bed, and she thought that the torchlight had changed it. Here, in the more even glow of the fire, the face of her new father held nothing terrifying. Seamed, coarsened by exposure to rough weather, the darkened skin caught the gold reflections squarely, without compromise or evasion, admitting all the engravures of time. The beard was short, rough and grizzled, parted to show a cleft in the long chin. The mouth, not smiling, but just, had a heavy lower lip which could admit of anger. The nose was short and flattened, the cheek bones were high, the forehead was high and wide, the eyes, now gray, now black, as the light changed, were calmly interested, calm in the assurance of authority. He sat at ease in the stiff-backed rush-bottomed chair, his dark jerkin laced to the throat, his right hand resting on the edge of the table, vigilantly surveying his household, like some Homeric king, some ruler of an island commonwealth who could both plow and fight, and the hand which rested on the table was scarred as from some defensive struggle in years long gone by. Without bearing any outward symbol of his power, he was in his own person both authority and security. He ruled, as the contemporary records say, using the verb which belongs to royalty, and the young girl seated beside him, in feeling this, felt also the great peace which his authority created for his household. It was the first of many evenings in which his presence should testify for her that the beasts were safe, that the grain was safe, that neither the wolves, whose voices could be heard on winter nights, nor marauding bands of mercenaries such as the current hearsay from the larger valleys sometimes reported, could do anything to harm the hearth beside which this man was seated. Because of him the farm was safe, and therefore Artigues, and therefore Languedoc, and therefore France, and therefore the whole world was safe and as it should be.

Martin was sufficiently kind to her, in spite of her apprehensions. He treated her with rather more affection than he did his sisters, bullying her occasionally, as he never bullied them, leaving her for the most part to her own affairs. At night they slept together in their own bed, shoulders turned away from each other, the tired young heads buried deep in the feather-stuffed pillows. Bertrande continued, day by day, her long apprenticeship for the position which she was destined to fill, that of mistress of the farm.

A year went by, during which Bertrande was aware of no other sentiment for her husband than a mild gratitude for his leaving her alone. Then, in the early autumn, Martin went bear-hunting. A cordon had been organized in the parish, according to custom, in order to check to some extent the increasing boldness of those animals which not only destroyed the young barley in the spring but also attacked cattle and sheep. It was generally maintained that there were two species of bear in the Pyrenees, those which were vegetarians strictly and those which were carnivorous. The latter were a far greater menace than the wolves, which were not seen in summer and which were dangerous only in the winter months when stock was likely to be safe in stable or fold. Martin had heard of the cordon, and, without saying anything to anyone, had risen early and gone off to join the hunters. He was not seen all that day. When evening came, the workers returned to the farm, shepherd, swineherd, carter, vintager, but no Martin. Monsieur Guerre inquired for his son, but no one had any information to offer. According to custom, the farm workers and the household servants sat down with their master while Madame Guerre and Bertrande waited upon them. The usual talk of the day’s work went on, the meal was finished, the tables were cleared away, and the hour for prayers drew near, before the door burst open and Martin entered, staggering under a load of bearmeat done up in the yet bloody hide of the bear. He was exultant. But when he saw his father’s expectant eyes, his exuberance died away, and, depositing his booty before his father, he made his excuses for being absent from the farm labor, and recounted, more briefly than he had intended, the adventures of his day. His father watched him quietly. When the boy had finished, his father said,

“That is all you have to say?”

“Yes, my father.”

“Very well. Kneel.”

Martin dropped on his knees, and his father, leaning forward, struck him with the knuckles of his right hand full upon the left side of his jaw. Martin said nothing. Madame Guerre caught her breath but made no outcry. In a moment Martin stood up and went to spit blood into the fire.

“Prayers, my children,” said the father.

The household, upon its knees, with bowed heads, attended to the prayers which the father repeated, and then, dispersing, went off to bed. Several hours later that evening when the house was quiet and only a small gleam of firelight shone through the folds of serge which enclosed their bed, Bertrande said to Martin:

“Are you awake?”

“Certainly. My jaw aches. He has broken me two teeth.”

“It was not just,” she whispered with indignation.

“Certainly it was just. I didn’t ask him if I might go. I was afraid that he might refuse me. But it was well done, was it not, to kill a bear?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied fervently. “Martin, you are brave.”

He said nothing to that, agreeing in his heart, but as he fell asleep, later, his arm rested on her shoulder. She had sided with him against the paternal authority, however just that authority might be. They were two, a camp within a camp. As for Bertrande, to her own surprise she began to understand that Martin belonged to her and that her affection for him was even greater than her respect and admiration for his father.

In the morning Madame Guerre, examining the damage done to her son’s teeth, wept, but did not protest against her husband’s severity.

“You understand, my son, it is necessary,” she said. “If you have no obedience for your father, your son will have none for you, and then what will become of the family? Ruin. Despair.”

“Yes, my mother, I understand,” said Martin.

No one but Bertrande had hinted that the punishment was arbitrary and severe, and nothing further was said by anyone about the matter.

But gradually Bertrande’s affection for her husband became a deep and joyous passion, growing slowly and naturally as her body grew. All about her, life flourished and increased itself, in field, in fold, in the rose-flushed bramble stems of spring before the green leaf unfurled, and in the vine leaves of autumn that lay like fire along the corded branches. She felt this passion within herself like the wine they drank in the early days of spring, light, tart, heady, and having a special fragrance, and her delight illuminated her love like the May sunshine pouring downward into the cupped wine. Early in her twentieth year she gave birth to a son, and her happiness seemed crowned and sanctified beyond anything she had ever dreamed. They called the boy Sanxi. His grandfather, receiving him in his arms a few minutes after his birth, rubbed his lips with garlic and touched them with a few sour drops of the wine of the country, welcoming him as a true Gascon. The boy thrived, and his mother thrived with him, as if they lent each other well-being.

Being the mother of an heir, Bertrande now received from her parents-in-law a new esteem which was manifest in little favors. This filled her with pride and contributed in no small measure to the grace with which she carried her dark head. More than ever she understood her position in the household, part of a structure that reached backward in time towards ancestors of whose renown one was proud and forward to a future in which Sanxi was a young man, in which Sanxi’s children were to grow tall and maintain, as she and Martin now helped to maintain, the prosperity and honor of the family.

Martin had been placed in full charge of certain labors of the farm, and more especially in charge of certain fields. He was responsible to his father for all he did, but the method and the details were in his own hands. It was a part of his progress toward the assumption of the full authority of the farm, which could not come to him until after his father’s death, but for which he must be early prepared.

His situation was moreover curious in this respect; for the extent of his father’s lifetime Martin would remain legally a minor. He might grow old, Sanxi might marry and have sons, but as long as the elder Guerre survived, so long was he absolute head of the house, and such liberty as Martin might enjoy was to be enjoyed only under his father’s rule. This was so well understood together with the necessity for the law, that it never occurred to Martin to suppose it might be otherwise. It was known throughout Languedoc that a father owned the privilege of freeing his son, if he chose, from the parental authority, but this could only be done through a deliberate and formal ceremony; and although there were fathers who sometimes so liberated their sons, if anyone had asked Martin Guerre what he thought of such a procedure, he would almost certainly have replied that he thought ill. All such authority as belonged to the cap d’hostal Martin Guerre wished to retain, however much he might personally suffer for the time being under such authority. After the lapse of years he expected himself to be cap d’hostal, and when that responsibility should rest upon him he would have need of all the accumulated authority of antiquity, even as his father had need of it now.

Martin resembled his father greatly, both physically and in disposition. Bertrande, who sometimes observed his smothered resentment, or impatience at his inferior position, understood both the impatience and the attitude which kept it in control, the acceptance of things as they were, and said quietly to herself:

“In his day he will make a protector for this family as like his own father as two men well may be, and for that thanks to God.”

Outwardly, Martin had the swarthy skin, the high forehead, the gray eyes, the flat, short nose, the lips, the high cleft chin of his father, and something of his father’s build. Too early labor at the plow had rounded his shoulders. Nevertheless he was a skillful swordsman and boxer, agile, tall, and well-developed for his years. “Not a pretty man,” as the servant had said, “but a very distinguished man.” His ugliness was ancestral, and that in itself was good.

People so reasonable, so devoted, so strongly loving and hard working should have been exempt, one feels, from the vagaries of a malicious fate. Nevertheless, the very virtues of their way of life gave rise to a small incident, and from that incident developed the whole train of misfortune which singled out Bertrande de Rols from the peace and obscurity of her tradition.

It was a day in autumn. The vintage was done and the winter wheat was being put in the ground. Since the men were not expected to return to the farm at noon, Bertrande had taken Martin’s lunch to him, and while he ate, she sat beside him on the sun-warmed, roughened earth at the edge of the field. She was bare-footed and bare-headed, the bodice of her gown open a little at the throat because of the noonday heat. The flesh at the edge of the gown was creamy, and the color deepened upward into a warm tan, growing richer and brighter on the rounded cheeks; and at the edge of the hair, in the shadow of the thick dark locks, the creamy color showed again, now moist from the sheltered heat. She watched her husband with tender, happy eyes. Before them, the cultivated ground slanted downward to a hazel copse. They could hear above them the murmur of the stream, reduced from its full summer flow, where it ran under the chestnut trees, before it circled the field, running below them through the copse and on into the narrowing valley. Across the valley and on the higher slopes, the beech and oak woods were tinged with gold and russet, and higher still a blue haze seemed to be gathering, like threads of smoke. Leaf, earth, and wine in the still sunlight gave forth the odors of their substances; the air was full of autumn fragrance. Martin, when he had finished his lunch, wrapped the fragments of bread and cheese and put them in his wallet. He returned the earthen wine jug to the hands of his wife and said:

“I am going away for a little while.”

Bertrande made an exclamation of surprise.

“You may well be astonished,” replied Martin. “This is the way of it. This morning I took from my father’s granary enough seed wheat to plant the half of this field.”

“You did not ask him for it?” cried Bertrande in alarm.

“Certainly, no. He would have denied it to me because it is his notion that I should put aside whatever grain I need from my own harvesting. But this year I have more land under cultivation than I had hoped to have. Should I let it go to waste? He has finished his planting; the wheat remains unused. So I took it, and I have planted it. Was it not well done?”

“It was well done,” she answered, “but I am afraid for you.”

“I am afraid for myself,” he said with a smile. “Without a doubt, he would flay me. Therefore I am going away. When he has had time to reflect, he will see that it was well done, and he will forgive me. Then I can return. You remember the bear?”

He rubbed his hand reminiscently along his jaw while Bertrande also smiled a little.

“You will have to be gone at least a week,” she said. “Perhaps longer. If I could send you word . . .”

“Eight days should be enough,” said Martin. “It is done for the good of the house—he will see that. And it is better that you should not know where I am in case he asks you. I shall go to Toulouse, then further, so that you can answer honestly, ‘I do not know where he is.’ Embrace my little son for me, and do not be disturbed.”

She kissed him on both cheeks, feeling the warmth of the sun upon his flesh, caressing with her hand the short smooth beard, and then, in a brief premonition of disaster, held to his arm and would not let him go.

“Do not distress yourself,” he repeated tenderly. “I shall be safe. I shall enjoy myself, moreover. And I shall see you in a week.”

So he went off. Once he turned to wave with a free, elated gesture, and then the shadows of the trees engulfed his figure. Bertrande returned to the farm, swinging the empty jug from a forefinger and thinking of the path which led down the valley beside the torrent falling and tumbling toward the Neste. Once she stepped aside to let pass a herd of swine being driven up into the oak forest to feed on acorns. She greeted the swineherd absently, thinking of Martin’s journey, and how he would pass village after village, ford the cold streams, follow the narrow passes beside the Neste and eventually emerge into the greater valley of the Garonne, see the level fields, the walled cities, broad roads traversed by bands of merchants and armed men. The woods were still after the passage of the beasts—no insects and few birds. She wished that she might have gone with Martin. At the farm she found Sanxi, and was glad that she had not gone.

The afternoon passed as usual, but at suppertime, when Monsieur Guerre asked her where Martin was, and she answered, as had been arranged between them, “I do not know,” she trembled beneath the cold gray gaze, penetrating and clear as a beam of light reflected from a wall of ice.

When it was learned that certain baskets of grain had been removed from the granary, the anger of Monsieur Guerre was terrible, as she had known it would be, and she was thankful that Martin’s shoulders were beyond the reach of his father’s heavy whip. At the end of a week the anger of Monsieur Guerre had not abated. Apprehensively Bertrande listened at the approach of every passer-by, started and turned cold each time the door to the house creaked on its broad hinges, and hoped that Martin might be fortunately delayed. Again and again she wished that some arrangement had been made between them by which she might meet and warn him. As week followed week, alarm at his prolonged absence began to mingle with the fear of his premature return. At the end of a month she was almost certain that some evil must have befallen him, and in great fear and agitation presented herself before the father of the family and confessed all that she knew of Martin’s design.

Monsieur Guerre listened to her in silence, without moving a finger. Then he answered coldly:

“Madame, that my son should have become a thief is the greatest shame I have ever been asked to bear. Since he is my son, my only son, and since the welfare of the house depends upon the succession of an heir, I consider it my duty to forgive him. When he returns and confesses his crime, and has borne his punishment, I shall withdraw my anger. Until that time, no matter how distant it may be, rest assured, Madame, my anger shall exist. You may return to your work, Madame.”

It was terrible to her to be addressed in this manner by a man whom she so greatly respected. “For their children,” wrote the learned Etienne Pasquier a few years later, “fathers and mothers are the true images of God upon earth,” and this was not an opinion which Pasquier imposed upon his time, but one in which he had been schooled. Bertrande admitted the inflexible justice of Martin’s father, and regretted bitterly that she had fallen in with Martin’s plans for avoiding punishment. How much better if he had stayed and submitted! He would now be forgiven and all would be well. She now prayed that he return at once. But the winter deepened about the village of Artigues, the ways were blocked with snow, and as even the mountain torrent became locked under ice she abandoned all hope of seeing him that winter.

It was lonely without him. The days, shortened by the double shadow of winter and of the steep mountain-sides, held little gaiety for the wife of Martin Guerre, and the nights were unutterably long. When spring came, the snow melted and all the valley was murmurous with the sound of rushing water. Still Martin delayed his return, and she said to herself:

“It is too early to hope for him. All the streams are flooded, the fords are impassable. Men and horses have been drowned trying to cross La Neste in flood.”

She said this, but still her heart unreasonably demanded that he return and that quickly. With the first fine weather, the young wheat sprouting, the vines beginning to put forth tufts of silvery, crumpled leaves, with the half-wooded, half-cultivated valley ringing, now far, now near, with birdsong, her own youth and beauty quickened; and together with her consciousness of her youth, her beauty, her desire deepened for her husband. Somehow, with the winter, had died the fear that Martin might have been hurt or killed. She was at that time too young to believe in the reality of death. The reviving season held only her love and her impatience.

But spring went by, and Martin did not return. Through the deepening summer she looked for him in vain and only when the first heavy snow again closed the mountain passes did she admit to herself that her husband had left her. She knew that he had found the experience of liberty sweet, that to be master of his own actions was more precious to him than the society of his wife, the enjoyment of his son, or his share in the prosperity of the house. She believed that Martin was waiting until the time when he might return as head of the house, that he could not brook the idea of returning, not only to punishment, but to the continued rigors of his father’s authority. She said nothing of this to anyone, but the thought was not an easy one to live with.

He had deserted her in the full beauty of her youth, in the height of her great passion, he had shamed her and wounded her, and when he returned, if he should return after the death of his father, his authority would be as great as his father’s then was, and to murmur against his treatment of her would then be improper in the highest degree.

Martin’s absence weighed upon the whole family. Although his father never mentioned his name, it was evident to those who knew him well that he had aged since Martin’s departure. The second year after the disappearance of her son, Madame Guerre died. She was not an old woman, and it may have been possible, as her daughters believed, that the illness from which she suffered during the last year of her life was greatly aggravated by the prolonged absence of her son. Bertrande assumed her duties and mourned her, for whatever their differences, always unexpressed by Bertrande, on other matters, the deserted wife had felt that her mother-in-law retained no anger against Martin. With Monsieur Guerre it was quite another matter. However perfect his courtesy to her, Bertrande felt always in his presence the just, inflexible displeasure that he maintained toward her husband, and she was reminded, also, that she had shared in Martin’s plan. To his original offense, as time went by, Martin was also adding the greater offense of neglecting his inheritance.

The displeasure of Monsieur Guerre had become as necessary and inevitable a part of his character as his spine was of his body. When he entered a room that displeasure entered with him. The household, meanwhile, had changed and was no longer gay. Martin’s elder sisters had married and lived elsewhere. The youngest, having married a cadet, or younger son, still lived at home and her husband had come to live with her. He was a quiet soul, deferring easily to Bertrande and to Monsieur Guerre. His presence did not greatly enliven the scene. Sanxi, who was excessively healthy, did not know how to be unhappy, and whether he played or rested, the place where he happened to be was for his mother the only joyous spot on the farm. For the rest, the household waited. Work went on, but the feeling of expectation was always in the air.

The fourth year after Martin’s departure his father, though an expert horseman, was thrown from his horse, and, his head striking against a rock as he fell, he was killed instantly. Bertrande, who had seen him ride away from the house, firm and erect in the saddle, could hardly believe the servants who came with the news an hour later. Still, there was something fitting in the manner of his death, which was abrupt, violent and absolute. The peremptory summons and the prompt obedience were like everything else in his way of living. It would have been difficult to conceive of him as grown old, yielding, little by little, perforce, his authority, hesitating and dwindling, and yet, if Martin had not returned, holding on to a life thoroughly exhausted in order not to leave the house without a master.

The shock of his death threw the family into confusion. Something like a panic seemed to overpower the servants and to reduce the four sisters of Martin to helpless children. And yet at the end of the day, Bertrande, finding for the first time a moment to herself, was surprised to consider how completely his death had been accepted, how long he seemed to have been dead who was not yet buried, whose death, early that morning, has been almost as remote as the day of judgment.

Pierre Guerre, the brother of Monsieur Guerre, had arrived in the afternoon and had announced his position as head of the family. He was a lesser man than his brother, shorter and broader of frame, with something of the family countenance but without the quality of great distinction that somehow had belonged to the old master. No less honest, but more simple, easier to approach, a good farmer, a solid soldier, Uncle Pierre had entered the kitchen and crossed with sober dignity to his brother’s chair by the hearth. He had assigned tasks, taken the legal matters into consideration, sent for the priest and made public the news of the death. The panic had subsided, the servants had gone about their business as usual, the older sisters had returned to their homes, and Bertrande had said to herself:

“Now it will be safe for Martin to return.”

She did not expect him to appear magically. She made her own estimate of the time that it might take the news, traveling uncertainly about the countryside, to reach him, and how long it would take him to make the journey home. And hope flourished and wore greener branches than in many a long day. But as the year which she had allowed passed on and drew to a close, her hope again declined, and there were times when despair took its place entirely. She no longer had the fine sense of immortality which she had felt before the death of Martin’s parents. Death had now become an actuality rather than a possibility. Death was something that not only could happen but that did happen.

A new fear assailed her. When she thought of Martin as perhaps dead, his remembered features suddenly dissolved, and the more she strove to recollect his appearance, the vaguer grew her memory. When she was not trying to remember him, his face would sometimes reappear, suddenly distinct in color and outline. Then she would start and tremble inwardly and try to hold the vision. But the harder she tried, the dimmer grew the face. The same thing had happened to her, she now remembered, after her mother’s death. The beloved image had faded. An impression of warmth, of security, the tones of the voice, the pressure of the hand had remained, but she could not see her mother’s face. She had spoken of this to Madame Guerre, who had replied:

“There are people like that. They do not remember with their eyes, but with their ears, maybe. With me, it is the eye, and I could tell you at any moment in which chest I have laid away anything that you might want. I do not remember where it is, I see it. I cast my eye, as it were, over all my arrangements, and I see where I have laid the article which you desire.”

Once indeed Bertrande thought that Martin had returned. She was walking on the path to the lower fields and was near the place where she had said farewell to her husband almost five years before. A man coming toward her under the shadow of the trees moved with Martin’s gait and was so like him in build that Bertrande stopped, her hand on her breast and her heart leaping suddenly in such wild delight that she could hardly breathe. But the figure, approaching, lost its likeness to the man she loved. She saw presently that he was a stranger and that his features did not resemble those of Martin Guerre in the least. He did not even come near enough to pass her, but some few yards away turned off into the woods in the direction of Sode. Their eyes had met, like those of strangers who met in a narrow path, and he had saluted her, but without recognition.

After he had gone, she stood there, ready to weep in her sick disappointment. The day was cool, a day toward the end of winter, and she wore a heavy black wool cape with a hood, and on her feet were the pointed wooden sabots of her mountains, but she seemed to be standing barefoot on the moss, and bareheaded. Martin’s hands were upon hers; she could see the familiar scars, the torn fingernail; and Martin’s head was bent and touching hers. She could not see his face for his cheek was against her forehead. From the pressure of his hands upon hers such peace and joy flowed into her body that all the woods seemed warm, bathed in autumnal sunlight. The moment faded and she stood alone again in the thin winter air. She realized then that she had not seen his face, and wondered if that might be of good or bad omen. But the touch of his hand had been very living, and she renewed her hope.

If she heard of there being strangers in town, as there so often were, smugglers from Spain, or deserters from one army for another passing from kingdom to kingdom by way of the Port de la Venasque who delayed their wanderings to visit awhile in the rich mountain villages, she sent for them and entertained them overnight, giving them food, wine and a warm place to sleep. Of these she inquired for news of Martin. Had they, while serving with the Duke of Savoy or under the old Constable Montmorency or with the young Duke of Guise, heard of any man named Martin Guerre? Or bivouacked with him? Or perhaps fought by his side? None of these wanderers had met with such a man. They gave her, in return for her hospitality, other news, of how, before the death of the old king, Guienne, Angoumois and Saintonge had risen in insurrection because of the salt tax, of how at Angoulême the king’s tax collectors had been beaten to death and sent “to salt the fish of the Charente,” their flesh being flung into the river. She heard of the cruel revenge which Montmorency took under the new king, Henry, the second of that name, at Bordeaux, burning alive those who had killed the tax collectors, and oppressing and humiliating the whole city most grievously. She learned of the siege of Metz and of Henry’s continuance of the quarrels of his father with the Emperor from men who had fought with Guise under the walls of that city. The Emperor had said, “I see now that Fortune is a woman; she prefers a young king to an old emperor,” and, fatigued and ill, “his face all pale and his eyes sunk in his head, his beard as white as the snow,” had made his resolve to abdicate and withdraw to Yuste, there on the other side of the Pyrenees in the Spanish monastery of the Cordeliers. Her imagination traveled far afield, thinking that wherever there was fighting, there Martin was likely to be; but of Martin himself she learned nothing. She charged these wanderers, upon their leave-taking, with a message to her husband, if they should chance to meet him:

“The old Master is dead. Come home.”

She even made a journey once to Rieux, where her mother’s sister then lived, thinking that to that town, which was a bishopric, almost as many travelers must come as to Toulouse. The town lay in a green meadow in a curve of the Arize, near to the spot at which that turbulent stream hurls itself into the Garonne. Behind it stood the wall of the Pyrenees. The delicate, bold spire of the cathedral, rising above the tiled roofs of the houses, seemed less tall than it was because of the height of the mountains. At the inn and at the cathedral doors Bertrande made her inquiries, and besought her aunt to question travelers whenever she might have the opportunity. She also begged that the death of Martin’s father be announced from the cathedral. But a nostalgia came upon her there—she had never before left the parish of Artigues. She missed Sanxi, and everything seemed strange. Even the room in which she slept in her aunt’s house seemed turned around, and the sun rose in the west and shone through western windows all the morning. Or so it seemed to Bertrande. After a few days she made her excuses to her aunt, and went home to Artigues.

And time went by. Meanwhile Sanxi, who in his earliest infancy had given some slight promise of growing to look like his father, daily grew more and more to resemble the sisters of Martin Guerre, who had their mother’s features and proportions rather than those of their father. This was at first a grief to Bertrande, although in considering Sanxi with his fresh young face and thick smooth chestnut hair, he seemed to her so altogether remarkable and charming that she could not wish him otherwise in any detail. She began to listen instead for the tones of his father’s voice in the boy’s light treble. So, nourishing her devotion with hope and with imagination, she took charge of Martin’s household, tended his child, and waited.

The house flourished, Sanxi grew, and Bertrande increased in beauty. Her sorrow and her new sense of responsibility ennobled her physical charm. She acquired unconsciously a manner of gracious command. Eight years after the departure of her husband she no longer had the first tender radiance which had so pleased the young man, but a greater and more mature beauty had taken its place.

Eight years after the departure of Martin Guerre, Bertrande his wife was seated in the Chamber instructing her son in the catechism. The first warm days of summer were come, and neither mother nor son was paying as great attention as might have been paid to the lesson in hand. The room, large, dusky, cool, shut them effectively from the affairs of the kitchen and the courtyard. The wooden shutters were opened wide, but the window was high. It let in the sunshine but did not permit a view of the yard. The peace of the summer day without, the quiet half hour alone with Sanxi, the release from the continual round of practical duties had relaxed Bertrande. She looked at Sanxi’s cool young cheek beside her knee and thought, “At last I begin to be at peace.”

And her thought, sweeping backward quickly over all the moments of anguish, of desire, of hatred, even, hours of fierce resentment against Martin for making her suffer, for holding her from any other life than a prolonged fruitless waiting for his return, hours of terror when she had contemplated his death in some engagement of the Spanish wars, hours to be remembered with horror in which she had desired his death that she might be free of the agony of incertitude—all these reviewed in a moment with a sharp inward knowledge of herself, her thought returned like a tired dove to this moment of peace in which love was only love for Sanxi, as innocent and cool and gentle as the curve of his cheek. She regarded him thoughtfully and tenderly, and Sanxi, lifting his eyes to hers, smiled with a secret amusement.

“Repeat the answer, my son,” said Bertrande.

Sanxi did so, his delight deepening.

“But you have given me that reply for two questions, Sanxi. You do not attend.”

“No, mother, for three questions, the same answer,” said Sanxi, suddenly hilarious.

“You must not make fun of sacred things,” she said to him as gravely as she could, but neither of them was deceived, and as they smiled at each other, a hubbub arose in the courtyard which made Sanxi run to the window. Standing on his tiptoes, he still could not see much but the adjoining buildings. The tumult increased, with shrill cries, definitely joyous. Bertrande de Rols turned toward the door, leaning slightly forward in her chair. The noise, advancing through the kitchen, was approaching the Chamber, and suddenly the door swung open to admit Martin’s Uncle Pierre, his four sisters and a bearded man dressed in leather and steel, who paused on the threshold as the others crowded forward. Behind him all the household servants and one or two men from the fields showed their excited ruddy faces. The old housekeeper, pushing past him, almost beside herself with joy, curtsied as low as she could, and cried:

“It is he, Madame!”

“It is Martin, my child,” said Uncle Pierre.

“Bertrande,” cried the sisters in chorus, “here is our brother Martin!”

Their voices filled the room, echoing from the low beams and the stone walls; they were all talking at once, and, as Bertrande rose to her feet, keeping one hand on the back of the chair to steady herself against a sudden, quickly passing dizziness, the bearded figure advanced gravely, surrounded by the agitated forms of the sisters, the uncle, the servants, who were now all swarming in behind the original group.

It was dark at the far end of the room. Bertrande stood in the sunlight and met, as in a dream, the long-anticipated moment, her breath stilled and her heart beating wildly. The figure in leather and steel advanced with even tread, a stockier figure than that of the man who had gone away eight years before, broader in the shoulder, developed, mature. The beard was strange, being rough and thick, but above it the eyes were like those of Martin, the forehead, the whole cast of the countenance, like and unlike to Bertrande’s startled recognition, and as he advanced from the shadow he seemed to Bertrande a stranger, the stranger of the wooded pathway, then her loved husband, then a man who might have been Martin’s ancestor but not young Martin Guerre.

When he had advanced to within a few feet of her, he stopped, and she read in his eyes a surprise and an admiration so intense that her limbs seemed all at once bathed in a soft fire. She was frightened.

“Madame,” said the stranger who was her husband, “you are very beautiful.”

“Cap de Diou!” exclaimed the uncle. “Are you surprised that your wife is beautiful?”

“Beautiful, yes, I knew, but beauty such as this I did not remember.”

“Yes, Martin, yes,” cried the sisters. “She has changed, you are right. It is another beauty.”

“But why do you stand there? Embrace her, my nephew.”

And then Bertrande felt on her cheek the imprint of the bearded lips, and on her shoulders the weight of the strong hands, felt with a shock the actual masculinity of the embrace, so strange for one who had been long accustomed only to the light touch of Sanxi’s mouth. The embrace released her from her trance, reminding her of the last kiss which she had given Martin at the edge of the wheat field, and all the emotion tightly held in check for so many years was in her voice as she cried:

“Ah, why have you been away so long! Cruel! Cruel! I have almost forgotten your face! Even your voice, Martin, is strange in my ears.”

“Bertrande,” said Pierre Guerre with gravity, “this is no proper welcome for your husband, to overwhelm him with reproaches. You forget yourself, my child, indeed you do. My nephew, you must pardon her. It is the excess of emotion. We cannot tell you how we rejoice at your return. It was the greatest of sorrows to your father that you were gone so long. But that is over. I praise God that you are safely with us, no longer a boy, but a man grown. In times like these a house has need of a master and a child of a protector.”

“I praise God also,” said Bertrande softly, “and I ask your pardon, my husband.”

“No, Uncle,” came the reply. “She does well to reproach the man who left you all so long unprotected. It is I who should ask pardon of her. But you must believe me: until I passed through Rieux I did not know that my father was dead.” And, bending above her hand, he promised Bertrande that he would never again leave her and that he would do all in his power to atone for the neglect which he had shown her. Bertrande was deeply touched and not a little surprised. Uncle Pierre remarked:

“It is well done, my nephew. I can see that the wars have done more for you than strengthen bone and muscle. You have spoken like a true father and like the head of a house.”

Behind him the four sisters of Martin were agitated by murmurs of approval, and there were cries of approval and admiration from the servants, who, crowding forward, all wished to salute their long-absent master.

He greeted them all, inquiring for certain ones who had died during his absence, questioned them about their families and their health, praised them for their loyalty and good service, and appeared so genuinely pleased to see them all that their enthusiasm redoubled.

Bertrande, watching him, said to herself:

“He is noble, he is generous, he is like his father again, but become gracious.”

But suddenly the master, putting aside gently the servants who stood between him and Bertrande, cried:

“But where is Sanxi? Where is my son, that I may embrace him?”

At this Sanxi, who had been hiding behind his mother, burrowed his head into her skirts, drawing the ample folds about his shoulders.

“Come, Sanxi,” said his mother, taking him by the shoulders. “Here is your father, your good father of whom we have talked so many times. Salute him.”

“Ah, my little monsieur,” exclaimed a great voice, “it is good to see you,” and Sanxi, clinging like a kitten to his mother’s skirts, so that she had to disengage his fingers one by one, felt himself hoisted into the air and then folded close to a hard shoulder, smelt the reek of leather and horse-sweat, and then felt the wiry beard rubbed joyously against his face.

“Mama!” he cried. “Mama!”

“It is the strangeness,” he heard his mother’s voice saying apologetically. “Do not hold it against him. Consider, how sudden and how strange—for him, as for me.”

“Tonnèrre!” cried the great voice. “He is hard to hold. But never mind. We shall be friends, in time.”

The boy felt himself set on his feet firmly, and then his parents turned away from him. Some people pushed in between him and his mother, and as the crowd moved toward the door, everyone laughing and talking, it carried her along, clinging to the arm of the stranger. The swineherd and the boy who cared for the horses were the last to leave the room. They lagged behind, buffeting each other out of sheer good will, and the swineherd, turning, saw young Sanxi still standing in front of his mother’s chair.

“What a fine day for you,” he called. “It isn’t everyday that a boy gets a father.”

An hour later Sanxi had recovered himself sufficiently to dare sit beside his father on the long bench before the fireplace. On the other side of his father was the priest; in front of him, on a stool, was Uncle Pierre. His mother kept coming and going from the table to the fireplace, pausing sometimes with her hand on the shoulder of Uncle Pierre to gaze happily and incredulously at his father.

Uncle Pierre had to tell again how he had met Sanxi’s father, “away by the church, far from the road to the farm. I knew him at once, and that from the back of his head. I cried, ‘Hollah, Martin, my nephew, where are you going, away so far from your own house? You have returned,’ I said. ‘Pray do not leave us before you have seen your own roof.’ And what answer did he make, this excellent man? ‘I am going,’ said he, ‘to the church to give thanks to God for my safe return and to pray for the soul of my father of whose death I learned only yesterday.’”

The priest nodded with grave approval; the uncle wiped an actual tear from his eye.

“So then I cried, ‘Good boy, embrace me, Martin, embrace your old Uncle Pierre,’ and together we went and knelt in the church. I am glad that I have lived to see this day.”

Then Sanxi’s father had to hear from the priest and from Uncle Pierre all the story of how Sanxi’s grandfather had fallen from his horse and been killed instantly, and of how his grandmother had died very quietly in her bed with all her family and her servants round about, weeping, all save her son Martin, and through all these recitals Sanxi was puzzled to see how his mother alternately wept and smiled. His father did not cry. He was very serious, very serious and strong, and Sanxi, sitting beside him, observed minutely all the straps and buckles of his armor and how the metal of his gorget had chafed the leather of his jerkin, and began to admire him, silently.

For the rest of the day he attached himself to his father’s person, like a small dog who does not mind whether he is noticed or not, provided he is permitted to be present. He heard his father’s brief account of his wanderings. He listened to the servants as they poured out to his father their stories of everything that had taken place since his departure, eight years ago. He even listened unnoticed while Uncle Pierre went over the business of the house with his father. And in the evening there were violins and flutes, roast meat as if it were a fête day, and neighbors riding in from miles around to welcome his father home. Sanxi had not known that his own household could be so gay. The very walls of the kitchen were animated and seemed to tremble in the ruddy glow from the chimney. The copper vessels winked and blazed. The glazed pottery on the dresser also gave back the quivering light, and his father’s armor, as he flung himself back in his chair, or rose to meet a newcomer, was momentarily like the sky of an autumn sunset. But the seasons are tyrannical for the farmer. In the morning the flutes and violins were put away, and before dawn the men were about the usual work of the farm. The master to the fields, the mistress to the dairy—everything was just as usual until evening, and then, after supper before the hour for prayers, there was much talk by the fireplace of foreign lands, sieges and marches, the slaying of heretics, and finally, instead of his mother saying, “Prayers, my friends,” there was the master of the house, like Sanxi’s grandfather, announcing,

“My children, it is time for prayer.”

The estate prospered surprisingly after the return of the master. The vigor of the man was contagious, and he had a way of noticing the work that a servant was doing and saying a word of approval that the old master had never had. For Bertrande, as for Sanxi, it was a new life, almost a new world. Gladly she surrendered the responsibilities of the farm to her husband’s care, and surrendered herself to his love. From having been a widow for eight years, she was suddenly again a wife. The loneliness of the house was dissipated. Even when there were not old friends come from a distance to greet Martin Guerre, even when the priest was not established in the corner of the hearth to hear accounts of the world below the mountains, there was good conversation in the house, and sometimes music, and Sanxi flourished and grew manly in the companionship of a hero. His newly-found father was no less to him.

At the end of a few months Bertrande found herself with child. She rejoiced thereat, and she also trembled, for at times a curious fear assailed her, a fear so terrible and unnatural that she hardly dared acknowledge it in her most secret heart. What if Martin, the roughly bearded stranger, were not the true Martin, the one whom she had kissed farewell that noonday by the side of the freshly planted field? Her sin, if such indeed were a fact, would be most black, for had she not experienced an instinctive warning? On the night of his return, overcome by desire and astonishment, she had trembled in his embrace and murmured again and again:

“Martin, it is so strange, I cannot believe it to be true.”

To which the bearded traveler had replied:

“Poor little one, you have been too long alone.”

In the morning her fear had vanished, Martin’s family and friends, the servants, the very animals of the place, it seemed, affirming his identity, and putting her heart at peace.

So she had been happy, and had rejoiced in the presence of this new Martin even more than in that of the old, and it was not until she began to feel the weight of the child in her body that the fear returned. Even so, it did not stay. It was like the shadow of a dark wing sweeping suddenly across the room, and then departing swiftly as it had come, leaving all things standing as usual under the cold, normal light of day. But one day, seeing Martin returning from a ride with Sanxi, and seeing the easy comradeship between the two, she said aloud:

“It is not possible that this man should be Martin Guerre. For Martin Guerre, the son of the old master, proud and abrupt, like the old master, could never in this world speak so gaily to his own son. Ah! unhappy woman that I am, so to distrust the Good God who has sent me this happiness! I shall be punished. But this is also punishment in itself.”

No one heard her speak, and, weeping bitterly, she withdrew to her own room where she remained until a servant came to find her at the hour of the evening meal. Nevertheless, in spite of her contrition, she could not refrain, the moment that they were left alone that evening, from accusing her husband of being other than the man he represented, and of asking for proof of his identity.

She had expected passionate proof or passionate denial. The man before her regarded her gravely, even tenderly, and said:

“Proof? But why proof? You have seen me. You have felt the touch of my lips. Behold my hands. Are they not scarred even as you remember them? Do you remember the time my father struck me and broke my teeth? They are still broken. You have spoken with me; we have spoken together of things past. Is not my speech the same? Why should I be other than myself? What has happened to give you this strange notion?”

Bertrande replied in a barely audible voice:

“If you had been Martin Guerre you would perhaps have struck me just now.”

He answered with gentle surprise:

“But because I struck you on the day we were married, is that a reason I should strike you now? Listen to me, my dearest. Am I who speak to you now more different from the young man who left you, than that young man was different from the child you married?”

“When you left me,” said Bertrande, “you resembled your father in flesh and spirit. Now you resemble him only in the flesh.”

“My child,” said her husband, ever more gravely, “my father was arrogant and severe. Just, also, and loving, but his severity sent from home his only son. For eight years I have traveled among many sorts and conditions of men. I have been many times in danger of death. If I return to you with a greater wisdom than that which I knew when I departed, would you have me dismiss it, in order again to resemble my father? God knows, my child, and the priest will so instruct you, that a man of evil ways may by an act of will so alter all his actions and his habits that he becomes a man of good. Are you satisfied?”

“And then,” said Bertrande, in a still smaller voice, marshaling her last argument, “Martin Guerre at twenty had not the gift of the tongue. His father, also, was a silent man.”

At this her husband, hitherto so grave, burst into a laugh which made the Chamber echo, and still laughing, with his broad hand he wiped the tears from her wet face.

“My darling, how funny you are,” he said. “Weep no more. Every Gascon has the gift of the tongue. Some employ it, some do not. Since I am become no longer arrogant and severe, I choose to employ my gift.” Then, more gently, he continued. “Madame, you are demented. It happens sometimes to women who are with child. Pay no attention to it. It will pass, and when your time is over, you will look back to this with astonishment.”

“Perhaps that is it,” said Bertrande in acquiescence. “For God knows I do not wish you to be otherwise than my true husband. When I went to visit my aunt in Rieux, being in a strange town, I became confused as to the directions, and not until I left that house did it seem to me, when I was within doors, that the east was not the west. So it must be with me now. For when I look at you it seems to me that I see the flesh and bone of Martin Guerre, but in them I see dwelling the spirit of another man.”

“When I was in Brittany,” said her husband, “I heard a strange story of a man who was also a wolf, and there may also have been times when the soul of one man inhabited the body of another. But it is also notorious that men who have been great sinners have become saints. What would become of us all if we had no power to turn from evil toward good?”

And so he led her on to talk of other matters, of foreign lands and battles in Flanders until she was again calm. She put her fear away, or rather, she regarded it as a delusion, and she gave herself over to the happy anticipation of her second child. In her affection for her husband was now mingled a profound gratitude, for he had delivered her, at least for the present, from the terror of sin. When, upon a certain day she asked him if he remembered such and such a little incident, and he responded, smiling, “No, and do you remember when I told you that your eyes are speckled like the back of a mountain trout?” she only smiled in return, full of confidence and ease.

“You did not say such things when you were twenty,” she replied.

It was the time of year when the grapes were being harvested, and the odor of ripe muscats was in the air. When the wine was made and the leaves on the vine stocks had turned scarlet, Bertrande rode out among valleys that dipped in fire toward Luchon between the irregular advances of the woods, saw the conical haystacks burning with dull gold beside the stone walls of farm buildings, felt, as she rode in the sunshine, the cold invigorating sweep of wind from the higher mountains, lifted her eyes and saw how the white clouds piled high above the rich green of the pine woods and how the sky was intensely blue beyond, blue as a dream of the Mediterranean or of the Gulf of Gascony. And returning, toward evening to her own house, as the blue haze of evening began to intercept and transmute the shapes of things, she smelled the wood smoke from her own hearth fire and thought it as sweet as the incense which was burned in the church at Artigues. Or she saw at the far end of a field, a man wearing a scarlet jerkin working in a group of men uniformly clothed in brown, a small dot of scarlet moving about on long brown legs against the golden surface of the earth, and these things, intensely perceived as never before since she could remember, filled her with a piercing joy. The cold metallic gleam of halberds moving forward under a steely sky against the background of the russet woods, as a band of soldiers passed her by; the very feel and pattern of the frost upon the threshold early in the morning as the season advanced; the motion and songs of birds, until their numbers diminished; and then the iron sound of the church bell ringing in somber majesty across the cold valleys—all these she noticed and enjoyed as never before. And even, when winter had closed around them, one night from a far-off hillside, the crying of wolves had filled her with a pleasure enhanced with dread, for the doors were safely closed and all the animals safe within walls, and a good fire roared in the great fireplace, spreading shifting constellations of gold against the black throat of the chimney, so that the dread was a luxury, and her enjoyment of the strange distant voices all the greater. And all this vividness of feeling, this new awareness of the life around her, was because of her love for this new Martin Guerre, and because of the delight and health of her life-giving body. Yet even this love was intensified, like her pleasure in the cry of the wolves, by the persistent illusion, or suspicion, that this man was not Martin.

The illusion, if such it was, did not pass away at the termination of her pregnancy, as he had prophesied it would do, but she had grown used to it. It lent a strange savor to her passion for him. Her happiness, and the happiness of her children, especially that of the newly born, the son of the new Martin, shone the more brightly, was the more greatly to be treasured because of the shadow of sin and danger which accompanied it. She wrapped the little body in swaddling bands, sheltering the little bald head from the chill spring air with her softest woolen cloth, and walked out into the fields along paths still wet from melting snow, where the earliest spring blossoms had already pricked the dead leaves. The winter wheat showed its point of new sharp green, and the air alternately misted, showered, and shone in confusing variability.

In June the wheat was harvested and the brook of the valley was turned loose by irrigating ditches upon the stubble fields, which had already begun to parch and burn in the midsummer heat. The steep fields, being so flooded, were like a series of cascades and terraces, running and shining; yet the water also sank deep into the rich earth and before long the fields were bright, some with flowers and grass, some with the new crop of buckwheat. And still the happiness of Bertrande continued, accompanied always by the shadow of her suspicion, and she could no longer say:

“It will pass when I am delivered of the child.”

Through the summer, little by little the shadow increased in the mind of Bertrande. In vain did she contend with it. In a thousand small ways her suspicion was strengthened, in ways so small that she was ashamed to mention them. She thought of speaking of the matter in confession, but checked herself, saying:

“The priest will think me mad.” She did not say, “Or worse, he will find a way to prove that which I only suspect.”

But this was in her mind, and day after day she turned aside, she doubled her tracks, like a pursued creature, trying to avoid the realization which she knew was waiting for her. But as time went on she found herself more and more surely faced with the obligation of admitting herself to be hopelessly insane or of confessing that she was consciously accepting as her husband a man whom she believed to be an impostor. If the choice had lain within her power she would undoubtedly have chosen to be mad. For days and weeks she turned aside, as in a fever, from what she felt to be the truth, declaring to her distracted soul that she was defending the safety of her children, of her household, from Uncle Pierre down to the smallest shepherd, and then at last, one morning as she was seated alone, spinning, the truth presented itself finally, coldly, inescapably.

“I am no more mad than is this man. I am imposed upon, deceived, betrayed into adultery, but not mad.”

The spindle dropped to the floor, the distaff fell across her knees, and though she sat like a woman turned into stone and felt her heart freezing slowly in her bosom, the air which entered her nostrils seemed to her more pure than any she had breathed in years, and the fever seemed to have left her body. She began then quietly to array before her in this clear passionless light the facts of her situation as she must now consider it, no longer distorted through fear or shame or through the desire of the flesh. She knew that she would never again be able to pretend that this was the man whom she had married. Although she had loved him passionately and joyously, and perhaps loved him still, and although he was the father of her son, she must rid herself of him. But could she rid herself? If she asked him to go, would he go? If she were to accuse him publicly of his crime, could she prove it? And if she could not prove it, in bringing such an accusation would she not be wronging the entire family from Sanxi and herself to the least of the cousins and cousins-in-law? And what of her youngest son, the son of the impostor? Had he no claim upon her, that she should of her own free will dishonor his birth? Terror assailed her lest she be trapped inescapably, and in her profound agitation and fear she rose and paced back and forth in the long, silent room until she was fatigued and trembling. She crossed to the window, and, leaning on the high sill, looked down into the courtyard.

Dusk was gathering, an autumn dusk. The paving stones were black with damp, but by morning they would be lacy white. While she stood there, looking down, her husband rode into the yard. A boy ran to meet him, and led his horse away after he had dismounted. The smith, whose fire glowed dimly in the cold gray light, left his work for a moment to salute his master, and returned to his work, smiling and rubbing his blackened hands together; and the old housekeeper, she who had brought the réveillon to the child bride and groom, so many years ago, appeared on the doorstep, holding a cup of warm wine. The master paused on the threshold to drink the wine and thank the old woman, and Bertrande could see quite plainly the look of adoration with which she received the empty cup.

“How firmly he is entrenched,” she sighed. “How firmly.”

The next day, an occasion presenting itself as Martin’s younger sister was praising his conduct to his wife, Bertrande ventured:

“Yes, he is very kind, very gentle. One would almost say, is this the same man who so resembled in action and in feature your father?”

“One would almost say so,” assented the sister amiably.

“But I do say so,” returned Bertrande. “Often I ask myself, can this man be an impostor? And the true Martin Guerre, has he been slain in the wars?”

“Mother of Heaven,” replied the sister, shocked, “how can you say such a thing, even think so? It is enough to tempt the saints to anger. Oh, Bertrande, you have not said such a thing to anyone else, have you?”

“Oh, no,” she answered lightly.

“Then for the love of Our Lady, never speak of it again to me or to anyone. It is unkind. Martin could consider it an insult. He might be very angry if he heard it.”

“Very well,” said Bertrande. “I was jesting,” and she smiled, but her heart was sick.

At confession, kneeling in the stale, cold semi-darkness, her hands muffled in her black wool capuchon, her head bowed, she said, as she had long meditated but never dared:

“Father, I have believed my husband, who is now master of my house, not to be Martin Guerre whom I married. Believing this, I have continued to live with him. I have sinned greatly.”

“My child,” replied the voice of the priest, without indicating the least surprise, “for what reason have you suspected this man not to be the true Martin Guerre?”

“Ah, he also has suspected him,” said Bertrande to herself, and her heart gave a great leap of joy, like that of an imprisoned animal who sees the way to escape.

She replied to the priest as she had replied to her husband, giving instances of his behavior which seemed to her unnatural.

“What shall I do,” she besought him finally, “what shall I do to be forgiven?”

“Softly, my child,” said the calm voice of the priest. “It is then for his kindness to you that you accuse him?”

“Not for his kindness, but for the manner of his kindness.”

“No matter,” said the priest. “It is because of a great change in his spirit. He spoke to me of this long since, being concerned for you, and it seems to me that he has been toward you both wise and gentle. Go now in peace, my daughter. Be disturbed no more.”

Bertrande continued to kneel, only drawing her cloak closer about her shoulders. The cold air seemed to draw slowly through the meshes of the wool and rise from the cold stones on which she knelt. At last she replied incredulously:

“You then believe him to be no impostor?”

“Surely not,” said the easy voice of the priest, warm, definite and uncomprehending. “Surely not. Men change with the years, you must remember. Pray for understanding, my daughter, and go in peace.”

Slowly she got to her feet and slowly made her way through the obscurity to the doorway, pushed aside the unwieldy leather curtain, stepped outside into the freely moving air and the more spacious dusk, and descended the familiar steps.

Familiar figures passed her, greeting her as they went on into the church. She answered them as in a dream, and as in a dream took the path to her farm. She felt like one who has been condemned to solitude, whether of exile or of prison. All the circumstances of her life, the instruction of the church, her affection for her children and her kindred rose up about her in a wall implacable as stone, invisible as air, condemning her to silence and to the perpetuation of a sin which her soul had learned to abhor. She could not by any effort of the imagination return to the happy and deluded state of mind in which she had passed the first years since the return of her husband. The realization that she was again with child added to her woe, and the weight, such as she had carried before in her body joyously, now seemed the burden of her sin made actual and dragged her down at every step.

The path, turning to follow the contours of the mountainside, brought her after a time to the crest of a slope above her farm. There it lay, house, grange and stable, set about with its own orchards, its chimney smoking gently, infinitely more familiar, more her own after all these years than the house in which she had been born; yet as she looked down toward it from the hillside she thought that it was no longer hers. An enemy had taken possession of it and had treacherously drawn to his party all those who most owed her loyalty and trust. Her eyes filled with tears, and when she drew her hands away from her face, a commotion had arisen in the courtyard below. People were running about with torches, gathering into a group from which excited cries, staccato and sonorous, rose toward the hillside, and presently three figures on horseback detached themselves from the group and rode away, the hoofs ringing on the stones. She remembered then that Martin had promised to make one of a cordon for a bear hunt from the parish of Sode, and knew that these must be his neighbors come for him.

When she reached her doorway, the housekeeper greeted her.

“The Master is gone to Sode. Ah, they are fortunate to have him! He is famous as a hunter of bear.” She laughed, helping Bertrande to remove her cape; and did not see that her mistress’s face had been stained with tears.

The next evening as they sat together, her husband said to Bertrande:

“Why do you look at me so strangely with your lovely two-colored eyes, your lucky eyes?”

“I was wondering when you would leave me to return again to the wars.”

“I have told you never, never until you cease to love me.”

“I have ceased to love you. Will you go?”

Something in the quality of her voice restrained the man from jesting. “I do not believe you,” he said, courteously.

“You must believe me,” she cried with passion. “I beg of you to go. You have been here too long already,” and a fire kindled in the eyes which the Gascons call lucky, the eyes of hazel and green, which made her husband lean forward and look long and searchingly into her face.

At last he said:

“You are still cherishing that madness of which you spoke, long since. Can you suppose that while you believe this thing of me, I will ever leave you? That would serve only to deepen your madness and increase your suffering. Do you not understand?”

“You are intricate,” she cried. “You have the subtlety of the Evil One himself.”

The man straightened, and rose from his chair. When he spoke, the quality of his voice had changed completely.

“I am sorry, Madame. There are others to be considered besides yourself. School yourself, Madame, to the inevitable.”

He lifted her hand to his lips, and without another word turned and left her.

“Ah,” exclaimed Bertrande bitterly, “that was the true manner of Martin Guerre. He has profited well from my complaints, this impostor.”

Then began for the woman a long game of waiting and scrutinizing. Some day, she told herself, he will be off his guard, some day, if I do not warn him too often, I shall catch him in his deception, and free myself of him. “Ah, Martin, Martin,” she cried in her loneliness, “where are you and why do you not return?” And as she observed the man whom she now called the impostor, considered the tranquillity of his demeanor and the ease with which he accomplished all his designs, confidently winning all people to him, the terrifying thought occurred to her that his great sense of security might lie in some certain knowledge, unshared by herself or by anyone else at Artigues. Perhaps the real Martin was indeed dead. Perhaps this man had seen his body on some distant battlefield, besmeared with blood and mutilated, the face turned downward to the bloody grass.

Perhaps, and at this last thought her soul recoiled in horror, perhaps he had himself slain Martin Guerre that he might come to Artigues in perfect safety and inherit his lands.

She watched him as he sat by the fire, fatigued from the day’s work, yet playing gently with the children, holding the youngest child upon his knee, and discoursing meanwhile to Sanxi, and he did not appear a monster. The priest came still, through the winter evenings, as before Bertrande had made her momentous confession, and, hearing the talk between the curé and the master of the house, Bertrande could not but admit that this man was wise, subtle, and, if not learnèd, infinitely skilled in argument. The priest valued him, the children loved him, and these virtues of his which entrenched him with those who should have supported her, but made her the more bitter against him. Passionate as had once been her love for this stranger, so passionate became her hatred of him, and her fear; yet in order that his power over her might not become greater, she dissembled her hatred and veiled her fear; for this reason and also because the innocent and observant eyes of Sanxi were upon her. Now all the years of loneliness before the return of Martin Guerre, or rather, before the coming of the impostor, stood her in good stead. She enclosed in her heart a single fierce determination, and outwardly her life went on as usual.

Still, she sickened. When her pallor was mentioned to her, she explained it by her physical condition. She grew more thin in cheek and shoulder as her belly grew more round. The bones of her face, the delicate arch of the nose, the high cheek bones, the wide and well-shaped skull, defined themselves under the white skin, and beneath the high arching brows her lucky eyes shone with an extraordinary luminosity.

Her husband was extremely attentive to her health, ordering all things that he could imagine to increase her comfort, excusing her from work whenever it was possible, and if there was a battle between them, apparently only Bertrande herself was aware of it. Sometimes she wondered, so unfailing were his courtesies, whether he was indeed aware of the fact that they were enemies. However, in the beginning of the spring and toward the termination of her pregnancy, an incident occurred which defined their positions beyond any doubt.

Martin’s younger sister and her husband, Uncle Pierre Guerre, the curé and Martin Guerre himself, whom Bertrande called the impostor, were returning from mass at Artigues to Martin’s farm. As they approached the inn, the landlord, leaning from an upper story window—for the ground floor was given over to the accommodation of the horses of his guests, according to custom—called to Martin Guerre:

“Hollah, Master Guerre, here is a friend of yours from Rochefort, an old comrade in arms who asks the way to your house.”

He drew in his head, turning around to speak to a person in the room behind him, and as Martin’s party came up to the door of the inn, there issued from that door a thick-set figure wearing a coat of link armor over a red woolen jerkin, who carried a cross-bow slung over one shoulder and a short sword fastened to his belt. His face was scarred from more than battle wounds, and one eye was clouded by some kind of infection that was gradually masking the lens.

“I was at Luchon,” he said, coming close to them, without hesitation, “soaking my old carcass and my scabby hide in that unspeakable mud. It smells of bad eggs, pah, but it is warm, and that feels good. There I learned of your being home again, and I came to stretch my legs before your fire. Eh, Martin, we shall have much to say of Picardy, eh, and other matters less heroic.” He laughed, thrusting his thumbs through his belt, but the man whom he addressed neither laughed nor smiled but regarded him with a somewhat puzzled countenance.

“Eh, Martin?” repeated the soldier, and, indicating by a nod of his head Martin’s younger sister, “Is this your wife?”

“My friend of Rochefort,” said Martin slowly, “I cannot for the life of me remember when or where we met. I am not so certain that we ever met at all.”

The soldier cocked his head to one side, and then, with the gesture of a man who feels the leg of a spavined horse, bent quickly, and grasping Martin below the left knee, gave the leg a sharp squeeze and then a slap. Straightening himself abruptly, he announced:

“Certainly, you do not remember me! You are not even sure you know me, eh? Impostor! You are Monsieur Martin Guerre, my friend? You return from the mass, you are neat and proper, you have a great distaste for the smelly old soldier! You are nothing but a fraud. The true Martin Guerre—I knew him very well. There was a man. He could see beyond the dirt on the face of a friend. He lost a leg before St. Quentin in the year fifty-seven.”

There was a dead silence, during which Martin Guerre lifted his left eyebrow the while he contracted the right, a trick, as his sister remembered, which had been characteristic of his father.

Then Uncle Pierre said:

“Brute! You have the manners of a pig. Take yourself away before you force me to roll you in the dirt.”

“I do not go away so easily,” said the soldier from Rochefort. The man whom he had accused still regarded him calmly, and slowly remarked:

“Doubtless he wishes me to bribe him to leave. I have heard that there was employed under the Duke of Savoy a man who resembled me greatly in feature. Perhaps it was he who lost a leg.”

“Ventre de Dieu,” exclaimed the soldier with increased impatience and scorn. “I knew him well, the true Martin Guerre. He was a Gascon and he lost his left leg at the battle of St. Laurent before St. Quentin. It is all one to me if this man is a rogue. He is your relative, not mine. If he had been Martin Guerre, he would have known me.”

And with many oaths he turned back to the inn, of which all the windows now stood wide open as those within tried to see and hear what went on; he was still cursing under his breath and in more languages than one as he disappeared within the shadow of the doorway, but he made no further effort to have his story believed.

“He is malicious,” said Pierre Guerre with indignation, as the small party proceeded on the way to the farm.

“He was disappointed,” said Martin. “He thought to find a welcome with good lodging and food for a week. I do not grudge him the food, but I cannot have him sitting about every evening telling stories of gallant adventures—which I did not commit—before my wife, who is so sick.”

The curé said nothing, but Martin’s sister and uncle discussed the matter of having the soldier apprehended.

“Let it pass,” said Martin. “It was a mistake; there is truly a man who resembles me. I have heard of him more than once. And the fellow was disappointed. Had he been less foul with disease I would have brought him home with us anyway, to hear the news from Spain.” To the priest he added, “I could wish that this had not happened.”

The priest nodded, said nothing, but the sister continued indignant and voluble, and when they reached the farm, and found Bertrande waiting for them in the kitchen, she burst at once into an account of the adventure.

“Imagine it,” exclaimed Uncle Pierre as the young woman paused for breath. “Only imagine it! He leaned over, this pig of a man, and pinched Martin below the knee as if he had been a horse for sale at the market. I wonder that he did not offer to look at his teeth.”

“He called Martin a rogue,” repeated the sister, ever more indignant. “Worse than that,” said the brother-in-law. “He called Martin an impostor.”

Bertrande, looking from one hot, excited face to another, turned at last her brilliant eyes full upon her husband’s quiet countenance, in a look of triumph and scorn.

“At last,” she cried suddenly in a strange hoarse voice, “at last, dear God, Thou wilt save me!”

She pressed her hands to her temples, then turned, and ran from the room.

“Go with her,” said Martin, his face immediately full of concern. “Go with her quickly, my sister. Do you not see? She is ill.” To the priest he said, “You understand to what a pass it has come? I would give half my farm if this soldier from Rochefort had never come to Luchon. This will unsettle her reason.”

The sister, who had followed Bertrande, found her kneeling beside the bed, clutching the coverlet in agony. To all questions and reproaches she answered only:

“I am dying, I am dying. I beg of you, send for my nurse.”

She was delivered that night in great suffering of a daughter who died before she had lived an hour. Bertrande herself was very ill, and in the fever which followed the birth of the child, asked only to see the soldier from Rochefort. To humor her, for he thought her hours were numbered, the curé sent for the soldier, but the man was not to be found. He had not lingered at Artigues. He had been seen at St. Gaudens some days later. After that all trace of him was lost. However, the curé caused to be written down and properly witnessed and signed the accounts of those who heard the soldier’s accusation, and these papers he brought to the invalid. Immediately after she had received them, the condition of Madame Guerre began to improve, a fact which could not fail to impress not only the curé but her entire family.

“She is mad,” they said to each other, “but if we humor her and are patient, God willing, she may recover.”

The improvement continued. She gained strength slowly but steadily and was soon able to walk about a little in her room, but she refused steadily to leave the Chamber. She refused likewise to see her husband, to admit him to her room, or in any way to have anything to do with him. Everyone on the farm could see how heavily this weighed upon the master. He was as patient as ever with his people, and as kind, but there was little merriment.

“Madame is not herself since her illness,” the housekeeper said to the priest, “and it is breaking the Master’s heart.”

The priest sought out Martin Guerre, and found him at work in the fields. Together they sat down in the shade of the beech trees, and the priest said:

“Who would have thought that kindness could have worked so much sorrow!”

Martin shook his head.

“There would have been no sorrow, Father, if I had not tried to run away from my father’s anger. The trouble begins there. But what shall I do to help her? Once she asked me to leave her.”

The priest surveyed his friend intently. If this man were not indeed his friend and the son of his friend, surely his eyes would betray him.

“And you refused to leave?” the priest said.

“At that time I refused,” said the man before him, evenly, his sad eyes meeting those of the priest without hesitation. “I thought that to leave her then would but confirm her in this madness, and that I should be deserting her to years of pain—as if I were to fasten upon her the guilt of a sin—” he hesitated—“a sin of which she must not be accused.”

His voice was vehement, and he stopped speaking abruptly, overcome with emotion. To the priest, who knew the voice, who knew the face, there could be no doubt whatever but that the grief, the concern and the humility were real. He passed a hand over his forehead and looked away toward the empty wheat field.

“My son,” he answered at last, “I do not know what to advise you. What you have said is true. If you run away—if you disappear again—it will look like an admission of guilt. Unless, of course, you go with my consent and knowledge, leaving word of where you may be found, and denying the accusation of the fellow from Rochefort. It is conceivable that your absence might improve the condition of your wife. Your presence but adds continual fuel to the fire. The spirit is ill, and it has need of rest to heal itself, of rest as well as prayer. But you cannot leave the farm indefinitely. Your people have need of you. The parish, also—I have need of you. Is there no journey you could make about some business of the farm?”

Martin shook his head.

“The business of the farm is all in the parish of Artigues.”

“You left a sum of money with your uncle when you were a boy. I think that it has never been spent. Take it, and journey to Toulouse and there purchase a gift for Our Lady. Be home again before the snow. Say farewell to your wife before you go.”

“She will not speak to me,” said the man with a wry smile. “But I shall say farewell to you before I go. I must help them with the wheat harvest before I leave. Meanwhile”—he hesitated—“let us say nothing of the matter until it is accomplished. There will be less talk.”

The priest nodded, and blessed him. Martin Guerre returned to his work.

A few days later Bertrande herself sent for Pierre Guerre. The honest man found her seated in the high-backed chair near the curtained bed, but as he approached her, she rose.

“I have sent for you, my uncle,” she said in a low voice, “because you are still the head of our family, and I must beseech your help.”

The room was cool, and to the diminished vitality of the invalid it seemed even cold. She stood wrapped in her black wool capuchon, the hood thrown back on her shoulders. Her illness had aged her, but there showed in her face such poise and clarity of spirit that the uncle was unaccountably moved.

“Sit down, my child,” he said gently. “You will tire yourself.”

She shook her head.

“I ask you to believe me, believe me at last, when I say to you now, ‘I am not mad.’ All my household believe me to be mad. I have only yourself to whom to look for help.”

“I believe you, my child,” he answered quietly. “Sit down. Look, I will sit down beside you on the coffer.”

“I have no proof,” said she, “unless the story of the soldier from Rochefort can be considered proof.”

“It is a strange story,” replied the uncle. “I was angered that day, but since then, the picture seems to move, like people changing places in a dance. If there is another man who resembles Martin, this must be the man. You are Martin’s wife, and you would be the first to know. Moreover, he has behaved strangely of late.”

“In what manner?” said Bertrande.

“He came to me demanding a sum of money which he left with me before he ran away. I replied that the money had made part of the sum for the purchase of the lower fields. It was a matter of which his father had approved. The purchase was made after his father’s death, according to his father’s plan.”

“I remember,” said Bertrande. “What then?”

“He was angered,” said Pierre shortly.

“I understand,” said Bertrande slowly. “He wishes money in hand in order to leave us. Now that he fears detection, now that he has pillaged us, now that he has almost killed me, he will go away.” She began to weep and hid her face in her hands.

A deliberate, abiding wrath grew in the old uncle as he watched her bent head and listened to her sobs. “Madame,” he said, striking with his clenched hand upon his knee, “give me your permission to accuse this man of his crime. He shall not leave us unpunished.”

Bertrande could hardly speak for her tears. But:

“Accuse him, punish him, do as you like with him, only rid me of his presence,” she implored.

Less than a week later armed men from Rieux arrived at the farm and arrested the master of the house. They brought him in irons from the field to the kitchen for a final identification by Bertrande. His own men followed after, angry and sullen. Standing beside the master’s chair, before the hearth, Bertrande identified him as the man who had claimed, but falsely, to be her husband.

“I accuse him,” she said clearly, “of being an impostor and not the true Martin Guerre.”

It was the first time since the birth of the child that she had left her room. Uncle Pierre stood beside her. It was evident that the men from Rieux had been expected.

Sanxi, seeing his father in chains, burst into a passion of weeping, flung himself, first upon his father, and then, kicking and scratching, upon the two guardsmen.

“Madame,” said his father quietly, above the turmoil thus raised, “is it indeed you who do this to me?”

Bertrande bowed her head, and turned her back upon him.

The man sighed, and nodded, as if to himself. Then, turning to the housekeeper, he asked that the youngest child be brought. The old woman, all in tears, held up the little one to his father to be kissed. The people of the farm crowded about, and the priest, entering in haste, cried to the men-at-arms:

“This is folly—you do not know what you are doing!” He stretched out his hands and would have prevented their departure.

“Let be,” said the prisoner, still quietly. “It is not the fault of the men. They must do as they have been commanded.” And then, addressing his people, he said: “Good-by, my children. God willing, I shall return to you safely.”

“It is a mistake,” said the priest again to the guardsmen. “You do not understand that the woman is mad.”

But the guard moved forward, with the prisoner between them, through the wide doorway into the courtyard of the farm. The housekeeper, Sanxi and the other servants followed closely behind them. There was some delay in the courtyard as a horse was brought for the prisoner. Bertrande, who had continued to stand with her back to the room, her eyes upon the hearth, turned now and looked about her. She was entirely alone. In the courtyard the servants shouted their last farewells. She heard Sanxi’s voice.

“Good-by, my father, my dear father!”

II. Rieux

The accusation had been made at Rieux, since Artigues was too small a place to boast a court, and thither Bertrande went with her uncle, Pierre, and the servants who were to be called as witnesses. She stayed in the house of her mother’s sister, occupying the same room which she had been given on her earlier visit, and in which the sun had always seemed to shine through western windows in the morning. But this time the sun shone from the east, as it should do, and Bertrande marveled that she had ever felt confused about the direction. In the same fashion she marveled that she should have permitted herself to be deceived concerning the identity of the man who had called himself her husband. Her present belief was inescapable and plain, and yet she found herself alone in it, alone, that is, save for the support of honest Pierre. She left in Artigues a house in which the very servants looked at her askance. Of Martin’s four sisters, two had not hesitated to declare that they thought her malicious. They said openly, so that the report returned to her:

“For years during Martin’s absence she was sole mistress of the farm. Now she cannot bear to be put back into her proper place. She has a greed of authority, and of money. She was severe to us before we married, severe and miserly. This is all a plan to destroy Martin and possess the farm.”

The other sisters, particularly the youngest, defended her. She had done no more in the management of the estate and of the family than their mother would have required her to do, and her strange fancy that Martin was not her husband had arisen from the grief of the long separation. They were sure that she was insane. The charity and the coldness were alike difficult for Bertrande; and at Rieux, even her aunt supported the claim of the impostor.

“My poor child,” she said to Bertrande, “your years of suffering have told on your brain in a strange way. Why, I have known the boy all his life! Of course I shall testify in his favor, if I am asked, and when the courts have decided that he is really your husband, perhaps you will have some peace, although it’s all a great pother to go through with in order to convince a wife of what she ought to know without help.”

At the first session of the court the crime was formally charged to the prisoner of misrepresentation and theft. Bertrande then demanded through Pierre Guerre, and in fact only because of the uncle’s insistence, that the prisoner be made to do penance publicly, that he pay a fine to the king, and that he pay to herself the sum of ten thousand livres. She was then asked to state her reasons for the accusation.

“My lords,” she began, “there is the testimony of the soldier from Rochefort.”

She was interrupted.

“We ask you for your testimony only,” they reminded her.

She bent her head, and after a moment, told them just what she had told the priest. Upon being questioned further, she added:

“I also found it curious, upon remarking the prisoner at sword practice with my son, that Martin Guerre should fence so awkwardly; he was known to be distinguished in the art.”

The prisoner smiled, and shrugged his shoulder slightly. A brief smile also flitted across the face of one of the judges, and Bertrande, seeing it, exclaimed:

“You may smile, my lord, and my testimony may seem innocent to you and of small importance, but I swear by God and all His holy angels that this man is not my husband. Of that I am certain, though I should die for it.”

“Well, we shall inquire, Madame, we shall inquire,” said the justice, and called for the accused to be examined.

The prisoner stepped forward with an easy manner, as if he stood before his own hearth. He explained that during his absence he had served the King of Spain, that he had traveled extensively both through Spain and France, and that he had not known until he came to Rieux, some three years earlier, that his parents were dead; that upon learning that he was head of the house, he had made all haste to return to his wife and child, and had endeavored in every way to make up for his past neglect. He furnished the names and addresses of people who could verify the story of his wanderings. He told of his return to Artigues, of how Pierre Guerre, his uncle, had been the first person in the village to recognize and welcome him, and averred that Pierre had been to him in all things friendly until he, Martin, had found reason to question Pierre about the disposition of a certain sum of money which he had left in the care of his uncle. Since that time, he said, his uncle had sought to destroy him. He even hinted in conclusion that an attempt had been made upon his life.

The judges then asked him a great number of questions regarding the history of his family, the date of his own wedding, the date of birth of Sanxi, to all of which he answered without hesitation.

“Madame,” said the judges to Bertrande, “you have heard these answers. Are they correct?”

“They are all correct, my lords,” said Bertrande, “but still the man is not my husband.”

The judges conferred together and presently announced that the case would be dismissed for a short time while an examination should be made into the characters of the accusers. Bertrande, her face burning with shame at this implication, turned to Martin’s uncle.

“This is because we have asked for money,” she said bitterly. “All that I ask, all that I hope is to be rid of his presence.”

Uncle Pierre shrugged his shoulders.

“You must not be unreasonable,” he told her. “After all, there will be the expense of the trial.”

However, the investigation determined that the characters of Bertrande and Pierre were above reproach, and the case was ordered to proceed. In the interval, word of the dispute had gone round the countryside, and a great number of persons had either presented themselves voluntarily or had been called by the court as witnesses. On the morning when the case reopened, the chambers of the judges were crowded with interested persons, of whom no fewer than one hundred and fifty were present in the quality of witnesses.

The examination of relatives began, followed by that of the farm servants, then of neighbors from Artigues. Without a dissenting voice they all declared that the man in fetters was no other than Martin Guerre himself. The priest, being called, declared that the man was Martin and gave an eloquent account of Bertrande’s illness and her madness, as he had discussed it with her husband and herself.

The day was wearing to a close, and Bertrande, sadly, said to Pierre Guerre:

“Do not all these people begin to convince you that you may be mistaken?”

“I am not one to change my mind every five minutes,” said honest Pierre. “I have thought him a rogue, and a rogue he remains.”

The priest departed and a new witness was called.

“Your name?” said the judge.

“Jean Espagnol.”

“And whence do you come?”

“From Tonges, my lord.”

“Your occupation?”

“Soldier of fortune.”

“Do you know the prisoner?”

“That I do, my lord.”

“And by what name do you know him?”

“Arnaud du Tilh, my lord. Sometimes we call him Pansette.”

A murmur ran over the room. People stretched themselves, and Bertrande shot a glance at the accused man, whose face, however, showed no guilt, no surprise and only a very natural interest in the proceeding.

“And how long have you known the prisoner?”

“Oh, from the cradle, my lord.”

“Have you had any conversation with him of late?”

“My lord, he told me less than half a year ago that he was playing the part of one Martin Guerre, that he had met this said Guerre in the wars, and that this Guerre made over to him, for certain considerations, the whole of his estate and the permission to impersonate himself.”

“Ah, it is a lie,” cried the voice of Bertrande, passionately.

“Well said, Madame,” added the prisoner.

“Silence,” demanded the judge.

The witness spread his hands palm outwards with the expression of a man who has done his best for the cause of truth and justice, and, being dismissed, took his place again in the crowd.

From then on the case began to appear most dubious for the prisoner, for although it was rather a tall story that Martin Guerre would have made over all his possessions to a wandering rogue for whatever considerations, there were many witnesses examined who declared that the prisoner was in fact a Gascon by the name of Arnaud du Tilh. There were also among the witnesses called, some who were acquainted with both Martin Guerre and the rogue du Tilh. Of these, some said that the prisoner was Martin, some that he was Arnaud, and some declared themselves unable to decide between the two. The examination of witnesses ran on at such length that it was necessary to reconvene the court on the following day. Finally, when the last witness had given his testimony, the judges sent for Sanxi, and tried to find in his face some resemblance to the man who claimed to be his father. But since the boy so obviously resembled his father’s sisters, who were said to resemble their mother, rather than their father, the countenance of Sanxi was of little aid to the judges.

The judges withdrew and debated the case at length. Bertrande, sitting clasping and unclasping her hands, overheard two of the spectators who were commenting freely on the case. Said one:

“They have proved nothing against the man, and the woman demands a great sum of money.”

“If she denies him to be her husband,” said the other, “why did she not deny it immediately? She lived with him for three years without complaining. Why does she quarrel with him now?”

“She has lost her pains, without a doubt,” said the first.

“My God, my God,” said Bertrande, bowing her head and clasping and unclasping her long hands in a passion of despair, “deliver me from sin.”

The judges returned and prepared to speak:

“Whereas, out of one hundred and fifty witnesses called by this court of Rieux, forty have testified that the prisoner is Martin Guerre, sixty have refused to testify to his identity, and fifty have testified that he is none other than Arnaud du Tilh, and whereas the wife of Martin Guerre, whose opinion should bear more weight with us than that of any other living person, has testified that the prisoner is not her husband, we do affirm that the prisoner is in fact Arnaud du Tilh, commonly known as Pansette. And we do condemn the said Arnaud du Tilh to do public penance before the church of Artigues, and before the house of Martin Guerre, and to suffer death by decapitation before the house of Martin Guerre.”

A gasp as of astonishment and pity swept the room, and Bertrande de Rols, rising from her seat, cried out in a clear, terrified voice:

“Not death! Not death! No, no, I have not demanded his death!”

She stood, grown very pale, confronting the judges with surprise and horror in her features; and then, putting out her hand gropingly, she half-turned toward Pierre Guerre, and fell unconscious into his arms.

The prisoner had started also at Bertrande’s cry. In spite of the sentence just passed upon him, his eyes were clear, and his face bright, one would have said, with joy.

III. Toulouse

It is difficult to relate all that Bertrande de Rols suffered in the days which followed directly upon this decision. She returned to Artigues, to a house in which all peace and contentment had been destroyed. Nor was there anyone in Artigues, except Martin’s uncle, who did not by word or gesture blame her for this destruction. Sanxi regarded her with frightened, incredulous eyes, or slipped from a room as she entered, like a small animal who has been beaten continuously and without having offended. Nor was the matter ended. If the sentence had been carried through without delay, Bertrande felt, she might have borne the horror with some courage and reached, afterwards, a certain peace of finality, and time might have justified her action; but the case had been appealed at once by Martin’s sisters to the parliament of Toulouse, and the summer dragged forward through a long, heartbreaking uncertainty.

The wheat was harvested, but without exultation, and threshed, but without merriment. As in other years the water of the mountain stream was turned upon the stubble fields and ran in shining cascades across the parched and broken earth, but Bertrande de Rols did not walk out to see it, nor did it matter to her that the flowers sprang up after the passage of the water as if a carpet had suddenly been spread, a carpet of a thousand flowers and a thousand pleasant odors. During the last days of August word was brought to Artigues that the parliament of Toulouse had found the evidence inconclusive and had called the witnesses for a second trial.

The curé visited Bertrande.

“My daughter,” he said, as persuasive and kindly as if she had not now for almost a year steadily refused his advice, “it is no more than my duty to entreat you to consider once more that which you have undertaken.”

“Reverend Father,” said Bertrande abruptly, “have you never once thought but that I might be right? Consider the soldier from Rochefort. Is it not possible that this man may indeed be Arnaud du Tilh? Is it not more than likely?”

“All things are possible with God,” said the priest, “but I cannot think it likely that the man of whom we speak should be one and the same with a most notorious rogue.” His voice softened and his eyes became very sad. “The man of whom we speak was one whom I had grown to value greatly. His ways, his thoughts, were kindly. There was no soul in my parish of Artigues who did not benefit in some way from his presence here.”

“You valued him,” said Bertrande quietly, “more than you valued Martin Guerre who ran away?”

“Indeed, more,” said the priest. “What was that boy? A raw, impatient youth, a thoughtless boy, selfish in the extreme. He had in him, it is true, the qualities of a great man. I like to think that he has grown into that man. His selfishness has become generosity, his impatience has become energy well-directed. It did not happen suddenly. He was eight years in a hard school.” He paused, and in a curious voice asked her, “It does not pain you to hear me praise him?”

“No,” she answered slowly, as if she questioned herself. “It is no more than just to remember that he has been kind to us—kind to all, save me, and kind even to me after a strange fashion.”

“Then if it does not pain you to hear him praised,” said the priest, pursuing his slight advantage, “if it pleases you a little to hear good of him, then you cannot have ceased entirely to love him, and does not this love convince you that he is truly Martin Guerre?”

“No,” said Bertrande fiercely and quickly. “No, Father. Can you not see, it is in this love that he has wronged me most, that he has damned my soul? I have sinned, through him, and you will not understand it even long enough to give me absolution! No, Father, I cannot believe him to be other than the rogue, Arnaud du Tilh.”

Her cheeks had flushed, as if with a fever, and to the priest her eyes held a strange luminosity. He lifted his hand and then, helplessly, dropped it upon his knee. He said:

“There is a doubt, nevertheless. While there remains a doubt you run the risk of unwillingly, unwittingly, assisting at the destruction of your own husband. I counsel you to withdraw the charges before it is too late. Those who love you, and him, have given you an opportunity of retreating from this whole affair.

“Is it for you to assume vengeance? You believe that you have sinned. You are in danger of sinning far more greatly. If there is evil in the matter, God will unravel it in His own good time. No, do not answer now. I advise you to withdraw the accusation. If you cannot do this, if your heart will not permit you to do this, then I shall pray for you that you may be prevented against your will from so harming, not only yourself, but all who love you.”

He left her sorely shaken, as he had meant to do, not in her opinion of the man’s guilt, but in her belief in the wisdom of her action. The event had gone beyond her plan. “I did not demand his death,” she reminded herself; “but now I must demand it.”

After the priest came Martin’s youngest sister. She knelt in front of Bertrande and, covering Bertrande’s two hands with her own, looked up into the face of her sister-in-law, and said most pleadingly:

“Bertrande, my dearest sister, we were always good friends. Do not be angry with me now. When you come before the judges of Toulouse, say to them, ‘I withdraw the charges made against my husband. I do not know how it happened—I think that I was mad.’ Our uncle will not press the charges, if you do not. Martin will forgive you. We shall all be happy again. Dear God,” and she suddenly began to weep, “we cannot have him killed before his own house.”

She bowed her head on her hands, and Bertrande felt upon her own cold fingers the warm tears.

“Little sister,” she answered in despair, “how can I deny the truth?”

“It is only the truth for you, not for us,” returned the weeping girl. “For the truth, that none of us believe, you would destroy us all. We shall never be happy again. The farm will never prosper again.”

“Your uncle believes as I do,” said Bertrande.

“Ah, but he is old. He wants nothing to be changed that was not just as it was when our father died. He would not change a cobble stone. And Martin changes everything, and is changed himself, so that we all love him more.”

“Well, then,” said Bertrande, “if the man be Martin, as you would have me say, why does not Arnaud du Tilh come forward and declare himself? Why should he let an innocent man suffer in his name?”

“He has enough to answer for with the law,” replied the girl with some impatience. “It is to his advantage to be considered dead. The law will cease to seek for him. And why should a rogue put his neck into a halter for the sake of another?”

Bertrande sighed and laid her hand gently on the girl’s shoulder.

“I am so sorry,” she said, “so sorry.” But she promised nothing.

September came, reddening the vines, making the mornings and evenings cool. Bertrande, returning from church the evening before her departure, whither she had gone in preparation for the journey to Toulouse, crossed the courtyard toward her house, wearily. She saw the housekeeper sitting near the doorway killing doves, and sat down beside the old woman.

“You have made your prayers, Madame,” said the old woman.

“Yes.”

“I wish that you had made them for a better cause.”

“How can you know what prayers I made?”

“I cannot know, Madame. I only know that since you have had this strange idea of yours, nothing goes well for us. And all was well before. So well.”

She sighed, leaning forward, holding the dove head down between her hands, the smooth wings folded close to the smooth soft body, while the dark blood dripped slowly from a cut in the throat into an earthen dish. The dish, already filled with blood, darker than that which was falling into it, spilled over slightly, and a barred gray cat, creeping cautiously near, elongated, its belly close to the ground, put out a rasping pale tongue and licked the blood. The housekeeper, after a little, pushed it away with the side of her foot. A pile of soft gray-feathered bodies already lay beside her on the bench. The living dove turned its head this way and that, struggled a little, clasping a pale cold claw over the hand that held it, and relaxed, although still turning its head. The blood seemed to be clotting too soon, the wound was shrunken, and the old woman enlarged it with the point of the knife which she had in her lap. The dove made no cry. Bertrande watched with pity and comprehension the dying bird, feeling the blood drop by drop leave the weakening body, feeling her own strength drop slowly away like the blood of the dove.

“What would you have me do?” she asked at length. “The truth is only the truth. I cannot change it, if I would.”

The old woman turned her head without lifting her shoulders, still leaning forward heavily above her square, heavy lap. Her face was much more lined than in the days when Bertrande had first known her. There were creases above and below her lips, parallel with the line of the lips, as well as creases at the corners of the mouth. Her forehead was scored with lines that arched one above the other regularly, following the arches of the eyebrows. There were fine radiating lines about her eyes. The skin was brown and healthy, with ruddy patches on the cheek bones, but nevertheless the face was worn.

“I, Madame?” she said.

Bertrande looked into the tired affectionate brown eyes and nodded.

“Ah,” said the housekeeper, turning once more to the dove which now lay still in her hands, “Madame, I would have you still be deceived. We were all happy then.” She laid the dead dove with the others, and stooped to pick up the dish of blood.

All the way to Toulouse the echoes of these three conversations rang through the mind of Bertrande de Rols, making a slow, confused accompaniment to the clop-clop of the horses’ hooves. The housekeeper rode behind her, Uncle Pierre before. They descended the valley of the Neste, the road running close to the stream, until the valley closed about them narrowly, leaving barely room for the passage of the torrent and the path above it. The woods were yellowing, but were still rich in leafy shadow. They came from the deep gorge to the wider valley of the Garonne, the stream coming in swiftly from the right, from the valley of Aran, saw St. Bertrand de Comminges with its narrow buttresses rising from its stony pedestal far below them in the green cup of the hills, crossed the Garonne and came into the more spacious country where the heavy-laden vines were trained from maple tree to maple tree in natural festoons. They passed St. Gaudens and St. Martory; they approached Muret. It was the journey which Bertrande had taken in imagination with Martin that autumn when he had first left her, and it was all rich and lovely, the wild mountain scenery giving way gradually to more thickly clustered farms, thorn hedges around the autumn gardens, and fruit trees set about the houses, medlars, plums and cherries, and always the fresh running of the water beyond the road; but now she traveled in great bitterness of heart, hearing through the noise of the hooves and the splashing of the Garonne, only the reproaches and prayers of those dependent upon her.

It had come to be a fixed idea with her that Martin was dead. It was incredible to her that any man could stand so calmly to face the extravagant charges brought against him as Arnaud du Tilh had done, if he had not certain knowledge that the man was dead whose place he usurped. Justly or unjustly she believed also that du Tilh had had something to do with Martin’s death. Being so bereaved, and so unjustly blamed, herself, she would have welcomed almost any plan that would have given her back the sympathy and understanding of those she loved. And they had entreated her to withdraw the charges against du Tilh. Well, and if she did? Was it too late? Might she not restore to them the happier days?

“I, Madame? I could wish you still to be deceived.”

The words recurred to her again and again. Might she not purchase for her people with this one secret weight of shame against her soul the peace and happiness which she desired for them, and for herself their forgiveness and gratitude?

Again, if the court of Toulouse should reverse the decision of the court of Rieux, what then? Might she not feel released from this necessity of pursuit and revenge? The judges of Toulouse were very learnèd men and very near to the king in authority. The king, in turn, was appointed of God. Might she not consider it in some sense an indication from heaven, if the court should command her to receive this man as her husband, and might she not thereby find peace?

She had not seen the man whom she accused since the day in court when she had cried out against the sentence of death. His face had grown a little shadowy, the whole quality of his person a little unreal. Riding in the late afternoon under the shadow of trees, and out from that shadow into the light of a meadow, then again into the shadow of other, farther trees, she let herself slip for a time into a dream of surrender, and drooping over the saddle-bow, giving herself easily to the slow motion of the horse, she thought only of the restored tranquillity in the big kitchen, the contented faces bent above the evening meal—little of the man seated in the chair by the hearth, and, for the time being, nothing of herself in that new and impossible relationship. Meanwhile Pierre Guerre rode before her, and when she lifted her eyes from the roadway, or from the contemplation of the roadside grass, she saw his broad and honest back going steadily on.

She remembered then that he was not only her one supporter in the task which she had undertaken, but that he was also the one remaining defender of the old authority of her husband’s house. He was that authority, simple and direct, without need of subterfuge or of superfluous charm, which before the coming of the stranger had kept them all in a secure and wholesome peace. He was for her that day a tradition more potent than the church. In her country the church had sometimes been denied, but even the Albigenses, hunted from town to town, from town to mountain cavern, and mercilessly destroyed for that denial, had never denied the tradition of which Pierre Guerre was the symbol. When she lay down that night in a strange bed in a strange valley, it was with a fatigue which overwhelmed body and soul, so that she felt she would have been fortunate never to waken.

On the third day of their journey they had come to the lowlands, and the September heat was excessive. There were no more cool ravines with belated shadows, where the water dripped from rocks, and where ferns grew. Now the fields lay parched and dusty. A white dust rose constantly from the road under the horses’ hooves, and the leaves of the plane trees were dulled by dust. Earlier in the day they traversed the waste lands, filled with rocks and patches of wild lavender. At noon the heat was so great that they stopped to rest for nearly three hours under a grove of plane trees. Here there was shade for them and for their beasts, but the cicadas, boring into the bark of the trees for cooling drinks in the hot weather, beat their cymbals so loud in their great content, at the heat, at the sweet liquid which they sucked all day, that the whole grove rang, harshly reverberant. The air seemed to tremble to the sound, and for Bertrande they were a torment made audible. She was glad to resume the way, although the noise of the cicadas accompanied them still, now near, now far, as they passed other groves.

The Garonne ran, broader now, no longer splashing and sparkling, but sullenly, a yellow flood weighted with earth from the mountain-sides where the goats browsed. They crossed it toward evening over a wooden bridge into the city of Toulouse. Farther downstream, the first four arches of the Pont Neuf, the new stone bridge which was to be so well and so cleverly constructed that it would withstand even the most violent of the spring floods, projected its incompleted ramp less than half way across the yellow tide. Before them on the quay, the western sunlight shone full upon the whitened brick façade of Notre Dame de la Dalbade, and behind them the Pyrenees, of which a long spur had accompanied them almost to the city, retreated range upon snowy range, now turning slowly rose-color, far away, even into Spain. Behind La Dalbade lay Toulouse, a huddle of buildings of a dusty, rose-colored brick, intricate, noisy and odorous. The mountain peasants crossed the quay, passed the white façade of the church, and plunged into the network of echoing streets.

They found an inn and ordered supper, after engaging lodging for the night. The ordinary was full of guests, mostly merchants from the neighboring small towns, with a sprinkling of city men. Bertrande found a place in a corner, and, leaning back against the stained plastered wall, took refuge from herself and her companions in the public confusion of the room. Gradually, through the fog of personal misery which enveloped her, she observed that the talk was not general and easy, as one might have expected it to be, but that a group of men was giving great attention to a small number of travelers, and that there was a great deal of head-shaking, and of sober looks. When the hostess brought her supper, she detained her long enough to ask of what the men were talking.

“Of Amboise, Madame. You have heard nothing of Amboise?”

Bertrande shook her head.

“You are Catholic, Madame?”

Bertrande nodded.

“And so am I, Madame, but Amboise was the work of the Guises. God be praised, we have no such Catholics in Toulouse. It seems there was a conspiracy of a sort, not greatly proved—there was more talk than evidence. And for that—every kind of death: hangings, decapitations, drownings, without number every day, and so for a whole month. I am Catholic like yourself, Madame, but in Toulouse for every Catholic there is at least one Protestant. And they are good people, Madame. I promise you, I would as soon cut off my own head as that of my neighbor, and that for his being merely a Protestant!”

“But judging from those faces,” said Pierre Guerre, indicating the talkers on the other side of the room, “one would think it a rebellion sooner than a conversation.”

“A rebellion, yes,” said the hostess. “I would not think it impossible. Toulouse has not always been bound to the French crown.”

She went off, and the somber discussion continued, never more animated, never less intense, like a storm cloud that hangs patiently at the edge of an horizon, waiting for a wind to blow it into action.

“I do not know what is the matter with the world,” said Pierre Guerre. “It seems to be breaking up in little pieces. In the days of Francis we were strongly French.”

The room in which they slept, the entire party of mountaineers, for the inn was crowded, was hot and close. In the morning the streets were still warm and in the unmoving air the odors and stenches of the previous days remained, like a kind of disembodied refuse. There was none of the early morning crispness of the mountains, nor the amplitude of the purified air in which odors of the farm, of the beasts and of cooking, stood like symbols of the force and vigor, the healthiness of life. Bertrande awoke unrefreshed and felt in the air, as in her mind, the sultriness which paralleled the sullen temper of the men in the eating-room the evening before.

After the cup of wine, which seemed sour, and a piece of bread, which seemed bitter, she followed Pierre Guerre bare-headed through the streets to the council chambers of the Parliament in the Château Narbonnais.

The streets were crowded. People were speaking, not the mountain patois, but Languedocien, and with a curiously clanging, hard resonance, which made, in the narrower passages, everything seem to be spoken twice, re-echoed in metallic vigor from the dusty walls. And all the way Bertrande asked of herself, What am I doing here, in this unhappy town, in this prolonged stench, this heat, this desolating strangeness? I am pursuing a man to his death, a man who has been many times kind to me, who is the father of my smallest child. I am destroying the happiness of my family. And why? For the sake of a truth, to free myself from a deceit which was consuming me and killing me. She remembered herself speaking to Martin’s sister.

“What would you have, my sister? The truth is only the truth. I cannot change it.”

The sister had replied:

“It is true only for you.”

“And might I be wrong?” she asked herself again as she mounted the stone steps and stood waiting before the great, closed door. She felt, in approaching this tribunal of Toulouse, a finality she had not felt at Rieux. It would not be possible for her to appeal this decision. It waited for her, behind those doors, in the quality of a doom. Suddenly her confidence deserted her, and terror engulfed her. She saw herself as borne forward helplessly on a great tide of misunderstanding and mischance to commit even a greater sin than that of which she had been afraid. The words of the priest returned to her. It had been holy counsel; she had refused it. She broke into a heavy sweat which turned cold on her skin and made her shudder even in the meridional heat. She was dizzied. The door before her grew insubstantial, invisible, as if she had walked into an icy cloud on the summit of La Bancanère. Blindly, she reached out her hand for Uncle Pierre, and, the doors being opened, she entered the courtroom leaning on his arm.

The judges of Toulouse wished to confront the two accusers with the accused, but singly, feeling that much might be revealed to the acute observer in the countenances of the accusers which had not been recorded in the account of the case forwarded to them by the judges of Rieux. Accordingly, once inside the courtroom, Bertrande was constrained to leave the support of Uncle Pierre, and, attended by a guard, advanced before the very seat of the judges. A hum of voices which had filled the room ceased suddenly as she appeared. In the abrupt silence she heard the admonition and then the question of the judge and, lifting her eyes, saw before her at the distance of only a few feet, the man for whom she had felt for one extraordinary year a great and joyous passion. He was regarding her with a look at once patient, tender and ironic. In her distress she saw no other face, and could not bear the contemplation of that tender gaze. She looked down, dropping her head forward, while the blood beat upward into her face and then receded. Who was this Arnaud du Tilh? What manner of man was he that he did not return her hatred with hatred, and why had he not made good his escape from this most dangerous justice on the day when she had first suspected him? Her face turned very white, while a return of the giddiness which had seized her just before she entered the court made it almost impossible for her to continue standing. She replied to the questions of the judges in a half-audible voice, and was then escorted to a small doorway through which she gained the courtyard, the sunlight, and a degree of solitude. She was instructed to return to the inn and to remain there until sent for. She went to her room and lay down.

Inside of an hour Pierre Guerre, who had been similarly instructed, joined her there. He was morose, annoyed at being detained at the inn, feeling himself a prisoner and having no occupation, large or small, with which to while away the time. He felt that he had behaved badly at the trial, and it was true that, although his conviction was as sound as ever, his manner had been hesitating, and embarrassed. He had felt himself stared at and smiled at as a peasant, a mountaineer. He had overheard, as the guard led him through the crowded room, an amused comment on his dress, the wit of which he had not understood, but the intent of which he had understood only too well. Annoyed at the crowd, humble before the judges, suddenly for the first time in his life acutely self-conscious, he had lost, for the space of five minutes, the simple dignity which had lent, at Rieux, such great weight to his testimony. Added to this discomfort was the spectacle of the impostor who had lost during his period of imprisonment some of his healthy brown color but none of his air of being arrogantly in the right.

“We are lost,” said old Pierre to himself as he returned to the inn. “If it depended on me, we are lost indeed.”

He dared not mention his discomfort to his niece, but it was the principal reason for the morose silence with which he rejoined her and set himself to wait out the day.

Bertrande lay upon the bed and regarded the stained canopy. Or she turned her head idly and surveyed the wall, or the figure of old Pierre seated on a straight bench under the window. She felt a great illness. A weight seemed to lie upon her breast which made breathing difficult, and the air which entered her lungs, after she had made so great an effort to expand them, contained no freshness, no reviving quality. Her mind had gone numb through prolonged self-examination. Exhausted and trapped by all these walls, by all these circumstances, she lay still and remembered that the one thing she desired was to be free of Arnaud du Tilh.

Meanwhile the court was proceeding with the examination of witnesses. One hundred and fifty witnesses had been called from the hearing at Rieux, and thirty new ones. Jean Espagnol testified as he had done at the former trial, and introduced a friend, Pelegrin de Liberos by name.

Pelegrin de Liberos, being sworn, testified that he was an old friend of Arnaud du Tilh, and that Arnaud had recently not only admitted his identity to him, but had given him a handkerchief to be delivered to Arnaud’s brother, Jean du Tilh.

Gradually a body of information was built up, minute details contributed now by one witness, now by another. The shoemaker of Artigues testified that the foot of Martin Guerre exceeded slightly that of the accused. Certain witnesses to the number of five who had formerly testified with assurance that the accused was indeed Martin Guerre, now declared that they could not be sure whether he was or whether he was not. Of the thirty new witnesses, twelve declared themselves unable to make any decision regarding the identity of the accused. He might be either Martin Guerre or Arnaud du Tilh, for all they could observe. On the other hand, seven of the new witnesses were quite sure that he was du Tilh, and ten were equally convinced that he was Martin Guerre. It was established that Martin Guerre had appeared to be taller and more slender than Arnaud du Tilh, and that he had been somewhat round-shouldered. However there was also the argument that since the accused was eleven years older than was Martin Guerre when last seen, the natural increase in weight and age might make him seem shorter than had appeared Martin Guerre, the boy of twenty.

Still, as the day went on, it was decided beyond a doubt that Martin Guerre had two teeth broken in the lower left jaw, as had also the accused; that Martin Guerre had a scar on the right eyebrow and the trace of an ulcer on one cheek, as had also the accused; that Martin Guerre had a drop of extravasated blood in the left eye, as had also the prisoner; that Martin Guerre had the nail of the left forefinger missing, and three warts on the left hand, two of which were on the little finger, as had also the man in fetters. So that the evidence tended well toward the defense, when there appeared before the judges an old man in the clothes of a mountaineer but with a somewhat more distinguished bearing than the costume might have seemed to warrant. He was sworn and his name was asked.

“I am called Carbon Bareau.”

“And do you recognize the prisoner?”

“Gentlemen, this man in irons is the child of my own sister.”

The old man then began to weep, and it was some time before he had recovered composure sufficient to continue.

“I have loved this boy,” he said at last, “for he has a way with him, a way of stealing the heart, but I have feared for him ever since he grew old enough to talk. He has had no respect for the laws, gentlemen. It breaks my heart to say that he has even declared there is no God. He has revered his parents not at all. With no faith, no respect for family, nor for the law of the kingdom, what could one hope for, gentlemen? He has a good heart, that is all. But what is a good heart when he can so disgrace an honorable family?”

The two brothers of Arnaud du Tilh were then called and testified that the prisoner “resembled” their brother. Further than that they would not commit themselves.

After this came a long succession of witnesses for the defense, forty–five people all of blameless reputation and well-qualified to know what they were talking about. Martin’s four sisters testified that the accused was their brother, as did also two brothers-in-law. Many people who had been guests at the wedding of Bertrande and Martin testified that the accused was certainly Martin Guerre. The curé of Artigues testified in favor of his friend.

Last witness of all came the old housekeeper who had brought to the bridal couple the little midnight repast, or réveillon. She had a story to tell after she had identified the prisoner as her young master. She stood before the judges with her hands clasped firmly at her belt, her brown eyes, good, honest, kind, fixed steadily upon the revered faces, and cleared her throat. Shortly after the return of Monsieur, she testified, she had heard Madame remark to Monsieur that she had kept certain chests unopened since his departure, so long ago. Upon hearing this, Monsieur had described certain white culottes wrapped in a piece of taffeta and requested that they be fetched him. Whereupon Madame had given to the housekeeper the key to the chest and requested her to fetch the pantalons, and the housekeeper had done so, finding them wrapped exactly as Monsieur had described. She made her recital bravely, greatly impressed herself at the gravity with which the judges heard it, and then, trembling with triumph and embarrassment, crept back to her place.

It was now late in the afternoon. The day’s heat seemed to have accumulated in the crowded room along with the testimony of the witnesses, and the place was stifling. The light which entered through the high windows struck almost levelly upon the wall opposite, above the heads of the judges. The scribe laid down his pen, and the judges leaned forward to confer with each other. The examination was over, and it remained only to interpret the information. Those who had most to lose or gain by the decision had been dismissed to an inner room, but the courtroom was still packed.

It was neither reasonable nor just, the court argued first of all, to permit the bad reputation of the rogue Arnaud du Tilh to affect the fate of the prisoner if he was indeed Martin Guerre. Secondly, the judges argued, if it were so easy for the wife of Martin Guerre to mistake Arnaud for her husband, even if only for a short time, it would have been just as easy for the soldier from Rochefort to mistake Arnaud for Martin; there was no way of proving that the man who lost a leg at the battle of St. Laurent before St. Quentin was Martin Guerre rather than Arnaud du Tilh. Thirdly, they argued, it was beyond human ingenuity for any man to impersonate so well, to know so many intimate details of the life of another man, and to exhibit so close a physical resemblance to another man as the accused. Last of all, the court considered that the confusion of Bertrande at the sight of the accused, together with the report of her outcry in the court of Rieux when the sentence of death had been pronounced against the prisoner, testified badly for her case. Therefore the judges decided, and doubtless to their own relief, for they had been sadly puzzled, that the prisoner must be in truth none other than Martin Guerre, as he himself affirmed. The populace seemed pleased with the decision, and the clerk of the court prepared to put the verdict down in writing.

As this individual drew up his inkpot and sharpened his pen, and as the judges of Toulouse relaxed in their chairs and mopped their foreheads, conversing among themselves, and not, shrewdly, overlooking the smiles which overspread the courtroom, a commotion was heard at the outer door in which could be distinguished a great deal of stamping and of beating on the stone floor with the butt of a halberd, and a vigorous exposition of an undeterminable nature in an unmistakably Gascon voice. The court sent to inquire; the messenger returned with news of some importance, for, as the audience twisted about and necks were craned in curiosity, a way was cleared through the crowd so that a Gascon soldier in travel-stained garments was permitted to walk directly up to the seats of the justices.

The halberds of the attendants sounded on the floor as the men halted, one on each side of the soldier; but there also sounded, during the entrance of the group, what resembled the butt of a third halberd, but which was, remarkably enough, a wooden leg worn by the Gascon soldier.

The judges surveyed the newcomer. He was sunburned, and bearded, but through the beard the shape of the high, cleft chin was easily discernible. His left eyebrow was scarred; and there was a trace of an old ulcer on one cheek. He returned the scrutiny of the judges of Toulouse with eyes which were arrogant, gray and cold.

“Body of God,” said one of the justices, sinking back in his seat in something not unlike despair, “this is either Martin Guerre or the devil,” and he gave an order to the attendants to put the newcomer under arrest.

After brief deliberation among the judges, the order was also given to remove the accused man to an adjoining chamber and to close the doors against further entrance. This done, the weary justices proceeded to examine the soldier with the wooden leg.

“I am without any doubt Martin Guerre,” said the soldier. “I lost my leg before St. Quentin in the year fifty-seven. I am the father of Sanxi Guerre, and of no other children.”

To all the questions which had previously been put to the accused man, the soldier was able to reply with reasonable accuracy. Once or twice his answers were at variance with those of Bertrande to the same question, now and again he hesitated before answering, but in the main he showed a knowledge of the affairs of Martin Guerre which might well have justified his claim to be that man. He also manifested an unusual knowledge of the career of Arnaud du Tilh. This was interesting, for the accused man had known nothing at all of the affairs of du Tilh; he had heard rumors of his existence—that was all. But the newcomer seemed no better informed concerning the affairs of Martin Guerre than the accused had seemed. At the end of an hour the judges were no nearer a decision than they had been early that morning.

There remained a final test, however. The prisoner was summoned and made to stand face to face with the one-legged soldier. Then, one by one, the relatives of the two men were called, and asked to make their choice.

Carbon Bareau, the first of the relatives of du Tilh to be called, stared for a moment with great surprise at the soldier, then, turning without any hesitation at all, laid his hand on the shoulder of the prisoner and said:

“Gentlemen, this is my nephew.”

The brothers of Arnaud, confronted by the two men so extraordinarily similar, hesitated, and then, turning from the prisoner as from the soldier, besought the court to excuse them from bearing witness. The court, with a humanity rare in that century, dismissed them. They had in their request testified more than they realized.

When the youngest sister of Martin Guerre was admitted, she lifted her hands to her forehead in a gesture full of amazement and distress, and then, without hesitation, flung herself upon the breast of the soldier with the wooden leg and burst into tears. One by one the other relatives of Martin Guerre, being admitted, stared with surprise from the soldier to the prisoner and back again, and confessed with many apologies and protestations of sorrow at their mistake that the soldier with one leg was undeniably Martin Guerre, who had been so long away.

It was remarkable that while Martin Guerre received this succession of tearful recognitions with a consistent, stern reserve, Arnaud du Tilh the prisoner, although growing perceptibly graver, lost none of his calm air of assurance and none of his dignity.

Meanwhile the judges, seeing which way the case had turned, sent to their hotel for Pierre Guerre and Bertrande de Rols. The day had been long. For these two lonely defenders of a cause it had seemed longer than a century. When the messenger came for them, they left the confinement of the inn and followed him through the still-confining streets with the intense fatalism of the defeated. The messenger had been instructed to tell them nothing, but rumor had preceded the messenger with the advice that the case had been decided against them. Pierre Guerre was admitted alone, and Bertrande, left in an ante-chamber with a guard, was clearly and sharply aware for the first time in that exhausting day of one thing, and that was that she could not return to Artigues as the wife of Arnaud du Tilh.

After a time the door to the courtroom opened, and she was admitted. She made her way through the crowd toward the space before the judges. Without looking up to see it, she yet felt the intense curiosity of all these unfamiliar faces bent upon her like a physical force. In the silence of the room the insatiable interest of the crowd beat upon her like a sultry wave. She reached the open space, and stopped. There she lifted her eyes at last and saw, standing beside Arnaud du Tilh the man whom she had loved and mourned as dead. She uttered a great cry and turned very pale. The pupils of her parti-colored eyes, the lucky eyes, expanded until the iris was almost lost. Then, reaching out her hands to Martin Guerre, she sank slowly to her knees before him. He did not make any motion toward her, so that, after a little time, she clasped her hands together and drew them toward her breast, and, recovering herself somewhat, said in a low voice:

“My dear lord and husband, at last you are returned. Pity me and forgive me, for my sin was occasioned only by my great desire for your presence, and surely, from the hour wherein I knew I was deceived, I have labored with all the strength of my soul to rid myself of the destroyer of my honor and my peace.”

The tears began to run quietly down her face.

Martin Guerre did not reply immediately, and in the pause which followed, one of the justices, leaning forward, said to Bertrande:

“Madame, we have all been very happily delivered from a great error. Pray accept the profound apologies of this court which did not earlier sufficiently credit your story and your grief.”

But Martin Guerre, when the justice had finished speaking, said to his wife with perfect coldness:

“Dry your tears, Madame. They cannot, and they ought not, move my pity. The example of my sisters and my uncle can be no excuse for you, Madame, who knew me better than any living soul. The error into which you plunged could only have been caused by willful blindness. You, and you only, Madame, are answerable for the dishonor which has befallen me.”

Bertrande did not protest. Rising to her feet, she gazed steadily into the face of her husband and seemed there to see the countenance of the old Monsieur, the patriarch whose authority had been absolute over her youth and over that of the boy who had been her young husband. She recoiled from him a step or two in unconscious self-defense, and the movement brought her near to the author of her misfortunes, the actual Arnaud du Tilh.

In the silence which filled the courtroom at Martin’s unexpected severity, a familiar voice close to her elbow pronounced gently:

“Madame, you wondered at the change which time and experience had worked in Martin Guerre, who from such sternness as this became the most indulgent of husbands. Can you not marvel now that the rogue, Arnaud du Tilh, for your beauty and grace, became for three long years an honest man?”

“Sirrah,” answered Bertrande, “I marvel that you should speak to me, whose devotion has deprived me even of the pity of my husband. I once seemed to love you, it is true. I cannot now hate you sufficiently.”

“I had thought to ask you to intercede for mercy for me,” said Arnaud du Tilh.

“You had no mercy upon me, either upon body or upon soul,” replied Bertrande.

“Then, Madame,” said du Tilh, and there was at last neither arrogance nor levity in his voice, “I can but die by way of atonement.”

Bertrande had turned to look at him as he spoke. She turned now from him towards her husband, and then, without speaking, moved slowly toward the door. The court did not detain her, and the crowd, in some awe, drew aside enough to let her pass without interruption. Bertrande did not see the crowd. Leaving the love which she had rejected because it was forbidden, and the love which had rejected her, she walked through a great emptiness to the door, and so on into the streets of Toulouse, knowing that the return of Martin Guerre would in no measure compensate for the death of Arnaud, but knowing herself at last free, in her bitter, solitary justice, of both passions and of both men.

Arnaud du Tilh, being confined in the prison at Artigues in the days which followed immediately upon the hearing at Toulouse, made a confession in which he stated that he had been tempted to the imposture by the frequency with which he had been mistaken for Martin Guerre. All that he knew of Martin’s life and habits he had gleaned from Martin’s friends, from his servants and from members of his family. He added that he had not originally intended to take Martin’s place in his household, but had intended to stay only long enough to pick up a little silver or gold.

The court decreed that he had been convicted of the several crimes of imposture, falsehood, substitution of name and person, adultery, rape, sacrilege, plagiat, which is the detention of a person who properly belongs to another, and of larceny; and the court condemned him to do penance before the church of Artigues on his knees, in his shirt, with head and feet bare, a halter around his neck and a burning taper in his hand, asking pardon of God and of the king, of Martin Guerre and of Bertrande de Rols, his wife; the court then condemned him to be handed over to the common executioner, who should conduct him by the most public ways to the house of Martin Guerre, in front of which, upon a scaffold previously prepared, he should be hanged and his body burned. All his effects were forfeit to the crown. And this decree bears the date of September the twelfth, in the year 1560, in the city of Toulouse.

Of Martin Guerre nothing more is recorded, whether he returned to the wars or remained in Artigues, nor is there further record of Bertrande de Rols, his wife. But when hate and love have together exhausted the soul, the body seldom endures for long.

Afterword: The Return of Janet Lewis

Larry McMurtry

(From The New York Review of Books, June 11, 1998)

In 1922 the printer-typographer Monroe Wheeler, who would go on to have a long and distinguished career with MoMA, set off to be a young-man-about-Europe. He was determined to publish poetry and publish it elegantly, to which end he established (first in Germany) an imprint called Manikin, under which he issued three booklets of verse. The first, The Indians in the Woods, was by a young Midwestern poet named Janet Lewis; William Carlos Williams’s Go Go was the second; the third and last was Marriage, by Marianne Moore.

Not long before he left Illinois, Wheeler had got his feet wet typographically, so to speak, by publishing two books of verse now not easily secured: The Bitterns, by his friend Glenway Westcott, and The Immobile Wind, by a young teacher of languages named Arthur Yvor Winters, who had, not long before, been released from the Sunmount Sanatorium in Santa Fe, where he recovered from a serious bout with tuberculosis. Young Winters was soon to go off to Moscow, Idaho, to take the only teaching job he could get, but, on a trip to Chicago, he met Janet Lewis. Monroe Wheeler was one link, poetry a second, and tuberculosis a third, for Janet Lewis too was soon forced to go off to Sunmount, where—after nearly five years—she also recovered. Hers was a close call. The two married in 1926—Janet Lewis was still in Sunmount and Yvor Winters still teaching in Idaho, from whence he carried on an intense correspondence, largely about poetics, with Hart Crane, Allen Tate, and others. Once Janet Lewis was well, the young couple moved to California and Winters took up the professorship at Stanford that he was to hold for the rest of his life.

Together the two writers raised children (two), Airedales and goats (many), and—one might say—poets: ranks upon ranks of poets who came to learn from Winters; in their memoirs he is still legend. He wrote his books, Janet wrote hers. To his enemies in criticism—at various times they included the Agrarians (particularly John Crowe Ransom), Eliot, Pound, R. P. Blackmur, and many others—Yvor Winters was a bruiser, a kind of absolutist gladiator who struck often and with considerable accuracy at flaws in a poem or a critical system. To poets—from Hart Crane on to J.V. Cunningham, Donald Justice, Donald Hall, Thom Gunn, Ann Stanford, Robert Haas, and many others—he was a kind of Apostle, though of course they felt varying degrees of allegiance to his beliefs about poetry and of attachment to the man himself; but to Janet Lewis he was, for forty-two years, a much-treasured husband, as she makes clear in an audiotape made twenty years after his death. The cut of that grief went very deep; his name, A. Yvor Winters, is still on the mailbox of their modest house in Los Altos.

Of all the above mentioned, Wheeler and Westcott, Crane, Tate, Williams, Marianne Moore, and Yvor Winters are gone, but Janet Lewis lives on, for the most part happily, in Los Altos; her sight has weakened but not her spirit. She has published poetry in every decade of this century except the first, poetry that has never lacked for champions. One of the most ardent, at present, is Thom Gunn, who had this to say about her most recent collection, The Dear Past (1994):

I think she should be getting the closest attention. In this collection of old age, almost incredibly, she is simultaneously as stringent and sweet-natured, as sharp and generous as she was throughout the Collected Poems. She is as ever deceptively simple. That is, hers is the best kind of simplicity, because it contains an implied complexity. . . .

The Dear Past reprints poems published between 1918 and 1991, a wingspan all but incredible, and made the more so by the clarity and authority of a voice she has sustained for so long: a voice that is considered, lucid, spare, and tough on itself in a high Midwestern way. Though perhaps less imperatively than her husband, she too has touched many poets, from the time of Hart Crane to the time of Robert Haas. Of her verse she has kept and reprinted only about a poem a year, taking her time and finishing her work; luckily she has been granted a great deal of time to take.

In addition to the poetry Janet Lewis has written two children’s books, six books of prose, four libretti, and a number of chorales. Though I am mainly concerned in this essay to applaud and perhaps bring new readers to the three remarkable historical novels she published between 1941 and 1959, I do think that Janet Lewis’s more than eighty years of vigorous, variegated, and steady devotion to literature deserves a salute. She is a striking example of a quiet talent working quietly through almost the entirety of a noisy, celebrity-heavy century.

From so much attention one would expect a masterpiece, and it too is there, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), the story of an artifice so skillful, so confusing to its victims, that simple honesty is defeated and a good woman brought to ruin.1 It’s a short novel that can run with Billy Budd, The Spoils of Poynton, Seize the Day, or any other of the thoroughbred novellas that might be brought to the gate.

In a statement given to Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft for the 1955 edition of that still-invaluable reference work Twentieth Century Authors, Janet Lewis made a couple of intriguing statements. She mentions her husband’s standing as a breeder of Airedales, but says nothing about his fame as a literary critic, encouraging us to suspect that the much-feared Yvor Winters, one of the hardest hitters of the bare-knucklers who slugged it out in the bloody pit of criticism as it was in the Thirties and Forties, may really have put more of his heart into his dogs. About herself she has this to say:

I have lived a life rather lacking in “events” but with a rich and in the main very happy background. This sort of life does not provide a very interesting brief biography. The interest is chiefly in the background, which can’t be treated briefly and still be interesting.

Though that statement was made forty-three years ago, I doubt she would modify it much today.

That life began in Chicago, in 1899. (Janet, who is often amused, was particularly amused recently when a schoolgirl pointed out that if she makes it another couple of years she’ll have lived in three centuries.) Her father, Edwin Herbert Lewis, a teacher and writer, encouraged his children’s artistic leanings from the first. Her brother, Herbert Lewis, designed the dust jacket and endpapers for her first work of prose, The Invasion (1931). She went to the same Oak Park high school as Hemingway, at the same time, and was friends with his sister Marcelline, who was in her French club. “So I heard a lot about Ernie,” she says now. She and Hemingway each have a poem in the January 1923 issue of Poetry.

The Lewises, like the Hemingways, had a summer place up in Michigan, in the Lewises’ case way up, on an island in the St. Mary’s River, midway between Mackinac and the Sault Ste. Marie. She includes three or four up-in-Michigan stories in the collection Good-Bye, Son, stories which contrast interestingly with Hemingway’s Michigan stories. The emotional saw-teeth beneath the clear surface of Hemingway’s prose are not there in Janet Lewis, though, like as not, her stories are more overtly tragic than his. In stories such as “Proserpina,” “River,” and “Nell,” the local tragedies and misfortunes—a kindly drunk’s drowning, an appealing young woman self-thwarted—are ringed with a soft Midwestern melancholy closer in tone to Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Lee Masters than to the pre-existential edginess of Hemingway. The St. Mary’s River country she describes in The Invasion is that country unspoiled, as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but in his “Big Two-Hearted River” the same country is despoiled, the scarred terrain a natural metaphor for burnout. Janet Lewis had been happy in Michigan; she saw it as a fullness, whereas for Hemingway it seemed to accentuate the absences in life.

Another difference is that her interest in Michigan, once it went beyond the responses of an enraptured child on a summer outing, was historical. She made Ojibway friends, and was soon deep in the history of that much-disputed region: first Indian, then French, then British, then American, and always, after the French arrived, métis. The Invasion is an imaginative history of the founding Johnston family, a family in which Scotch-Irish and Indian blood soon mixed. It happened to be the family, too, into which the pioneering ethnographer Henry Schoolcraft married, a distant result of which was Hiawatha, Mr. Longfellow having depended more than a little on Henry Schoolcraft’s researches. Janet Lewis has always insisted that The Invasion is a “narrative,” not a novel; whatever one calls it, it is a confident, pungently written first book, with close attention paid to the densities, the shading, and the smells of the Northern forests and its peoples, at the time when the Americans first came to them.

That Janet Lewis, the woman, was less depressed than her schoolmate Ernest Hemingway is not to suggest that her work is Pollyanna-ish; the message of her major fiction is very dark indeed. She comes back again and again to the fate of honesty in a violent world. Her novels are tragedies, and this despite the fact that she was the product of a happy family, and, as a wife and mother, helped mold a happy family. The calm of her prose, and of the best of her verse, is a hard-won—indeed, a philosophic—calm. No one, saint or poet, could have lived through almost the entire twentieth century—or any century—and remained undisturbed. It is what she makes of her disturbances, as she struggles to keep her balance and do her duty, that is impressive. Not for nothing was the little magazine that she and her husband published for a single year in the late twenties called The Gyroscope: the instrument that spins and yet does not lose its balance.

Hart Crane was awed by Yvor Winters’s learning—why, he could even read Portuguese!—and so impressed by his sensitivity to poetry that he allowed him to midwife The Bridge, rather as Pound had midwifed The Waste Land; and, though there was an ugly quarrel once Winters’s harsh, disappointed review of the finished poem came out, Crane had not been entirely wrong to trust Winters’s ear and his sensitivity. Yvor Winters from the first put the act of evaluation at the center of his critical practice. In The Armed Vision Stanley Edgar Hyman poked fun at some of Winters’s wilder overestimations—Elizabeth Baryush, Jones Very, Sturge Moore—but he still respected Winters’s force as a critic. This essay is about Janet Lewis, not Yvor Winters, but it is, I think, of interest that all Janet Lewis’s major fiction hinges on the difficulty of just and accurate evaluation, not merely in the law but in the mundane circumstances of everyday life, where the consequences of misevaluation are apt to be more destructive than they usually are in literary criticism. Something of the evaluative habits of the poet-critic husband soaked deep into the creative practices of the poet-novelist wife.

The Winterses were not wealthy; professors were not then superstars. Janet Lewis wanted to write fiction for magazines that paid money, so as to add her tiny bit to the family coffers. But she was not by nature a good plotter, and was only now and then able to sell something to the slicks. Sometime in the Thirties Yvor Winters was lent an old law book, a nineteenth-century compilation of famous cases of circumstantial evidence. At some point Winters handed the book to his wife, thinking there might be something in it that would help her with her plots.

Did it ever! Though not quickly. At first she merely took notes and reflected, but the notes sprouted and in time she produced the three novels of her maturity: The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Sören Qvist (1947), and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959). Though it is not likely that the family finances were much affected, Janet Lewis did learn to plot. She tells three stories in which the fate of honest people depends on their ability or inability to correctly evaluate the confusing body of evidence that life presents us as we go rushing through it. In all three cases it is the human, not the judicial, misevaluation that makes the books so powerful.

Whoa, though. Despite the steady and loyal readership these three novels have won her, Janet Lewis thinks of herself mostly as a poet. Poetry is what she began with and what she still has now. She started with Imagism, the vogue of her youth, but she soon developed a less impersonal, more individual, and more complex poetic style. One would be foolish to try to guess where she’ll finish up, since so far she’s shown no inclination to finish at all. She has always looked closely, and with delight, at the natural world and has rendered it vividly both in verse and prose. Some of her poems have come from contemplation of her garden, or her goats, or just the morning light:

The path

The spider makes through the air,

Invisible,

Until the light touches it.

The path

The light takes through the air,

Invisible,

Until it finds the spider’s web.

I won’t attempt to follow Janet Lewis through the many decades of adding and subtracting, winnowing and honing, that have boiled down to the poems in her most recent selection, but I would like to link in a brief way one set or sequence of poems to the prime concerns of her fiction, specifically her powerful desire for balance; she doesn’t want to be swept away, or altered in her nature, however violent or whatever the character of the storms that strike her. This need for balance doesn’t deny sentiment—she has plenty of that—but attempts to secure for sentiment its due dignity.2

In the interview mentioned earlier, she makes clear that the death of Yvor Winters was a devastating blow; for a time after it she wrote nothing. But she did go back to the desert, to the places of the pueblo peoples, the Hopi and Navajo, peoples who appear to live in harmony with the eternal simplicities: sun, stone, sky. She ponders a fossil:

In quiet dark transformed to stone,

Cell after cell to crystal grown,

The pattern stays, the substance gone. . . .

And, in a museum in Tucson, contemplates—at first with envy—the mummy of a small Anasazi woman:

How, unconfused, she met the morning sun,

And the pure sky of night,

Knowing no land beyond the great horizons . . .

But later she learns of the massacre at Awatobi (1700), where defenders of the old gods wiped out a village that had accepted the new gods of the Spaniards; she realizes that the little woman may not have been spared confusion and terror after all:

Men of Awátobi,

Killed by men of the Three Mesas,

By arrow, by fire,

Betrayed, trapped in their own kivas.

. . .

The men of the Three Mesas,

In terror for the peace of the great kachinas

Who hold the world together,

Who hold creation in balance,

Took council, acted. . . .

In bereavement Janet Lewis sought, even as she had in the happy Gyroscope years, the secret of things that move but are not changed:

The sunlight pours unshaken through the wind . . .

And she takes a poet’s delight in the fact that the Navajo, who simplify many things, cannot reduce water to one name:

Tsaile, Chinle,

Water flowing in, flowing out.

Still water caught in a pool,

Caught in a gourd;

Water upon the lips, in the throat,

Falling upon long hair

Loosened in ceremony;

Fringes of rain sweeping darkly

From the dark side of a cloud,

Riding the air in sunlight,

Issuing cold from a rock,

Transparent as air, or darkened

With earth, bloodstained, grief-heavy;

In a country of no dew, snow

Softly piled, or stinging

In a bitter wind.

The earth and sun were constant,

But water,

How could they name it with one word?

In poetry Janet Lewis developed a singularity of voice over time, but in prose she was from the first strikingly confident. Here is the opening paragraph of The Invasion; we are on the Plains of Abraham in 1759:

That September day the English appeared so suddenly that they seemed to have dropped from the sky; appeared, and fired. A warm rain fell now and again upon the troops, and the smoke from the rifles lay in long white streamers, dissipating slowly. The noise of the rifles, reflected from the running water and from the cliffs, was something like thunder, but the rain was too quiet. And running, for the French, had become almost more important than fighting. The head of Montcalm lay upon the breast of Ma-mongazid, the young Ojibway, the dark sorrowful face, with its war paint of vermilion and white, intent above the French face graying rapidly. Presently they took the Marquis to the hospital in St. Charles, where he died. Ma-mongazid with his warriors in thirty bark canoes returned to La Pointe Chegoimegon through the yellowing woods and the increasing storms of autumn. The rule of the French was over, the Province of Michilimackinac had become the Northwest Territory. The Ojibways called the English Saugaunosh, the Dropped-from-the-Clouds, and regretted the French.

With similar confidence she brings us to Jutland in the early seventeenth century, as she opens the story of the parson of Vejlby, Sören Qvist:

The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward. The air was clouded with dampness. It was late November, late in the afternoon, but no sunlight came from the west, and to the east the sky was walled with cloud where the cold fog thickened above the shores of Jutland. There was the smell of sea in the air even these few miles inland, but the foot traveler who had come upon sight of the inn had been so close to the sea for so many days now that he was unaware of the salty fragrance. . . .

and to Gascony almost a century earlier, as she begins Martin Guerre:

The movement backward, into earlier centuries, which might inhibit many writers, seems to excite Janet Lewis and also to increase her assurance. When she comes into her own time, as she does in her one conventional novel of manners, Against a Darkening Sky (1943), set in Santa Clara County during the Depression, she is noticeably less confident. The heroine of that book is introduced to us as Mary Perrault, but is often thereafter called Mrs. Perrault, as if the author is not sure just how much intimacy she should assume with her main character.

In a way the three historical novels, all based on actual cases in the law, are legal briefs brought to life, the novelist being a prosecutor whose sympathies are nonetheless with the accused; and the accused, in all cases, become the condemned. There is nothing quite like these three books in our fiction; such echoes as there are are French, particularly Stendhal. All the central characters, whether Bertrande de Rols, or Pastor Sören, or the honest bookbinder Jean Larcher, are threatened by judicial confusion over circumstantial evidence, but the brilliance of the pattern is the way in which Janet Lewis shows that none of the three would ever have been in court in the first place had they themselves not made similar misjudgments when confronted with the rushing mass of circumstantial evidence in everyday life.

Perhaps the best example of such normal error occurs in The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. Paul Damas, the apprentice bookbinder who has seduced his master’s wife, Marianne, loses a button from his shirt:

One day in midsummer, Paul and Marianne being alone in the bindery, Paul remarked that he had lost a button from his shirt, and Marianne offered to sew it on for him.

It seemed an innocent activity, especially in view of their relationship. She performed the task deftly and quickly, then looked about for her scissors to snip the thread. Not finding them, “Lend me your knife,” she said to Paul. “No, never mind,” and, bending toward him, she bit the thread. The action brought her head against his breast. Perhaps she held it there the fraction of a moment longer than was necessary. It seemed to Paul that she delayed the moment, for, looking over her head, he met the surprised gaze of his master. Jean had returned, with no undue quietness of step, with no intention of taking anyone unawares, but absorbed in themselves, neither Paul nor Marianne had heard the opening of the door or the advancing step. A rigidity in Paul warned Marianne of something amiss. She lifted her head, looked first at Paul, then followed his glance toward her husband.

Midday, midsummer, the air was warm and moist after a morning shower. Marianne had discarded her cap and her fichu. Her arms were bare almost to the shoulder, as she had pushed back her sleeves. The air, the informality of the moment, the two figures standing like one in a rectangle of sunlight, all combined to give Jean an impression of what was in fact the truth. But the moment itself was innocent.

A sense of revelation rushed upon him, bringing to mind a hundred hitherto unquestioned gestures, poses, inflections. They were lovers, these two. He had taken his wife in adultery. . . . He stopped dead where he stood. Then the moment resolved itself naturally, without drama. Marianne came toward him, holding on the middle finger of the hand poised above her, her silver thimble. . . .

“I mislaid my scissors,” she said. “I had to use my teeth.” . . .

Jean’s fear and knowledge turned about him and then leveled into an illusion. Nothing was wrong. . . .

There you have the pregnant, and, in this case, fatal, error. Jean Larcher had read the action correctly, had seen the avidity in his wife’s face and in her bite; and yet he talks himself out of it. Had he held to his true perception and thrown his adulterous wife and treacherous apprentice out at this juncture, he would have saved himself torture and death. But he suborned his own sound judgment, in this case tragically.

The human tendency to dissuade oneself from accurate insight surfaces rather more complexly in the story of Sören Qvist, a good pastor at war with himself because of his uncontrollable angers. Pastor Sören has a real enemy, one Morten Bruus, who tricks him, but it is really the force of the Pastor’s faith-driven self-accusation that causes the trick to work: he convinces himself that he has killed Morten Bruus’s brother, though the brother, in fact, is not dead.

Reading the three novels in a line, from The Wife of Martin Guerre to The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is a powerful experience. Though all three were based on actual cases in the law, their power is literary not legal. In each story a son leaves home because of strife with the father, and returns too late to save the family. In each the ruin of an honest person is complete, and in each there is a fully and vividly realized woman who finds herself twisting helplessly in the dilemmas posed by love and duty. To each of these women—Bertrande de Rols, Anna Sörensdaughter, and Marianne Larcher—Janet Lewis might say what she says to the mummy of the Anasazi woman in Tucson, “my sister, my friend,” for she knows these women: their feelings, their gestures, their happiness, their changeability, and their stunned helplessness as they see doom approaching.

Anna Sörensdaughter has her happiness destroyed when the young judge she loves and is engaged to marry has to pass the sentence of death on her father. Bertrande de Rols must finally accuse the nice imposter who is kind to her because she can but for so long live a lie; she chooses truth over love and then is dismissed with perfect coldness when the real Martin Guerre comes back and discovers that she has dishonored him. Marianne Larcher is the weakest of the three women, so physically in thrall to the young apprentice that she will do anything for him; but she is no less appealing for being blindly dependent, even though it results in her good husband being condemned. The last words of the Martin Guerre story might serve as ending for all these novels:

In the old law book her husband lent her, Janet Lewis discerned a great theme: the limitations of human judgment, not merely between judge and accused but between husband and wife, father and son, king and counselor (for it was a little burlesque in the manner of the late Monsieur Scarron, insulting Madame de Maintenon, that resulted in the execution of the honest bookbinder). She discerned it and, for a span of some twenty years in her long life, had the intelligence, the persistence, and the force to be equal to it.

Auden reminded us definitively that it’s language Time worships: not wisdom or innocence or physical beauty or, I would add, length of life. Janet Lewis has indeed lived a long time, but what is important is that all through that long time she has continued to tell the stories that have meant something to her in a manner all her own, and with a distinction of language that will carry them forward to startle and delight readers yet to come.

Though I was at Stanford in 1960 I failed to meet Janet Lewis. Now and then I would see her husband proceeding in Johnsonian fashion through the college, often with a Boswell or two tugging at his sleeves, but, at the time, it was her work that excited me, an excitement that came back with its old force when I reread her recently.

So I ventured a letter and, to my delight, she promptly called me in Texas and invited me to dinner on Valentine’s Day of this year. She didn’t sound like the grandmother of fiction, either, when she called; she just sounded like a well-spoken woman who was curious about what a writer from Texas would make of her work.

I arrived at her home in Los Altos hand in hand with El Niño; the abundant vegetation that must once have enticed her goats dripped from every leaf and stem. I felt like the person who was going to meet the person who had once seen Shelley plain—Shelley in this case being Hart Crane, who had visited the Winterses at Christmas in 1927. Janet, still convalescent, gave him tea in her bedroom, which, at the time, she was rarely allowed to leave. “Oh yes,” she said, when I mentioned that tea. “He was very polite.” Despite the breach that occurred over her husband’s review of The Bridge, the Winterses were both deeply grieved when Hart Crane killed himself by jumping off the boat.

Janet too is very polite, but she’s neither fussy nor chilly. She’s lived in that smallish but cheerful house for sixty-four years and is thoroughly the mistress of it; there she raised her family, there she watched war come and war be over, there she entertained generations of poets, artists, musicians, and even the occasional lepidopterist such as Vladimir Nabokov, who showed up at her door with his butterfly net one day in 1941. The Nabokovs and the Winterses hit it off; the exiles came often for meals. I had heard that Nabokov enjoyed himself so much in her kitchen that he sometimes helped her wash up; when I asked her about this she chuckled and said, “Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had.”

I had hardly said hello when we were off through the streaming backyard to the small, detached study where she and Yvor Winters did their writing; an old Royal typewriter sits as a reminder of those days. On the walls, casually tacked up, were photographs of a number of noble Airedales and several slightly less noble poets, one or two of them so obscure that neither of us could quite puzzle out who they might be. A sketch of Pound was by one window; a lovely photograph of Janet as a young woman hung from a nail. Janet remarked that the goats came into her life at a time when she was too weak to write but liked to sketch; Yvor Winters went down the road and bought a couple of goats, so his wife could have something to sketch besides Airedales.

Later, two gifted men friends turned up and cooked a delicious meal, which we ate at the small table in her kitchen. Once, on the audiotape, when a young interviewer was asking her how she got the details right in her historical fiction, Janet talked for a bit about looking at Breughel and reading lots of histories, but then she dropped from the highfalutin’ and merely said, “I’ve always liked kitchens”; it is as if she is saying that from her own bright kitchen, where Vladimir Nabokov once wielded a dish towel, she can imagine all kitchens, as her fiction—filled with kitchens—demonstrates.

In the company of most people who are brushing a century, ignoring their age requires conscious effort; but when Janet Lewis is discussing a book or remembering a visit or a trip, or describing northern Michigan as it was in her girlhood, remembering that she’s elderly is what takes the conscious effort. Perhaps the fact that her sickness was so nearly mortal, that she lived for five years of her young womanhood with death as a near-neighbor, has left her unimpressed that it’s in the neighborhood still. Though she is reasonably cautious, and is attended by squadrons of friends, who do their attending for the rich reward of her company, there is also a slightly mischievous, slightly devil-may-care, I’ll-go-when-I’m-good-and-ready air about her. It’s as if that terribly early struggle has bought her a little exemption, and she knows it, and she means to enjoy her privileges to the full.

The four of us finished the meal very companionably, had dessert, had more tea. Janet probed around in a bookcase and found an essay on her poetry that she thought I might like to read. I took it and wandered back to my motel on the Camino, thrilled. A great lady of American letters had—for the space of an evening—been my valentine.

The Trial of Sören Qvist

Swallow Press

An imprint of Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com

First Swallow Press / Ohio University Press edition published 1983

Printed in the United States of America

Swallow Press/Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ƒ™

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 13 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lewis, Janet, 1899–1998.

The trial of Sören Qvist / Janet Lewis ; introduction by Kevin Haworth.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8040-1144-0 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8040-4054-9 (electronic)

1. Qvist, Sören Jensen, –1626—Fiction. 2. Denmark—History—Christian IV, 1588–1648—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3523.E866T7 2013

813’π iv.52—dc23

2013016753

To Maclin Guérard

Foreword for the First Swallow Press Edition

The story of the Parson of Vejlby is famous in Denmark. Steen Steesen Blicher (1782–1848), himself a Jutlander and a Parson, tells it in his Knitting Room Stories.

I first came across it myself in a volume by Phillips called Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. The only date I have been able to find for Phillips is the year 1814, when “Chief Baron Gilbert was superseded as an authority on the English laws of evidence by the books of Phillips.” He may have found his account in the story by Blicher, although I think, from certain differences of detail, that he had another source, possibly the same one Blicher had. At all events, I am sure that the story of Sören Jensen Qvist is, in its main facts and in many of its details, and even in some of the speeches of important characters, history rather than fiction. It would be impossible as well as foolish to attempt an archeologically correct version of the legend. However, I believe that there is nothing in my account of the Parson of Vejlby which might not have happened as I tell it. He is one of a great company of men and women who have preferred to lose their lives rather than accept a universe without plan or without meaning.

There was said to be, before the presence of the Germans in Denmark, the cross in Aalsö churchyard which the Parson of Aalsö raised to the memory of his friend. I trust that it is still there.

J.L.

April 11, 1946

One

The inn lay in a hollow, the low hill, wooded with leafless beech trees, rising behind it in a gentle round just high enough to break the good draft from the inn chimneys, so that on this chill day the smoke rose a little and then fell downward. The air was clouded with dampness. It was late November, late in the afternoon, but no sunlight came from the west, and to the east the sky was walled with cloud where the cold fog thickened above the shores of Jutland. There was a smell of sea in the air even these few miles inland, but the foot traveler who had come upon sight of the inn had been so close to the sea for so many days now that he was unaware of the salty fragrance.

The inn was familiar to him, and he thought he remembered what lay beyond the turn of the road as it circled the wooded hill and disappeared in shadow. Something in the aspect of the inn was also unfamiliar to him as he stood looking down at it from his side of the hollow where it lay shrouded in its own exhalations. The sign of the Golden Lion still hung above the door, although much of the fine bright yellow paint was gone from the wood. The last pale flakes were in tone now like the beech leaves which clung to the saplings at the edge of the denuded forest. When he had last seen it, the paint had been as fresh as buttercups. That was in the heyday of the king’s loves, when the inn had been named in honor of the king’s bastard children, all Golden Lions, the illegitimate children of the king being still more noble than the legitimate children of most people. Now that the king was old, and Denmark shrunken and impoverished by his reign, some of the Golden Lions had indeed shown themselves most noble. Others were quarreling among themselves. But here even in Jutland, which had suffered most from the King’s wars, the reign of Christian the Fourth was still considered glorious. Even the wayfarer looking down upon the Golden Lion, when he thought of the King, thought of him as splendid. Failing in health, blind in one eye ever since the great naval battle of the Kolberger Heide, and now turned sixty-nine, Christian was, in this year of 1646, even more the hero of his people than in his lusty and extravagant youth.

But there was more than loss of paint from the sign to change the appearance of the inn. The traveler had remembered it with an open door, light streaming out generously upon the road before it, and with people coming and going. This evening the door was closed and all the windows were shuttered. There was no one in sight. Something about the shape of the inn seemed changed, as well, but after slow searching in his memory the traveler concluded that it was not the inn itself, but its background and setting, that had suffered loss. Surely he could remember a small wooden dwelling just beyond the innyard, and another across the road from it, but these were gone now. The inn was no longer one of a group, but solitary.

This matter of closed doors and shuttered windows was not new to him since he had first entered the outlying districts of Jutland. He had come through inhospitable and half-deserted country. He had passed farms but poorly under cultivation, and farmhouses still unroofed in which the thick grass of Jutland grew above charred timbers fallen into the dwelling rooms. But he had somehow taken it for granted, in his slow mind, that when he reached his own county and his own parish, things would be as they had been, the doors open and the people kindly.

He went down the slight hill, limping, because the heel was gone from one boot, and the sole of the other had loosened, letting enter the sand and fine gravel. He approached the inn, and knocked. The Golden Lion hung above his head without creaking, so still and heavy was the air. A fawn-colored hound with a tail as long as a whip crept round the corner of the building and stared at him suspiciously with pale yellow eyes, then, hearing the door start open, turned and ran, the long tail curled under its belly. A young woman with a good tall figure, a firm bosom and straight shoulders, came out of the inn and closed the door behind her, holding one hand still upon the latch.

With her came the aroma of the inn. It clung to the heavy serge of her garments, and she stood before the stranger in a sensuous aureole of warm air. The smell of beer, of wood smoke, of roasting meat and fish, of wool and leather impregnated with grease and sweat, all the fine compounded flavor of conviviality and food assailed the nostrils of the stranger with such a promise of good things behind the closed door that the walls of his stomach drew together painfully. She waited for him to speak, hugging her arms against the cold. The stranger took off his wide-brimmed felt hat and held it under his right arm as he inquired humbly if she were the new mistress of the Golden Lion. Her eyes went briefly to the sign above their heads and then down to his coat, his shabby feet, as she answered yes, that she was the mistress.

“Then could you give me,” said he, “food and lodging for the night?”

Her eyes continued to appraise him, and although her presence was surrounded with warmth and the scent of hospitality, the eyes were reserved and unfriendly. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly as she answered:

“As a guest, or as a beggar?”

“Well, tonight,” he said, looking down also at his broken boots, and then, with embarrassment, at her cold, bright eyes, “tonight I am out of funds. But it might not always be that way,” he hastened to add. “And I am as near starved as ever I was.”

“But tonight,” said she, “I have guests—a wedding party—and the house is very crowded. I have no room for beggars.”

“I have been a soldier,” he said.

“We have no love for soldiers in these parts,” she answered.

“You should feed the hungry and lay yourself up treasure in heaven,” he said then, but not as if he believed very greatly in such treasure. “There will be plenty of scrapings if there is a party,” he added with more conviction.

She continued to appraise him with her eyes, as if she might find something to make her alter her refusal. That he was very tired was evident in the gray look of the skin and the drawn features. He had not been shaved in a long time. The lower part of his face was black with stubble, and the lank black hair, streaked slightly with gray, fell down in straggling ends upon the collar of his doublet. He wore no linen, but his doublet had once been exceeding fine, of a heavy padded crimson satin quilted in a diamond pattern with gold thread, and having skirts in the French style. It was filthy now, and splitting at the elbow. He might well have been a soldier. He wore above this fine French garment a heavy leather jerkin, and across this, diagonally over one shoulder and down to his belt, such a leather band as might have carried a pistol and knife. The left sleeve of the doublet was folded and tucked within the leather jerkin. It was empty from just above the elbow. His ragged serge breeches consorted ill with the crimson doublet. The hat which he held under his right arm was green with age and lacked both feather and buckle. The little green eyes in the fatigued countenance were fastened to those of the mistress of the inn with a look from which all expression had been drained save that of hunger. Neither the servility nor the fear remained. The appeal was too intense; she wished him away from the inn.

“We have no love for soldiers or for beggars,” she repeated. “You had best be going along.”

She had turned away and would have pressed down the latch save for his bitter exclamation.

“Going along! As if I hadn’t been going along for weeks now, and maybe months. So when I come back to my own parish, where I may be rich again someday—yes, rich and honorable—they tell me to be going along.” Then, as if the changes in the landscape might have indeed deceived him, he inquired, “This is truly Aalsö parish, isn’t it?”

“Truly enough,” she said, “and Aalsö village a few miles down the road if you keep going.”

“Then could you tell me one thing,” he said, “before you shut the door on me—just one thing?”

“And that’s what?” she asked.

“You know of one Morten Bruus?”

“Indeed, why not?” she answered shortly.

“Well, then, is he living or dead?”

“Dead,” she answered. “Dead since before St. John’s Day.”

The beggar, still holding his battered hat in his right hand, lifted his hand and rubbed the back of it slowly across his mouth, backward and forward several times, whether, as it seemed, to partly hide the smile on his lips or simply to express his satisfaction at the news. The satisfaction was most plain, and horrible. It shone in the small green eyes, grown strangely bright in that dulled countenance. At last he said:

“Dead almost half a year, you promise me?”

“Surely dead, dead as a stone,” she answered.

“Bear with me,” said the beggar. “It is a comfort to me to hear it said.”

“And to many another,” she replied. “Well, give you good night.”

This time she pressed her finger on the latch, and, in the silence, he heard it sprung.

“Wait one minute,” he cried. “If you will not take me in tonight, where will I bide? You would not, mistress, be so unkind as to shut a poor soldier out in the wet and the cold. You see for yourself how cold it is going to be. Is there no charity left in Jutland?”

The mistress of the Golden Lion shrugged her shoulders. “You might ask of the pastor,” she said.

“The pastor?” said the beggar. Then, as if the name were dredged from a deep, muddy memory, “That would be Pastor Peder Korf.”

“No,” she said briskly. “Peder Korf is dead, God rest him. The pastor now is Juste Pedersen, and a very good man he is, too.”

“Pastor Juste,” repeated the beggar. “Is he a kind man, and hospitable?”

“Kind as Sören Qvist,” she answered, pushing the door open a crack.

“So!” cried the beggar suddenly. “And did you know Pastor Sören?”

“How would I have known him?” said the woman. “I was not weaned in his day. It is only a way of speaking they have in these parts. Kind as Sören Qvist, generous as Sören Qvist—so the phrase goes. That is just the way they talk.”

“And do they never say angry as Sören Qvist?” said the beggar with a faint, evil grin.

The woman looked at him in some surprise, but made no answer, as if the question deserved none. The beggar, for a moment, seemed disposed to inquire further into this way of speaking. Then he settled his old hat on his head and, peering at her slyly from under the brim, said, in a beggar’s manner:

“I am a stranger in these parts—at least, I’ve been gone so long I’m as good as a stranger. But does the parsonage still stand where it used to?”

“Why would it be changed?” she said.

He did not reply, but looked at her oddly again from under the brim of his hat before he resumed his journey. In spite of the cold, the inn wife remained to watch him, her hand still on the latch, until his limping figure had rounded the bend in the road and quite disappeared from view. As she stood so, the door was pulled open behind her, and a man, coming to stand beside her, dropped his arm about her shoulders.

“What keeps you so long, lass?” he said. He was a well-favored fellow in his middle forties, his face ruddy and toughened, marked by few lines, and his thick blond hair fell evenly on a clean white linen collar. The inn wife turned toward him and smiled, and continued to look at him as if she were rinsing her vision of an unpleasant image.

“Only a beggar,” she said at last, “but a filthy animal, a son of the Bad One. He was asking about Morten Bruus. And now it seems to me that he looked oddly like Morten. Had Morten yet a brother?”

He shook his head. “Only the one you’ve heard of. And that was two too many whelps of the same breeding,” he said.

“He seemed pleased to hear of his death.”

“Even the beggars of the roads,” said the man.

In the room behind them someone began to sing, a good rich voice in a rolling stave that was taken up by the other merrymakers. The inn wife and her companion still stood without, the light from the open door pouring out around them and blurring upon the heavy air. The man presently said, without raising his voice, but his voice, close to the woman’s ear, distinct in every word:

“Morten Bruus, may God send him, though dead, a lasting and a feeling body to suffer all the torments of the flesh forever and ever. May his skin be torn from him in little pieces, each one no bigger than a fingernail. May worms devour his bowels, and his stomach be filled with broken glass, and the roof of his mouth scorched, his eyelids cut off, and his eyes open upon the fire that surrounds him, world without end. May God never permit him to repent of his life in order that he may never be forgiven for any deed of it. Amen.”

This unangered expression of a quiet, impersonal, and well-considered hatred came forth phrase by phrase in leisurely fashion to the accompaniment of the merry trolling within doors. “Amen,” said the inn wife, and the music continued.

Two

The one-armed beggar went on toward the village of Aalsö. After the nearness of warmth and nourishment withheld, the evening seemed increasingly lonely and the cold more penetrating. The twilight faded so slowly that the lessening of the light seemed rather a thickening of the air, as those night vapors considered full of harm and contagion gathered in the hollows of the road, in the low bushes, and in the shadows of the beechwoods. The fawn and umber tones of the dried weeds, the sandy road, in the gentle landscape were gradually obscured, and the faint pale gold of the stubble fields had no counterpart of pale gold in the sky. The beggar, in his soiled crimson doublet like a dying coal, moved on laboriously between the fields and hedges and came at last to Aalsö village. It was like the other villages of Jutland, diminished, closed, and dark, although so early in the night. It was inhabited, however, he could tell. Smoke issued from its chimneys. He turned from the highroad to a lane through a plowed and planted field and, feeling the landscape ever more familiar in its small details, crossed a plank bridge above a brook and found himself before a small whitewashed half-timbered dwelling.

It was surely the Aalsö parsonage; it was smaller than he remembered it. He had not come here as often as he had been sent, when he was a boy, but he remembered it. He stepped close to the door and knocked, and, as he waited for a sound from within, he put up his right hand and touched the blackened straw of the thatch which came down shawl-like about the doorway.

There should have been a jog in the wall to the right of him, and the higher roof of the unit which he remembered as the New Room. This was gone, and had been gone for some time; the older part of the house had been rethatched, and that portion of the wall of the New Room which remained had been leveled off at shoulder height and made to be the wall of a courtyard. He looked over the wall and saw that grass had grown between the bricks of the old floor. On the farther side of the courtyard was a small byre with a half-open doorway. As he looked, an old woman came through the doorway, carrying a ruffled brown hen under each arm. She did not see him at once, for she was picking her steps upon the uneven bricks; when she did glance up and observe him, she was frightened. She stopped short, then stepped back against the wall of the byre, holding her two brown hens in a closer embrace. For her, the outline of the broad and rakish hat, the long black hair, the gleam of crimson of the French doublet, meant the presence of a soldier, and, like the inn wife, she had no love for soldiers. However, after her first fright, she came forward staunchly, passed through the swinging wooden gate in the side wall, and so around to the spot where the stranger waited.

The stranger had never been skilled at begging, but whereas he had presented himself to the inn wife as one who had been a soldier, he now had wit enough to present himself as a beggar. He took off his battered hat and asked for food and shelter. There was a certain honesty in his servility; he was half starved, and shaken with fatigue.

The old woman had a kind face, a face full of wrinkles in a soft, fresh-colored skin. Her blue eyes were round and gentle, her head bound in a cap of dull blue camlet. The line of white which framed her face was not linen, but the smooth margin of white hair. She said:

“Do you come from far?”

“As far as from Hamburg within the last month. Before that, from Bohemia. But I was a boy in Aalsö parish. I did my catechism here,” he expatiated, “with Pastor Peder Korf.”

“Did you so?” she said, taking a step forward. “But did you look to find Pastor Peder?”

“They tell me that he is dead.”

She nodded.

“And that Pastor Juste is kind as Sören Qvist.”

She did not smile at this, but nodded again, seriously. “Yes,” she said, “he is kind. If you will wait now, I will go tell him that you are here.”

She edged by him and pushed the door open with her elbow, being careful not to joggle her hens, and pushed it shut again from within. She returned after a little time and let him into the kitchen of Aalsö parsonage.

The room was so dark that at first he saw nothing but the light of the fire on the raised hearth, but it was warm, warm and snug. He felt with pleasure the closeness of the walls, the nearness of the heavy beams in the low ceiling. He had been too long out of doors under a sky crowded either with wind or with massing fog. It was fine to feel a roof close over his head. He made his way across the brick floor to a stool near the hearth and sat down, holding out his hands to the fire. The old woman busied herself in the darker corner of the kitchen. He heard her wooden shoes clapping on the bricks, the swish and swing of her heavy skirts, and, behind him, the rustling of feathers, a few sleepy clucks. In a short time the old woman came bearing a wooden plate on which was a loaf of bread, uncut. She dragged a small bench near the hearth, set the plate upon it, and stood back, winding her hands in her dark blue apron. The beggar looked from the loaf to the old woman, standing there solidly with the light from the fire on her face, on her white smock and yellow bodice and her blue apron, watching him. The light was golden upon the glazed side of the loaf. He eyed it, then, since she did not move, reached out his hand toward it.

“Stop!” cried the old woman, dropping her apron and reaching toward the loaf herself. “You would not take my good loaf in your dirty hand, like that! Where is your knife? Cannot you cut yourself a piece, like a Christian man?”

“I have no knife,” said the beggar, taken aback. “If I had had a knife I would have traded it for a can of beer at the inn. So help me, I have no knife, and I could not use it with great skill if I had it.”

The old woman considered him. “Turn toward the fire,” she commanded him. Obediently he slewed around on his seat. “Very well,” she said, “you carry no knife on your back at least, and”—she hesitated a little, as if in slight apology—“I did not at first notice that your sleeve was empty. I saw a Spanish soldier,” she continued, “came with Wallenstein’s men, had a belt like yours over his shoulder and carried a long dagger in it, on his back. I will cut the bread. Were you ever a soldier?”

“Until I lost my arm,” he said. “But what can a man do with only one arm? Since then I am a beggar.”

When she had cut the bread, she gave him a slice of cheese as well, and she noted how the hand that reached for it shook with eagerness, and how, as the man ate, he seemed to forget where he was, and everything except the taste of food in his mouth. Watching him, as she had watched so many others here in the pastor’s kitchen, she felt her fear give way to pity, and having filled a pewter mug with beer, she set it close to the coals to warm. Starving men, starving animals, for over forty years this had been one of her duties, to feed them and to give them shelter. The bounty was less great now than in the old days because there was less to give. Still, what the pastor could bestow was for the homeless, and she had the bestowing of it.

“You can sleep in the byre,” she said. “It is clean enough, and the beasts make it warm.”

He consumed the bread and cheese to the last crumb, drank the warm beer, and sat, with his hand about the mug, staring into the fire for a few minutes before he spoke again.

Then he said, half to himself, “I have nothing, you see, not even a knife. Nothing at all but the rags I wear. But it may not always be so.” The warm beer in an empty stomach made him feel sorry for himself. It was pleasant to be sorry for himself beside a warm fire. Slowly his mind began to work again, and he remembered why he had come back to Aalsö. Surely it was not to study Luther’s Catechism in the New Room, which was now gone. But he had needed to see Pastor Peder. He said to the old woman cautiously, yet as if it did not concern him greatly, “Do you know one Morten Bruus?”

“Aye,” she answered without enthusiasm. “He was at one time of this parish.”

“Then he is dead? As I hear?”

“Yes, dead, and no one the sadder.”

“Surely not myself,” said the beggar. “Well, we cannot all be mourned.”

“We need not be hated,” said she.

“So he was hated, eh?” said the beggar.

“If you know his name, you know that he was hated,” she replied.

She rose to put away the remnant of the loaf in a wooden chest on the farther side of the fire, and he watched her regretfully but did not venture to protest. Beyond the chest was a door, the door to the parson’s bedroom, as he remembered, and in the wall beyond it, at right angles, was the alcove where the housekeeper’s pillows and quilts were piled. In all the years that he had been away he had not paused once to try to remember this room, but now that he was here again everything returned to his memory as being just as it had been, except that the door to the New Room was now walled up. As for the old woman, he seemed somehow to remember her, and yet the more he thought, the more it came to him that the pastor’s housekeeper had been a smaller woman, with sharp black eyes and a quick hand. She had not had the patience of Peder Korf.

“So the old pastor is dead,” he said at length. “Was it long since?”

The old woman seated herself on the bench in which she had bestowed the bread.

“Long since indeed,” she said. “I was young then. Well, at least I was but in my forties, and today that’s young.” She sighed, and the beggar inquired:

“It was not old age then that did away with the pastor. Like enough it was the plague.”

“A plague of Catholic bandits,” said the old woman. “A gang of Wallenstein’s men. May God never forgive them.”

The beggar considered. “Yes, that was long since I had not been long out of Jutland then.”

“Torstenson’s men were thieves and vandals also,” said the old woman, “but at least they were not Catholics but merely Swedes. Ah, but Jutland has suffered, suffered for all of Denmark. I wonder why God was willing to have us suffer so. But Wallenstein’s men were the worst.”

The beggar said nothing, and the old woman, speaking out of an old and deep sadness, continued:

“Everyone fled to the islands that had strength to move, or nearly everyone. Pastor wouldn’t go, and I stayed with Pastor. But when they came, and we saw the flames about Aalsö village and the nearby farms, I ran into the woods. Pastor stayed by the place. He was a brave man, Pastor Peder Korf. He said that his people might be running to him for help, and he meant to stay and protect them.” She paused, and the beggar kept silent, his head tipped forward, watching her from under his black brows with his little greenish eyes. She drew a deep breath and said, “When I came back to the place, Pastor was hanging from the beech tree, close by the door there, hanging by his beard—you remember his thick brown beard—and cut in many places; and he was dead. The house was burning. The cattle gone. Each last little hen was gone. There was a fire set in the barley field, that was ripe for mowing. I came back and stood here in front of this house and looked at him, and saw the turf all bloody under where he was hanging. They did that because they thought to mock him, to mock a priest for wearing a beard. You remember how thick and strong a beard he had, and how he used to tug at it with his fingers when he was thinking? The fire burned almost all night. Then, before morning, it began to rain. And so, year before last, when Torstenson came, we all hid. Pastor Juste went through the village and gathered all his people together, and we hid in the beechwood, and so we are still alive. The Swedes burned much and stole everything. Still, it was not quite so bad as when the Catholics came.” She stopped speaking. Then she said, “That God should make such men.”

“I was with Wallenstein’s men,” the beggar muttered, as if to himself. “I was with them in Bohemia. But,” he added piously, “when they took the road to Jutland, I left them. Not for anything would I have come back to soldier in Jutland.”

“God may take that into consideration when your time comes,” said the housekeeper, “that you burned houses only in another country. Well, it is late. Come. I will show you where you can sleep.”

The beggar picked up his hat from the floor beside him and stood up, unwillingly. He looked at the embers on the hearth, red-golden, translucent, showing, some of them, the exact shape of the twig or branch, transmuted but intact, and all veiled in a blue flickering.

“A pity to leave so good a fire,” he said.

The housekeeper stood with her hand on the door, waiting for him.

“I never thought to give food or drink to one of Wallenstein’s men,” was all she said.

“Well, thanks for the food,” said the soldier, “all the same.”

He moved limping toward the door, his hat in his hand, but turned once more to look back at the glowing hearth.

“I can surely see Pastor in the morning?” he asked.

The old woman answered by a nod.

“This Morten Bruus,” he said again, delaying his departure. “If all the farms in Jutland have been twice robbed, I suppose he can no longer be very rich. Were his buildings fired, like the others?”

“Oh no,” the old woman answered, “he had the devil’s protection on him, if you ask me. His buildings were never fired, nor his fields trampled, and he died the richest man in Vejlby parish, or in this one, too.”

“Do you say so? Well then.” The beggar considered this information and then inquired with an air of great caution, “Did he leave a rich widow, this fellow Bruus?”

“Never a wife, never a widow, nor any kith or kin,” said the old woman.

“Nor any friend? Did he leave his goods in gift to a friend?”

“Living or dead, he never gave anything to anyone, that I ever heard of,” she answered him. “You are very curious about Morten Bruus. Did you know him ever?”

The beggar stretched out his one arm in a gesture of exultation.

“That is what I shall tell the pastor in the morning,” he said. “I shall be rich. I have been the poorest and now I’ll be the richest. I am Morten’s brother Niels.” He gave a short laugh, the sound of which rung against the copper pans hanging upon the farther wall and echoed sharply back, with neither mirth nor friendship. The old woman lifted her head and drew back a step, exactly as if she had been struck in the face.

“So then,” she said with scorn. “Perhaps you were never with Wallenstein’s men, either. Perhaps I may forgive you that. A pig bit off your arm, doubtless, and you have come all the way from Aalborg, perhaps, but you have never been out of Jutland in all your life. This is a fine story about the brother of Morten Bruus, but you have come to the wrong house with it.” She pushed the door wide open and stood waiting for him to leave. The cold air poured in upon them from the blackness without. “You should be sent away for such lying,” she said, “but the pastor has said you might sleep with the beasts. Well, good night,” she added impatiently.

But the beggar stood his ground.

“I am not lying,” he said. “I am really the brother of Morten Bruus. I can prove it, since it’s true.”

“You are Niels Bruus?” said the old woman.

“Niels, the brother of Morten.”

“Oh, what a scurvy liar,” said the old woman with deeper scorn. “What a poor and pitiful liar. Listen to me. With my own eyes I saw the body of Niels Bruus dug out of the ground many, many years ago, and he was so long dead he stank. Yet you come and tell me that you are Niels Bruus.”

The effect of these words upon the beggar was strange. He stared at the old woman with eyes gone blank with astonishment, and his jaw sagged. Then he began to grin, a stupid evil grin, and then he broke into laughter. He struck his hat against his thigh to emphasize his enjoyment of her statement, and his laughter, filling the small room, seemed to her the most stupid, the most evil sound she had ever heard.

“Stop,” she cried. “Be quiet,” and stamped upon the brick floor with her wooden shoes, opposing one noise to another, in a kind of panic. “Are you gone crazy?”

The beggar paused in his laughter to ask, “And was my face all battered, mistress?” Then, as he saw her blench from him, “And did you see a fine lead earring in this ear?” and he pointed, with his hat, to his left ear.

The old woman’s face filled with horror. She lifted a hand and crossed herself, slowly.

“Tell me,” said the beggar, “did Parson Sören see me too? And smell me, ha? Tell me, who dug me up and where was I buried?”

The old woman, having retreated from him a few steps, stopped and, composing herself, her face full of loathing, placed both hands firmly on her hips and replied in a steady voice, as if she were exorcising a demon:

“I saw in Pastor Sören’s garden Morten Bruus himself strike the spade into the ground and uncover the body of Niels, his brother; I, and many others. It would take more than a beggar from Aalborg to make me think other than that Niels is dead and buried in Vejlby churchyard. Do you think to be rich with Morten’s money? Oh, what a fool!”

“But I know that the face was battered, and that the body wore my clothes, and that my lead earring was in the left ear, yes, just as I used to wear it. How do you think I know all that?”

The woman gave a shrug of the shoulders.

“Anyone can know all that,” she answered.

“Well, but I know more,” said the beggar. His voice became quiet and sly. “I know that Morten buried the body. That is why he could find it. It was,” he said, ever more sly and confidential, “a little joke that Morten played on Pastor Sören. Morten did not love the pastor, if you remember.”

His eyes were fixed upon the round blue eyes of the old woman, and he thought he saw a horrified belief grow slowly in those honest blue eyes.

“Yes,” he cried triumphantly, “a little joke that Morten played upon the pastor, and I can tell you all about it.”

The old woman turned her back upon him abruptly and crossed the kitchen to the pastor’s door. She knocked, her back still turned upon the beggar, then entered the pastor’s room and closed the door behind her.

The beggar could not stand still for excitement. He limped to the hearth and stood staring briefly at the golden embers under their veil of blue. Then he limped across the room to the wall in which once had been the door to the New Room. With that door gone, the kitchen seemed very small; aye, and with the door to the parson’s study closed. He looked at all the cupboards with shut doors and tried to remember in which one the old woman had locked the cheese; then, growing aware that his feet hurt him, he returned to the stool by the hearth and drew off his boots. The bricks were cold to his feet, but the air of the room was warmer than the wet and broken leather. He began to rub his feet with his hand, and was sitting so, stooped by the fire, when the door to the study swung open, and the old woman came back into the kitchen.

She was followed by an old man in a loose black gown that was furred at the neck but shabby. A fringe of white hair showed about the rim of his black skullcap. His face was lean and his figure slight and somewhat stooped. He moved forward silently, after the clacking footsteps of the housekeeper, because he was in his stockinged feet, and the quietness of his advance, together with his appearance of great age and gentleness, produced a certain awe within the beggar. The hilarity that had possessed him died away, although the excitement remained. He stood up and bobbed his head respectfully to the old man.

“Pastor Juste Pedersen,” said the old woman, “here is the man who claims to be the brother of Morten Bruus.”

“Sit down, my friend,” said the old man. “Sit down, Vibeke.”

He motioned toward the bench by the fire, and the housekeeper seated herself as she had been formerly. The pastor drew up a stool and seated himself so that he could face both the housekeeper and the beggar. The light from the hearth shone full upon him, gilding the shabby robe, the bosses of the high, bony forehead, the lean hands with heavy knuckles which lay quietly upon his knees.

“Now then,” said Pastor Juste sensibly, “let us get at the truth of this matter.” He looked the beggar over, unhurriedly, with the eye of a man who has had much experience at reading countenances, and the intense excitement held in check by the advance of authority did not escape him. “Vibeke Andersdaughter,” he said, “tells me that you claim to have been formerly of my parish, and that you now are come to demand the fortune of Morten Bruus. Tell me, how did it happen that you left this country in the first place?”

“Morten sent me away,” said the beggar.

“Ah! And when was it you left?”

The beggar considered.

“It was after harvest, and before snow. And the year, it was before Lutter-am-Barenberge. It was the autumn before the summer when the King was defeated at Lutter. Yes, that was it.”

“Were you perhaps at Lutter?” asked the pastor.

“I was at Lutter, yes.”

“Was it there that you lost your arm?”

“No, that was much later. I was at Lutter, with Wallenstein.”

“You mean to say that you fought against your King?” said the pastor.

“Well, Morten told me to get clear out of Jutland. So I went into Germany. And what could I do? It was winter; no one wanted a farm hand. But there was always fighting. Besides, Wallenstein paid much better than the King.”

“It has nothing to do with the case,” said the pastor, “still, I should be interested to know where you did lose your arm.”

“That was at Lützen,” said the beggar. “That was in ’thirty-two, I mind. We had a bad time at Lützen. And since then I beg.”

“It was a sorrowful thing for Jutland,” said the pastor, “the defeat of the King. Now, that was 1626, in August. So that I reckon that you left Jutland in the fall of 1625. You have been gone then full one and twenty years, and more than half that time you have been a beggar. Knowing that Morten was rich, and could have given you a home, why did you not return to Jutland, after Lützen?”

“I was afraid of Morten,” said the beggar without hesitation.

The pastor considered this.

“Did you then wrong your brother?”

“Oh no, Pastor, I never wronged him. I only did whatever he told me, and I was afraid of him. And he told me to stay out of Jutland.”

“Then,” inquired the pastor, “how did you come to hear of his death? Is the name of Morten Bruus known as far away as Lützen?”

“Well,” said the beggar, “as you say, twenty-one years is a long time, and I speak like a Jutlander still. People are much kinder to a man who doesn’t talk like a stranger. So in the end I came back to Slesvig, just a bit over the border, to hear a bit of natural talk. I was in Slesvig on a farm in the Black parish, and there was a man there who had once traded a horse from Morten. He had heard that Morten was dead, and he was telling his wife. So I heard it. So I came north. In Aebeltoft I heard it too. So it seemed safe to come home.”

“It is true that you speak like a Jutlander,” said the pastor. “Still, that alone is hardly enough to prove you Morten’s brother. Did anyone tell you that you resembled Morten?”

The beggar grinned and showed his blackened teeth.

“I was never so handsome as Morten,” he said.

“You were baptized in this parish?”

“But surely.”

“How old were you when you left Jutland?”

“I was eighteen years, I think.”

“And how old was Morten at that time?”

The beggar counted on his fingers.

“Morten was twenty-six years then. We were living at Ingvorstrup then, in Vejlby parish.”

“Since Peder Korf is gone, could you name anyone in this parish, or in Vejlby, who knew you when you were a boy?”

The beggar had to think a little while, and the first name that he brought forth caused the pastor to glance at Vibeke.

“It is a pity,” said the pastor, “that Erland Neilsen of Ingvorstrup was dead before my day. Think again.”

The beggar then, without great hesitation, tried half a dozen names, but at each of them the pastor shook his head.

“All these are either dead, or gone away, years since. Consider now, it is not enough that you know these names, and the ages of Niels and Morten. You could have learned any of this over a can of beer at the last inn. If you are to prove yourself Morten’s brother you must think of someone who can stand before us and swear to recognizing you.”

“Well, then,” said the beggar slowly, very slowly, “there could be Sören Qvist, who was pastor at Vejlby.”

At this the pastor and Vibeke again exchanged glances. Then the pastor rose.

“That about settles it,” he said.

“Settles what?” said the beggar.

“That you are not Niels Bruus. Look here, my friend. I am sorry for you. Since you are crippled and homeless, it is a great temptation to seek for wealth that does not belong to you. Still, you should know better than to set yourself up as being a man long since dead. There are those who would bring punishment upon you for pretending to be other than you are. Take my advice, and say no more about it.”

The beggar also rose to his feet.

“That is all very well to say talk no more about it, but I am telling the truth. I think I know who I am. And I have as much right to Morten’s money as any man alive. Perhaps you will be telling me Pastor Sören is gone too. Well, I forgot that he would be an old man, a very old man, even, but he was strong and hale when last I saw him, and he would remember me. Anna Sörensdaughter would remember me too, and she will not be old.”

He spoke vehemently, so much so that the pastor was constrained to lift his hand to quiet him. But Vibeke, the old Vibeke, now came forward and said:

“Pastor, I have been thinking. He has, as you have noticed, a strong look of Morten Bruus. There was always something we never understood about the whole affair. God help us all, I was sure there was witchcraft in it. God protect us, but indeed I think he is Niels. Make him stay and tell us what Morten buried, was it a dead cat or a wax baby like the wax babies of Kalmar. Tryg Thorwaldsen would know him, and Tryg is still alive.”

The pastor turned to the beggar. “Do you know a man by the name of Tryg Thorwaldsen?” he asked.

“The magistrate from Rosmos?” said the beggar. “Yes, I know him. Yes, he would know me. He was not one of my friends, but he is an honest man.”

“Are you willing to be questioned by him?” said the pastor.

“Yes, yes,” said the beggar. “Yes, I am willing. He is an honest man, and he will see that I come by my money. After all, I have a right to my money.”

“Then, in the morning,” said the pastor, “I will ride over and fetch him.”

“Oh, fetch him tonight!” cried the old woman.

“What need?” said Pastor Juste. “The man can sleep here, no matter who he is, and in the morning I can fetch Thorwaldsen. Or we can go together, all of us, to Rosmos.”

“Tonight, tonight!” cried the old Vibeke, catching at his arm with both her hands. The hands dug into his arm as if to steady themselves, but the pastor could feel how they trembled, and turning to look into her face, he saw that the blue eyes were almost black, the pupils distended in a great fear. He smiled to reassure her, laying his hand over hers.

“He will not vanish like an apparition,” he said.

“Ah, but he might,” she whispered. “You do not understand, you were not here when it happened.”

“But he has much to gain by staying,” said the pastor.

“Do you think I will run away, mistress?” said the beggar. “Oh no, oh no. Who would run away from a fortune like that of my brother Morten?”

“God might strike you dead before morning,” retorted the old woman. “Or the devil might put out a hand for you. Then we should never know.” But to the pastor she said, pleading, her heart in her voice, “Those of us who loved him have a right to know how it happened. Tryg has a right to know.”

The beggar interrupted harshly, “I have already told you how it happened. God’s wounds, the trouble is you don’t believe me.”

“That is true,” said the old woman. “With one breath I believe you are Niels. With the next, you are only a beggar of the roads has picked up part of an old story. How can I sleep in peace until someone else tells me, ‘Yes, it is Niels,’ or ‘No, it is not Niels; Niels is in Vejlby churchyard’?”

“It is indeed an old story,” said Pastor Juste.

“For you it is,” said Vibeke. “For me it is as if it had happened yesterday, and my heart aches, as it did then, and I am afraid, as I was then. I beg of you, go for Tryg tonight. Or, faith, I will go myself.”

The parson gave a half groan.

“It shall never be said of me I sent you on an errand at this hour of the night. I will go myself,” he said.

Three

Judge Tryg Thorwaldsen was entertaining guests, but he left his place at the table to greet the pastor from Aalsö. From the door at the head of the stairs, for the dining room was on the first floor, the pastor surveyed the company seated about the long oak table. The room was narrow, paneled with oak. On the one side a row of narrow casement windows overlooked the street. This night their leaded panes shone like black water, or, where the glass was set unevenly, caught the candlelight like small mirrors. The center of the table was a blaze of candles, the faces of the company bright in the glow, all the backs in silhouette. The light shone upon the silver tankards and crystal glasses, the ruddy cheeks, the well-combed hair, the fine white linen collars, upon a few starched and fluted ruffs, on good broadcloth and velvet, and, where there was velvet, upon some broad gold chains.

Thorwaldsen himself was in velvet, with a single gold chain; he wore a collar of white linen with the new square lappets. A man in his late forties, his hair was more gray than flaxen, and he wore it cut very short for the times. He had an extraordinarily long and bony face, with a wide, pleasant mouth and a long, bony chin; his eyes were honest and intelligent, and of a blue so steady and bright that they redeemed the general homeliness of his other features.

“I have guests of some importance,” he said courteously, “but if the matter is urgent, I can come with you.”

“It is not that I place great credence in the story of this beggar,” explained the pastor, “but that my housekeeper is distressed beyond reason.”

“I have an old regard for Vibeke Andersdaughter,” said Thorwaldsen. “I will come at once. Unless we can persuade you to stop for a glass of burgundy.”

“I thank you,” said the pastor, “but I am truly uneasy at leaving her. I should like to return at once.”

He waited for Thorwaldsen in the close darkness at the foot of the stairs, and when the magistrate had joined him they stepped together out of doors, still waiting for their horses to be brought. The outer darkness was less intense than that within doors. A pallor overhung the housetops, and from this pallor a few stars emerged, like snow that did not fall. The night was very cold. The pastor protested at the delay.

“You need not be so uneasy about Vibeke,” said Thorwaldsen. “She is still hale, and I warrant her a match for any one-armed man.”

“It is not that,” the pastor answered. “She is afraid of something unnatural. I too have the feeling that something evil is encamped by my hearth. It is hard to explain.

“I am not sure this beggar is malevolent. Rather, he seems to me stupid, only. I am reminded of what I was once taught concerning the nature of demons, that they are demons by virtue of their very incompleteness. The evil of this man lies in what he lacks.

“Do you think he could actually be Niels Bruus?”

“I have been convinced for twenty-one years,” said Thorwaldsen, “that I saw Niels buried in Vejlby churchyard.”

“He has a very strong look of Morten Bruus,” said the old pastor.

“That might well be,” said the other. “Bruus was not an outlander. Although he had no close living kindred, he had any number of forty-second cousins.”

The horses were brought then, and they mounted. For a time they rode together. Thorwaldsen said:

“Twenty-one years is a long time, and yet tonight it looks not half so long to me as it seemed when I was twenty-one and looked forward into it.”

“It is a great pity,” said the pastor, jogging by his side, “to have to dig up and bring to light, as it were, this tragedy so long buried and, in some part, forgotten. It must be painful to you, and I am sorry that I have to recall it to you.”

Thorwaldsen said, simply, “It is the one real sorrow of my life.”

The pastor sighed and said, “You must have loved your wife very much.”

“She was not my wife,” answered Thorwaldsen. “We were betrothed.”

“It is all the same thing,” said the pastor, in the innocence of his heart.

“It is not the same at all,” answered the other, “because if she had been my wife, she would not have left me. At least, I think that she would not have done so.”

“You must pardon me,” said the pastor, “if I am not well informed. I was not in Jutland at the time. As you may remember, I came only in ’twenty-nine.”

“I am not very good at remembering dates,” said Tryg Thorwaldsen, “but I do remember that you came after the peace. Well, you must have heard plenty of it, even then.”

“Very much,” said the pastor, “and sometimes things contradictory. It was even then taking on the shape of a legend. As was most natural. But it was so much spoken of that when I heard this beggar call for Sören Qvist as a witness, I concluded that he must know nothing whatever about the true story. In short, I took him to be a fraud.”

“Could he not,” said the magistrate, “have pretended to know nothing of the fate of Sören Qvist in order to assume an innocence? He would hardly care to put his neck into a noose even for Morten’s fortune.”

“You think it hazardous, then, to be Niels Bruus?” asked the pastor.

“There is that possibility,” said Tryg.

“I think he has no sense of such a hazard,” said the pastor. “Nor are his wits nimble enough for such a calculation. But consider, that if Morten sent his brother out of Jutland before the corpse was dug from the ground, then his brother would not be likely to know anything of what befell thereafter. It seems to me this beggar may be Niels.”

“I was acquainted with Niels, living,” said Thorwaldsen. “I never doubted but that I saw him buried in Vejlby churchyard.”

The pastor did not reply. The finality in the magistrate’s words was matched with doubt in his own mind, but, after all, he had taken Thorwaldsen from his warm room and his companions not so much for the sake of a beggar who might or might not come into a fortune as to quiet the fear of old Vibeke.

When the road grew narrow, the magistrate took the lead. Overhead more stars appeared, blurred and bright, although on earth the mist remained thick; it lay clouded among the trees and over the fields; the breath from the nostrils of the horses showed mist within mist. The air stung and clung to the face. Perhaps it was clearing overhead in preparation for a more intense cold. The pastor, still thinking of Vibeke, wished they might travel faster.

As for Tryg Thorwaldsen, he pushed forward through the darkness and mist as if he were pushing through time, but backward, year by year, slowly back to his young manhood and the vehemence and vigor of his youth. Through the darkness faces appeared to him, touched with spring sunlight, touched with tears, and an old sorrow and longing that he thought he had put aside resumed its old power. He thought, “The past is never dead. Within ourselves it becomes a part of ourselves, and lives as we do, and beyond us it becomes a part of the popular speech. When the story is forgotten, the phrase survives. ‘As kind as Sören Qvist.’ I heard the saying only this morning in Vejlby market.” It was usual. He had heard it so often that he had not paused to remark it, or to consider it as a herald of any return of the past. Then, might the past return? he asked himself.

He drew rein suddenly and, turning in his saddle, waited for the pastor to overtake him.

“I was abrupt, Pastor Juste,” he said. “Pardon me. It is incredible to me that your beggar should be Niels, yet, if it is so, I shall have a search to make through every village and farm, yes, and every city in Skaane, though it should take me the rest of my life.”

“And for whom would you search?” inquired the old pastor hesitantly, hearing the passion in the quiet voice.

“Why, for Anna Sörensdaughter.” Thorwaldsen spoke very low. The name drifted to the old man, through the darkness, through the chill air, like some petal loosened from a flowering bough remote in spring.

“Through every village, every farm,” said Thorwaldsen again.

Four

After Vibeke had seen the pastor cloaked and mounted and upon his way to Vejlby, she brought fresh wood to the fire and then, latching the door against a slight wind that seemed to be rising from the west, returned to her seat behind the fire. The beggar had not stirred from his place on the other side of the hearth.

Vibeke was learning afresh that doubt is a dreadful torment. And twenty-one years is a long time over which to recall a face of which you never took especial note. The excitement which had possessed the beggar a short time before had died away, and a greater fatigue had taken its place. He stared into the fire with eyes grown dull. Vibeke, watching him, thought again that the narrow forehead and the long nose with the remarkably long and narrow nostrils were very like the features of Niels Bruus. But the lines of the face were all cut much deeper than in the face she remembered, and the black stubble of the unshaved beard darkened them about the mouth and chin in an unremembered way. The lank black hair was like that of Niels. But, on the other hand, now that so much depended upon it, the likeness seemed not so great. And he had been one of Wallenstein’s men, Wallenstein who had been for two years and a half the scourge and terror of Jutland. He had said that he had no knife, but you could never trust a man who had been with Wallenstein. Perhaps this story of his was just a trick to get money, as the parson had suggested, or even, since he was so near starved and had been turned from the inn, a device to get a meal and a lodging for the night. She watched him carefully, lest he slip his hand into his pocket, or into his breast, and come forth with a knife, and the more she watched him, the more certain she became that he was only an impostor, and she wished that she were not alone in the house with him. She wished that she could send him out to the byre and lock the door upon him. But he would not stir; she knew that. He was waiting for the return of Parson Juste and the magistrate, and he was there by her own demand. He was calm enough about it now for anyone who knew himself to be a fraud. You would think he might be frightened at the thought of being questioned by so great a man as Judge Thorwaldsen. Indeed, he had not seemed pleased at the idea. Perhaps he would yet be frightened, and slip out before they came. Or perhaps he meant to strike her down and rob the house and escape. She watched him very carefully, and she reckoned that, even if he drew a knife, she could seize the parson’s stool and strike him with it.

And then, the more she watched him, the more the face again began to resemble that of Niels, and the beggar became a man who had been dug from the ground before her very eyes. She remembered again how awfully the corpse had stunk, and the odor of filth which surrounded the beggar became to her nostrils the odor of corruption. A deep unholy terror possessed her. This was not Niels returned to explain the corpse, but the corpse of Niels returned to harry the soul of old Vibeke. She sat very still for fear that her fear would cross the small intervening space to the living corpse and that he would know his power over her. Little by little she forced her fear of him back, but only by the power of a greater fear, that he should know she feared him. She thought that if he talked, he would have less time to think of what harm he might do. She felt also that she would be less frightened if she spoke. So she began:

“That must have been a dreadful battle when you lost your arm.”

“Aye,” he said.

“And a long time ago. Fourteen years you have been doing without that arm.”

“So long?” he said. “I hadn’t counted.”

“I cannot write but I can reckon,” said Vibeke.

“Fourteen years of begging. And all that time you never once came near Jutland?”

“As I told you,” he said.

“Nor met a Jutlander?”

“Mistress Vibeke,” said the beggar, “you ask me questions. Parson asks me questions. Master Thorwaldsen will ask more questions. I can wait until Parson and Magistrate come back, and answer them all at once.”

Vibeke gave a short laugh.

“No doubt but you are a Jutlander, whatever else,” she said.

The beggar lifted his shoulders, let them drop in a slow shrug.

“I answer questions. You do not believe me. Why do I waste my breath?”

There was justice in the remark, so that Vibeke did not reply. They sat, one on each side of the fire, in silence, while Vibeke’s fear grew larger and pressed against her heart, as she said to herself, like an indigestion. Presently the beggar said:

“As you know something about it, how would you reckon Morten’s wealth?”

“In money, I would not know,” said the old woman. “In land, he had more than when he was born.”

“You are a Jutlander also,” said the beggar.

“But I know this,” said she. “The one that inherits the wealth will inherit no good will with it.”

Again the beggar lifted his shoulders in that sluggish gesture of unconcern.

“Who has wealth needs no good will,” he said.

“Never believe that,” said the old woman.

The beggar made no answer, and they waited, Vibeke never taking her eyes from the figure across from her, the beggar now and again stealing a covert glance at the old woman from beneath his heavy slanting brows. The time went slowly. Only once again did the beggar open his lips.

“Yet how should Master Thorwaldsen know Niels?” he said. “How many times did he meet Niels on the road, or at the market, and stop to speak with him? I shall ask for Anna Sörensdaughter, I shall.”

Vibeke pressed her old lips more firmly together. The beggar continued to stare into the fire. Not for the world would she let him know what tenderness, what sense of loss the mention of that name brought into this hour of fear and dislike. She closed her eyelids slowly to press away the tears that gathered; opened them again upon a blurred figure in the firelight.

The coming of Judge Tryg Thorwaldsen and Pastor Juste changed all this. An eddy of damp air entered with them and made the chimney smoke. Vibeke ran to take the judge’s cloak, to help the pastor off with his boots. At Thorwaldsen’s command she drew up a trestle table to the middle of the floor, set chairs, brought candles, replenished the fire. The low roof seemed lower still because of the height of Thorwaldsen’s figure, and the room smaller because of the shift of furniture.

“We will have light,” said the judge, “so that I can look well at this man. And, Pastor, fetch your paper and ink. We will have a record of all that is said. Sit here by the table, Pastor. Vibeke, set the lights here.”

The door being shut, the chimney drew properly again. The air cleared. The candle flames steadied themselves. Vibeke brought a pewter mug of beer and set it by the fire to warm for Judge Tryg Thorwaldsen. They began with the examination.

“It is established,” said Pastor Juste, “that we have here a man who declares himself to be Niels, the brother of Morten Bruus, lately of Ingvorstrup in the parish of Vejlby. He further deposes that he left the province of Jutland in nutting time in the autumn before the defeat of King Christian, whom God save, at Lutter-am-Barenberge. That would have been, then, shall we say, in October 1625?”

The judge nodded. “As you say, Pastor Juste.” The beggar also assented.

“Then, having been a soldier for seven years, off and on, he lost an arm at Lützen, and that would be in 1632.”

Again Tryg nodded and the beggar copied him.

“He then begged his bread throughout the German duchies, as also in Bohemia and in Slesvig-Holstein, for the space of fourteen years. He is now returned to Aalsö parish in the month of November, and the year 1646, to lay claim to the fortune of his brother Morten. He has as yet called upon no one living and able to identify him.”

“Write that all down,” said Tryg, and after a pause the pastor answered, “It is written.”

“And now, Master Thorwaldsen,” said the beggar, “do you not remember Niels Bruus?”

“You could be Niels,” said Thorwaldsen. “Or you could not be. I was present when they buried the body of Niels—so called.”

The beggar grinned at that, and Tryg said, “I hope that you understand that it is a serious matter for you to represent yourself as someone other than you are. You stand in the way of a heavy penalty if you should fail to prove yourself Niels Bruus.”

“Anna Sörensdaughter will identify me,” said the beggar with confidence.

The judge looked at him for a long moment without stirring, almost as if he had not spoken. Then he said, “Let me question you a little. You have asked us to remember Niels. If you are Niels, you will remember something of Vejlby, and of Aalsö. You were a boy here. Did you do your catechism with Pastor Qvist?”

The beggar shook his head. “With Pastor Peder Korf,” he said, and added piously, “I did it none too well, more’s the pity.”

“But why not with Pastor Sören?” inquired the judge. “You were of his parish.”

The beggar shrugged his shoulders. “We were none too good friends with Pastor Sören when I was a boy. Morten had quarrels with him, and Morten sent me to Pastor Korf. I did not always come when I was sent.”

The judge considered this awhile and then said, “You must have known Vejlby well, however. Tell me something of Vejlby. The inn there—tell me, what was the name of the inn at Vejlby and where did it stand?”

“That is easy,” said the beggar. “Everyone knows that the name of the inn was the Red Horse, and it stood on the market street, facing the east.”

Juste Pedersen was about to interrupt, when Tryg checked him with a motion of his hand.

“Was there anything else you can remember about the Red Horse Inn?” he inquired.

The beggar had a faint smile. “It was also called the Sign of the Three-legged Horse,” he said.

“He is wrong enough there,” said Pastor Juste, “but he has probably been at a great many inns in his day, and perhaps we should not reckon this too seriously.”

“But he is not wrong,” said the judge. “When the Germans came, they burned the inn, and the new inn stands, as you are thinking, in quite another spot and has another name, but the old inn stood, as he says, on the market street facing east, and the artist who made the sign, for reasons of his own, painted the red horse with three legs.” He reached into his pocket for a white linen handkerchief and wiped his hands upon it nervously. “In a horse-trading country, Pastor Juste, you will grant that even the churls remember a horse with three legs. But your memory is not always so clear,” he said, turning again to the beggar, “and one thing else puzzles me. Why have you not asked Vibeke Andersdaughter to identify you?”

“Ah, she,” said the beggar. “I have been a long time trying to remember her name. I know now. She was Pastor Sören’s housekeeper in the old days. She has changed. She is old now. Besides, I never paid much attention to her.”

Tryg looked at Vibeke. She answered slowly, “He might be Niels Bruus. I think he is Niels Bruus.”

“Well, am I not Niels Bruus now?” demanded the beggar. “You say so—Vibeke says so.”

“There is nothing so far,” said Tryg very slowly, “to prove that you are not Niels Bruus. The whole matter now lies in how honest an explanation you can give . . .” He paused, and the beggar took the words out of his mouth.

“Of the corpse in the garden, eh? Well, I will tell you.”

“Speak a little slowly,” said Juste. “I cannot write too fast.”

“Well,” said the beggar, “as you know, I was a servant to Pastor Sören Qvist.”

“Tell me,” said Tryg curiously, “you that left Jutland because you were afraid of Morten, were you never afraid of Pastor Sören?”

“Oh no,” said the beggar promptly. “The pastor was a good man. Even when he was angry, and struck me, I was not afraid of him, for he was still a good man. But Morten—Morten had always a kind of devil in him. Even when we were children I was always afraid of him. He was always much cleverer than I. He was older, too, and more handsome, but he was always cleverer. And always I did what he told me to. So when he told me to plague the pastor and make him angry; I did. Then Morten rewarded me. Morten did not love the pastor. Do you understand?”

“I begin to understand,” said Thorwaldsen. “Go on.”

“Then one day I made Pastor angry and he knocked me down. I remember it was nutting time. I ran home to Morten and told him what had happened, and he praised me and gave me good food. Then he locked me up. I thought that was strange, but Morten was cleverer than I. Master Thorwaldsen, cannot I have one swig from your mug? It makes me thirsty to talk so much.”

The judge swore under his breath, but pushed the pewter mug toward the beggar, who drank, and drank again. Finally he set the mug on the table, wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his crimson doublet, and went on with his story.

“Morten 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 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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