Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/368

Rh Paul Féval's complaint that justice is sometimes too quick to seize upon appearances, and neglect the supposition of fabricated evidence. Sören was a clergyman of middle age, settled over a small primitive parish in Jutland. Pure and irreproachable in character, genial, generous, and devout, he was cursed with a fiery and ungovernable temper; yet he was universally revered, and varied his pastoral cares, as is not infrequent in Scandinavian countries, by cultivating a modest farm. He had a daughter, gentle and comely. A farmer in a neighboring village, one Morten Bruns, well off but of bad reputation, sought this daughter in marriage, but was rejected both by her and by the pastor. Soon after a brother of his, Niels Bruns, entered the pastor's service as a farm-hand. Niels was lazy, imprudent, and quarrelsome, and frequent altercations occurred between him and his master. One day Sören found the man idling in the garden. A quarrel ensued, when the pastor, his hot temper getting the better of him, struck Niels several times with a spade, saying, "I will beat thee, dog, until thou liest dead at my feet!" The man then jumped up and ran off into the woods and was not seen again. The rejected suitor, Morten, after his brother had thus mysteriously disappeared, boldly charged the pastor with the crime, and offered to produce convincing proofs of the fact. Sören was therefore arraigned, when the following evidence was arrayed against him. A man testified that, on the night after the quarrel, he saw the parson, in his green dressing-gown and a white nightcap, digging hard in the garden. It was also proved that, a search having been made in the garden, a body had been unearthed, undoubtedly that of Niels, with his clothes and ear-rings upon it. A servant-girl testified not only to having heard Sören repeatedly threaten to kill Niels, but to having seen the parson go out into the garden on that fatal night in his green dressing-gown and nightcap. Still stronger evidence was produced to the effect that the parson had been seen, in his green dressing-gown and night-cap, carrying a heavy sack from the wood near by into the garden. The chain of evidence was apparently complete against Sören; and the poor pastor now sealed his own fate by declaring that he believed that he had killed Niels, though unconsciously. He stated that he was wont to walk in his sleep. He had found texts, written sermons, and visited his church while in a state of somnambulism. He must, therefore, have found the man dead in the wood while thus unconscious, and buried him while in this condition. To be brief, Sören was found guilty and executed.

Twenty years after Niels Bruns turned up again, alive and well, grown now old and gray. He recounted how his brother Morten (now dead) had concocted a plot to fasten the crime of murder on the pastor, in revenge for the rejection of his suit. A body had been disinterred and dressed in Niels' clothes; the dressing-gown and nightcap had been abstracted and used as we have seen, and replaced; Morten, dressed in them, had brought the body in the sack, and buried it in the garden; and then, his plot carried out, he had given Niels a purse and bid him begone, and not to return, or his life should answer for it. Niels had kept out of the way till Morten's death, and now had returned with this terrible tale.