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