The Trial of Sören Qvist

One

3 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 4 Janet Lewis 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 5 T H E T R I A L O F S Ö R E N Q V I S T 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...