"Oh, you barristers!" cried the Judge. "How you twist everything! The kind-hearted creature wanted to save Victorine Lippert and pity moved her to lie at first: she has just openly and repentantly confessed that she did. But at the trial, before the Crucifix, before the Judges, her courage left her. She was silent, because like a good and chaste girl, she could not bring herself to speak before a crowd of people of all those repulsive details. You see, everything is explained. You are talking in vain."
"In vain!" Berger sighed profoundly. "Good-bye," he said turning to go.
But after he had gone a few steps, Hoche called after him. The old man's eyes were full of tears. "You are angry with me?" he said.
"No."
"Well, you have no reason to be angry, though I have--but I forgive you. By what you said you might easily have made me unhappy if the case had not been so clear. Certainly I am upset now. To-morrow is Christmas Eve; my children and grand-children will come and bring me presents, and I shall give them presents, and I shall think all the time: Hoche, what a frightful thing if you were a murderer! You will take back your words, won't you? I am no murderer, am I?"
Berger looked at the childish old man. "O tragicomedy of life!" he thought, but added aloud:
"No, Herr Hoche, you are no murderer."
In the evening he went to see Sendlingen and look over the minutes which he too had the right of disputing. He would have been disconsolate enough if he had not already known their contents; as it was the extraordinary tone of the document cheered him a little. The 'wise young man' was perhaps himself an author, or at least had certainly read a great many cheap novels; the style in which he had reproduced the servant girl's imaginations was, in the worst sense of the word "fine!" How this lessened the danger of the contents was shown especially, by that worst fact of all which Hoche could not bring himself to pronounce, and which was of such monstrous baseness that the faith of even the most vapid of judges must have been shaken in all the rest.
"That is quite harmless," said Berger. "More than that, these monstrous lies are just the one bit of luck in all our misfortunes."
"Certainly!" Sendlingen agreed. "But we must not count too much upon them. The examining judge may not believe everything, but he will certainly not discredit everything. It could not be expected after Hoche's enthusiastic advocacy of the witness' credibility."