The Chief Justice: A Novel

by Karl Emil Franzos

"It was a shot!" screamed an old gray-headed man in a trembling voice, above the rest, before he got into the train. "So the telegram to the prefect says."

"A shot!" the word passed from mouth to mouth and some wept aloud.'

"No!" cried another, "it was a stab from a dagger, the General himself told me so."

Confused and unintelligible, the cries reached Sendlingen's ears till they were drowned by the rush of the wheels, and again nothing was to be heard save the noise of the rolling train.

And again his over-wrought imagination presented another picture. The Emperor had heard his prayer and said: "I grant her her life, I will commute the punishment to imprisonment for life, for twenty years. More than this I dare not do; she would have died had she not been your daughter, but I dare not remit the punishment altogether, nor so far lessen it that she, a murderess, should suffer the same punishment as the daughter of a common man had she committed a serious theft." And to this too he had known of no answer, and had come home and had to tell his poor daughter that he had deceived her by lies. She had broken down under the blow, and had been taken with death in her heart to a criminal prison, and a few months later as he sat in his office and dignity at Pfalicz, the news was brought him that she had died.

"Would this be justice?" cried a voice in his tortured breast. "Can I suffer this? No, no! it would be my most grievous crime, more grievous than any other."

The train had reached the last station before Vienna, a suburb of the capital. Here the throng was so dense, the turmoil so great, that Sendlingen, in spite of his depression, started up and looked out. "Some great misfortune or other must have happened," he thought, as he saw the pale faces and excited gestures around him. But so great was the constraining force of the spell in which his own misery held his thoughts, that it never penetrated his consciousness so as to ask what had happened. He leant back in his corner, and of the Babel of voices outside only isolated, unintelligible sounds reached his ears.

Here the people were no longer disputing with what weapon that deed had been done which filled them with such deep horror. "It was a stab from a dagger," they all said, "driven with full force into the neck." Their only dispute was as to the nationality of the malefactor.

"It was a Hungarian!" cried some. "A Count. He did it out of revenge because his cousin was hanged."

"That is a lie!" cried a man in Hungarian costume. "A Hungarian wouldn't do it--the Hungarians are brave--the Austrians are cowards--the blackguard was an Austrian, a Viennese!"