“All the witnesses are present, your worship,” answered Kobus, indicating, with a majestic wave of the hand, his solitary son Hannes, who sat so forlorn, that, looking at him and the schoolmaster, it would have been hard to say which was witness and which defendant; for the Dominie had his handcuffed hands on his knees under the table, and you would not have guessed from his calm features—pale and worn with the fatigues of the last few days—that he was accused of any crime.
“But,” pursued Kobus, “your worship has just said something that gives me an idea. Ought there not to be some other witnesses?”
“Other witnesses?”
“Yes, I mean witnesses to witness for him, do you see? I mean to say, Hannes sits here, for instance, to speak against—I mean against the Dominie,—but ought there not to be some witnesses to speak for him as well?”
The burgomaster began to think. This was a difficult question, one of those ticklish and delicate problems, the solution of which forms the principal raison d’être of a burgomaster’s career. If only this miserable trial had never begun! He cast a furtive glance at the defendant. If only he could consult the Dominie, and ask him to look up his books about the matter! But away with such humiliating thoughts! No; better, if it must be, to manifest his ignorance in a more becoming way: “Veldwachter, is that what they do in town? It was different in my time.”
“They do it that way now, your worship.”
“Then we had better move with the times, and adapt ourselves to the new usages. But where are the—the for-witnesses to come from?”
“Oh! there’s a whole crowd outside the door, your worship—perhaps you might find one among them. And if there’s no one to be had—well, at any rate, we’ve done our best to find one.”
“Go outside, then, and proclaim a summons, on my behalf.”
Kobus went and did so, wording the “proclamation” as clearly as he knew how. But a deathly stillness was all the answer he received. For though many a simple soul was honestly convinced of the defendant’s innocence, and though here and there a solitary voice had been raised in his favour,—to go in there, into the council-chamber,—to stand before the tribunal,—that was more than those timid folk could undertake.