When strangers came to the
parsonage their bearing and expression showed that the murder lay
heavy on their minds, and they read the same story in us. We took
each other's hands with a sense of remoteness. The murder was the
only thing that was present with us. Whatever we talked of we
seemed to hear of the murder in voice and word. The last
consciousness at night and the first in the morning was that
everything was unsettled, and that the joy of life was suddenly
arrested, like the hands on a dial at a certain hour.
But by degrees the murder fell into its proper place among other
interests; curiosity and gossip had made it commonplace. It was
taken up, turned over, considered, picked at and pulled about,
till it became simply "the last new thing." Soon we knew every
detail of the relation between the murdered and the murderer. We
knew who it was that Peer's mother had wanted him to marry; we
knew the Hagbo family in and out, and their history for
generations past.
When the magistrate came to the parsonage to institute the
preliminary inquiry, the murder was merely an inexhaustible theme
of conversation.
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