CHAPTER XXX
EPILOGUE
Doubtless there is not another street in Stockholm as ugly, and not another house as old, as dirty, and as gloomy. The entrance gate has the inviting appearance of a disused gallows. The rubble stones in the yard have moved more closely together in the course of time, so that a few small blades of grass have been able to shoot up. The house stands by itself, like an old hermit who has sought a solitary spot in which to collapse. There has once been an Assaying Office in the yard, and the outside walls are blackened with smoke. The chinks between the window frames and the walls are grown over, and the house looks as if it had not washed its face or eyes for a generation. The foundation has settled, and the building is stooping to the left. The leaking gutter has been weeping tears which have drawn black furrows all over the front of the building; the plastering is crumbling off here and there, and on windy nights one can hear it rattling down the walls into the street below. The house looks like an old dowager house of poverty, recklessness, carelessness, and vice.
And yet there are two people who cannot pass through the street without stopping to look at the miserable, frowning old building with emotion almost amounting to love. To them the entrance gate is a triumphal arch, the weeds and the gutter a green meadow, and a murmuring brook, the black house a charming ruin, containing lovely, rose-red memories. It is more, even, for whenever they pass it, the air vibrates with music, perfumes rise from the earth, and they see the sun shining even on the cloudiest autumn day; there have been times when they forgot themselves so far as to kiss each other; but they have always been a little mad, these good people.
Three years ago our young friend—we may call him friend since he repented of his youthful errors, apologised to society, and became a respectable individual, serving the country and wearing purple in the House of Parliament—our young friend, I say, was busy on the third floor of the ugly old house with a sheet of pins between his lips, a hammer in his coat-pocket, and a pair of pincers under his arm; he was standing on a ladder, putting up curtains in a small room, furnished only with a tiny sofa, a tiny dressing-table, a small desk, and a very small bed with white curtains.
In the dining-room the faithful Isaac, in shirt-sleeves, was engaged in spreading paste on a piece of wallpaper, stretched on an ironing-board which rested on two chairs; he was whistling and singing one unknown song after the other to quite unheard-of tunes. When he was tired of working, he prepared luncheon on an empty box standing before the window.
Outside the sun was shining into the neighbour's garden. It was a tiny garden squeezed between the walls of the houses; it had a pear tree in full bloom, and two elder bushes covered with blossoms; between the gables a piece of blue sky was visible and the mast heads of the timber barges in the harbour.
Isaac had been to the dairy; had bought sandwiches and porter; had papered the future mistress's room; had purchased oleanders and ivy, so that the landing windows with their black frames should not shock the young wife as she entered her new home; he would have liked to paint them, but he was afraid that she might object to the smell.
A cab stopped before the front door.
"It's Borg," said Isaac. "What the dickens does he want here? And that pest, Levin, is with him!"