For ever so long there had lived in this box a quaint old tune. It woke at the blow and the snuff box began to play.
“Confound it,” exclaimed Christopher Ulwing, and tapped it again to silence it, but the box continued to play.
The two men, as though they had been interrupted by a comic interlude, stopped talking. The builder returned the box into his pocket. Anne bent her head close to her grandfather’s coat. There was now a sound in it as if a band of little Christopher’s tin soldiers were playing prettily, delicately, far, far away.
Florian was waiting with a lantern at the bridgehead on the Pest side. Many small lamps moved through the silence. Snow fell in the dark streets.
But now Anne was leaning her tired head fully on her grandfather’s pocket. “More!” she said gently over and over again and inhaled the music of the snuff box just as Mamsell Tini breathed in the lavender perfume from her prayer book.
CHAPTER III
Winter came many times. Summer came many times. The children did not count them. Meanwhile an iron chain bridge had grown together from the two banks of the Danube. Even when the ice was drifting it was not taken to pieces; it was beautiful and remained there all the year. The Town Council had planted rows of trees along the streets. Oil lamps burnt in the streets at nightfall and the Ulwing house no longer stood alone on the shore. The value of the ground owned by the great carpenter had soared. Walls grew up from the sand. Streets started on the waste land, stopped, went on again. Work, life, houses, brick-built houses, everywhere.
Everything changed; only Ulwing the builder remained the same. His clever eyes remained sharp and clear. He walked erect on the scaffoldings, in the office, in the timber yard. He was a head taller than anybody else. They feared him at the Town Hall and the contractors hated him. He quietly went on buying and building and gradually the belief became a common superstition that everything the great carpenter touched turned into gold.
Indoors, in the quiet safe well-being of the house, the marble clock continued to tick monotonously, but the children had long ago lost the belief that it was a lame dwarf who hobbled through the rooms. For a long time Christopher had even realized that there were no fairies. His grandfather had told him so. He shouted at him and took him by the shoulders:
“Do you hear, little one, there are no fairies to help us. Only weaklings expect miracles, the strong perform miracles.”