He bent in embarrassment over the little boy who lay and gazed at him with large, serious eyes. “You must give me a little time,” he said.
“It’s little Marie’s boy,” said Ellen, with a peculiar intonation.
He stood up quickly, and looked in bewilderment at her. It was a little while before he comprehended.
“Where is Marie?” he asked with difficulty.
“She’s dead, Pelle,” answered Ellen, and came to his aid by holding out her hand to him. “She died when the child was born.”
A gray shadow passed across Pelle’s face.
III
The house in which Pelle and his wife lived—the “Palace,” the inhabitants of the street called it—was an old, tumble-down, three- storied building with a mansard roof. Up the middle of the façade ran the remains of some fluted pilasters through the two upper stories, making a handsome frame to the small windows. The name “Palace” had not been given to the house entirely without reason; the old woman who kept the ironmonger’s shop in the back building could remember that in her childhood it had been a general’s country-house, and stood quite by itself. At that time the shore reached to where Isted Street now runs, and the fruit-gardens went right into Council House Square. Two ancient, worm-eaten apple-trees, relics of that period, were still standing squeezed in among the back buildings.
Since then the town had pushed the fruit-gardens a couple of miles farther back, and in the course of time side streets had been added to the bright neighborhood of Vesterbro—narrow, poor-men’s streets, which sprang up round the scattered country-houses, and shut out the light; and poor people, artistes and street girls ousted the owners and turned the luxuriant summer resort into a motley district where booted poverty and shoeless intelligence met.
The “Palace” was the last relic of a vanished age. The remains of its former grandeur were still to be seen in the smoke-blackened stucco and deep windows of the attics; but the large rooms had been broken up into sets of one or two rooms for people of small means, half the wide landing being boarded off for coal-cellars.