It is like loud laughter at a funeral, a drinking song in a church.
While the rocking-chair is still rocking she hears suddenly how the piano is laughing at her sorrows, and she stops in the middle of a bar. She rises and turns to the rocking-chair.
But the next instant she is lying in a swoon on the floor. It was not her husband who sat in the rocking-chair, but another,—he to whom little children do not dare to give a name, he who would frighten them to death if they should meet him in the deserted attic.
Can any one whose soul has been filled with legends ever free himself from their dominion? The night wind howls outside, the trees whip the pillars of the balcony with their stiff branches, the sky arches darkly over the far-stretching hills, and I, who sit alone in the night and write, with the lamp lighted and the curtain drawn, I, who am old and ought to be sensible, feel the same shudder creeping up my back as when I first heard this story, and I have to keep lifting my eyes from my work to be certain that no one has come in and hidden himself in that further corner; I have to look out on the balcony to see if there is not a black head looking over the railing. This fright never leaves me when the night is dark and solitude deep; and it becomes at last so dreadful that I must throw aside my pen, creep down in my bed and draw the blanket up over my eyes.
It was the great, secret wonder of my childhood that Ulrika Dillner survived that afternoon. I should never have done so.
I hope, dear friends, that you may never see the tears of old eyes. And that you may not have to stand helpless when a gray head leans against your breast for support, or when old hands are clasped about yours in a silent prayer. May you never see the old sunk in a sorrow which you cannot comfort.
What is the grief of the young? They have strength, they have hope. But what suffering it is when the old weep; what despair when they, who have always been the support of your young days, sink into helpless wailing.
There sat Anna Stjärnhök and listened to old Ulrika, and she saw no way out for her.