Читать книгу Modern Swedish Masterpieces: Short Stories онлайн

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“Perhaps you ought to go,” says Frederick. “She may soon be home. What should I do if she wanted to beat you, I who am lying here sick and weak, who grow dizzy if I get up out of bed. Perhaps you ought to go.”

“I’m not afraid,” says Magda.

For she wants to show unmistakably that she loves him and that she will gladly suffer for her love’s sake.

Only when twilight comes does she kiss him for the last time and steal out of the house. She stops a minute in the courtyard and looks up at the window of the room where he is lying with her almond blossoms and violets on the bed-cover. When she turns to the little room in the wing of the court, she stands face to face with Mrs. Wetzmann, and she utters a little scream.

There is no living human being in the courtyard, none but these two. Round about stand the walls, staring at them in the darkness with empty, black windows, and the old linden trembles in its corner.

“You’ve been up there!” says the sweeper’s wife.

As a child I always believed that she smiled when she said this, and that her teeth shone as white in the darkness as those of her husband’s prentices.