In the corner was a bed which had begun its career well up in the social scale and had slowly descended until it was now more than ready for the kindling-box. Upon it lay a heap of rags swathing the skeleton of what had once been a woman. Her head was almost bald. Its few silver-white hairs were tied tightly into a nut-like knot by a rusty black string. Her skin, pale yellow and speckled with dull red blotches, was drawn directly over the bones and cartilages of her skull and face, and was cracked into a network of seams and wrinkles. The shapeless infoldings of her mouth were sunk deep in the hollow between nose and chin. Her hands, laid upon the covers at which her fingers picked feebly, had withered to bones and bunches of cords thrust into two ill-fitting gloves of worn-out parchment.
As Stanhope entered, the women at the stove rose, showed their worse than toothless gums in a momentary smile, then resumed the doleful look which is humanity’s universal counterfeit for use at death-beds. They awkwardly withdrew and the old woman opened her eyes—large eyes, faded and dim but, with the well-shaped ears close against her head, the sole reminders of the comeliness that had been.
She turned her eyes toward the broken-backed chair at the head of her bed. He sat and leaning over put his hand—big and strong and vital—upon one of her hands.
“What can I do, Aunt Albertina?” he said.
“I’m leaving, Doctor Stanhope.” There was a trace of a German accent in that hardly human croak.
“Well, Aunt Albertina, you are ready to go or ready to stay. There is nothing to fear either way.”
“Look in that box behind you—there. The letters. Yes.” He sat again, holding in his hand a package of letters, yellow where they were not black. “Destroy them.” The old woman was looking at them longingly. Then she closed her eyes and tried to lift her head. “Under the pillow,” she muttered. “Take it out.” He reached under the slimy pillow and drew forth a battered embossed-leather case. “Look,” she said.
He opened it. On the one side was the picture of a man in an officer’s uniform with decorations across his breast—a handsome man, haughty-looking, cruel-looking. On the other side was the picture of a woman—a round, weak, pretty face, a mouth longing for kisses, sentimental eyes, a great deal of fair hair, graceful, rounded shoulders.
“That was I,” croaked the old woman. He looked at that head in the bed, that face, that neck with the tendons and bones outstanding and making darker-brown gullies between.
“Yes—I,” she said, “and not thirty years ago.”