“My husband is worse and I must go to him,” she said, quietly and solemnly.
Appearances must, of course, be saved.
They said good-bye with many regrets and expressions of sympathy. The young Russian musician had a refined and a very sensitive face. He meant to kiss his hostess’s hand but stopped half way and turned a little pale. As he bent over this beautiful and robust woman’s body it seemed as if he had suddenly been startled as before something dead, before the stench of a dead soul.
Laura hurried to bed, took a sleeping draught and pulled the bed cover over her head.
Early the next morning she was awakened by the message of the death of her husband. She first felt a strange creepy sensation of relief. Now he would never call for her again. Now she no longer need go and see him. Now she could escape the nursing home....
But then she was seized by a bitter ague. Her nerves at least had not forgotten him. A cold breath chilled certain of her more intimate memories and the cold bony fingers of death groped too close to her own spine. It was like a poisoning of the senses.
Laura felt so out of sorts and so sick that she quite believed she was mourning her dead husband and felt keenly sorry for herself. She dressed in her plainest black frock and sank down into an easy chair.
Then a tall thin man in a black frock coat, carefully buttoned, and dismal folds on his forehead appeared ghostlike on the scene. He was the undertaker. Laura told him with a tired, an infinitely tired gesture, and in a few monosyllables to address himself to her brothers at Selambshof and Trefvinge. After which the gloomy looking figure withdrew bowing solemnly.
Laura sank together. “I am an old woman,” she thought. “Everything inside me feels so frozen and dead. I am an old, broken, lonely woman. My life is finished.”