Time passed, and Laura grew impatient. She took a peep at the picture galleries. The door was locked but she found the key on a shelf.
The poor deserted pictures! Dust, spiders’ webs, damp spots and dust again. Through dirty window panes, shaded by overgrown fir hedges and entangled branches of creeper, through glass roofs covered by the shrivelled leaves of autumn and the snow of winter a miserable twilight penetrated. The poor nudes in the pictures shivered in their bare skin over a long narrow drift that had blown in through a broken window in the roof. The “plein air” and impressionistic landscapes were blotted out by the dust and twilight. The modern brutalities seemed to survive longest. One or two shrill colour-screams still cut through the dark, the icy cold, and the silence like a cry of distress....
Laura huddled up in her furs. This was too dismal. She felt hungry—a desire to chew something—so it was always nowadays if she was exposed to any emotion. She took a packet of tough nougat out of her hand bag and took refuge before a big Dutch picture of still life. Chewing and staring at a crowd of hams, salmon, lobsters, oysters and tankards of ale she thought for the thousandth time: “That Hedvig! That miserable emaciated misfortune! What a jolly life she might lead if she were not so idiotic!”
Then Laura saw a dark shadow on the window. A woman came stealing out from the edge of the wood. She was thin and bent and she trudged heavily along in the deep snow. In her skirt she carried a big bundle of branches, brought down by the wind. From under the cap pulled deep down over the eyes she looked with shy, spying glances at the sledge and then walked quickly up to the kitchen door.
A moment later she slid stealthily and nervously into the hall.
That grey ghost was Hedvig Hill. The world had long ago forgotten that she had been a beauty and had been married to a young sympathetic patron of art. She generally passed as a half-crazy old maid who was afraid of people, who hated Jews, and hid her money in the seats of chairs. But nobody knew how wealthy she was. Whilst she herself got poorer and poorer and sank into a state of hopeless sterility, her money had multiplied and multiplied. It now represented an enormous sum of power and influence that she could not grasp or imagine.
Hedvig stopped with her hand on the door knob and stared anxiously at Laura:
“What do you want here?”
Laura swallowed a piece of chocolate:
“Peter has been ill for some time ... well, it is nothing infectious....”