I have before me now an old letter which came to me at the police court. It reads as follows:
‘For God’s sake, come and see us! This is a forlorn hope.’
As it gave the name and address of the writer, I went, and again it was Christmas Eve. The snow lay deep on the ground, and a hard frost had bound it together; the fog was choking and almost impenetrable, when about seven in the evening I found myself knocking at the door of the house. There was no light in the passage, but someone--I could not see who--answered the door. I inquired for Miss G----, and the voice said: ‘Downstairs.’ The door closed, the owner of the voice went away, and I was left in complete darkness. I struck a match, and by the aid of its feeble light found the ramshackle staircase that led below. I groped for a door, found one, and again knocked, and it was opened. A middle-aged woman with an old shawl round her head stood before me, a small benzoline lamp in her hand. Her face was so swollen that her features would not have been recognised even by friends. I told her my errand, and she asked me in and gave me a chair. It was an uncanny place. The fog penetrated the room, and the small, smoky lamp scarcely relieved the gloom. I had not been seated a moment before I was aware that there was something or somebody alive in one corner of the room, for a difficult and almost choking breathing was very audible. Beyond asking me in, the woman in the shawl had not spoken, so, lifting the little lamp from the table, I went to the corner, and very soon found a pair of eyes gazing into mine. The eyes and the breathing belonged to another woman, who lay on a miserable bed in the corner. She was evidently near death, and could not speak to me, so I found my way to the chair. ‘Who is she?’ I asked quietly of the woman in the shawl. ‘My sister.’ ‘She is very ill?’ I said. ‘She is dying,’ was the reply. ‘Have you had the doctor?’ ‘Yes; the parish doctor has just gone away, and he says she won’t last till morning.’ ‘Why did you write to me?’
She cried silently for some time, and then she told me that they had lived together for years, getting a living by making ladies’ aprons, etc., for the shops; that for a long time past her sister had been failing, and that for the past three months she had lain on that bed. She told me also how her own eyes had been gradually weakening, and her own earnings had fallen off, and, to make things worse, for the past month she had been half mad with neuralgia. So they had got behind with their rent, and the landlady was constantly abusing them and threatening to turn them out. They were the daughters of a once thriving tradesman. The dying sister had married a professor of languages, and with her husband had lived for a long time in Germany and France. Her husband had lived expensively and died suddenly, leaving his wife unprovided for. She herself had kept house for her father--she scarcely remembered her mother--and after the death of her father, who left her some little money, her sister joined her, and they tried to eke it out by doing needlework. But their earnings were small, and by degrees their bit of money went, and now sickness and death had come, and they were penniless. I made no more inquiries. I could see for myself that poverty and death were in that murky room. So I satisfied the landlady, sent in some coals, nourishment, and a better lamp. On Christmas Day, by the aid of this lamp, she saw her sister die, and a few days afterwards she stood by the grave of that sister, who had been given a common--very common--interment by the parish.