Father and son slept in the same chamber, but neither spoke, for neither of them wanted to keep the other from sleep, which would alone wrap them in oblivion.
"Don't give up!" said Sonnenkamp at last, as he fell asleep. Roland slept also, but after an hour he awoke and tossed about restlessly. The darkness seemed to stand like a black wall before him, and he sat up as if in delirium.
To lose one's senses, one's reason—yes, to lose them! they are suddenly gone, you know not when, you know not where; you only know they are not here, and they are no longer in your power. But if you could only find them! Your thoughts are no longer under your own control; they come and go, they combine and disperse according to their own pleasure; and yet you inwardly feel that this will not last, it cannot last; that the time must come when you will once more have the mastery.
"If it were not night! if it were only not night!" groaned Roland to himself, as he awakened in a wandering mood from a short hour's sleep. For the first time in his life, he awoke in the night distressed and sad at heart, with the whole world dark and impenetrable before him.
"Oh, if it were not night! if it only were not night!" he said to himself again. He thought of what Eric's mother had once said: "In the night-time everything is more terrible; day comes, and with the daylight all sufferings, both of the body as well as those of the mind, are less formidable; the eye then looks upon the things of the world, and the sunlight illumines and enlivens everything."
"It will be day again!" he comforted himself at last, and sank away into sleep out of all his brooding fancies.
Early in the morning they started with Pranken for the Villa.
CHAPTER VII.
SICK AT HEART.
The morning air was fresh and cool. Bertram was not on the box of the carriage, but a hired coachman sat next to Lootz. Roland knew the horses, and wanted to take the stranger's place, but Sonnenkamp said in a hoarse voice:—