And wish, as if my heart would burst.—Wordsworth.
As before, day after day passed slowly and sadly over the head of the young forsaken wife. The golden month of October was declining towards its close, and still she received no letter from her husband in answer to her last impassioned appeal.
She wrote again and again; but with no better success. How he must have steeled his breast against her to resist the pleading of her letters, where every word seemed a tear of blood wrung from her crushed and bleeding heart. But most likely he did not even trust himself to read them.
In this agony of suspense, she must have either maddened or died, but for the “little angel” she expected; for it is scarcely possible for the mother of an unborn babe, even under the greatest trials and heaviest sorrows, either to lose her reason, or break her heart. In making ready for the little one, and in looking for its coming, she found an antidote against despair.
But her moods, of course, varied with the state of her nerves. There were times in which she hoped, when her hour should come, that both she and her babe might be permitted to die, and go to their eternal rest.
“Where I shall never trouble him more; or, perhaps regret him, either, though this is doubtful. Oh, Alick! Alick!” she would exclaim, with a burst of tears and sobs.
But these miserable spells of despondency she always repented as sins. And she, afterwards, prayed that her babe might live, and that she might be forgiven, and spared and strengthened to raise it.
She was so young and inexperienced that she did not know when to count upon the advent of the little stranger; but she felt sure that the time could not be far off.
It was in the last days of October, that she received another letter from her recreant husband. She was standing at the window of her bed-chamber, watching for the arrival of Leo from the post-office, as she had watched for so many days, when she saw the boy riding towards the house.
She tapped on the glass panes to attract his attention; and he heard her, and he pulled a letter from his pocket, and held it up to view as he struck the spurs to his horse’s flanks and dashed rapidly up to the door.