‘But, Miss Sara, you’ll make yourself very ill, and you will break my heart.’
‘Oh, what nonsense!’ she said, with a sound like a little laugh. ‘What is the use of lying down when one can’t sleep. By-and-by I shall be so tired that I can’t help sleeping, and when I feel like that, I will go to bed.’
She folded her hands, and leaned back her head, and there was the same expression upon her face as that which had been there ever since she had given Ellen the little parcel containing Jerome’s ring to post–an expression like the changeless one of some beautiful marble mask from which a pair of restless, wretched human eyes looked forth, haunting all who can read the language they speak.
Fear seized Ellen’s heart at the long duration of this strained, unnatural calm. She dreaded the end of it. A terrible vision of her young mistress, with perhaps reason for ever overturned, leading an existence worse than death, occurred to her.
‘I wish he could see her,’ she thought bitterly. ‘It would haunt him to his dying day, and if it drove him mad, it is only what he would deserve. To think of an empty fool like that playing with the heart of a woman like this. ’Tis enough to make one believe there’s nothing but evil to prevail in the world.’
She dressed herself hastily, and prepared some coffee, of which she induced Sara to partake. The day dragged on. No one came near. Even Falkenberg failed in his usual call. Sara said nothing to Ellen of any suffering she endured. The woman could only guess from the utter transformation of her usual ways and habits that she was enduring tortures, and her own pain and perplexity increased. Once Sara went to her studio, and began to paint; but in a moment she flung down brush and palette, and began to pace about the bare boards, restlessly.
She did not resume the effort: it had been in the first instance mechanical.
The day appeared like a week to Ellen. It was November, when the daylight soon faded. The weather was cold; there was a foretaste already of a biting winter, in a sharp, black frost, and a leaden sky, which caused the day to close in even earlier than usual.
It was evening. Sara had taken up a book, and was gazing unseeingly at the page, and turning over the leaves restlessly. Suddenly she closed the book, and said:
‘Is not this Wednesday, Ellen?’