Miss Sarepta told Tessa that while knowing that good things were laid up for her, she had no thought that such a good thing as Tessa Wadsworth was laid up for this winter’s enjoyment and employment.
It may be that the strain of the day’s living added to the feverishness of the night’s yearnings; for when darkness fell and the wind sounded in the sitting-room chimney, her heart sank, her hands grew cold, her throat ached with repressed tears, and when she could no longer bear it, the daily paper having been read aloud and a letter or two written, she would take her candle and bid the old people as cheery a good night as her lips could utter and hasten up-stairs to her fire on the hearth to reperuse her letters and to dream waking dreams of what might be, and when the fire burned low to lie awake in the darkness, till, spent in flesh and in spirit, she would fall asleep.
At the beginning of the third week, she took herself to hand; with a figurative and merciless gripe upon each shoulder she thus addressed herself: “Now, Tessa Wadsworth, you and I have had enough of this; we have had enough of freaks and whims for one lifetime; you are to behave and go to sleep.”
Behaving and going to sleep took until midnight with the first attempt, and she dreamed of Dr. Lake and awoke crying. Was Sue crying, too? Sue had loved her husband, his influence would color all her life, she might yet become her ideal of a woman; womanly. Sue’s hand had been in his life; had not his hand with a firmer grasp tightened around her life?
Tessa did not forget to be metaphysical even at midnight with the tears of a dream on her eyelashes.
Was every one she loved asleep, or had some one dreamed of her and awoke to think of her?
“God bless every one I love,” she murmured, “and every one who loves me.”
The next night by sheer force of will she was asleep before the clock struck eleven, and did not dream of home or once awake until Hilda, the Swedish servant, passed her door at dawn.
Her letters through this time were radiant, of course. Mrs. Towne only, with her perfect understanding of Tessa, detected the homesickness, or heartsickness. Tessa was wading in deep waters; she did not need her, else she would have come to her. She had learned that it was her characteristic to fight out her battles alone.
Had Ralph any thing to do with this? He had suddenly grown graver, not more silent; in the morning his eyes would have a sleepless look, the sunshine seemed utterly gone from them; once he said, apropos of nothing, after a long fit of abstraction: “It is right for a man to pay for being a fool and a knave, but it comes terribly hard.”