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Willis was sorry for the captain's sleeplessness, but he was glad that the mystery hanging over them both had been so far cleared up. His visions and dreams had been a source of constant annoyance to him; but now that their origin had been discovered, he felt that henceforward he might sleep in peace. After a rapid run, the sloop cast anchor off the Cape.
Silent, self-controlled, she had given no sign of her suffering and her terror, though her eyes were ringed with sleeplessness and her mouth had grown stiff with its effort to command. The tension was torture. Her heart strings were drawn to the snapping point; her mind was a bowstring never relaxed, till every fiber of her resistant body ached for relief. At last they had arrived.
When he reached home, he went to bed as usual; but the consciousness of his misfortunes kept him awake. At nine o'clock in the morning, having never closed his eyes, and feeling utterly overcome by sleeplessness and fatigue, he was just about to get up, when some one knocked at his door. He rose hastily, put on his clothes, and went to open the door.
"Over-application in Germany caused absolute sleeplessness, at one time, I think he told me, for more than a week; and this, with kindred transgressions, brought on that insomnia by which his after-life was troubled, and by which his power for work was diminished; for, as I have heard him say, a sound night's sleep was followed by a marked exaltation of faculty.
The dysentery became worse, owing to sea-sickness, and in the most utterly exhausted condition, scarcely able to drag myself another step, I made for the best hotel in Spezia, which, to my horror, was situated in a noisy, narrow street. After a night spent in fever and sleeplessness, I forced myself to take a long tramp the next day through the hilly country, which was covered with pine woods.
Thus appeared as he slept the excellent Feodor Feodorovitch, the easy, spoiled father of the family table, the friend of the advocate celebrated for his feats with knife and fork and of the bantering timber-merchant and amiable bear-hunter, the joyous Thaddeus and Athanase; Feodor, the faithful spouse of Matrena Petrovna and the adored papa of Natacha, a brave man who was so unfortunate as to have nights of cruel sleeplessness or dreams more frightful still.
These closing years were sadly clouded by sleeplessness and depression of spirits, from which at times he roused himself to bursts of his old brilliancy and humor. A year before his death he said to one of the innumerable inquiries about his health, "I have a streak of old age. Pity, when we have grown old, we could not turn round and grow young again, and die of cutting our teeth."
She watched him covertly for a time while she still chatted on. And she noted that there were very weary lines about his eyes, lines of anxiety, lines of sleeplessness, that filled her warm heart with quick sympathy and a longing to help. The road was one of wild beauty. It wound up a desolate mountain pass along which great black boulders were scattered haphazard like the mighty toys of a giant.
Just as he went in he saw that the nurse was hiding something from him with a scared look and that Princess Mary was no longer by the cot. "My dear," he heard what seemed to him her despairing whisper behind him. As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, he was seized by an unreasoning panic it occurred to him that the child was dead.
And mingled pathetically with all this are confessions of pain, weariness, illness, faintness, sleeplessness, internal bleeding, all bravely borne, and never for an instant suffered to interfere with any business arrangement. But if the strain of the readings was too heavy here at home, what was it likely to be during a winter in America?
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