Bishop awaited her. He was gowned as usual in his violet, with round
black cap, and gauntlet cut to show his ring. And as she came into the
great hall, he advanced to her with both hands outstretched and a look
of trouble in his clear eyes.
“Eleanore, for the first time in many years I come to you in sorrow, to
bring to you what comfort the Church can give,” he said gently, fixing
his eyes upon her to read how she had taken her blow, and from it decide
what his attitude toward her should be. For St. Nazaire had a great and
affectionate respect for Eleanore, and he was accustomed to treat her
with a consideration that he used toward no other woman. It was for this
that he had come to her in her grief, at the first moment that he heard
the news of Laure’s flight.
“Come thou into this room, where we can be alone,” she said quickly,
leading him into the round armory that opened off the great hall
immediately opposite the chapel. Half closing the heavy door, she sat
down on a wooden settle, motioning the Bishop to a tabouret near at
hand.
“Is there any news of her? What hast thou heard?” she asked eagerly,
bending toward him.
“I come but now from the priory, where I chanced to go to-day. This
morning the girl Eloise, a lay sister, she that was accustomed to ride
hither from the priory with Laure, confessed to many rides and
love-passages between herself and Yvain the young squire, while Bertrand
Flammecœur followed Laure.”
Madame drew a sharp breath, and the Bishop continued: “The girl is now
under heavy penance; yet is she a silly thing, and in my heart I find no
great blame for her.”
“Then there hath been no word—no news—of Laure? Left she no token in her
cell?”
“Nothing, Eleanore, nothing.”
“Ah, St. Nazaire! St. Nazaire! how did we that cruel thing? How took we
away from a young girl all her freedom, all her youth, all her love of
life? Know I not enough of the woe of loneliness, that I should have
sent her forth into that living death? Alas! alas! I am all to blame.”
“Not wholly thou, madame. Perhaps the Church also,” said the Bishop,
softly.
Eleanore looked at him in something of amazement. It was the first time
that he had ever suggested any criticism of the Church. But after these
words had escaped him, the Bishop paused for a little and fixed upon
Eleanore a look that she read aright. It told her many things that she
had guessed before, many unuttered things that had drawn her closely to
St. Nazaire; but it told her also that these things must never be
discussed between them; that never again would the man be guilty of so
heretical an utterance as that which he had just voiced.
After this he began to speak again, still in the same tone of sympathy,
but with a subtle difference in the general tenor of his views. He told
her, in a manner eloquent with simplicity, of his talk with Laure on the
eve of her consecration. He reminded Eleanore that Laure had entered of
her own free will upon the life of a nun. He recalled the girl’s
contentment throughout the period of her novitiate; and finally, seeing
that he had succeeded in obliterating some of the self-reproach in this
woman to whom he was so sincerely attached, he began to prepare her for
the blow that he was about to deal, to tell her what words could not
soften, to inflict a wound that time could not heal, but which,
according to the law of the Roman Catholic Church, he was bound to
administer.
Eleanore listened to his plausibly logical phrases with close attention.
She sat there before him, elbow on knee, her head resting on her hand,
her eyes wandering over the armor-strewn walls. The Bishop talked around
his subject, circling ever a little nearer to its climax; but he was
still far from the end when madame, suddenly straightening up and
looking full into his eyes, interrupted him to ask baldly: “Monseigneur,
hast thou never, in thy heart, known the yearning for a woman’s love?”
“Many a time and oft, madame, I have _felt_ love—a deeply reverent
love—for woman; and I have rejoiced therein, and given thanks to God,”
was the careful reply.
But Eleanore had begun her attack, and she would not be repulsed in the
first onslaught. “And has no woman, Reverend Father, known thy love?”
she demanded.
“Madame!” A pale flush overspread St. Nazaire’s face. “That question is
not—kind,” he said haltingly, but without rebuke.
“Nay. I am not kind now. Make me answer.”
St. Nazaire looked at her thoughtfully, and weighed certain things in
certain balances. Because of many years of the confessional and also of
free confidence he knew Eleanore thoroughly,—knew how she had suffered
every soul-torment; knew her unswerving virtue; sympathized with her
intense loneliness. He prized her trust in him more than she was aware,
and he feared to jeopardize that confidence now by whatever answer he
should make. Ignorant of the purport of her questions, he yet saw that
she was in terrible earnest in them. So finally he did the honest and
straightforward thing. Answering her look, eye for eye, he said slowly:
“Yea, Eleanore of Le Crépuscule, a woman hath known my love. What then?”
“Then if thou, a good man and as strong as any the Church ever knew,
found that to human nature a loveless life is an impossibility, how
shouldst thou blame a maid, high-strung, full of youth, vitality,
emotions that she has not tried, for yielding to the same temptation
before which thou didst fall? How is it right that the Church—that
God—should demand so much?—should ask more than His creatures can give?”
“Eleanore! Eleanore! thou shalt not question God!”
“I do not question Him. It is—it is—” untried in this exercise, she
groped for words. “It is what ye say He saith. It is what ye declare His
will to be that I question.”
“What, Eleanore, have I declared His will to be? Have I yet blamed or
chid the waywardness of Laure, whom indeed I loved as a dear daughter,—a
child of purity and faith?”
“Then, then,” Eleanore bent over eagerly, and her voice shook,—“then, an
_thou_ blamest her not, St. Nazaire, thou wilt not—” she clasped her
hands in an agony of pleading, “thou wilt not put upon her the terrible
ban? Thou wilt not excommunicate her?”
It was only then that the Bishop realized how skilfully she had led up
to her point. He had not realized that he was dealing with perception
engendered by an agony of grief and fear. As she reached her climax, he
sprang to his feet, and began to pace the room, hands clasped behind
him, brows much contracted, head far bent upon his breast. Eleanore,
meantime, had slid to her knees and watched him as he moved.
“If thou wilt spare her, ask what thou wilt of me. I will do her
penance, whatever thou shalt decree. I will give money; I will give all
that remains to me of my dower, freely and with light heart, to the
Church. I will aid whomsoever thou wilt of thy poor, I—”
“Cease, Eleanore! These things cannot avail against the Church. Thou
must not tempt, thou must not question; thou canst not understand _the
Law_! I am but an instrument of that Law, and am commanded by it. Laure,
the bride of Heaven, hath forsaken her chosen life. She must endure her
punishment, being guilty of—thou knowest the sin. Next Sunday the ban
must be put upon her. In doing so, I but obey a higher power. Eleanore,
Eleanore, rise from thy knees! Thou art tearing at my heart! Peace,
woman! Peace, and let me go!”
Eleanore, in her agony of despair, had crept to him and clasped his
knees, mutely imploring the pity that he dared not show. Logic and
reason he had put from him, holding fast to the tenets of that Church
that had made him what he was. In all his career he had not been so
tried, so tempted, to slip his duty. But, through the crucial moment, he
did not speak; and after that he was safe from attack.
After many minutes the mother loosed her clasp of him, and ceased to
moan, and let him go; for she saw that he could not help her. And as he
passed slowly out of the room, she rose to her feet and looked after him
blindly. Then she groped her way to the door, crossed the great hall,
and, with her burden, ascended the stairs and went to her own room. Next
morning, when the Bishop said mass in the chapel, madame, for the first
time in thirty years on such an occasion, was not present. Nor did
monseigneur seem astonished at the fact, but left his sympathy for her
before he rode away to St. Nazaire.
All that afternoon and night, indeed, till after dawn of the next day,
weary henchmen of the keep came straggling in on spent horses, fruitless
returned from a fruitless quest. And when they were all back again, and
the hope of seeing Laure was gone, the shadow of loneliness settled a
little lower over the great pile of stone, and the silence within the
Castle grew more and more intense to the aching heart within.
In the general desolation of Castle life Alixe, the unnatural child of
peasant blood, came very close to the heart of Eleanore. Through the
long, budding spring madame fought a terrible battle with herself
against an overpowering desire for an end of life, for the peace of
death. And in these times Alixe often drew her away from herself by
getting her to hunt and to hawk,—two amusements in which madame had been
wont to indulge eagerly in her youth, and which she found were still
possible for her, though she had grown to what she thought
old-womanhood. Besides this, she and Alixe took the long walks that
Laure had formerly delighted in; and the two ventured into many a deep
cave in the sea-cliffs, and explored many crevices that no native of the
coast would enter. In these places they found fair treasures of the sea,
but were never accosted by any of the supernatural beings said to
inhabit such spots. Nor, though they listened many times for it at
twilight, did either of them hear, a single time, the long, low, wailing
cries of the spirit of the lost Lenore.
In this way some pleasures entered unawares into the life of Eleanore.
Perhaps there were other pleasures also, so simple and so familiar that
she took no cognizance of them as such. Perhaps of a morning, in the
spinning-room, when her fingers flew under some familiar, pretty task,
and her ears were filled with the chatter of the demoiselles, who still
strove after light-hearted joys amid their gray surroundings, she found
forgetfulness of Laure’s bitter disgrace. Or better still, when, at the
sunset hour, she paced the grassy falcon-field, watching the glories of
the sea and sky, there came to her heart that benison of Nature that God
has devised for all of us in our days of woe. But when she was alone, in
early afternoon, or, most of all, through the silent night-watches, she
was sometimes overcome with sheer terror of herself and of her solitude.
At such times she fought the creeping horror with what weapons time had
given her, battling so bravely that she never suffered utter rout.
In a dim, quiet way the weeks sped on, leaving behind them no trace of
what had been, nothing for memory to hang her lightest fabric on. In all
the weeks that lay between Laure’s flight and the coming of July,
Eleanore could remember distinctly just one talk beside the bitter one
with St. Nazaire. And this other was with neither Alixe nor the Bishop,
who, however, made it a point to come once in a fortnight to Le
Crépuscule.
On a fair morning in May, as the dawn crept up out of the east not many
hours after midnight, Eleanore rose, in the early flush, and, clothing
herself lightly, left her room with the intention of going into the
fields to walk. No one was to be seen as she entered the lower hall;
but, to her amazement, the great door stood half open, and through it
poured a draught of morning air, rich with the perfume of blossoming
trees and fertile fields. Wondering that Alixe should have risen so
early, Eleanore left the Castle and hurried out of the courtyard into
the strip of meadow lying between the wall and the dry moat. Here, near
the north edge of the cliff, sitting cross-legged in the grass, sat
David the dwarf, holding in his hand something to which he talked in a
low, solemn tone. Advancing noiselessly toward him, Eleanore perceived
that it was a dead butterfly that he had found, and to which he was
pouring out his soul. Amazed at the first phrases that caught her ears,
she halted a few steps behind him, and there learned something of the
thoughts that lay hidden in his volatile brain.
“White Butterfly, White Butterfly, thou frail and delicate child of
summer, speak to me again! Say, hast thou found death as fair as life,
thou White and Still? Came the messenger to thee unawares, or didst thou
see his face and know it? Wast thou confessed, White Butterfly? Wentest
thou forth absolved of all thy fluttering sins?
“Say, wanderer, didst love thy life? Wast afraid or sorrowful to leave
it, in its dawn? Or foundest thou comfort in the thought of eternal rest
for thy battling wings?
“And I, O living Thistledown, teach me my way! Shall I follow thee into
the great world, to roam there seeking why men love to live? Or shall I
also, like thee, leave it all? Shall I go, knowing nothing of the joy of
life? Or, again, shall I practise a weary courtesy, and remain to bring
echoes of laughter into that Twilight Castle, for the sake of the love I
bear its Twilight Lady? Her life, my flutterer, hath been such a dream
of tears as even thou and I, dead thing, have never known. Yea, many a
time while I laughed and shouted at the light crew of damsels that sleep
there now, my heart hath bled for her. O Ghost of the Morning, know you
what Eleanore, our lady, thinks of me, the fool? And yet, yet I do so
deeply pity her—”
“Thou pityest me, David?” echoed Eleanore, advancing till she stood
before him, forgetful of how her appearance must startle him.
David looked up at her, winking slowly, like one that would bring
himself out of a dream-world into reality. “Lady of Twilight, thou’rt a
woman, lonely and mournful, forsaken of thy children. Therefore I grieve
for thee,” he said slowly, gazing at her with his big eyes, but not
rising from where he sat.
“A woman,” said Eleanore, looking at him with a half-smile, and echoing
his tone,—“a woman doubtless is always to be pitied; and yet what man
deems it so? Master David, ye are all born of women, and ye are all
reared by them. Afterwards, in youth, ye wed, use us as your playthings
for an hour, and then leave us in your gray dwellings, while ye fare
forth to more manly sports and exploits. There in solitude we bear and
rear again, and later our maidens wed and our sons depart from us, and
for the last time, in our age, we are left alone to die. Truly, David,
thou mayest well pity!”
David’s wide mouth curved in a bitter smile.
“Even so, Madame Eleanore. And now, for fifteen years, I have lived as a
woman lives. Mayhap by now I know her life better than other men—if,
indeed, I am a man, being but little taller than the animals. And all
these things said I to my dead friend here in my hand.”
“’Tis now fifteen years since thou camest with my lord to Crépuscule?”
“Ay, fifteen. I was then a boy of about such age. Fifteen years in Le
Crépuscule by the sea! It is a lifetime.”
Madame sighed. Then her face brightened again as she looked down at the
dwarf. “What was the life of thy youth, David? ’Tis a tale I have never
heard.”
“’Tis but a little tale. Like my dead butterfly, I wandered. I come of a
race of dwarfs,—all straight-backed, know you, and not ill to look upon.
My father was a mountebank. My mother, who measured greater than was
customary among us, cooked and sewed and travelled with us whithersoever
we went in our wagon. When I was young,—at the age of five or
thereabouts,—I began to assist my father in his entertainments. When I
was fifteen we were in Rennes for the jousting season, and there thy
lord saw me, bought me, and brought me back to you, lady, to be your
merry jester. But indeed my laughter hath run low, of late. Long years I
have bravely jested through; but now the Twilight spell is creeping over
me, and merriment rises no more in my heart. Indeed, I question if I
should not beg leave of thee to go forth into the world again for a
little time, to learn once more the song of joy. Yet when thou art near,
and I look out upon the sea, and behold the sun lifting his glory out of
the eastern hills, I ever think I cannot go,—I cannot leave this gentle
home of melancholy.”
“Thou art free, David, if freedom is mine to bestow upon thee. Indeed, I
could not ask that any one remain in this sad and quiet place, of any
than his own will. Go thou forth into the world! Go forth to joy and
life and laughter. Fill thy little heart again with jests. Forget the
brooding silence of Le Crépuscule, and laugh through the broad world to
thy heart’s content. Yet we shall miss thee sorely, little man.”
Madame stopped speaking, and there was a pause. David seemed to have no
response to make to her words. Instead he bent over the earth, digging a
little hole in the sod. Into this he laid the dead form of his white
butterfly. When he had covered it from sight with the black earth, and
patted a little earthen mound over it, he rose to his feet with an
exaggerated sigh.
“So I bury my friend—and my freedom. My desire is dead, Madame Eleanore,
with my freedom. I will remain here among you women-folk, and keep you
sad company or merry as you demand. Look! The rim of the sun is pushing
over the line of the distant trees!”
“Yea, it is there—far away—in the land where Laure may be, deserted,
mayhap, and a wanderer, cast out from every dwelling that she enters!”
Eleanore whispered these words, more to herself than to David. They were
an expression of her eternal thought. The dwarf heard them, and sought
some comfort for her. But her expression forbade comfort; and, in the
end, he did not speak at all. The two of them stood side by side and
watched the sun come up the heavens. Presently the Castle awoke, and
shortly Alixe came out to the field to feed the young _niais_ and the
mother-birds in the falcon-nests. So Eleanore, when she had given the
young girl greeting, returned to her solitude in the Castle, finding her
heart in some part relieved of its immediate burden.
One by one the lengthening days passed. June came into the world, and
palpitated, and glowed with glory and fire, and then died. During this
time not a word had come from distant Rennes to tell the Lady of
Crépuscule how Gerault fared. The midsummer month came in, and the young
men and maidens of the Castle grew gay with the heat, and made riotous
expenditure of the riches of Nature. That year the whole earth seemed a
tangle of flowers and rich meadow-grass, with which young demoiselles
played havoc, while the squires and henchmen hawked and hunted and drank
deep. These days stirred Eleanore’s heart once more to love of life, and
woke the sleeping soul of Alixe to strange fits of passionate yearning
after unattainable ideals. The living earth brought fire to every soul,
and the pinched melancholy of winter was dead and forgotten.
On the night of the seventh of July the Castle sat unusually late at
meat, for the Bishop had arrived unexpectedly, and, being in a merry
mood, deigned to entertain the whole Castle with tales and jests. Just
in the middle of a story of Church militant in the war of the three
Jeannes, there came the grating noise of the lowering drawbridge, a
faint echo of shouts from the men-at-arms in the watch-tower, and the
clatter of swift hoofs over the courtyard stones. Half a dozen henchmen
ran to open the great door, while Eleanore rose with difficulty to her
feet. Her heart had suddenly come into her throat, and she had turned
deathly white with an unexpressed hope and an inarticulate fear. There
was a little pause. The new-comer was dismounting. Then, after what had
seemed a year of waiting, Courtoise walked into the hall, advanced to
his liege lady, and bent the knee.
“Courtoise!” gasped Eleanore, faintly. “Courtoise—thy message!”
“Madame,” he cried, “I bring joyful tidings from my lord! He sends thee
health, greeting, and duty, and prays you to prepare the Castle for a
great feast; for in a week’s time he brings home his bride from Rennes!”
[Illustration]
_CHAPTER SIX_
A LOVE-STRAIN
[Illustration]
Late that night, when the little throng below had been as nearly
satisfied with information concerning the great event as three poor
hours of steady talking from Courtoise could make them, Eleanore sat in
her own room alone with the messenger, there to learn those intimate
details of Gerault’s wooing, that none but her had right to know. She
questioned Courtoise eagerly, earnestly, repeatedly, with such yearning
in her eyes that the young squire’s heart smote him to see what her
loneliness had been.
“Tell me again, Courtoise, yet once again! She is fair, this maid?”
“As fair as a rose, madame; her skin composed of pink and white, so
cunningly mingled that none can judge which hath most play upon it. And
her eyes are blue like a midsummer sky; and she hath clouds of hair that
glisten like meshes of sun-threads, crowning her.”
“And she is small and delicately formed?”
“She is slender and fragile; yet is she in no way sickly of body.”
“And her name,” went on madame, musingly, “is Lenore! Is that not a
strange thing, Courtoise? Is’t not strange that a second time this name
should have entered so deeply into the life of thy lord? Was he glad
that it so chanced, Courtoise; or did he hesitate to pronounce it
again?”
“I know not if it troubled him at first, madame. But this I know: that
he is happy in her.”
“Then the dear God be thanked! I ask no more. Ah! It seems that at last
I can pray again with an open heart. ’Twill be the first time
since—since—” Suddenly Eleanore began to tremble. “Courtoise,” she
whispered, pale with dread, “hath thy lord heard—of—of Laure’s flight?”
Courtoise bent his head, answering in a strained voice: “My lord had
news of—of the flight late in the month of March. Monseigneur de St.
Nazaire sent us the word of it, and for many weeks my lord hunted the
country over for a trace of her. And when he found her not, nor any word
of her, he forbore, in his grief, to write to thee, dear lady, lest he
should cause thy tears to flow again.”
“I thank the good God that he knows!” murmured Eleanore. “It had been
more than I could bear that Gerault should come home to find his wedding
feast blackened with a new-learned shame.”
“Yea, Lady Eleanore.”
“And so now, Courtoise, go thou to thy rest; for I have kept thee long,
and thou’rt very weary. And on the morrow there must be a beginning of
making the Castle bravely gay for the home-coming of its lord and its
bride. Likewise, on the morrow thou must tell me more of the young
Lenore, my daughter.”
Courtoise smiled wearily, and then, with proper obeisance, hurried off
to his own room, a little triangular closet opening into Gerault’s old
bedroom on the first floor. When the squire was gone, his liege lady
also laid her down; and for the first time in many months sank easily to
sleep. For happiness is the best of doctors, and this that had come to
her was a greater happiness than Eleanore had thought ever to know
again.
Through the next week the very dogs about the Castle caught the air of
bustle and eager life that had laid hold of it. Never, since the days of
the old lord and his crews of drinking barons, had Le Crépuscule shown
such symptoms of gayety. Every scullion scampered about his pots and
kettles as if an army of Brittany depended on him for nourishment. The
henchmen hurried about, polishing their armor and their steel trappings
till the keep glittered as with many mirrors, and they broke off from
this labor now and then to see that the stable-boys were at work on the
proper horses or to dissolve into thunderous roars of laughter at a
neighbor’s jest. The young demoiselles were giddy with excitement. They
pricked their fingers with spindles, they broke innumerable threads on
the wheels, they stopped the loom to dance or sing in the middle of the
morning; and while they were arranging the rooms where the train of the
young bride were to lodge, they gossiped so ardently over possible
future gayeties that their very tongues were like to drop off with
weariness. As for the squires, all five of them, headed by Courtoise,
were to ride out to Croitôt on the Rennes road, as an additional escort
for Seigneur Gerault. And the parade they made over this matter was more
than Montfort had for his coronation at Rennes when the great war ended.