be drawn away. But she carried forever after the memory of that quiet
half-hour, in which the mighty hand of nature had been lifted over her
to give her blessing.
Courtoise the faithful had kept the two from a summons at the hour of
supper; and on their return they found food left upon the table for
them; but, what was unusual at this time, the great room was empty. Only
Courtoise, who was again at work in the armory, knew how long they sat
and ate and talked together, and only he saw them when they rose from
table, passed immediately to the stairs, and ascended, side by side.
Then the young squire knew that they would come down no more that night;
and he guessed what was really true: that on that evening Lenore’s cup
of happiness seemed full; for, as never before, Gerault claimed and took
to himself the unselfish devotion that she was so ready to give. When
she slept, a smile yet lingered round her lips; nor, in that sleep, did
she feel the change that came upon her lord.
Not many hours after she had sunk to rest, Lenore woke slowly, to find
herself alone in the canopied bed. Gerault was not there. She put out
her hand to him, and found his place empty. Opening her eyes with a
little effort, she pushed the curtains back from the edge of the bed,
and looked about her. It could not be more than twelve o’clock. The room
was flooded with moonlight, till it looked like a fairy place. The three
windows were wide open to the breath of the sea; and beside one of them
knelt Gerault. He was wrapped in a full mantle that hid the lines of his
figure; and Lenore could see only that his brow rested on the
window-sill, that his shoulders were bent, and his hands clasped tight
on the ledge beyond his head. Unutterable pain was expressed in the
attitude.
What was he doing there? Of what were his thoughts? Why had he left her
side? Above all, what was his secret trouble? These questions passed
quickly through Lenore’s brain, and her first impulse was to rise and go
to him. Had she not the right to know his heart? Had he not given it to
her this very night? She looked at him again, asking herself if he were
really in pain; if he were not rather simply looking out upon the
moonlit sea, and was now, perhaps, engaged in prayer, to which the
beauty of the scene had lifted him. She would go to him and learn.
She sat up in bed, pushed her golden hair out of her neck and back from
her face. Then she drew the curtains still farther aside, preparatory to
stepping out, when suddenly she saw Gerault lift his head as if he
listened for something far away; and then she caught the whispered word,
“Lenore!”
For some reason, she could not have told why, Lenore did not move, but
sat quite still, staring at him. She heard him say again, more loudly,
“Lenore!” but he did not turn toward her bed. Rather, he was looking
out, out of the window, and down the line of rocky shore that stretched
away to the north.
“Lenore! I hear thee! I hear thy voice!” he whispered, to himself,
fearfully. “I hear thee speaking to me.—Oh, my God! My God! When wilt
Thou remove this torture from my brain?” He rose to his feet and lifted
his arms as if in supplication. “It is a curse upon me! It is a madness,
that I cannot love this other maiden. Thou spirit of my lost
Lenore!—Lenore!—Lenore!—Thou callest to me from the sea by day and
night!—Only and forever beloved, come thou back to me, out of the
sea!—Come back to me!—Come back!” His hands were clenched under such a
stress of emotion as his girl-wife had never dreamed him capable of. Now
he stood there without speaking, his breath coming in sobbing gasps that
shook his whole frame. The beating of his heart seemed as if it would
suffocate him, and his body swayed back and forward, under the force of
his mental anguish. For the first time in all his years of silent grief,
he gave way unreservedly to himself; let all the pent-up agony come
forth as it would from him, as he stood there, looking off upon that
wonderful, inscrutable, shimmering ocean, that had played such havoc
with his changeless heart.
From the bed where she sat, Lenore watched him, silent, motionless,
afraid almost to breathe lest he should discover that she was awake. But
Gerault wist nothing of her presence. He had known no joy in her, in the
hallowed hours of the early night; else he could not now stand there at
the window, calling, in tones of unutterable agony and tenderness, upon
his dead,—
“Lenore! Lenore! Come back!—O sea—thou mighty, cruel sea, deliver her up
for one moment to my arms! Let me have but one look, a touch, a
kiss.—Oh, my God!—Come back to me at last, or else I die!”
He fell to his knees again, faint with the power of his emotion; and
Lenore, the other, the unloved Lenore, sat behind him, in the great bed,
watching.
The moonlight crept slowly from that room, and passed, like a wraith,
off the sea, and beyond, into the east. The stars shone brighter for the
passing of the moon. There was no sound in the great stillness, save the
rustling murmur of the outflowing tide. In the chilly darkness before
the break of dawn, Gerault of the Twilight Castle crept back to the bed
he had left, looking fixedly, through the gloom, at the white, passive
face of his wife, who lay back, with closed eyes, on her pillow. And
when at last he slept again, she did not move; yet she was not asleep.
In that hour her youth was passing from her, and she, a woman at last,
entered alone into that dim and quiet vale where those that lived about
her had wandered so long, so patiently, and, at last, so wearily, alone.
[Illustration]
_CHAPTER EIGHT_
TO A TRUMPET-CALL
[Illustration]
After the night of Gerault’s passion, twelve days ebbed and flowed away
without any incident of moment in the Castle. How much bitter heart-life
was enacted in that time, it had indeed been difficult to tell. Lenore
wondered, constantly, as she looked into the faces about her and
questioned them as she refused to question her own heart. If, beneath
that cloak of lordly courtesy and calmness, Gerault could hide such a
grief as she knew was buried in his soul; if she herself found it so
easy to conceal her own knowledge of that bitterest of all facts, that
she was a wife unloved,—what stories of mental anguish, of long-hidden
torture, might not lie behind the impassive masks around her. There was
Madame Eleanore, madame of the commanding presence and infinitely gentle
manners. What was it that had generated the expression of her eyes?
Lenore had scarcely heard the name of Laure, thought only that there had
been a daughter in Crépuscule who had died long since; and so she wove a
little history of her own to account for that haunted look so often to
be found in madame’s dark orbs. Gerault she knew. Alixe puzzled her, but
there also she found food for her morbidness. Courtoise and the
demoiselles she did not consider; but David the dwarf held
possibilities. The young woman’s new-sharpened glance quickly discovered
that the jester suffered also from the devouring malady, and she
wondered over and pitied him also.
Indeed, at this time, Lenore was in an abnormal and unhealthy frame of
mind. It seemed to her that all the world lived only to hide its
sorrows. But her melancholy speculations concerning the nature of the
griefs of others saved her from the disastrous effects of too much
self-analysis. Her love for Gerault, to which she always clung, led her
to pity him as he would not have believed she could have pitied any one;
and, unnatural as it seemed, she brooded as much over his sorrow as over
her own. Melancholy she was, indeed, and older by many years than when
she had first come to Le Crépuscule. Sometimes the fact that Gerault did
not know how much she knew brought her a measure of comfort, but it made
her uneasy, also, for she was not sure that she was not wrongfully
deceiving him. She could not bring herself to confess to Father Anselm
what she felt no one should know; and neither did she find it in her
heart to tell Gerault himself of her inadvertent discovery, though had
she but done this last, all might have come right in the end. But from
day to day she put away from her the thought of speaking, and from day
to day she drew closer into herself, till she was shut to all thought of
confiding in him who had the right to know the reason of her
unhappiness.
Gerault, however, was not unobserving, and he noticed the change in her
very early in its existence. It was an intangible thing, elusive,
changeable, varying in degree. All this he realized; but, man-like,
never guessed the reason for it, never knew that Lenore herself was
unconscious of it. Did she desire to coquet with him, render him
uneasily jealous of every one on whom she turned her eyes? If so, it was
useless, for the knight believed himself incapable of jealousy in regard
to her. He had married her for the sake of his mother, and for Le
Crépuscule,—much as the fact did him dishonor. In the very hour of their
highest love, his thoughts had been all for another; and when she slept
he had left her side to cry into the night and the silence, unto that
other, of whom this young Lenore had never heard. Despite these
confessed things, the Seigneur Gerault felt in some way hurt when the
timid shadow of his wife no longer haunted him by day, nor stretched to
his protecting arm by night. She had withdrawn from him into herself,
and even his occasional half-hours of devotion failed to bring any light
into her eyes, though she treated him always with half-tender courtesy.
Her lord was not a little puzzled by her new manner, but he took it in
his own way; and there was presently a stiffness of demeanor between the
two that would have been almost laughable had it not been so
pathetically cruel to Lenore.
The month of July passed away, and August came into the land. Brittany,
long blazing with sunlight, lay parching for want of rain. The moors
grew brown and dusty, and the meadow flowers bloomed no more. But the
blue sea shimmered radiantly day by day, and the sunsets were ever more
glorious and more red.
On a day in the first week of the last summer month, when Anselm had
found the temperature too great for the casting of choice paragraphs of
Cicero before the unheeding demoiselles, when the Castle reeked with the
smell of cooking, and the air outside was heavy with the odor of
hard-baked earth, Gerault sat in the long room alone, reading Seneca
from an illuminated text. A heretical document this, and not to be found
in a monastery or holy place; yet there were in it such scraps of homely
wisdom and comfort as the Seigneur—something of a scholar in his idle
hours—had failed to find in Holy Scripture.
In its dimly lighted silence the long room was, at this hour, a soothing
place. The row of small casement windows were open to the sea, and two
or three swallows, coming up from the water below, flitted through the
room, and once even a sleek and well-fed gull came to sit upon a sill
and flap his wings over the flavor of his last fish.
Gerault’s back was turned to the light; yet he knew these little
incidents of the birds, and took pleasure in them. A portion of his mind
rejoiced lazily in the quiet and solitude; the rest was fixed upon the
Latin words that he translated still with some lordly difficulty. He
found himself in the mood to consider the thoughts of men long dead, and
was indulging in the unsurpassed delight of the philosopher when, to his
vast annoyance, Courtoise pushed aside the curtains of the door, and
came into the room followed by another man. Gerault looked up testily;
but as he uttered his first word of reproach, his eye caught the dress
of his squire’s companion, and he broke off with an exclamation: “Dame!
Thou, Favriole?”
“May it please thee, Seigneur du Crépuscule,” was the reply, as the
new-comer advanced, bowing. He was elaborately and significantly dressed
in a parti-colored surcoat of blue and white silk, emblazoned behind and
before with the coronet and arms of Duke Jean of Brittany. His hosen
were also parti-colored, yellow and blue, and the round cap that he held
in his hand was of blue felt with a white feather. At his side hung the
instrument of his calling, a silver trumpet on a tasselled cord; for he
was a ducal herald, and, before he spoke, Gerault knew his errand.
“Welcome, welcome, Favriole!” he said kindly. “What is thy message now?
Surely not war?”
“Nay, Seigneur Gerault! A merrier message than that!” Lifting his
trumpet to his lips, he blew upon it a clear, silvery blast, and, after
the rather absurd formality, began: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Be it known to
all princes, barons, knights, and gentlemen of the Duchy of Brittany and
the dependency of Normandy, and to the knights of Christian countries,
if they be not enemies to the Duke our Sire,—to whom God give long
life,—that in the ducal lists of Rennes in Brittany, upon the fifteenth
day of this month of August in this year of grace 1381, and thereafter
till the twentieth day of that month, there will be a great pardon of
arms and very noble tourney fought after the ancient customs, at which
tourney the chiefs will be the most illustrious Duke of Brittany,
appellant, and the very valiant Hugo de Laci, Lord in vassalage to his
Grace of England, of the Castle Andelin in Normandy, defendant. And
hereby are invited all knights of Christian countries not at variance
with our Lord Duke, to take part in the said tourney for the glory of
Knighthood and the fame of their Ladies.”
Favriole finished, smiling and important, and from behind him rose a
little buzz of interest. For, at sound of the trumpet, almost all the
Castle company had hurried from their various retreats to learn the
meaning of the untoward sound. In this group, not foremost, standing
rather a little back from the rest, was Lenore, gravely regarding
Gerault, where he sat with the parchment before him. She had recognized
Favriole, the herald, for a familiar figure in the lists at that
long-past tournament where she had first thought of being lady of her
lord; and she grew a little white under the memories that the herald
brought her. Gerault had seen her at the first moment of her coming,
and, as soon as Favriole finished his announcement, beckoned her to his
side. She came forward to him quietly, and took her place, acknowledging
the pleased salute of the visitor with the slightest inclination of her
golden head. When she was seated at the table, Gerault, who had risen at
her coming, spoke:
“Our thanks to you, Sir Herald, for your message, which you have come a
long and weary way to bear to the one spurred knight in this house. And
devotion to our Lord, Duke Jean, who—” Gerault paused. His mother had
just come to the room and halted on the threshold, a little in front of
the general group, her eyes travelling swiftly from Favriole’s face to
that of Lenore. Gerault, his thought broken, hesitated for an instant,
and turned also to look at his wife. Instantly Lenore rose, and advanced
a step or two to his side. Then she said in a curiously pleading tone,—
“I do humbly entreat my lord that he will not refuse to enter this
tournament; but that he will at once set out for Rennes, there to fight
for—for ‘the glory of his Knighthood, and the—the fame of his—Ladies’!”
When Lenore had spoken she found the whole room staring at her in open
amazement. Gerault gave his wife a glance that brought her a moment’s
bitter satisfaction,—a look filled with astonishment and discomfort.
Long he gazed at her, but could find no softening curve in her white,
set face. Every line in her figure bade him go. At length, then, he
turned back to Favriole, with something that resembled a sigh, and
continued his speech.
“Sir Herald, carry my name for the lists; and my word that on the
fifteenth day of this month I shall be in Rennes, armed and horsed for
the tourney. My challenge shall be sent anon.—Courtoise! Take thine
ancient comrade to the keep, and find him refreshment ere he proceeds
upon his way.”
Courtoise bowed, wearing an expression of mingled pleasure and
disapproval, and presently he and the herald left the room together,
followed by all the young esquires. After their disappearance the
demoiselles also wandered off to their pursuits, and presently Gerault,
Eleanore, and Lenore were left alone in the long room. Eleanore stood
still, just where she was, and looked once, searchingly, from the face
of her son to that of his wife. Then she addressed Gerault: “See that
thou come to me to-night, when I am alone in my chamber. I would talk
with thee, Gerault.” And with another look that had in it a suggestion
of disdain, madame turned and went out of the room.
When she was gone the knight drew a long sigh, and then, with an air of
apprehensive inquiry, faced Lenore. At once she rose and, with a very
humble courtesy, started also to depart. But Gerault, whose bewilderment
at the situation was changing to anxiety, said sharply: “Stay, Lenore!
Thou shalt not go till we have spoken together.”
Immediately she returned to her place and sat down. She gave him one
swift glance from under her lashes, and then remained in silence, her
eyes fixed upon the floor.
At the same time the Seigneur got to his feet and began to pace unevenly
up and down the room. His step was sufficient evidence of his agitation;
but it was many minutes before he suddenly halted, turning to his wife
and saying in a tone of command: “Tell me, Lenore, why thou biddest me
go forth into this tournament.”
“Ah, my lord—do not—I—” she paused, and, from flushing vividly, her face
grew white again: “Thou wilt be happier in Rennes, my lord.”
“How say you that? Were I not happier at home here with my bride?”
“Asks my lord wherefore?” answered Lenore, in a tone containing
something that Gerault could not understand.
“Nay, then, I ask thee naught but this: wouldst thou, all for thyself,
of thine own will, have me go? Dost thou in thy heart desire it?”
Lenore drew her head a little high, and looked him full in the face:
“For myself, for mine own selfish desires, of mine own will, I entreat
thee by that which through thy life thou hast held most dear, to go!”
Gerault stared at her, some vague distrust that was entering his mind
continually foiled by the open-eyed clearness of her look. Finally,
then, he shrugged his shoulders, and, as he turned away from her, he
said: “Be satisfied, madame. I do your bidding. I give you what pleasure
I can. In ten days’ time I shall set off; and thou wilt be unfettered in
this Crépuscule!”
And with this last ungenerous and angry taunt, the Seigneur, his brain
seething with some emotion that he could not define, strode from the
room. Lenore rose as he left her, and followed him, unsteadily, halfway
to the door. He went out of the Castle without once looking back, and
when he was quite gone, the young girl felt her way blindly to the chair
where she had sat, and crouching down in it, burst into a flood of
repressed and desperate tears.
When Gerault left Lenore’s side, he was no whit happier than she. After
the herald had made his announcement of the tourney, and Gerault had
begun his reply, it was his intent to refuse to go, though in his secret
heart he longed eagerly to be off to that city of gay forgetfulness. But
when his wife, Lenore, the clinging child, besought him, with every
appearance of sincerity, to leave her, he heard her with less of
satisfaction than with surprised disappointment. Now he fought with
himself; now he questioned her motive; again he longed for Rennes and
the tourney. Finally, there rushed over him the detestable deceit in his
own attitude; and he began to curse himself for what, sometimes, he
was,—the most intolerant and the most selfish of tyrants. In these
varying moods Gerault rode, for the rest of the afternoon, over the dry
moors, hawk on wrist, but finding his own thoughts, unhappy as they
were, more engrossing than possible quarries. He returned late—when the
evening meal was nearly at an end; and he perceived, with dull
disappointment, that Lenore was not at table. Madame presently informed
him that she lay in bed, sick of a headache; and this was all the
conversation in which he indulged while he ate his hurried meal. But as
soon as grace was said and the company had risen, Gerault started to the
stairs. Instantly his mother caught his sleeve and held him back,
saying,—
“Go not to thy room. She has perchance fallen asleep by now; and she
should not be wakened, for she hath been very ill. Seek thou rather my
bedchamber, and there presently I will come to thee; for I have somewhat
that I would say to thee, Gerault.”
Feeling as he had sometimes felt when, in his early boyhood, he had
waited punishment for some boyish misdeed, the Seigneur obeyed his
mother, and went up to her room, which was now wrapped in
close-gathering shadows. Here, a few moments later, Eleanore found him,
pacing up and down, his arms folded, his head bent upon his breast, a
dark frown upon his brows. The windows were open to the evening, and,
like some witchcraft spell, its sweetness entered into Gerault,
penetrating to his brain, and once again turning his thoughts to the
spirit that haunted all Le Crépuscule for him.
Madame came into the room, drawing the iron-bound door shut behind her,
and pushing the tapestry curtain over it. Then, without speaking, she
crossed the room, seated herself on her settle beside the window, and
fixed her eyes on the moving form of her son. Under her look Gerault
grew more restless still; and he was about to break the silence when
presently she said, in a low, rather grating tone: “Know, Gerault, that
I am grieved with thee.”
He turned to her at once with a little gesture of deprecation; but she
went on speaking:
“Thou hast brought home from Rennes a wife: a fair maid and a gentle as
any that hath ever lived; and moreover one that loves thee but too well.
In her little time of dwelling here she hath, by her quiet, lovely ways,
crept close into my heart, that was erstwhile so bitterly empty. And
having her here, and seeing her growing devotion to thee, her continual
striving to please thee in thine every desire, methought that thou, a
knight sworn to chivalry, must needs treat her with more than
tenderness. Yet that hast thou not, Gerault. Dieu! Thou’rt all but cruel
with her! God knows thy father came to be not over-thoughtful in his
love of me. Yet had he neglected and spurned me in our early marriage as
thou hast this bride of thine, I had surely made end of myself or ever
thou camest into the world. Shame it is to thee and to all mankind how—”
“Madame! Madame!—Forbear!”
At his tone, Eleanore held her peace, while Gerault, after a deep pause,
in which he regained his self-control, began,—
“Canst thou remember, my mother, a talk that we—thou and I together in
this room—held one afternoon more than a year agone? ’Twas in this room,
the day before I went last to Rennes. Thou didst entreat me to bring
thee back a wife to be thy daughter in the place of Laure.
“At that hour the idea was impossible to me. Thou knowest—’fore God thou
knowest—the suffering that time has never eased for me. A thousand times
I had vowed then, a hundred times I swore thereafter, that the image of
mine own Lenore should never be replaced within my heart; and it holds
there to-day as fair and clear as if it were but yesterday she went.
“Many months passed away, madame, and I saw this golden-haired maiden
about Rennes,—in the Ladies’ Gallery in the lists, and at feasts in the
Castle; yet I had never a thought in my heart of wedding with her.
Then—late in the spring—St. Nazaire sent me message of Laure’s disgrace,
her excommunication; and my heart bled for thee. I sent out many men to
search my sister, but not one ever gathered trace of her. Then, when
there was no further hope of restoring her to thee, the idea of marriage
came to me for the first time as a duty—toward thee. My whole soul cried
out against it. Lenore de Laval reproached me from the heaven where she
dwells. And yet—in the end—for _thy_ sake, madame, I brought home with
me the gentle child men call my wife.