Part 10
“Tones—tones, and yet again tones! Gerault—thou churl! Ay, I that have been faithful squire to thee these many years, I say it. Thou churl and worse, to have wedded with the sweetest lady ever sun shone upon, to bring her, a stranger, home to thy Castle, and then leave her there, day following day, while thou ridest over the moors to dally with some bird! All the Castle stares at the cruelty of thy neglect. Daily the demoiselles whisper together, wondering what distemper thy lady hath that thou seest her not by day—”
“Hush, boy—hush! Thou’rt surely mad!” cried out Gerault, with a note in his voice that gave Courtoise pause.
Then there fell between them a silence, heavy, and so binding that Courtoise could not move. He stood staring into his master’s face, watching the color grow from white to red and back again, and the expression change from angry amazement to something softer, something strange, something that Courtoise did not know in his lord’s face. And Gerault gnawed his lip, and bent low his head, and presently spoke, in a voice that was not his own, but was rather curiously muffled and unnatural.
“Thou sayest well, Courtoise. ’Tis true I have neglected her, poor, frail, pretty child! Ah! I had never thought how I have neglected her”; and Gerault sat suddenly down upon the step of the falcon-house and laid his head in his hands, in an attitude of such dejection that Courtoise experienced a swift rush of repentance.
For some time there was again silence between them. Courtoise, thoroughly mystified by the whole situation, had nothing whatever to say. Finally the Seigneur stood up, this time with his head high, and his self-control returned. He put the falcon, screaming, into his squire’s hands, and took the bodies of the pigeons from his belt.
“So, Courtoise, I leave them all with you. Where is the Lady Lenore?”
“Sooth, I know not; yet methinks when she left the armory where she had spoken to me, she passed into the chapel.”
“I go to her. And I thank thee, Courtoise, for thy rebuke.”
“My lord, my lord, forgive me!” Courtoise choked with a sudden new rush of devotion for his master. He would have fallen on his knees there on the courtyard stones, but that the Seigneur, with a faint smile at him, was gone, carrying alone the burden of his inexplicable sorrow.
The Lady Lenore was in the chapel, half kneeling, half lying upon the altar-step. In the dim light of the shadowy place her golden hair and amber-colored garments glimmered faintly. She was not praying, yet neither was she weeping, now. The long, hot loneliness of the afternoon had thrown her into a state of apathy, in which she wished for nothing, and in which she refused to think. She had no desire for company; but had any one come—David, or Alixe, or Madame—she should not have cared. It was only Gerault that she would not have see her in this place and attitude. The thought of Gerault was continually with her, as something omnipresent; but at this especial hour she felt no wish to see the man himself. Yet now he came. She heard a tread on the stones that sent a tremor through her whole body. Then some one was kneeling beside her, and a quiet voice said gently in her ear,—
“Lenore!—My child!—Why art thou lying here?”
Lenore tried hard to speak; but her throat contracted convulsively, and she made no answer.
“Child, art thou sick for thy home? Thou hast found sorrow here, and loneliness, in this new abode. Perhaps thou wouldst have had me oftener at thy side. Is it so, Lenore?”
The girl’s golden head burrowed down into her arms, and she seemed to shake it, but she did not speak.
Gerault looked about him a little helplessly. Then, taking new resolution, he put one arm about her, and, drawing her slight form close to him, he said in a halting and broken way: “Come, my wife—come with me for a little time. Let us walk out together to the cliff by the sea. The sun draws near the water—the afternoon grows rich with gold.—And thou and I will talk together.—Lenore, much might I tell thee of myself, whereby thou couldst understand many things that trouble thee now. Knowing them, and with them, me, thou shalt more justly judge me. Come, little one,—rise up!” He drew her to her feet beside him, and then, with his arms still around her, he stood and put his lips to her half-averted cheek. Under that kiss she grew cold and tremulous, but still preserved her silence. Then the two moved, side by side, out of the Castle, through the courtyard, and on to the outer terrace that ran along the very edge of the precipitous cliff against which, far below, the summer sea gently broke and plashed.
Here, hand in hand, the Seigneur and his lady walked, looking off together at the glory of the mighty waters. The crimson sky was veiled in light clouds that caught a more and more splendid reflection of the fiery ball behind them; while the moving waves below were stained with pink and mellow gold. Lenore kept her eyes fixed fast upon this sight, while she listened to what Gerault was saying to her. He talked, in a fitful, chaotic way, of many things: of his boyhood here, of Laure his sister, and Alixe, and of “one other that was not as any of us,—our cousin, a daughter of Laval, whose dead mother had put her in the keeping of mine.”
So much mention of this girl Gerault made, and then went on to other things, jumbling together many incidents and scenes of his boyhood and his youth, never guessing that Lenore, who continued so quietly to look off upon the sea, had seized upon this one little thing that he had said, and realized, with a woman’s intuition, that the story of his heart lay here. As Gerault rambled on, he came gradually to feel that he had lost her attention, and so, little by little, as the sunset light died away, he ceased to speak, and there crept in upon them, over them, through them, that terrible silence that both of them knew: the all-pervading, ghostly silence that haunted this spot; the silence that had brought the name upon the Castle,—the Chateau du Crépuscule. Lenore grew slowly cold with miserable foreboding, while Gerault, rebelling against himself, was struggling to break the bonds of his own nature.
“Well named is this home of ours, Lenore,” he said sadly.
“Yea, it is well named,” was the reply.
“Wilt thou—be—lonely forever here? Art thou lonely now? Hast thou a sickness for thy home and for thy people?”
For an instant Lenore hesitated. At Gerault’s words her heart had leaped up with a great cry of “Yes”; and yet now there was something in her that withheld her from saying it. When at last she answered him, her words were unaccountable to herself, yet she spoke them feelingly: “Nay, Gerault. Thou hast taken me to be one with thee. Thou hast brought me here to thy home, and it is also mine.”
A light of pleasure came into Gerault’s face, and he took her into his arms with a freer and more open warmth than he had ever shown her before. “Indeed, thou art my wife—one with me—my sweet one—my sweet child Lenore! And this my home is also thine,—Chateau du Crépuscule!”
Suddenly Lenore shivered in his clasp. That word “Crépuscule” sounded like a knell in her ears, and as she looked upon the gray walls looming out of the twilight mists, the very blood in her veins stood still. Whether Gerault felt her dread she did not know, but he did not loose his hold upon her for a long time. They stood, close-clasped, on the edge of the cliff, looking off upon the darkening sea, till, over the eastern horizon line, the great pink moon slipped up, giving promise of glory to the night. The cool evening breeze came off the waters. They heard the creaking and grating of the drawbridge, as it was raised. Then a flock of sea gulls floated up from the water below, and veered southward, along the shore, toward their home. Finally, in the deepening west, the evening star came out, hanging there like a diamond on an invisible thread. Then Gerault whispered in the ear of Lenore,—
“Sweet child, it is late. The hour of evening meat is now long past. Let us go into the Castle.”
Lenore yielded at once to the pressure of Gerault’s arm, and let herself 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.
_CHAPTER EIGHT_ TO A TRUMPET-CALL
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.