Part 11
“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.
“I confess it to thee only: I do not love her. Yet indeed none can say that I have used her ill, save as I could not bring myself falsely to act the ardent lover. If she hath been unhappy, then am I greatly grieved. Yet what hath she not that women do desire in life? What lacks there of honor or of pleasure in her estate? Moreover, if she has lost her own mother, hath she not gained thee, dear lady of mine? Mon Dieu, madame,—think not so ill of me. I swear that for me she yearns not at all. Even this afternoon, when all of you had departed from the long room, she did implore me, with sincerest speech, that I depart at early date for Rennes. How likes you that? And moreover, to all my questioning, she did stoutly deny that my going would be for aught but her own pleasure, and would in no way grieve her heart.” And Gerault stared upon his mother with the assured and exasperated look of a doubly injured man.
Madame Eleanore drew herself together and set her lips in the firm resolve still to treat her son with consideration. When she began to speak, her manner was calm and her voice low and quiet; yet in her eyes there gleamed a fire that was not born of patience. “So, Gerault! Doubtless all thou sayest is sooth to thee; yet I would tell thee this: when thou left’st her alone, I came upon her still sitting in the long room, leaning her head upon the table where thou hadst sat, weeping as if her heart was like to break. And when her sobs were still I brought her up to her room and caused her to remove her garments and to seek her bed, though all the while she shook with inward grief, till Alixe brought her a posset, and bathed her head in elder-flower water, and then, at last, she slept.”
“And gave she no name to thee as cause for her malady?”
“Art thou indeed so ignorant of us? Or is it heartlessness? Wilt thou go to Rennes?”
“Hath she not required me to go? Good Heavens, madame! what wouldst have me do?” he answered with weary impatience.
“Gerault, Gerault, if I could by prayer or anger make thee to understand for one instant only! Ah, ’tis the same tale that every woman has to tell. It was so with me. In my early youth I was brought from bright Laval, where I was a queen of gayety and life, to rule alone over this great Twilight Castle. Thy grandam was dead; and there was no other woman of my station here. In a few months after my home-coming as a bride, thy father rode away to join the army of Montfort in the East. From that time I saw my lord but a few weeks in every year; for the war lasted till I had reached the age of four-and-thirty. Thou camest to cheer my loneliness; and then, long after, Laure. And at last, when Laure was in her first babyhood, seventeen years agone, the long struggle ended at Auray; and then my lord, sore wounded in his last fight, came home. Alas! I was no happier for his coming. He had suffered much, and he was no longer young. We two, so long separated, were almost as strangers one to the other. Thou wast his great pride; dost remember how he loved to have thee near him? And many a time it cut me to the heart to hear the bloody, valorous tales he poured into thine ears; for I knew by them that he meant thee to do what he had done. It was not till he lay in his mortal sickness that we came back one to the other; but he died in my arms, whispering to me such words as I had never had from him before. That last is a sweet memory, Gerault; but the tale is none the less grievous of my young life here. And there is the more pity of it that mine is not the only story of such things. Many and many is the weary life led by some high-born lady in her castle, while her lord fights or jousts or drinks his life out in his own selfishness. Through those long years of the war of the Three Jeannes, I suffered not alone of women; and how I suffered, thou canst never know. Do thou not likewise with thy frail Lenore. Stay with her here a little while, and make her life what it might be made with love.”
Gerault listened in non-committal silence. When she finished he turned and faced her squarely: “Hast made this prate of my father and thee to Lenore?” he asked severely.
“Gerault!” The exclamation escaped involuntarily; when it was out Eleanore bit her lip and drew herself up haughtily. “Thou’rt insolent,” she said in a tone that she would have used to an inferior.
In that moment her son found something in her to admire, but the man and master in him was all alive. “Madame, we will waste no further words. I crave the honor to wish you a good-night.” And with a profound and ironical bow, he turned from the room, leaving Eleanore alone to the darkness, and to what was a defeat as bitter as any she had ever known.
Through the watches of the night this woman did not pray, but sat and meditated on the immense question that she had herself raised, and to which she had not the courage to give the true answer. Through her nearest and dearest she had learned the natures of men, knew full well their only aims and interest: prowess in arms, hunting, hawking, drinking, and, when they were weary, dalliance with their women. But was this _all_? Was this all there was for any woman in the mind of the man that loved her? The idea of rebellion against the scorn of men was not at all in her mind. She only wondered sadly how she and others of her sex came to be born so keenly sentient, so open to heart-wounds as they were. And she divined that her question burned no less in the brain of the young Lenore than in her own, though neither of them ever spoke of it together. Nor did either make any roundabout inquiries as to Gerault’s intentions with regard to Rennes. Not so, however, the demoiselles of the Castle. Courtoise was under a hot fire of inquisition throughout most of the following two days; but for once he himself was uncertain of his lord’s move, and presently there was a little air of joy creeping over the place in the shape of a hope that the Seigneur was going to remain in Crépuscule. This, indeed, was the secret idea of Courtoise; and only David the dwarf refused to entertain a suspicion that Gerault would not ride to Rennes for the tourney.
David judged well; for Gerault went to Rennes. Lenore knew on the tenth of the month that he would go. Madame remained in doubt till the day before the departure.
On the morning of the twelfth the whole Castle was astir by dawn. Gerault and his squire, bravely arrayed, came into the great hall at five o’clock, and sat down to their early meal. On the right hand of the Seigneur was Lenore, not eating, only looking about her on the fresh morning light, and again into Gerault’s face. She was not under any stress of emotion. She was, rather, very dull and heavy-eyed. Yet down in her heart lay a smothered pain that she felt must come forth before long, in what form she could not tell. She and Gerault did not talk much together. There was a little strain between them that was none the less certain because it was indefinable, and it was a relief to the young wife when madame finally appeared. Lenore saw Eleanore’s face with something of surprise. Never had it been so cold, so expressionless, so like a piece of chiselled marble; and looking upon her son, it grew yet harder, yet colder. But when madame, after some little parley with Courtoise, turned finally to Lenore, the child-wife found something in that face that came dangerously near to melting her apathy, and freeing the flood of grief that lay deep in her heart.
Half an hour later the knight and his squire were in the courtyard, where their horses stood ready for the mount. The little company of the Castle gathered close about their master, watching him as they might have watched some mythical god. Indeed, he was a brave sight, as he stood there in the early sunshine, flashing with armor, a gray plume floating from his helmet, and one of Lenore’s small gloves fastened over his visor as a gage. Lenore beheld this with infinite, gentle pride, as she stood fixing his great lance in its socket. Presently two of the squires helped him to mount to the saddle; and when he was seated, he lifted Lenore up to him to give her good-bye. A few tears ran from her eyes, and rolled silently down his breastplate, on which they gleamed like clustered diamonds. But Lenore wiped them away with her hair, that they might not tarnish the metal of his trappings; and by that act, perhaps, Gerault lost a blessing.
The last kiss that he gave her was a long one, and his last words almost tender. Then, putting her to the ground again, he saluted his mother, though her coldness struck him to the heart; and, after a final farewell to the assembled company, he turned and gave the sign of departure to Courtoise.
Spur struck flank. At the same instant, the two horses darted forward to the drawbridge, across which they had presently clattered. Alixe, who had been a silent spectator of the scene of departure, was standing near Lenore; and now she leaned over and would have whispered in the young wife’s ear; but Lenore could not have heard her had she spoken. The child stood like a statue, blind to everything save to the blaze of passing armor, deaf to all but the echo of flying hoofs. Here she stood, in the centre of the courtyard, alone with her strange little life, watching the swift-running steed carry from her all her power of joy. With straining eyes she saw the two figures disappear down the long, winding hill; and when they had gone, and only a lazily rising dust-cloud remained to mark their path, she stayed there still. But presently Eleanore came to her side and took her cold hand in a hot pressure. And then, as the two bereft women looked into each other’s eyes, the frozen grief melted at last, and the flood burst upon them in all its overwhelming fury.
_CHAPTER NINE_ THE STORM
For ten days after Gerault’s departure, Lenore led a disastrous mental existence, which she expressed neither by words nor by deeds. In that time no one in the Castle knew how she was rent and torn with anguish, with yearning that had never been satisfied, and with useless regret for a bygone happiness that had not been happy. The silent progress of her grief led her into dark valleys of despair; yet none dreamed in what depths she wandered. She, the woman chaste and pure, dared not try to comprehend all that went on within her. She dared not picture to herself what it was she really longed for so bitterly. The cataclysms that rent her mind in twain were unholy things, and, had she been normal, she might have refused to acknowledge them. The changes in her life had come upon her with such overwhelming swiftness that she had hitherto had no time for analysis; and now that she found herself with a long leisure in which to think, the chaos of her mind seemed hopeless; she despaired of coming again into understanding with herself.
During all these days Madame Eleanore watched her closely, but to little purpose. The calm outward demeanor of the young woman baffled every suspicion of her inward state. Day after day Lenore sat at work in the whirring, noisy spinning-room, toiling upon her tapestry with a diligence and a persistent silence that defied encroachment. Hour after hour her eyes would rest upon the dim, blue sea; for that sea was the only thing that seemed to possess the power of stilling her inward rebellion. Forgetting how the winds could sometimes drive its sparkling surface into a furious stretch of tumbling waters, she dreamed of making her own spirit as placid and as quiet as the ocean. The thought was inarticulate; but it grew, even in the midst of her inward tumult, till in the end it brought her something of the quiet she so sorely needed.
By day and by night, through every hour, in every place, the figure of her husband was always before her. How unspeakably she wanted him, she herself could not have put into words. She knew well that he had promised to come back—“soon.” But when every hour is replete with hidden anguish, can a day be short? Can ten days be less than an eternity? a possible month of delay less than unutterable?
One little oasis Lenore found for herself in this waste of time. Every day she had been accustomed to pray upon her rosary, which was composed of sixty-two white beads. Now, when she had said her morning prayer, she tied a little red string above the first bead. On the second morning it was moved up over the second bead; and so the sacred chain became a still more sacred calendar. How many times did she halt in her prayers to find the thirtieth bead! and how her heart sank when she saw it still so very far from the little line of red!
At the end of the first week of the Seigneur’s absence, it came to Madame Eleanore with a start that Lenore was growing paler and more wan. Then a suspicion of what the young wife was suffering came to the older woman, and she racked her brains to think of possible diversions for the forlorn girl. A hawking party was arranged, which Madame Eleanore herself led, on her good gray horse. And in this every one discovered with some surprise that Lenore could sit a horse as easily as the young squires, and that she managed her bird as well as any man. Alixe, who had always been the one woman in the Castle to make a practice of riding after the dogs, or with hawk on wrist, was filled with delight to find this unexpected companion for her sports; and she decided that henceforth Lenore should take the place of her old companion, Laure, in her life.
The hawking party accomplished part of its purpose, at least; for Lenore returned from the ride with some color in her face and a sparkle in her eyes. She was obliged, however, to take to her bed shortly after reaching the Castle, prostrated by a fatigue that was not natural. Madame hovered over her anxiously all through the night, though she slept more than in any night of late, and rose next morning at the usual hour, much refreshed. That afternoon, when the work was through, madame saw no harm in her riding out with Alixe for an hour, to give a lesson to two young _mués_ that were jessed and belled for the first time. And during this ride the young women made great strides in companionship.
What with new interest in an old pastime thus awakened, and a subject of common delight between her and Alixe, Lenore found the next nine days pass more quickly than the first. On the morning of the thirty-first of the month, however, Lenore had a serious fainting-spell in the spinning-room. She had been at work at her frame for an hour or more, when suddenly it seemed to her that a steel had pierced her heart, and she fell backward in her chair with a cry. The women hurried to her, and after some moments of chafing her hands and temples, and forcing cordials down her throat, she was brought back to consciousness. Her first words were: “Gerault! Gerault!” and then in a still fainter voice: “Save him, Courtoise! He falls!”
Thinking her out of her mind, madame carried her to her bedroom, and, admitting only Alixe with her, quickly undressed the slender body, and laid Lenore in the great bed. Presently she opened her blue eyes, and, looking up into madame’s face, said, in a voice shaking with weakness,—
“It was a dream—a vision—a terrible vision! I saw Gerault—_killed_! My God!” she put her hands to the sides of her head, in the attitude that a terrified woman will take. “I saw him— Ah! But it is gone, now. It is gone. Tell me ’twas a dream!”