Part 2

The girl, however, had her way with the creature. At sound of her voice it became attentive. At the touch of her hand it half raised its wings, the motion indicating expectant delight. In a moment more it had hopped upon the girl’s wrist, and sat there, swaying and preening contentedly.

“Sang Dieu, Alixe, thou hast done that well! Thou sayest he will also attack the _pât_ from your hand?”

Alixe merely nodded. To all appearances, she was wholly engrossed with the bird, which she continued to handle. Gerault and Courtoise had come close to her side, though the falcon betrayed its displeasure at their approach. All three of them had been silent for some seconds, when Alixe turned her green eyes upon the Seigneur, and, looking at him with a glance that carried discomfort with it, said in a very precise and cutting tone:

“So you leave Le Crépuscule to-morrow, Gerault? And for how long?”

“That I cannot tell,” answered Gerault, exhibiting no annoyance. “For as long a time as Duke Jean will accept my services.”

“Ah! then there will be fighting. I had not heard of a war. Tell me of it.”

Gerault became suddenly embarrassed and correspondingly displeased. “Of what import can it be to you, a woman, whether there is war or peace?” he inquired.

“Oh, there is great import.”

“Prithee, what may it be?”

“This: that an there were indeed a war thou mightest be forgiven thy great selfishness in going forth to pleasure, leaving thy mother here in her loneliness and sorrow; whereas—”

“Silence, Alixe! Thine insolence merits the whip,” cried Courtoise.

“Peace, boy!” said Gerault, shortly, and forthwith turned again to the demoiselle. “And is not my mother long accustomed to this life, and well content with it? Is she not lady of a great castle, mistress of enviable estates? Hath she not a position to be proud of? From her speech and thine one might think—” he snapped his fingers impatiently.—“Come you with me, Alixe. Let us walk here together on the turf, while I say to you certain things. Thou, Courtoise, return to the Castle if thou wilt.”

The squire, however, chose to remain in the field, and stood leaning against the wall, watching the falcons at his feet, and whistling under his breath for his own amusement. Alixe replaced Bec-Hardi, screaming angrily and flapping its wings, and moved off beside Gerault, her long red houppelande and mantle trailing upon the grass round her feet, the veil from her filet flowing behind her nearly to the ground. Long time these two, Lord of Le Crépuscule and his almost sister, walked together in the sunny light of the late afternoon. And long Courtoise the squire watched them as they went. Although Gerault had said, somewhat in ire, that he had a matter to speak of with her, it was Alixe that talked the most, and from his manner it could be seen that Gerault was fallen very much under the influence of her peculiar insistence. What it was they spoke of, Courtoise could only guess—and fear. For, though he might hold in his heart some sympathy with madame in her loneliness, yet the squire was a man, and young; and his young thoughts drew with delight the picture of Rennes’ gayeties in the summer-time, when no war was toward and the court alive with merriment. Indeed, it was not very wonderful that he prayed to be off on the morrow; but the occasional glimpse that he got of his lord’s face carried doubt into his heart.

As the squire stood there by the wall, musing, Madame Eleanore herself came out of the courtyard into the field. Her rosary hung from her waist, and in her hand was a little volume of Latin prayers. In some way, of which she was probably unconscious, the placid manner of her as she came into the field for her evening walk caused Courtoise’s idle dreams of gayety to vanish away, and the present, so tinged with the spirit of sweet melancholy, to become the only reality. The squire at once advanced toward his lady, while, ere he reached her, Alixe and Gerault had halted at her side.

“Indeed, my mother, thou art well come hither at this time. Prithee join us in our walk. For some time past Alixe and I have been speaking of thee. See, the air is sweet, for it comes off the fields to-night.”

“Indeed, ’tis sweet—sweeter than summer,” said Eleanore, smiling as she joined the twain. “But mayhap I shall break your pleasure by coming with you, for you are gay and young, and I—”

They moved on without having noticed him, and Courtoise lost the rest of Eleanore’s speech. But the squire remained in the field, watching the three move back and forth in the deepening dusk. When they came toward him for the last time, and passed through the gate in the north wall, returning to the Castle, all three faces were as calm as madame’s, and Courtoise permitted himself only one sigh for the lost summer at Rennes.

Oddly enough, the squire’s regrets proved to be premature, for immediately after the evening meal he was summoned by Gerault to the Seigneur’s room, to make ready for the journey. Gerault did not deign to inform his squire of the substance of his talk in the fields, but from the tranquillity of his manner Courtoise could not but perceive that everything had gone well. It was a late hour when all the necessary preparations had been made; and then the two, lord and squire, went together to the chapel and were there confessed by Anselm, the steward-priest; after which they bade each other a good-night, and sought their rest.

By sunrise, next morning, the whole Castle had assembled at the drawbridge, to say God-speed to their departing lord. Madame Eleanore, in bliault, houppelande, mantle, and coif all of black and white, held Gerault’s stirrup-cup, and smiled as she spoke with him. There was a chorus of chattering demoiselles and a boyish clattering of swords and little armor-pieces from the young squires, as Gerault buckled on his shield, whereon was wrought the motto and device of Crépuscule. Courtoise had already fastened to his lord the golden spurs. And now the two were mounted and ready, Gerault with lance in rest and white reins gathered on his horse’s neck; Courtoise, brimming with delight, now and then giving his steed a heel in flank that caused him to rear and curvet with graceful spirit. For the last time Gerault bent to his mother’s lips, and for the last time he looked vainly over the company for a glimpse of Alixe, his recent mentor. Finally his spurs went home. The drawbridge was down before him, the portcullis raised. Amid a chorus of farewell cries, he and Courtoise swept away together, over the bridge and down the long, gentle hill, and out upon the Rennes road, which, at some twelve miles from Le Crépuscule, passed the priory-convent of Les Vierges de la Madeleine.

When the twain were gone, and the group prepared to disperse,—the squires-at-arms to their sword-practice under the captain of the keep, the sighing demoiselles to their long morning of weaving and embroidery,—Alixe suddenly appeared from the watch-tower close at hand, inquiring for Madame Eleanore.

“Methinks she hath retreated to her room, to say her prayers for the Seigneur’s safe journey,” Berthe told her. And Alixe, with a nod of thanks, ran to the Castle, and ascended to madame’s room.

The door was open, for madame was not at prayer. She stood at the open window, looking out upon the sea. Alixe could not see her face, but from the line of her shoulders she read much of her lady’s heart.

“Madame,” she said, in a half-whisper.

Eleanore turned quickly. “Alixe!”

“Madame Eleanore—mother—”

A terrible sob broke from the older woman’s throat, and suddenly she fell upon her knees beside a wooden settle, and, burying her face in her hands, finally gave way to her desolation. Alixe, who had opened her heart, now comforted her as best she could, soothing her, caressing her, whispering to her in a magnetic, gentle voice, till madame’s grief had been nearly washed away. Then the young girl said, softly, in her ear:

“Think, madame! ’tis now but eleven days till thou mayest ride out to Laure at the priory. And there thou canst talk with her alone, and for as long as thou wilt. Also, when her novitiate is at an end, she may come here to thee, once in a fortnight, for so the Mother-prioress hath said.”

Eleanore held Alixe’s hand close to her breast, and while she stroked it, a little convulsively, she said, with returning self-control: “I thank thee—I thank thee—Alixe, for thy good comfort.” Then, in a different tone, she added, with a little sigh: “Eleven days—eleven ages—how many others have I still to spend—alone?”

_CHAPTER TWO_ THE SILENCE OF YOUTH

The priory-convent of the Virgins of the Magdalen was as old as any nunnery in Brittany of its repute. It had been founded in the early days of the tenth Louis of France and his good lady of Burgundy, long before the death of the last of the Dreux lords of the dukedom. It was celebrated for more than its age, however; for through three centuries it had held in ecclesiastic Brittany, for its wealth, its exclusiveness, and, above either of these things, its unswerving chastity, a place as unique as it was gratifying. In the year 1381 no breath of scandal had ever disturbed its fragrant atmosphere. Moreover, though this was a fact not much regarded by people in authority, it was a remarkably comfortable little house, of excellent architecture and ample room for the practice of any amount of worship. Its situation, however, was lonely. It stood nearly at the end of the Rennes coast road, on the outskirts of a thick forest, twenty miles from the town of St. Nazaire-by-the-sea, and twelve from the Chateau of Le Crépuscule. And it was here, in this pleasant if austere retreat, that many a noble lady of Laval and Crépuscule had ended her youth and worn her life away in the endeavor to attain undying sanctity.

On a certain afternoon in this mid-spring of 1381, the very day, indeed, that Lord Gerault took to the Rennes road to ease his ennui, a little company of nuns sat out in the convent garden, embroidering away their recreation time. The day was exquisite: sunny, a little chilly, its breeze laden with the rare perfume of awakening summer. The garden, at this season of the year, was a place of wondrous beauty, redolent of rich, pregnant soil, and all shimmering with the misty green of tender grass and countless leaf-buds, from the midst of which a few flowers, pale primroses and crocuses and a hyacinth or two, peered forth, starring the new-planted beds with the first fruits of this new union of earth and sky.

The spirit of the spring ruled supreme over all natural things. Only the creatures of God, the self-consecrated nuns, sat in the midst of this wonder of the young world, untouched by it. Heedless to the uttermost of this greatest of worldly blessings, they sat plying their needles in and out of their bright-colored, ecclesiastical fabrics, listening, in their dull and dreamy way, to the voice of one of their number who was droning out to them for the thousandth time the old and long-familiar laws of their order, expressed in the “Rhymed Rule of St. Benedict.” One only among them seemed not of their mood. This was a young girl, white-robed like all the rest, her unveiled head proclaiming her novitiate. As became her station she bent decorously to her task, and it had taken a close observer to see and read all the little signs she gave of consciousness of the world around her, the green, growing things, and the liquid bird-songs that came trilling out of the forest near at hand. Probably not even the most skilled of readers could have recognized all the meaning in the long, slow looks, half wondrous and half probing, with which, every now and again, she traversed the circle of faces about her. Her self-restraint was very nearly flawless, and was successfully maintained throughout the long period of recreation; so that not one of her companions guessed the relief she felt when the first clang of the vesper-bell roused them from their trance-like dulness. But the young girl wondered a little at herself when she perceived that her brows were damp with the sweat of the constraint.

At this time Laure of Le Crépuscule was sixteen years of age, and pretty as a flower to look upon. She was slim and white-faced, with immense, limpid brown eyes that were wont to move rather slowly, and burnished brown hair hanging in twists to her knees: an object for men to rave over, had any man worth so calling ever set eyes upon her. She was young enough and pure enough to be of unquestioning innocence; and, until now, the fiery life in her had found sufficient outlet in unlimited bodily exercise. She had seen nothing of real life, and never dreamed of the talent she possessed for it. It was from her own heart that the wish to consecrate herself to the eternal worship of God had come; for she believed that in this way she should find a haven for those terrible and fathomless mental storms of which she had weathered many in her young life, and of which her own mother never so much as dreamed. Utterly ignorant of her real self, she was yet a girl of strong intellect, of great versatility, of over-weening passions, and withal as feminine a creature as the Creator ever fashioned. Both her temperament and her appearance more resembled the dwellers of the far South—Provence or even Navarre—than the children of the rugged, chilly shores of northern Brittany; for her skin had the dark, creamy pallor of the South, and her eyes held none of the keen fire that glows in the North, while her hair grew low above her smooth, white brow.

Laure’s temperament was dramatically mobile. She adapted herself almost unconsciously to any mode or situation of life, and this, though she did not know it, was all that she was doing now. It was with real, if subdued pleasure that she went through the services of the day. From matins, which, at this period of the year, began at the cheerless hour of four in the morning, till compline, at eight in the evening, when the church bell tolled the end of another day of prayer, Laure’s nature was under a kind of religious spell, which she and those about her had joyfully interpreted as a true vocation.

The first eleven days of Laure’s convent life passed away in comparative calmness; and she found no weariness in them. On the twelfth, Madame Eleanore rode in from Le Crépuscule to see her daughter. She was admitted to the convent as speedily as if the little lay sister had known the devouring eagerness of the mother-heart; and because she was a lady of consequence, and because she was known to be very generous to the Church, and especially because the Bishop of St. Nazaire was her close friend, she was not left to wait in the reception-room, but conducted straight to the Prioress’ cell.

Mère Piteuse received Madame Eleanore with anxious cordiality. After their greetings the guest seated herself, and was obliged to keep silence for a moment before she could ask quietly,—

“And Laure, Reverend Mother,—how fares my child? Is she content with you?” Eleanore’s heart throbbed with unconfessed hope as she asked this question. For if Laure was _not_ content, she might return at will to the Castle, her home, and her mother’s heart.

But the Prioress returned Eleanore’s look with a smile of satisfaction. “In a moment Laure will come hither. I have sent for her. Then thou shalt learn from her own lips how well her life goes. Never, I think, hath our priory received a new daughter that showed herself so happy in her vocation. We shall call her name Angelique at her consecration.”

Eleanore felt her body grow cold, and her head swim. Her face, however, betrayed nothing. Her little girl, then, was really gone! Laure, the wild bird, was tamable. She—_could_ she become “Angelique”?

Neither madame nor the Prioress spoke again till there was a sound of gentle footsteps in the corridor, followed by a light tap on the wooden door of the cell.

“Enter!” cried the Prioress; and Laure came quietly in.

First of all she bowed to Mère Piteuse. Then, as Eleanore involuntarily held out her arms, the girl went into them, and kissed her mother with a warmth and a sweetness that perhaps Eleanore had not known from her before. At the same moment the Prioress rose quietly, and left the room. The instant that she was gone, Eleanore seized the girl in a still closer embrace, and held her tightly and more tightly to her breast.

“Laure, my darling! Laure, my sweet child! how hath my heart yearned for thee! How hath thy name lain ever on my lips while I slept, and been enshrined in my heart by day!”

The young girl’s arms wound themselves about her mother’s neck, and she laid her head upon that shoulder where it had been wont to rest in her babyhood. And Laure sighed a little, not unhappily, but like a child tired of play.

“Laure, wilt thou remain here in the convent? Art thou happy? Dost thou wish it, or wilt thou come home again to Crépuscule?”

A sudden image of the gray Castle, with its vast hall, and the great fire blazing in the chimney-place within, and all the well-known figures assembled there for a meal,—Alixe, Gerault, the demoiselles and young squires headed by Courtoise, and the burly men-at-arms that had played with her and carried her about as a little child,—all the long-familiar, comfortable scenes of her old life came before the girl’s eye. And then—then she drew a little breath and answered her mother, unfaltering: “’Tis beautiful here, and sweet and holy withal. I am content, dear mother. I will remain.”

“And hast thou, then, the vocation in thy heart, whereby some souls are claimed of God from birth to death, and find the utmost of their happiness in His communion?”

Laure’s great eyes fixed themselves upon the mother’s sad face as she replied again, very softly: “Yea, my mother. That, from my heart, do I believe.”

Eleanore sighed deeply, and then quickly smiled again. “Think not that I mourn, my daughter, for having yielded thee up to the Church. May this blessed spirit remain in thee, bringing thee everlasting peace.”

Then, while Laure still clung to her, the mother herself put the closely clasped arms away from her neck, and drew the novice to her feet. “Now, my Laure, I must go. But my thoughts are still left with thee.”

“But thou wilt come, mother?—In ten days’ time thou wilt come to me again?”

“Yea, sith it is permitted by the rules that I see thee once more, I will surely come,” she answered quietly.

“Laure will greatly rejoice at thy coming,” said the Prioress, gently, from the doorway.

So Eleanore renewed her promise, and shortly after rode away from the priory gate, into the thick wood through which ran the road to Crépuscule.

Her mother’s visit brought Laure two days of extremest homesickness and yearning. Then she regained her independence, and began to find a new delight in her surroundings. The perfect peace of it, the infinite, delightful detail of worship, with its multifarious candle-points, and its continual clouds of fragrant incense, all wrought together into a life of undeviating regularity, brought to the novice a sense of peculiar safety and freedom from vexation or care that was quite new to her, for all her youth. The day began with matins, repeated by each nun alone in her cell. Laure had been given a room in a corner of the priory, at the very end of the corridor of novices, and she gained therefrom an added sense of exclusiveness and seclusion. She had not once been late in her answer to the matins bell, and the mistress of novices, passing Laure’s cell on her first round of the day, had never failed to find her praying. Laure came of a pious house, and had known her prayers, all the forms of them, long before she entered the priory. They required no thought in the repetition, and therefore there was many a morning when she played the parrot at her desk, either too sleepy, or too much occupied with thoughts and dreams, to heed the familiar addresses to God. This was not entirely a fault, perhaps. The mornings came very early in these days, and there were wonderful things to be seen through her cell-window. She saw the dawn, golden-girdled, garbed in flowing rose-color, unlock the eastern portals of the sky. She saw stars and moon glimmer faintly and more faint, and finally sink to rest under the high, clear green of the morning heaven. Last of all, over the feathery line of trees that made a horizon for her at her cell-window, she could see the first dazzling ladder of the sun lifted up to lean against the east. And then Laure would long for the murmur of devotion to be stilled in the Abbey, for sun-mists were filling the Heavens, and from the forest the bird-chorus rose to a full-throated _tutti_, in its hymn of glorification to the new day.

This morning benediction that she found, Laure kept to herself by day, and carried with her until dark. There was no one in the priory to whom she could have confided her pleasure, for there was none in the Abbey that had her love, or, indeed, any love at all, for the world that God had made for Himself and for mankind. The day-tasks also had their pleasures for the novice. She learned, in time, that she was not obliged to fill her recreation hours with embroidery; but that she might sleep, or pray, or work in the garden, or do whatever a quiet fancy should select. So she chose to befriend the soil, and played with it as if it were a tender companion. And after her exercise here, the rest of the day, nones, vespers, supper, confession, and compline, melted away almost unheeded, leaving her at last to the sweet-breathed night, and to a sleep as dreamless and as sound as that of any baby.

In this most simple way, without any untoward happening, without her once leaving the priory, the days flowed on, spring melted into summer, and Laure found herself possessed of an infinite and ever-increasing content, the great secret of which probably lay in the fact that every waking hour had its occupation. She had entered her new life in the most beautiful time of the year, and, heedless of this, began, in her delusive happiness, to wonder why, long ago, the whole world had not taken to such existence. She had plenty of time to indulge in dreams,—vague and fragile dreams of the great world and the people dwelling therein, that she should never come to know. But the fact that she could never know them did not come home to her with the force of a deprivation. She did not feel herself to be a hopeless prisoner. She was not professed; and the fact that there still remained to her a free choice easily kept her from any over-vivid perception of the eternal dulness of convent life.

Once in two weeks Madame Eleanore came to see her, and if these visits were bitter to the mother, Laure never guessed it. Also, from time to time, the professed nuns would leave the convent for a day or two at a time, on what errands the novices were not told. But Laure knew that similar privileges would be hers after her profession.

The summer, in its fulness and beauty, passed away. Purple autumn came and went. And one day, in the first cold weather, Laure was summoned to the Mother-prioress’ room, where she was told a proud thing. It was that, if she chose profession at the end of her novitiate, which would come in the Christmas season, her consecration might take place at the same time, by special permission from the highest power; for, by ordinary ecclesiastic law, she was still many years too young for this consummation of the celibate life. But if she so chose, his Grace the Bishop of St. Nazaire would perform the ceremony of sanctification on the twenty-sixth of December, directly after the forty-eight-hour vigil of the birth of the Christ.