The Castle of Twilight

It was mid-April: a sunny afternoon. A flood of golden light, borne on gusts of sweet, chilly air, poured through the open windows of the Castle into a high-vaulted, massively furnished bedroom, hung with tapestries, and strewn with dry rushes. A heavy silence that was less a thing of the moment than a part of the general atmosphere hovered about the room; and it was not lessened by the unceasing murmur of ocean waves breaking upon the face of the cliff on which the Castle stood. This sound held in it a note of unutterable melancholy. Indeed, despite the sunlight, the sparkle of the waves, and the fragrance of the fresh spring air, this whole building, the culminating point of a long slope of landscape, seemed wrapped in an atmosphere of loneliness, of sadness, of lifelessness, that found full expression in the attitude of the black-robed woman who knelt alone in the high-vaulted bedroom.

Eleanore was kneeling at her priedieu. Madame Eleanore knelt at her priedieu, and did not pray. Nay, the great grief, the unvoiced bitterness in her heart, killed prayer. For, henceforth, there was one near and unbearably dear to her who must be praying for evermore. And it was this thought and the vista of her future lonely years that denied her, even as she knelt, the consolation of religion.

To the still solitude of her bedchamber, and always to the foot of her crucifix, the chatelaine of Le Crépuscule was accustomed to bring her griefs; and there had been many griefs and some very bitter ones in the thirty-four years that she had reigned as mistress over the Castle. But this last was one that, trained though she was in the ways of sorrow, defied all comfort, denied the right of consolation, and forbade even the relief of an appeal to the All-merciful. Laure, her daughter, the star of her solitude, the youth and the joy of her life, the object of all the blind devotion of which her mother-soul was capable, had this morning entered upon her novitiate at the convent of the Virgins of the Magdalen. Although Madame Eleanore’s family was celebrated for its piety, though many a generation of Lavals and Crépuscules had rendered a daughter to the eternal worship of God, there were still no records left in either family of a great mother-grief when the daughter left her home. But madame, Laval as she was, Crépuscule as she had learned to be, could not find it in her heart to praise God for the loss of her child.

Once again, after many years, years that she could look back upon now as filled with broad content, she was alone. Not since, many, many years ago, she had come to the Castle as a girl-bride, wife of a military lord, had such utter desolation held her in its bonds,—such desolation as, after the coming of her two children, she had thought never to feel again. In the days after the Seigneur’s first early departure for Rennes, without her, she had felt as now. It came back very vividly to her memory, how he had ridden away for the capital, the city of war, of arms, of glittering shield and piercing lance, of tourney and laughter and song; how she had longed in silence to ride thither at his side; how she had wept when he was really gone; how she had watched bitterly, day after day, for his return up the steep road that came out of the forest on the edge of the sand-downs below. Clearly indeed did her youth return to Eleanore as she knelt here, in the barred sunlight, alone with her unheeding crucifix. And intertwined with this memory was the new sense of blinding sorrow, the loss of Laure.

The reality, as it came to her, seemed even now vague and impossible. Laure, her girl, her strong, wild, adventurous, high-hearted, fearless girl, to become a nun! Laure, of whom, in her own way, Eleanore had been accustomed to think as she thought of the great white gulls that veered, through sunlight and storm, on straight-stretched pinions, along the rocky coast, as a creature of light, of air, above all of perfect, indestructible freedom! This, her Laure, to become a nun! Spite of what the Bishop of St. Nazaire had so earnestly told her, how, in all strong natures, there are strong antitheses and quiet, governing depths that no outer turbulence can disclose, Eleanore rebelled at the disposal that had been made of this nature. She knew herself too well to believe that her daughter could renounce all the joys of youth and of life without a single after-pang.

After this early mother-thought for the child’s state, Eleanore’s self-grief returned again with redoubled force; and her brain conjured up a vision of the future,—that great, shadowy future, that wrapped her heart around in a cold and deadening despair.

The April wind blew higher through the room, catching the tapestry curtains of the immense bed and waving them about like blue banners. The bars of sunlight mellowed and broadened over the shrunken rushes and the smooth stones of the floor. The surf boomed louder as the tide advanced. And Eleanore, still upon her knees, rocked her body in her helpless rebellion, and found it in her heart to question the righteous wisdom of her God. She did not, however, come quite to this; for which, afterwards, she found it expedient to give thanks to the same deity. Her solitude was unexpectedly broken. There came a knock upon the door, which immediately afterwards opened, and Gerault, her son, entered the room.

This fourth Seigneur of Le Crépuscule, a dark-browed, lean, and rather handsome fellow, clad in half armor and carrying on his wrist a falcon, jessed and belled, was the first of Eleanore’s two children. She reverenced him as his father’s successor; she held affection for him because she had borne him; and she respected him and his wishes because he was a man that commanded respect. But perhaps it was this very respect, which had in it something of distance, that killed in her the overwhelming love which she had always felt for his sister Laure, her youngest and beloved.

Gerault, seeing his mother’s attitude, stopped short in the doorway. “Madame, I crave pardon! I had not known you were at prayer,” he said.

Eleanore rose from her knees a little hastily. “Nay, Gerault, I was not at prayer. ’Tis an old custom of mine to meditate in that place. Enter thou and sit with me for a little.”

Gerault bowed silently and accepted her invitation by seating himself near one of the windows on a wooden settle. His silence seemed to demand speech from his mother. But Eleanore, once on her feet, had begun slowly to pace the floor of her room, at the same time losing herself again in her own thoughts.

Without speaking and without any discomfort at the continued silence, Gerault watched his mother—contemplated her, rather—as she walked. Often he had felt a pride—a pride that suggested patronage—in that walk of madame’s. Never, in any woman, had he seen such a carriage, such conscious poise, such dignity, such command. In his heart her son, somewhat given to irreverent observation and analysis of those about him, had named her the “Quiet-Browed,” and the very fact that he could have seen somewhat below the surface and yet named her thus, was evidence enough of her powers of self-control. It was he who finally broke the silence between them.

“Well, madame, the change in our house hath taken place. Laure’s new life is safely begun; and she hath given what she could to the honor of our race. Now that it is done, I return to Rennes, to the side of my Lord Duke.”

Eleanore made no pause in her walk, nor did she betray by the slightest gesture her feeling at the announcement. Too many times before had she experienced this same sensation. After a few seconds she asked quietly: “When do you go?”

In spite of her self-control, her voice had been a strain off the key, and now Gerault looked at her keenly, asking: “There is a reason why I should not ride to Rennes? I have not thy permission to go?”

Eleanore paused in her walk to turn and look at him. There was just a suggestion of scorn in her attitude. “Reason! Permission! Was ever a reason why a Crépuscule might not fare forth to Rennes, or one that asked permission of a woman ere he went?”

Again Gerault looked at her, this time in that dignified disapproval that man uses to cover an unlooked-for mortification. And the Seigneur was decidedly lofty as he said: “I have given thee pain, madame, though of how, or wherefore, I am wofully ignorant.”

“Pain, Gerault? Pain?” Eleanore repressed herself again and immediately resumed her walk. In a few seconds the calm, quiet dignity returned, her mask was replaced, every vestige of her feeling hidden, and she had become once more the châtelaine of unvoiced loneliness. Then she went on speaking: “Pain, Gerault? Surely not. Know I not enough of Rennes that I should not be well content to have thee in that lordly place, with thy rightful companions, men of thy blood? Shall I not send thee gayly forth again to that trysting-place of knightly arms?”

“And yet, madame, I did but now surprise in thy face a look of sorrow, of some unhappiness, that is new to it.”

“Well, even so?”

“Ah, yes! It is Laure’s departure. Yet that must not be too much mourned. Laure’s wild ways had come to be a source of uneasiness to both of us at times. ’Tis true that there is lost an alliance that might have brought much honor to Le Crépuscule. By the favor of my Lord Duke, Laure might have wed with Grantmesnil, Senlis, Angers itself, perhaps; and there was ever Laval.—Yet—”

He paused musingly, not seeing the look that had come back into the face of madame. Only when she stopped again and turned to him did he utter a soft exclamation, half surprise and half helpless apology. But Eleanore, smiling at him sadly, began, in that voice that had long been tuned to the stillness of the Castle: “If I could but make thee understand, Gerault! If I could make thee look upon my hours of loneliness here—and see—Gerault, it is not a matter of alliance, or of honor, or of dishonor, with Laure. It is that she was my child, my daughter, my companion—how adored!—here, in this—this great Castle of Twilight. Neither thou nor any man can know what our lives are.—But think, Gerault—think of me and of the Castle after thou art gone. What is there for me here? The tasks that I invent to fill the hours are useless to deaden thought. They are not changed from the occupations of thirty years ago. Nor, methinks, have women known aught else than spinning, weaving, sewing, spinning again, since the days of the earliest kings,—the Kings of Jerusalem.—And day after day through the long years I dwell here in this barren spot—dependent on others for what happiness I am to get in my life. And now—now the Church, in which always my hope of another, better life hath lain, taketh my child from me. Let then the Church give me something in place of her! Let the Church pay back something of its debt. And thou also, my son,—give me some help to live through the unending days of thy absence in Rennes.”

“I, madame!—the Church!—What art thou saying?”

“Hast thou not heard me?”