The Castle of Twilight

by Margaret Horton Potter

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.