The Castle of Twilight

by Margaret Horton Potter

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.

Laure heard this news with every appearance and every expression of delight; and when she returned to the church for tierce and morning mass, she tried, all through the service, to bring herself face to face with herself, to appreciate, as she was conscious that she must, sooner or later, the intense gravity of her position. But for some reason, by some failure of concentrative force, she could not bring her mind to the point of understanding. Over and over again her thoughts slid around that one fact that she knew she must try to realize,—how, after the giving of her final pledge, there could be no turning back, there could be no escape, while she should live, from this life of prayer. She did not appreciate it at all. She only remembered that she had been very contented here, and that the days were never long.

In the weeks that followed her talk with Mère Piteuse, Laure enacted this same scene of effort with herself many times, always futilely. As a matter of fact, it was too grave a responsibility to put upon the shoulders of a child in years and a less than child in experience. But this unfairness was one of the prerogatives of monasticism, unappreciated to this day.

Christmas time drew near; and gradually Laure dropped her efforts toward understanding and fell into dreams of a varied and complex, if unimportant, nature. She was to be professed alone, on the day after Christmas. No novice had entered the convent within three months of her, and, moreover, her birth and position made it desirable that she should be surrounded by a little extra pomp; for, although Laure did not know it, she was much looked up to by the nuns of humbler birth, and universally regarded as a future prioress of the house. During the last days of her novitiate the young girl was treated with peculiar reverence and consideration, and she was given a good deal of time for solitary reflection and prayer. Every day she was summoned to the cell of the Prioress, who herself gave the girl good counsel and instruction upon the higher life; while so much general attention was paid her that Laure became a little astonished at her own importance.

In the first three weeks of December Madame Eleanore did not come at all to see her daughter, and Laure grew lonely for her. She suspected nothing of her mother’s heart-sickness over the approaching ceremony that was to cut her child off from her forever; and, indeed, had Laure been told of the mother-feeling, she could not have understood it.

On the afternoon of the twenty-third day of December the novice was kneeling in her cell, supposedly at prayer, in reality indulging in a rather forlorn and melancholy reverie. It was the hour of recreation; and the convent was very quiet, for most of the nuns were sleeping, in preparation for the strain of the forty-eight-hour Christmas service. The stillness brought a chill to Laure’s heart, and she was near to tears, when her door was suddenly pushed open, and some one halted there. Laure turned quickly enough to see the white-robed Prioress disappear, closing the door behind a figure that remained motionless inside the threshold.

“My mother!” cried Laure, springing to her feet.

“Laure,” was the quivering response, as Eleanore held out her arms.

The dreamer, suddenly become a little child, went into the mother-clasp, her pristine home, and was half carried over to the only seat in the room,—a wooden tabouret, large enough for only one. Upon this Eleanore seated herself, while Laure sank to the floor beside her, huddling close to the human warmth of her mother, her head lying in that mother’s lap, both hands held tightly in the larger, stronger, older ones.

“Laure—my Laure—my little Laure!” was all that, at this time, madame could force her lips to say. And hearing it, the girl, suddenly overwrought and overswept with repressed yearning for home love, all at once burst into a convulsive flood of tears.