“If thou wilt spare her, ask what thou wilt of me. I will do her penance, whatever thou shalt decree. I will give money; I will give all that remains to me of my dower, freely and with light heart, to the Church. I will aid whomsoever thou wilt of thy poor, I—”
“Cease, Eleanore! These things cannot avail against the Church. Thou must not tempt, thou must not question; thou canst not understand the Law! I am but an instrument of that Law, and am commanded by it. Laure, the bride of Heaven, hath forsaken her chosen life. She must endure her punishment, being guilty of—thou knowest the sin. Next Sunday the ban must be put upon her. In doing so, I but obey a higher power. Eleanore, Eleanore, rise from thy knees! Thou art tearing at my heart! Peace, woman! Peace, and let me go!”
Eleanore, in her agony of despair, had crept to him and clasped his knees, mutely imploring the pity that he dared not show. Logic and reason he had put from him, holding fast to the tenets of that Church that had made him what he was. In all his career he had not been so tried, so tempted, to slip his duty. But, through the crucial moment, he did not speak; and after that he was safe from attack.
After many minutes the mother loosed her clasp of him, and ceased to moan, and let him go; for she saw that he could not help her. And as he passed slowly out of the room, she rose to her feet and looked after him blindly. Then she groped her way to the door, crossed the great hall, and, with her burden, ascended the stairs and went to her own room. Next morning, when the Bishop said mass in the chapel, madame, for the first time in thirty years on such an occasion, was not present. Nor did monseigneur seem astonished at the fact, but left his sympathy for her before he rode away to St. Nazaire.
All that afternoon and night, indeed, till after dawn of the next day, weary henchmen of the keep came straggling in on spent horses, fruitless returned from a fruitless quest. And when they were all back again, and the hope of seeing Laure was gone, the shadow of loneliness settled a little lower over the great pile of stone, and the silence within the Castle grew more and more intense to the aching heart within.
In the general desolation of Castle life Alixe, the unnatural child of peasant blood, came very close to the heart of Eleanore. Through the long, budding spring madame fought a terrible battle with herself against an overpowering desire for an end of life, for the peace of death. And in these times Alixe often drew her away from herself by getting her to hunt and to hawk,—two amusements in which madame had been wont to indulge eagerly in her youth, and which she found were still possible for her, though she had grown to what she thought old-womanhood. Besides this, she and Alixe took the long walks that Laure had formerly delighted in; and the two ventured into many a deep cave in the sea-cliffs, and explored many crevices that no native of the coast would enter. In these places they found fair treasures of the sea, but were never accosted by any of the supernatural beings said to inhabit such spots. Nor, though they listened many times for it at twilight, did either of them hear, a single time, the long, low, wailing cries of the spirit of the lost Lenore.
In this way some pleasures entered unawares into the life of Eleanore. Perhaps there were other pleasures also, so simple and so familiar that she took no cognizance of them as such. Perhaps of a morning, in the spinning-room, when her fingers flew under some familiar, pretty task, and her ears were filled with the chatter of the demoiselles, who still strove after light-hearted joys amid their gray surroundings, she found forgetfulness of Laure’s bitter disgrace. Or better still, when, at the sunset hour, she paced the grassy falcon-field, watching the glories of the sea and sky, there came to her heart that benison of Nature that God has devised for all of us in our days of woe. But when she was alone, in early afternoon, or, most of all, through the silent night-watches, she was sometimes overcome with sheer terror of herself and of her solitude. At such times she fought the creeping horror with what weapons time had given her, battling so bravely that she never suffered utter rout.
In a dim, quiet way the weeks sped on, leaving behind them no trace of what had been, nothing for memory to hang her lightest fabric on. In all the weeks that lay between Laure’s flight and the coming of July, Eleanore could remember distinctly just one talk beside the bitter one with St. Nazaire. And this other was with neither Alixe nor the Bishop, who, however, made it a point to come once in a fortnight to Le Crépuscule.
On a fair morning in May, as the dawn crept up out of the east not many hours after midnight, Eleanore rose, in the early flush, and, clothing herself lightly, left her room with the intention of going into the fields to walk. No one was to be seen as she entered the lower hall; but, to her amazement, the great door stood half open, and through it poured a draught of morning air, rich with the perfume of blossoming trees and fertile fields. Wondering that Alixe should have risen so early, Eleanore left the Castle and hurried out of the courtyard into the strip of meadow lying between the wall and the dry moat. Here, near the north edge of the cliff, sitting cross-legged in the grass, sat David the dwarf, holding in his hand something to which he talked in a low, solemn tone. Advancing noiselessly toward him, Eleanore perceived that it was a dead butterfly that he had found, and to which he was pouring out his soul. Amazed at the first phrases that caught her ears, she halted a few steps behind him, and there learned something of the thoughts that lay hidden in his volatile brain.
“White Butterfly, White Butterfly, thou frail and delicate child of summer, speak to me again! Say, hast thou found death as fair as life, thou White and Still? Came the messenger to thee unawares, or didst thou see his face and know it? Wast thou confessed, White Butterfly? Wentest thou forth absolved of all thy fluttering sins?