The moonlight crept slowly from that room, and passed, like a wraith, off the sea, and beyond, into the east. The stars shone brighter for the passing of the moon. There was no sound in the great stillness, save the rustling murmur of the outflowing tide. In the chilly darkness before the break of dawn, Gerault of the Twilight Castle crept back to the bed he had left, looking fixedly, through the gloom, at the white, passive face of his wife, who lay back, with closed eyes, on her pillow. And when at last he slept again, she did not move; yet she was not asleep. In that hour her youth was passing from her, and she, a woman at last, entered alone into that dim and quiet vale where those that lived about her had wandered so long, so patiently, and, at last, so wearily, alone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TO A TRUMPET-CALL
After the night of Gerault’s passion, twelve days ebbed and flowed away without any incident of moment in the Castle. How much bitter heart-life was enacted in that time, it had indeed been difficult to tell. Lenore wondered, constantly, as she looked into the faces about her and questioned them as she refused to question her own heart. If, beneath that cloak of lordly courtesy and calmness, Gerault could hide such a grief as she knew was buried in his soul; if she herself found it so easy to conceal her own knowledge of that bitterest of all facts, that she was a wife unloved,—what stories of mental anguish, of long-hidden torture, might not lie behind the impassive masks around her. There was Madame Eleanore, madame of the commanding presence and infinitely gentle manners. What was it that had generated the expression of her eyes? Lenore had scarcely heard the name of Laure, thought only that there had been a daughter in Crépuscule who had died long since; and so she wove a little history of her own to account for that haunted look so often to be found in madame’s dark orbs. Gerault she knew. Alixe puzzled her, but there also she found food for her morbidness. Courtoise and the demoiselles she did not consider; but David the dwarf held possibilities. The young woman’s new-sharpened glance quickly discovered that the jester suffered also from the devouring malady, and she wondered over and pitied him also.
Indeed, at this time, Lenore was in an abnormal and unhealthy frame of mind. It seemed to her that all the world lived only to hide its sorrows. But her melancholy speculations concerning the nature of the griefs of others saved her from the disastrous effects of too much self-analysis. Her love for Gerault, to which she always clung, led her to pity him as he would not have believed she could have pitied any one; and, unnatural as it seemed, she brooded as much over his sorrow as over her own. Melancholy she was, indeed, and older by many years than when she had first come to Le Crépuscule. Sometimes the fact that Gerault did not know how much she knew brought her a measure of comfort, but it made her uneasy, also, for she was not sure that she was not wrongfully deceiving him. She could not bring herself to confess to Father Anselm what she felt no one should know; and neither did she find it in her heart to tell Gerault himself of her inadvertent discovery, though had she but done this last, all might have come right in the end. But from day to day she put away from her the thought of speaking, and from day to day she drew closer into herself, till she was shut to all thought of confiding in him who had the right to know the reason of her unhappiness.
Gerault, however, was not unobserving, and he noticed the change in her very early in its existence. It was an intangible thing, elusive, changeable, varying in degree. All this he realized; but, man-like, never guessed the reason for it, never knew that Lenore herself was unconscious of it. Did she desire to coquet with him, render him uneasily jealous of every one on whom she turned her eyes? If so, it was useless, for the knight believed himself incapable of jealousy in regard to her. He had married her for the sake of his mother, and for Le Crépuscule,—much as the fact did him dishonor. In the very hour of their highest love, his thoughts had been all for another; and when she slept he had left her side to cry into the night and the silence, unto that other, of whom this young Lenore had never heard. Despite these confessed things, the Seigneur Gerault felt in some way hurt when the timid shadow of his wife no longer haunted him by day, nor stretched to his protecting arm by night. She had withdrawn from him into herself, and even his occasional half-hours of devotion failed to bring any light into her eyes, though she treated him always with half-tender courtesy. Her lord was not a little puzzled by her new manner, but he took it in his own way; and there was presently a stiffness of demeanor between the two that would have been almost laughable had it not been so pathetically cruel to Lenore.
The month of July passed away, and August came into the land. Brittany, long blazing with sunlight, lay parching for want of rain. The moors grew brown and dusty, and the meadow flowers bloomed no more. But the blue sea shimmered radiantly day by day, and the sunsets were ever more glorious and more red.
On a day in the first week of the last summer month, when Anselm had found the temperature too great for the casting of choice paragraphs of Cicero before the unheeding demoiselles, when the Castle reeked with the smell of cooking, and the air outside was heavy with the odor of hard-baked earth, Gerault sat in the long room alone, reading Seneca from an illuminated text. A heretical document this, and not to be found in a monastery or holy place; yet there were in it such scraps of homely wisdom and comfort as the Seigneur—something of a scholar in his idle hours—had failed to find in Holy Scripture.