The Castle of Twilight

by Margaret Horton Potter

And with this last ungenerous and angry taunt, the Seigneur, his brain seething with some emotion that he could not define, strode from the room. Lenore rose as he left her, and followed him, unsteadily, halfway to the door. He went out of the Castle without once looking back, and when he was quite gone, the young girl felt her way blindly to the chair where she had sat, and crouching down in it, burst into a flood of repressed and desperate tears.

When Gerault left Lenore’s side, he was no whit happier than she. After the herald had made his announcement of the tourney, and Gerault had begun his reply, it was his intent to refuse to go, though in his secret heart he longed eagerly to be off to that city of gay forgetfulness. But when his wife, Lenore, the clinging child, besought him, with every appearance of sincerity, to leave her, he heard her with less of satisfaction than with surprised disappointment. Now he fought with himself; now he questioned her motive; again he longed for Rennes and the tourney. Finally, there rushed over him the detestable deceit in his own attitude; and he began to curse himself for what, sometimes, he was,—the most intolerant and the most selfish of tyrants. In these varying moods Gerault rode, for the rest of the afternoon, over the dry moors, hawk on wrist, but finding his own thoughts, unhappy as they were, more engrossing than possible quarries. He returned late—when the evening meal was nearly at an end; and he perceived, with dull disappointment, that Lenore was not at table. Madame presently informed him that she lay in bed, sick of a headache; and this was all the conversation in which he indulged while he ate his hurried meal. But as soon as grace was said and the company had risen, Gerault started to the stairs. Instantly his mother caught his sleeve and held him back, saying,—

“Go not to thy room. She has perchance fallen asleep by now; and she should not be wakened, for she hath been very ill. Seek thou rather my bedchamber, and there presently I will come to thee; for I have somewhat that I would say to thee, Gerault.”

Feeling as he had sometimes felt when, in his early boyhood, he had waited punishment for some boyish misdeed, the Seigneur obeyed his mother, and went up to her room, which was now wrapped in close-gathering shadows. Here, a few moments later, Eleanore found him, pacing up and down, his arms folded, his head bent upon his breast, a dark frown upon his brows. The windows were open to the evening, and, like some witchcraft spell, its sweetness entered into Gerault, penetrating to his brain, and once again turning his thoughts to the spirit that haunted all Le Crépuscule for him.

Madame came into the room, drawing the iron-bound door shut behind her, and pushing the tapestry curtain over it. Then, without speaking, she crossed the room, seated herself on her settle beside the window, and fixed her eyes on the moving form of her son. Under her look Gerault grew more restless still; and he was about to break the silence when presently she said, in a low, rather grating tone: “Know, Gerault, that I am grieved with thee.”

He turned to her at once with a little gesture of deprecation; but she went on speaking:

“Thou hast brought home from Rennes a wife: a fair maid and a gentle as any that hath ever lived; and moreover one that loves thee but too well. In her little time of dwelling here she hath, by her quiet, lovely ways, crept close into my heart, that was erstwhile so bitterly empty. And having her here, and seeing her growing devotion to thee, her continual striving to please thee in thine every desire, methought that thou, a knight sworn to chivalry, must needs treat her with more than tenderness. Yet that hast thou not, Gerault. Dieu! Thou’rt all but cruel with her! God knows thy father came to be not over-thoughtful in his love of me. Yet had he neglected and spurned me in our early marriage as thou hast this bride of thine, I had surely made end of myself or ever thou camest into the world. Shame it is to thee and to all mankind how—”

“Madame! Madame!—Forbear!”

At his tone, Eleanore held her peace, while Gerault, after a deep pause, in which he regained his self-control, began,—

“Canst thou remember, my mother, a talk that we—thou and I together in this room—held one afternoon more than a year agone? ’Twas in this room, the day before I went last to Rennes. Thou didst entreat me to bring thee back a wife to be thy daughter in the place of Laure.