The Castle of Twilight

by Margaret Horton Potter

Madame and Alixe soothed her, smoothing the hair back from her brow, patting her hands, and giving her all the comfort that they knew. Presently Lenore was calm again, and asked to rise. Madame, however, forbade this, insisting that she should keep to her bed all day; and through the afternoon either she or Alixe remained in the room, sewing, and talking fitfully with Lenore. The young wife, however, seemed inclined to silence. A shadow of melancholy had stolen upon her, and there was a cold clutch at her heart that she did not understand. Eleanore had her own theory in regard to the illness, and Alixe, whatever she might have noticed, had nothing to say about it.

Next morning, the morning of the first of September, Lenore rose to go about her usual tasks, seeming no worse for the attack of the day before, except that her melancholy continued. Work in the spinning-room that day, however, was cut short on account of the heat, which was more oppressive than it had been at any time during the summer. Though the sky was clear and the sun red and luminous, the air was heavy with moisture; the birds flew close to the ground; spiders were busy spinning heavy webs; worms and insects sought the underside of leaves; and all things pointed to a coming storm. At noon two mendicant monks came to the Castle, asking dinner as alms; and when the meal was over, they did not proceed upon their way. The bright blue of the sky was beginning to be obscured by fragments of gathering cloud, and in the infinite distance could be heard low and portentous murmurs. The sense of oppression and of apprehension that comes with the approach of any disturbance of nature was strong in the Castle. At four in the afternoon, madame had prayers said in the chapel, and there was a short mass for safety during the coming storm. After this service, Lenore, with Alixe and Roland de Bertaux, went out to walk upon the terrace that overlooked the water. The sight before them was impressive. The whole sea, from shore to far horizon, lay gray and glassy, flattened by the weight of air that overhung it, heavy and hot with moisture. The sun was gone, and the heart of the sky palpitated with purple. Flocks of gulls wheeled round the Castle towers, screaming, now and then, with some uneasy dread for their safety. The air grew more and more heavy, till one was obliged to breathe in gasps, and the sweat ran down the body like rain. The moments grew longer and quieter. The whole world seemed to stop moving; and the birds, veering along the cliffs, moved not a feather of their wings.

After that it came. The sky, from zenith to water-line, was cut with a lightning sword, that hissed through the water-logged gray like molten gold. Then followed the cry of pain from the wound,—such a roar as might have come from the throats of all the hell-hounds at once. There was a quick second crash, while at the same instant a fire-ball dropped from heaven into the ocean, curdling the waters where it fell. Then, fury on fury, came the storm,—wind and rain and fiercer flashes, the line of the shower on the sea chased eastward by a toppling mass of rushing foam. With a scream the flock of gulls dashed out into the mist to meet it, and were seen no more; for now the world was black, and everything out of shelter was in a whirling chaos of spray and rain.

Inside the Castle holy candles had been lighted in every room, and beside them were placed manchets of blessed bread, considered to be of great efficacy in warding off lightning-strokes. The two monks, sincerely grateful for their shelter from this outburst, knelt together in the chapel, and called down upon themselves the frightened blessings of the company by praying incessantly, though their voices were inaudible in the tumult of the storm. The wind shrieked around the Castle towers. Flashes of white light, instantly followed by long rolls of thunder, succeeded each other with startling rapidity. And, as a fierce, indeterminate undertone to all other sounds, came the roaring of the sea, which an incoming tide was bringing every minute higher and closer around the base of the cliff below.

An hour went by, and yet another, and instead of diminishing in fury, the wind seemed only to increase. None in the Castle, not madame herself, could remember a summer storm of such duration. Every momentary lull brought after it a still more violent attack, and the longer it lasted, the greater grew the nervousness of the Castle inmates; for to them this meant the anger of God for the sins of His children. The evening meal was eaten amid repeated prayers for mercy and protection; and shortly thereafter, the little company dispersed and crept away to bed,—not because of any hope of sleep, but because there would be a certain comfort in crouching down in a warm shelter and drawing the blankets close overhead. The demoiselles, for the most part, and possibly the squires too, huddled two or three in a room. The monks were lodged together in the servants’ quarters; and of all that castleful, only the women for whom it was kept were unafraid to be alone. Eleanore, Lenore, and Alixe sought each her bed; but of them madame only closed her eyes in sleep.

Lenore found herself terribly restless; and the foreboding in her mind seemed not all the effect of the storm. Her thoughts moved through terrifying shadows. It seemed to her that some great, unknown evil hung over her; but her apprehension was as elusive as it was unreasonable. For some hours she forced herself to keep in bed, tossing and twisting about, but letting no sound escape her. It seemed at last as if the fury of the wind had diminished, though the lightning-flashes continued incessantly, and the whole sky was still alive with muttering thunder. A little after midnight, urged by a restlessness that she was powerless to control, Lenore rose, threw a loose bliault around her, took down the iron lantern that hung, dimly burning, on a hook in a corner of the room, and, lighting her way with this, went out into the silent upper hall of the Castle.

Gray and ghostly enough everything looked, in the dim, flickering lantern-light. There was in the air a smell of pitchy smoke from burnt-out torches, and it seemed to Lenore as if spirits were passing through this mist. Yet she felt no fear of anything in the spirit world. Her heart was full of something else,—a vague, indefinable, more terrible dread, an oppression that she could not reason away. Clad in her voluminous purple mantle, with her hair unbound and flowing over her shoulders, where it sparkled faintly in the lantern-light, she went down the stairs, across the shadowy, pillared spaces of the great lower hall, and so into the long room where Gerault had sat on the day when the herald had come to call him to Rennes. She had a vision of him sitting there at the table, bent upon his manuscript philosophy, never looking up, as again and again she passed the door. It was a ghostly hour for her to be abroad and occupied in such a way; yet she had no thought of present danger. A useless sob choked her as she turned away from this place of sorrowful memories and went to the chapel. Here half a dozen candles on the altar were still burning to the god of the storm; and Lenore, finding comfort in the sight of the cross, knelt before it and offered up a prayer for peace of mind. Then, rising, she moved back again into the hall; and, dreading to return to her lonely room, where the roar of waves and the soughing of the wind round the towers made a din too great for sleep, she sat down on a bench that stood beside a pillar directly opposite the great, locked door. Sitting here, her lantern at her feet, elbow on knee, chin on hand, she fell into a strange reverie. The bitterest of all memories came back to her without bitterness; and she tried to picture to herself that woman of Gerault’s secret heart. What had she been? How had she died? Or was she dead? In what relation had she really stood to Gerault? Was she that cousin of Laval—or some other? These thoughts, which, always before, Lenore had refused to work into definite shape, came to her now and were not repelled. Her musing was deepest when, suddenly, she was startled by the sound of light footsteps in the hall above. Some one came to the staircase; some one came gliding sinuously down. Lenore half rose, and looked up, cold with fear. Then she saw that it was Alixe, and, strangely enough, her fear did not lessen; for never had she seen Alixe like this.

Lenore looked at her long before she was noticed; and the strangeness of the peasant-born’s appearance did not lessen on close examination. She was dressed in garments of pale green. And in these, and in her floating hair, her greenish eyes, her arms, her neck, Lenore fancied that she saw twists and coils and lissome curves and the green and golden fire of innumerable snakes. In the shadowy light everything was indistinct; but there seemed to be a phosphorescent glow about Alixe’s garments that illumined her, till she stood out, the brightest thing in the surrounding darkness. Striving bravely to ward off her sense of creeping fear, Lenore raised her lantern high, and looked at the other, who had now reached the foot of the stairs. Yes—no—was this Alixe? Lenore took two or three frightened steps backward, and instantly Alixe turned toward her.

“Lenore! Thou!” she cried.

“Alixe!” Lenore stared, wondering at herself. Surely she had suffered a hallucination. Alixe was as ever, save that her eyes were a little wider, her skin a little paler, than usual.