The Castle of Twilight

by Margaret Horton Potter

Madame stood still for an instant in the centre of the disordered room, supporting Laure with one arm. Then she turned to Alixe.

“Go thou, Alixe, and get food,—milk, and meat, and bread,—and bring it in the space of a few moments to my room. But let no other seek to disturb us in our solitude. Now, my girl!”

Madame led her daughter across the hall and up the stairs, and to the door of her bedroom, into which Laure passed first. Madame followed her in, and closed and fastened the door after her. Then she turned to her child.

At last they were alone, where no human eyes could perceive them, no human ear hear what words they spoke. And now Eleanore’s arms dropped to her sides, and she stood a little off, face to face with Laure. With Laure? Yes, it was she,—there could be but one woman like her,—with her tall, lithe, straight form, terribly wasted now by hardship and suffering: with those firm features, and the unrivalled hair that hung, brown and unkempt, to her knees. And again, it was not the Laure that the mother had known. In her eyes—the great, doubting, haunted, shifting eyes—lay plainly written the story of the iron that had entered into her soul. And there was that in her manner, in her bearing, that something of defiant recklessness, that pierced her mother like a knife. It was not the rags and the dirt of her body; it was the rags and dirt of her defiled soul.

The girl looked straight before her into space; but she saw her mother’s head suddenly lowered, and she saw her mother’s hands go up before her face.

Then came Alixe’s knock at the door; and Laure went and opened it, took in the food, set it down on the bed, shut and fastened the door again, and returned to her mother, who was sitting now beside the shuttered window, her head lying on her arms, which rested on a table in front of her.

There was a silence. Laure’s hand crept up to her throat and held it tight, to keep the strain of repressed sobs from bursting her very flesh. Her eyes roved round the old, familiar, twilight room; but just now she did not see. Her brain was reeling under its weight of agonized weariness. What was she to say or do? What was there for her here? Her mother sat yonder, bent under the weight of her sin. Was there any excuse for her to make? Should she try to give reasons? Worst of all, should she ask forgiveness? Never! Laure had the pride of despair left in her still. She had come home dreaming that the gates of heaven might still be open to her. She found them barred; and the password she could not speak. Hell alone, it seemed, remained.

“Madame,” she said in a hard, quiet voice, “I have come wrongfully home, thinking thou couldst give me succor here. But I perceive that I do but pain thee. I will go forth again. ’Tis all I ask.”

At the mere suggestion that Laure should go again, madame’s heart melted and ran in tears within her. “Ah, Laure! my baby—my girl—thou couldst not leave me again?” she cried in a kind of wail.

“Mother! First of all, I came to thee!” said the girl, in a whisper that was very near a sob.