But, unexpectedly, Eleanore rose again, with a gleam of anger coming anew into her eyes. “Nay; thou didst not first of all come to me! If thou hadst—if thou hadst—ere thou wast stolen away by the cowardly dastard that hath ruined thee—!”
Laure trembled violently, and her voice was faint with pleading: “Speak no ill of him, madame! I was not stolen away. Freely, willingly, I went with him. Freely—” she drew herself up and held her head high—“freely and willingly, though with the curse of Heaven on my head, would I go with him still, were it in the same way!”
“God of God! why hast thou left him, then?”
A black shadow spread itself out before Laure’s eyes, and in her unpitying wilderness her woman’s soul reeled, blindly. Her voice shook and her body grew rigid, as she answered: “I—did not—leave him.”
“He is dead?” Eleanore’s tone was softer.
“No; he is not dead!” Laure’s face contorted terribly, as there suddenly rushed over her the memory of the last three months; and as it swept upon her, she sank to her knees, and held out her hands again in supplication: “Ah, pity me! pity me! As thou’rt a woman, pity me, and ask me not what’s gone! I loved him. God in Heaven! How did I love him! And he hath gone from me. Mine no more, he left me to wander over the face of the earth. He left me to weep and mourn through all the years of mine empty life. Flammecœur! Flammecœur! How wast thou dearer than God! more merciless than Him.” Here her words became so rapid and so incoherent that all meaning was lost, and the deserted woman, exhausted, overcome with her torn emotions, presently fell heavily forward to the floor, in a faint.
In this scene Eleanore had forgotten every scruple, every resentment, everything save her own motherhood and Laure’s need. Putting aside all thought of the girl’s shame, her abandonment, her rejection, she went to her and lifted her up in her strong and tender arms, and, with the art known only to the big-souled women of her type, poured comfort upon the bruised and broken body of the wanderer, and words of cheer and encouragement into her more cruelly bruised and broken mind. In a few moments Laure had recovered consciousness, had grown calm, and was weeping quietly in her mother’s arms.
Then madame began to make her fit for the Castle again. She took off the soiled and ragged garments, that hung upon the skin and bone of her wasted body. She bathed the poor flesh with hot water, and with her own tears. She combed and coiled the wonderful, tangled hair. And lastly, wrapping her, for warmth, in a huge woollen mantle, she led Laure over to her bed, drew back the heavy curtains, and laid the weary woman-child in it, to rest.
When Laure felt this soft comfort; when she realized where, indeed, she was and who was bending over her; when she knew what land of love and of tenderness she had finally reached after her months of anguished wandering,—it seemed that she could bear no more of mingled joy and pain. She let her tears flow as freely as they would. She clung to her mother’s hand, smoothing it, kissing it, pressing it to her cheek; and finally, lulled by the sound of her mother’s voice crooning an old familiar lullaby, her mind slipped gradually out of reality, and she went to sleep.
Long and long and long she slept, with the sleep of one that is leaving an old life behind, and entering slowly into the new. And for many hours her mother watched her, in the gathering darkness, till after Alixe had come softly in, and lit a torch near by the bed. And later the mother, unwilling to leave her child for a single moment, laid herself down, dressed as she was, and, drawing Laure’s passive form close to her, finally closed her eyes, and, worn out with emotion and with joy, lost herself in the mists of sleep.