On the morning of the sixteenth of January, Laure went into the spinning-room with the other women, to begin the old, familiar work. The sight of that room brought back to her a peculiar sensation. Long-forgotten memories of her girlhood’s yearnings and restless discontents, half-formed plans and desires, picture after picture of what she had once imagined convent life to be, crowded thick upon her, and caused her to shudder, knowing what these vague dreams had led her to. Here was the room, with its row of wheels and tambour-frames, and, at the end, the big, wooden loom, filled with red warp. Everywhere were little disorderly heaps of flax and uncarded wool, bits of thread and silk, and long woollen remnants clipped from uneven tapestry borders. In a moment this place would be alive with the droning buzz of wheels, the clack-clack of the loom, and the bright chatter of feminine voices. Laure heard it all in the first glance down the room, and in the same instant she lived a lifetime here. Before her eyes was an endless vista of mornings spent in this place upon work that could never keep her thoughts from paths where they should not stray. Alas! with Flammecœur she had neither toiled nor spun.
In neither face nor manner did Laure betray any suggestion of her feeling; and she found herself presently seated at a wheel, between Alixe, who was at the tapestry frame, and Lenore, who had come to the room for the first time in many weeks, and was engaged in fashioning a delicate little garment of white saie. Madame, at the head of the room, was embroidering a square of linen and overseeing the work of every one else; and she glanced, every now and then, rather searchingly into her daughter’s face, finding in it, however, nothing that could cause her anxiety; for Laure was ashamed of her own sensations, and strove bravely to conceal them.
Possibly this scene might have held out promise of reward to the thinker, the psychologist, or the humanitarian. Of all these quiet, busy women, was there one whose dull, passionless exterior did not cover an intricate and tumultuous heart-history? The rebellious thought-life of Alixe was no less interesting, despite her inactivity, than the deadening sorrow through which Lenore had passed. Nor had the early life of Eleanore, with its doubtful joys and its bitter periods of loneliness, left any stronger traces in her face than had the long after-years of rigid self-suppression. She had nearly overcome her once devastating habit of self-analysis, by forcing herself to take an unselfish interest in those around her. But the marks of her later and nobler struggles with grief lay as plainly in her face as those of her younger life. Only, the influence of her youth, with its rebellions and its solitudes, was to be found bodily transferred into the character of Laure, who had, in her infancy, absorbed her mother into herself. These four women, by reason either of years or station, had experienced much in the ways of joy and sorrow. But to what depths of unhappiness all the other pathetically colorless lives of the uninstructed and unloved women of that day had sunk, cannot be surmised by any one who has seen what strange courses loneliness and solitude will take. Who knows how great a self-struggle may result only in a pallid, vacant face and a negative personality? And what had they, all these neglected women of the chivalric age, to give them life, color, or force? Men did battle and feats of arms, expecting their ladies to sit at home, to toil and spin and bear them heirs, and, when their time came, haply die. So much we all know. But how much these same women, having something of both soul and brain, may have tried to use them in their small way, who has cared to surmise?
The January morning wore along, and by and by the fitful chatter became more fitful: the pauses grew longer; for every one was weary with work, and with the incessant noise of loom and wheel. Laure, who through the morning had been covertly watching Lenore at her task, saw that the young woman had grown paler than was her wont, and that the shadows under her eyes had deepened till their effect against her pallor was startling. Gradually Lenore’s hands moved more slowly. She would pause for a moment, and then, with a slight start, return to her work with so conscious an effort that Laure was more than once on the point of crying to her to stop. Presently, however, Lenore herself looked toward madame’s chair with an appeal in her eyes and a faintly murmured word on her lips.
Eleanore glanced at her, and then rose at once and went over to her side. “Why didst thou not speak sooner? Go quickly to thy room and lie down. Shall I send Alixe with thee?”
“Nay! Let me rather be alone!” And Lenore, hastily gathering her work into her arms, slipped from her place and was gone from the room.
The little scene caused no comment. Only Laure, who was not accustomed to the sight of Lenore’s transparent skin and almost startling frailty, sat thinking about her after she was gone. How forlorn must be her poor existence! If she had greatly loved Gerault,—and surely any maiden would have loved him,—how gray her world must have become! how without hope her life! Laure lost herself completely in a revery of Lenore’s sorrows, and forgot, for the time, how weary she herself was: how her foot ached with treading the wheel, and how irritated were her finger-tips with the long unaccustomed manipulation of thread. But it came as an intense relief when she heard her mother say softly,—
“Go thou, Laure, to thy sister’s room. Make her comfortable, if thou canst. Take the wheel also with thee and finish thy skein there.”