Many loving and penitent messages came to him from Clemence. At first he took no notice of them: at last, to one he returned an answer—“He would never see her again.”
II.
The summer came and the winter, and many a summer and winter passed, and the dreariest domain in all France was the once merry Château Regnier. Year after year the old man brooded alone. If friendship or chance brought guests to the château, they were received with stately formality, which forbade their stay; rarely did a stranger pass a night within its walls. The retainers kept their Christmas holidays as best they might; no great hall was opened and lighted, no feast was spread. They wondered how long the baron would live such a life, and what would become of the château should he die, for he had no heir to take it.
Ten years passed: the old man began to grow tired at last of his solitude; he listened to the voice of conscience—it reproached him with ten long years of neglected duties. The first thing he did was to open the doors of his chapel. He sent for artisans and ordered it to be repaired and refitted, then he sent a messenger to the Bishop of Toulouse, asking him to send a chaplain to the Château Regnier.
The church was in those days what she is now—the great republic of the world; but at that time she was the only republic, the one impregnable citadel where, through all the centuries that we call the middle ages, the liberties and the equality of men held their ground against hereditary right and feudal despotism. In the monastery the prior was often of lowly birth, while among the humbler brethren whom he ruled might be found men of patrician, even of royal lineage. Virtue and talent were the only rank acknowledged; the noble knelt and confessed his sins, and received absolution
from the hand of the serf. Thus, beside the princely-born Bernard we see the name of Fulbert, the illustrious Bishop of Chartres, raised to the episcopal throne from poverty and obscurity—as he himself says, “sicut de stercore pauper”; and the life-long friend and minister of Louis the Sixth, Suger, the abbot of St. Denis, and regent of France, was the son of a bourgeois of St. Omer.
So it happened that when the baron sent to the Bishop of Toulouse for a chaplain, a young priest, who was the son of a vassal of Château Regnier, threw himself at the prelate’s feet, and begged that he might be sent. The bishop looked on him with surprise and displeasure.
“Monseigneur,” said the priest, “you reproach me in your heart for what appears to you my presumption and boldness in making this request. I have a most earnest reason, for the love of God, in asking this; for a very brief time do I ask to remain chaplain at the Château Regnier, but I do most earnestly ask it.” So he was sent.
The young Père Rudal had been in his childhood a favorite with the baron. It was the baron who had first taken notice of the bright boy, and who had sent him away to the great schools of Lyons to be educated; and now, when he saw his former favorite return to him, the old man’s heart warmed again, and opened to the young priest.
It was with strange emotions that the Père Rudal stood once more in the home of his childhood. When a careless boy there, with no very practical plans for life, he had loved, with a boy’s romantic love, the beautiful Clemence. He was something of a dreamer and poet; she had been the queen of his reveries. He was the child of a vassal, and she of noble birth. This thought saddened