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It was true that he had never struck or threatened her; but he kept her like a prisoner at Kerfol, and when he rode away to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes he set so close a watch on her that she could not pick a flower in the garden without having a waiting-woman at her heels.
Not long afterward he went on business to the Quimper Assizes; and while he was away his aunt, the widow of a great nobleman of the duchy, came to spend a night at Kerfol on her way to the pardon of Ste. Barbe. She was a woman of piety and consequence, and much respected by Yves de Cornault, and when she proposed to Anne to go with her to Ste.
Every wandering merchant was welcome at Kerfol, and when the master was called away he never came back without bringing his wife a handsome present something curious and particular from Morlaix or Rennes or Quimper. One of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination, an interesting list of one year's gifts, which I copy.
The following week Yves de Cornault rode back to Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants, and told them he was to be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of Douarnenez. And on All Saints' Day the marriage took place. As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to show that they passed happily for the couple.
But the aspect of Kerfol suggested something more a perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of darkness. Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. "Tombs in the chapel?
But the aspect of Kerfol suggested something more a perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of darkness. Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. "Tombs in the chapel?
One day, in Yves de Cornault's absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them.
As such it is surely as fine a study of the influence of place as Mrs. Wharton's "Kerfol" or Mrs. Pangborn's "Bixby's Bridge." The brooding atmosphere of a house mindful of its past and reacting upon successive inmates morally, or perhaps immorally, has seldom been more faithfully rendered.
So I have tried to disentangle it, and give it here in a simpler form. At times, however, I have reverted to the text because no other words could have conveyed so exactly the sense of what I felt at Kerfol; and nowhere have I added anything of my own. It was in the year 16 that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain of Kerfol, went to the pardon of Locronan to perform his religious duties.
I don't exactly remember the details; but after you've read it I'll bet anything you'll leave your light burning all night!" I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it was chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my reading. The account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of the lord of Kerfol, was long and closely printed.
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