Chapter One:
An Early Fright
In Styria, we,
though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle, or
schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great
way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough
ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father
is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw
England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where
everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don't see how ever
so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts,
or even luxuries.
My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension
and his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the
small estate on which it stands, a bargain.
Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a
slight eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow,
passes in front of its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and
its moat, stocked with perch, and sailed over by many swans, and
floating on its surface white fleets of water- lilies.
Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front, its
towers, and its Gothic chapel.
The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade
before its gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries
the road over a stream that winds in deep shadow through the
wood.
I have said that this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say
truth. Looking from the hall door towards the road, the forest in
which our castle stands extends fifteen miles to the right, and
twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited village is about seven
of your English miles to the left. The nearest inhabited schloss
of any historic association, is that of old General Spielsdorf,
nearly twenty miles away to the right.
I have said " the nearest inhabited village,"
because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in
the direction of General Spielsdorf's schloss, a ruined village,
with its quaint little church, now roof-less, in the aisle of
which are the moldering tombs of the proud family of Karnstein,
now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate chateau which,
in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the
town.
Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and
melancholy spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you
another time.
I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute
the inhabitants of our castle. I don't include the servants, or
those dependents who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to
the schloss. Listen, and wonder! My father, who is the kindest
man on earth, but growing old; and I, at the date of my story,
only nineteen. Eight years have passed since then. I and my
father constituted the family at the schloss. My mother, a
styrian lady, died in my infancy, but I had a good-natured
governess, who had been with me, I might almost say, from my
infancy. I could not remember the time when her fat, benignant
face was not a familiar picture in my memory. This was Madame
Perrodan, a native of Bern, whose care and good nature in part
supplied to me the loss of my mother, whom I do not even
remember, so early I lost her. She made a third at our little
dinner party. There was a fourth, Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, a
lady such as you term, I believe, a "finishing
governess." She spoke French and German, Madame Perrodan
French and broken English, to which my father and I added
English, which, partly to prevent its becoming a lost language
among us, and partly from patriotic motives, we spoke every day.
The consequence was a Babel, at which strangers used to laugh,
and which I shall make no attempt to reproduce in this Narrative.
And there were two or three young lady friends besides, pretty
nearly of my own age, who were occasional visitors, for longer or
shorter terms; and these visits I sometimes returned.
These were our regular social resources; but of course there were
chance visits from "neighbors" of only five or six
leagues' distance. My life was, notwithstanding, rather a
solitary one, I can assure you.
My gouvernantes had just so much control over me as you might
conjecture such sage persons would have in this case of a rather
spoiled girl, whose only parent allowed her pretty nearly her own
way in everything.
The first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible
impression on my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced,
was one of the earliest incidents of my life which I can
recollect. Some people will think it so trifling that it should
not be recorded here. You will see, however, by-and-by, why I
mention it. The nursery, as it was called, though I had it all to
myself, was a large room in the upper story of the castle, with a
steep oak roof. I can't have been more than six years old, when
one night I awoke, and looking around the room from my bed,
failed to see the nursery-maid. Neither was my nurse there; and I
thought myself alone. I was not frightened, for I was one of
those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of
ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us
cover up our heads when the door creaks suddenly, or the flicker
of an expiring candle makes the shadow of a bed-post dance upon
the wall, nearer to our faces. I was vexed and insulted at
finding myself, as I conceived, neglected, and I began to
whimper, preparatory to a healthy bout of roaring; when to my
surprise, I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from
the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was
kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with
a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She caressed me
with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me
towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed,
and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two
needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I
cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me,
and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid
herself under the bed.
I was now, for the first time frightened, and I yelled with all
my might and main. Nurse, nursery-maid, housekeeper, all came
running in, and hearing my story, they made light of it, soothing
me all they could meanwhile. But, child as I was, I could
perceive that their faces were pale with an unwonted look of
anxiety, and I saw them look under the bed, and about the room,
and peep under the tables and pluck open cupboards; and the
housekeeper whispered to the nurse; "Lay your hand along the
hollow in the bed; someone did
lie there, so sure as you did not; the place is still warm."
I remember the nursery-maid petting me, and all three examining
my chest, where I told them I felt the puncture, and pronouncing
that there was no sign visible that any such thing had happened
to me.
The housekeeper and the two other servants who were in charge of
the nursery, remained sitting up all night; and from that time a
servant always sat up in the nursery until I was about fourteen.
I was very nervous for a long time after this. A doctor was
called in, he was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his
long saturnine face, slightly pitted with small-pox, and his
chestnut wig. For a good while, every second day, he came and
gave me medicine, which of course I hated.
The morning after I saw this apparition I was in a state of
terror, and could not bear to be left alone, daylight though it
was, for a moment.
I remember my father coming up and standing at the bedside, and
talking cheerfully, and asking the nurse a number of questions,
and laughing very heartily at one of the answers; and patting me
on the shoulder, and kissing me, and telling me not to be
frightened, that it was nothing but a dream and could not hurt
me.
But I was not comforted, for I knew the visit of the strange
woman was not a dream;
and I was awfully
frightened.
I was a little consoled by the nursery-maid's assuring me that it
was she who had come in and looked at me, and lain down beside me
in the bed, and that I must have been half-dreaming not to have
known her face. But this, although supported by the nurse, did
not quite satisfy me.
I remember, in the course of that day, a venerable old man, in a
black cassock, coming into the room with the nurse and
housekeeper, and talking a little to them, and very kindly to me;
his face was very sweet and gentle, and he told me they were
going to pray, and joined my hands together, and desired me to
say, softly, while they were praying, "Lord, hear all good
prayers for us, for Jesus's sake." I think these were the
very words, for I often repeated them to myself, and my nurse
used for years to make me say them in my prayers.
I remember so well the thoughtful sweet face of that white-haired
old man, in his black cassock, as he stood in that rude, lofty,
brown room, with the clumsy furniture of a fashion three hundred
years old, about him, and the scanty light entering its shadowy
atmosphere through the small lattice. He kneeled, and the three
women with him, and he prayed aloud with an earnest quavering in
his voice for, what appeared to me, a long time. I forgot all my
life preceding that event, and for some time after it is all
obscure also; but the scenes I have just described stand out
vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded
darkness.
ROSEWORLD | PLANET BUURIN | PLANET LITE |
