The Lady of the Shroud - Bram Stoker (phonics reader txt) 📗

supposed to know every part of it, from

the keep to the torture-chamber, we can spend a few days over it. Of

course, I have been over most of it, since I came—that, is, I went

at various times to see different portions—the battlements, the

bastions, the old guard-room, the hall, the chapel, the walls, the

roof. And I have been through some of the network of rock passages.

Uncle Roger must have spent a mint of money on it, so far as I can

see; and though I am not a soldier, I have been in so many places

fortified in different ways that I am not entirely ignorant of the

subject. He has restored it in such an up-to-date way that it is

practically impregnable to anything under big guns or a siege-train.

He has gone so far as to have certain outworks and the keep covered

with armoured plating of what looks like harveyized steel. You will

wonder when you see it. But as yet I really know only a few rooms,

and am familiar with only one—my own room. The drawing-room—not

the great hall, which is a vast place; the library—a magnificent

one, but in sad disorder—we must get a librarian some day to put it

in trim; and the drawing-room and boudoir and bedroom suite which I

have selected for you, are all fine. But my own room is what suits

me best, though I do not think you would care for it for yourself.

If you do, you shall have it. It was Uncle Roger’s own room when he

stayed here; living in it for a few days served to give me more

insight to his character—or rather to his mind—than I could have

otherwise had. It is just the kind of place I like myself; so,

naturally, I understand the other chap who liked it too. It is a

fine big room, not quite within the Castle, but an outlying part of

it. It is not detached, or anything of that sort, but is a sort of

garden-room built on to it. There seems to have been always some

sort of place where it is, for the passages and openings inside seem

to accept or recognize it. It can be shut off if necessary—it would

be in case of attack—by a great slab of steel, just like the door of

a safe, which slides from inside the wall, and can be operated from

either inside or outside—if you know how. That is from my room or

from within the keep. The mechanism is a secret, and no one but

Rooke and I know it. The room opens out through a great French

window—the French window is modern, I take it, and was arranged by

or for Uncle Roger; I think there must have been always a large

opening there, for centuries at least—which opens on a wide terrace

or balcony of white marble, extending right and left. From this a

white marble stair lies straight in front of the window, and leads

down to the garden. The balcony and staircase are quite ancient—of

old Italian work, beautifully carved, and, of course, weather-worn

through centuries. There is just that little tinging of green here

and there which makes all outdoor marble so charming. It is hard to

believe at times that it is a part of a fortified castle, it is so

elegant and free and open. The first glance of it would make a

burglar’s heart glad. He would say to himself: “Here is the sort of

crib I like when I’m on the job. You can just walk in and out as you

choose.” But, Aunt Janet, old Roger was cuter than any burglar. He

had the place so guarded that the burglar would have been a baffled

burglar. There are two steel shields which can slide out from the

wall and lock into the other side right across the whole big window.

One is a grille of steel bands that open out into diamond-shaped

lozenges. Nothing bigger than a kitten could get through; and yet

you can see the garden and the mountains and the whole view—much the

same as you ladies can see through your veils. The other is a great

sheet of steel, which slides out in a similar way in different

grooves. It is not, of course, so heavy and strong as the safe-door

which covers the little opening in the main wall, but Rooke tells me

it is proof against the heaviest rifle-hall.

 

Having told you this, I must tell you, too, Aunt Janet, lest you

should be made anxious by the arriere-pensee of all these warlike

measures of defence, that I always sleep at night with one of these

iron screens across the window. Of course, when I am awake I leave

it open. As yet I have tried only, but not used, the grille; and I

don’t think I shall ever use anything else, for it is a perfect

guard. If it should be tampered with from outside it would sound an

alarm at the head of the bed, and the pressing of a button would roll

out the solid steel screen in front of it. As a matter of fact, I

have been so used to the open that I don’t feel comfortable shut in.

I only close windows against cold or rain. The weather here is

delightful—as yet, at all events—but they tell me that the rainy

season will be on us before very long.

 

I think you will like my den, aunty dear, though it will doubtless be

a worry to you to see it so untidy. But that can’t be helped. I

must be untidy SOMEWHERE; and it is best in my own den!

 

Again I find my letter so long that I must cut it off now and go on

again to-night. So this must go as it stands. I shall not cause you

to wait to hear all I can tell you about our new home.

 

Your loving

RUPERT.

 

From Rupert Sent Leger, Vissarion, to Janet MacKelpie,

Croom.

January 29, 1907.

 

MY DEAR AUNT JANET,

 

My den looks out, as I told you in my last letter, on the garden, or,

to speak more accurately, on ONE of the gardens, for there are acres

of them. This is the old one, which must be almost as old as the

Castle itself, for it was within the defences in the old days of

bows. The wall that surrounds the inner portion of it has long ago

been levelled, but sufficient remains at either end where it joined

the outer defences to show the long casemates for the bowmen to shoot

through and the raised stone gallery where they stood. It is just

the same kind of building as the stone-work of the sentry’s walk on

the roof and of the great old guard-room under it.

 

But whatever the garden may have been, and no matter how it was

guarded, it is a most lovely place. There are whole sections of

garden here of various styles—Greek, Italian, French, German, Dutch,

British, Spanish, African, Moorish—all the older nationalities. I

am going to have a new one laid out for you—a Japanese garden. I

have sent to the great gardener of Japan, Minaro, to make the plans

for it, and to come over with workmen to carry it out. He is to

bring trees and shrubs and flowers and stone-work, and everything

that can be required; and you shall superintend the finishing, if not

the doing, of it yourself. We have such a fine head of water here,

and the climate is, they tell me, usually so lovely that we can do

anything in the gardening way. If it should ever turn out that the

climate does not suit, we shall put a great high glass roof over it,

and MAKE a suitable climate.

 

This garden in front of my room is the old Italian garden. It must

have been done with extraordinary taste and care, for there is not a

bit of it which is not rarely beautiful. Sir Thomas Browne himself,

for all his Quincunx, would have been delighted with it, and have

found material for another “Garden of Cyrus.” It is so big that

there are endless “episodes” of garden beauty I think all Italy must

have been ransacked in old times for garden stone-work of exceptional

beauty; and these treasures have been put together by some master-hand. Even the formal borders of the walks are of old porous stone,

which takes the weather-staining so beautifully, and are carved in

endless variety. Now that the gardens have been so long neglected or

left in abeyance, the green staining has become perfect. Though the

stone-work is itself intact, it has all the picturesque effect of the

wear and ruin wrought by many centuries. I am having it kept for you

just as it is, except that I have had the weeds and undergrowth

cleared away so that its beauties might be visible.

 

But it is not merely the architect work of the garden that is so

beautiful, nor is the assembling there of the manifold wealth of

floral beauty—there is the beauty that Nature creates by the hand of

her servant, Time. You see, Aunt Janet, how the beautiful garden

inspires a danger-hardened old tramp like me to high-grade sentiments

of poetic fancy! Not only have limestone and sandstone, and even

marble, grown green in time, but even the shrubs planted and then

neglected have developed new kinds of beauty of their own. In some

far-distant time some master-gardener of the Vissarions has tried to

realize an idea—that of tiny plants that would grow just a little

higher than the flowers, so that the effect of an uneven floral

surface would be achieved without any hiding of anything in the

garden seen from anywhere. This is only my reading of what has been

from the effect of what is! In the long period of neglect the shrubs

have outlived the flowers. Nature has been doing her own work all

the time in enforcing the survival of the fittest. The shrubs have

grown and grown, and have overtopped flower and weed, according to

their inherent varieties of stature; to the effect that now you see

irregularly scattered through the garden quite a number—for it is a

big place—of vegetable products which from a landscape standpoint

have something of the general effect of statues without the cramping

feeling of detail. Whoever it was that laid out that part of the

garden or made the choice of items, must have taken pains to get

strange specimens, for all those taller shrubs are in special

colours, mostly yellow or white—white cypress, white holly, yellow

yew, grey-golden box, silver juniper, variegated maple, spiraea, and

numbers of dwarf shrubs whose names I don’t know. I only know that

when the moon shines—and this, my dear Aunt Janet, is the very land

of moonlight itself!—they all look ghastly pale. The effect is

weird to the last degree, and I am sure that you will enjoy it. For

myself, as you know, uncanny things hold no fear. I suppose it is

that I have been up against so many different kinds of fears, or,

rather, of things which for most people have terrors of their own,

that I have come to have a contempt—not an active contempt, you

know, but a tolerative contempt—for the whole family of them. And

you, too, will enjoy yourself here famously, I know. You’ll have to

collect all the stories of such matters in our new world and make a

new book of facts for the Psychical Research Society. It will be

nice to see your own name on a title-page, won’t it, Aunt Janet?

 

From Rupert Sent Leger, Vissarion, to Janet MacKelpie,

Croom.

January 30, 1907.

 

MY DEAR AUNT JANET,