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

or

of any other living being. The letter, which was without direction,

ran as follows:

 

“If you are still of the same mind, and feel no misgivings, meet me

at the Church of St. Sava beyond the Creek to-morrow night at a

quarter before midnight. If you come, come in secret, and, of

course, alone. Do not come at all unless you are prepared for a

terrible ordeal. But if you love me, and have neither doubts nor

fears, come. Come!”

 

Needless to say, I did not sleep last night. I tried to, but without

success. It was no morbid happiness that kept me awake, no doubting,

no fear. I was simply overwhelmed with the idea of the coming

rapture when I should call my Lady my very, very own. In this sea of

happy expectation all lesser things were submerged. Even sleep,

which is an imperative force with me, failed in its usual

effectiveness, and I lay still, calm, content.

 

With the coming of the morning, however, restlessness began. I did

not know what to do, how to restrain myself, where to look for an

anodyne. Happily the latter came in the shape of Rooke, who turned

up shortly after breakfast. He had a satisfactory tale to tell me of

the armoured yacht, which had lain off Cattaro on the previous night,

and to which he had brought his contingent of crew which had waited

for her coming. He did not like to take the risk of going into any

port with such a vessel, lest he might be detained or otherwise

hampered by forms, and had gone out upon the open sea before

daylight. There was on board the yacht a tiny torpedo-boat, for

which provision was made both for hoisting on deck and housing there.

This last would run into the creek at ten o’clock that evening, at

which time it would be dark. The yacht would then run to near

Otranto, to which she would send a boat to get any message I might

send. This was to be in a code, which we arranged, and would convey

instructions as to what night and approximate hour the yacht would

come to the creek.

 

The day was well on before we had made certain arrangements for the

future; and not till then did I feel again the pressure of my

personal restlessness. Rooke, like a wise commander, took rest

whilst he could. Well he knew that for a couple of days and nights

at least there would be little, if any, sleep for him.

 

For myself, the habit of self-control stood to me, and I managed to

get through the day somehow without exciting the attention of anyone

else. The arrival of the torpedo-boat and the departure of Rooke

made for me a welcome break in my uneasiness. An hour ago I said

good-night to Aunt Janet, and shut myself up alone here. My watch is

on the table before me, so that I may make sure of starting to the

moment. I have allowed myself half an hour to reach St. Sava. My

skiff is waiting, moored at the foot of the cliff on the hither side,

where the zigzag comes close to the water. It is now ten minutes

past eleven.

 

I shall add the odd five minutes to the time for my journey so as to

make safe. I go unarmed and without a light.

 

I shall show no distrust of anyone or anything this night.

 

RUPERT’S JOURNAL—Continued.

July 2, 1907.

 

When I was outside the church, I looked at my watch in the bright

moonlight, and found I had one minute to wait. So I stood in the

shadow of the doorway and looked out at the scene before me. Not a

sign of life was visible around me, either on land or sea. On the

broad plateau on which the church stands there was no movement of any

kind. The wind, which had been pleasant in the noontide, had fallen

completely, and not a leaf was stirring. I could see across the

creek and note the hard line where the battlements of the Castle cut

the sky, and where the keep towered above the line of black rock,

which in the shadow of the land made an ebon frame for the picture.

When I had seen the same view on former occasions, the line where the

rock rose from the sea was a fringe of white foam. But then, in the

daylight, the sea was sapphire blue; now it was an expanse of dark

blue—so dark as to seem almost black. It had not even the relief of

waves or ripples—simply a dark, cold, lifeless expanse, with no

gleam of light anywhere, of lighthouse or ship; neither was there any

special sound to be heard that one could distinguish—nothing but the

distant hum of the myriad voices of the dark mingling in one

ceaseless inarticulate sound. It was well I had not time to dwell on

it, or I might have reached some spiritually-disturbing melancholy.

 

Let me say here that ever since I had received my Lady’s message

concerning this visit to St. Sava’s I had been all on fire—not,

perhaps, at every moment consciously or actually so, but always, as

it were, prepared to break out into flame. Did I want a simile, I

might compare myself to a well-banked furnace, whose present function

it is to contain heat rather than to create it; whose crust can at

any moment be broken by a force external to itself, and burst into

raging, all-compelling heat. No thought of fear really entered my

mind. Every other emotion there was, coming and going as occasion

excited or lulled, but not fear. Well I knew in the depths of my

heart the purpose which that secret quest was to serve. I knew not

only from my Lady’s words, but from the teachings of my own senses

and experiences, that some dreadful ordeal must take place before

happiness of any kind could be won. And that ordeal, though method

or detail was unknown to me, I was prepared to undertake. This was

one of those occasions when a man must undertake, blindfold, ways

that may lead to torture or death, or unknown terrors beyond. But,

then, a man—if, indeed, he have the heart of a man—can always

undertake; he can at least make the first step, though it may turn

out that through the weakness of mortality he may be unable to fulfil

his own intent, or justify his belief in his own powers. Such, I

take it, was the intellectual attitude of the brave souls who of old

faced the tortures of the Inquisition.

 

But though there was no immediate fear, there was a certain doubt.

For doubt is one of those mental conditions whose calling we cannot

control. The end of the doubting may not be a reality to us, or be

accepted as a possibility. These things cannot forego the existence

of the doubt. “For even if a man,” says Victor Cousin, “doubt

everything else, at least he cannot doubt that he doubts.” The doubt

had at times been on me that my Lady of the Shroud was a Vampire.

Much that had happened seemed to point that way, and here, on the

very threshold of the Unknown, when, through the door which I was

pushing open, my eyes met only an expanse of absolute blackness, all

doubts which had ever been seemed to surround me in a legion. I have

heard that, when a man is drowning, there comes a time when his whole

life passes in review during the space of time which cannot be

computed as even a part of a second. So it was to me in the moment

of my body passing into the church. In that moment came to my mind

all that had been, which bore on the knowledge of my Lady; and the

general tendency was to prove or convince that she was indeed a

Vampire. Much that had happened, or become known to me, seemed to

justify the resolving of doubt into belief. Even my own reading of

the books in Aunt Janet’s little library, and the dear lady’s

comments on them, mingled with her own uncanny beliefs, left little

opening for doubt. My having to help my Lady over the threshold of

my house on her first entry was in accord with Vampire tradition; so,

too, her flying at cock-crow from the warmth in which she revelled on

that strange first night of our meeting; so, too, her swift departure

at midnight on the second. Into the same category came the facts of

her constant wearing of her Shroud, even her pledging herself, and me

also, on the fragment torn from it, which she had given to me as a

souvenir; her lying still in the glass-covered tomb; her coming alone

to the most secret places in a fortified Castle where every aperture

was secured by unopened locks and bolts; her very movements, though

all of grace, as she flitted noiselessly through the gloom of night.

 

All these things, and a thousand others of lesser import, seemed, for

the moment, to have consolidated an initial belief. But then came

the supreme recollections of how she had lain in my arms; of her

kisses on my lips; of the beating of her heart against my own; of her

sweet words of belief and faith breathed in my ear in intoxicating

whispers; of … I paused. No! I could not accept belief as to

her being other than a living woman of soul and sense, of flesh and

blood, of all the sweet and passionate instincts of true and perfect

womanhood.

 

And so, in spite of all—in spite of all beliefs, fixed or

transitory, with a mind whirling amid contesting forces and

compelling beliefs—I stepped into the church overwhelmed with that

most receptive of atmospheres—doubt.

 

In one thing only was I fixed: here at least was no doubt or

misgiving whatever. I intended to go through what I had undertaken.

Moreover, I felt that I was strong enough to carry out my intention,

whatever might be of the Unknown—however horrible, however terrible.

 

When I had entered the church and closed the heavy door behind me,

the sense of darkness and loneliness in all their horror enfolded me

round. The great church seemed a living mystery, and served as an

almost terrible background to thoughts and remembrances of

unutterable gloom. My adventurous life has had its own schooling to

endurance and upholding one’s courage in trying times; but it has its

contra in fulness of memory.

 

I felt my way forward with both hands and feet. Every second seemed

as if it had brought me at last to a darkness which was actually

tangible. All at once, and with no heed of sequence or order, I was

conscious of all around me, the knowledge or perception of which—or

even speculation on the subject—had never entered my mind. They

furnished the darkness with which I was encompassed with all the

crowded phases of a dream. I knew that all around me were memorials

of the dead—that in the Crypt deep-wrought in the rock below my feet

lay the dead themselves. Some of them, perhaps—one of them I knew—

had even passed the grim portals of time Unknown, and had, by some

mysterious power or agency, come back again to material earth. There

was no resting-place for thought when I knew that the very air which

I breathed might be full of denizens of the spirit-world. In that

impenetrable blackness was a world of imagining whose possibilities

of horror were endless.

 

I almost fancied that I could see with mortal eyes down through that

rocky floor to where, in the lonely Crypt, lay, in her tomb of

massive stone and under