The Lady of the Shroud by Bram Stoker (book series for 10 year olds .txt) đź“•
"Sorry. But, of course, you don't understand such things." Then he went on talking before father had time to say a word.
"Let us get back to business. As you do not seem to follow me, let me explain that it is BECAUSE I do not forget that I wish to do this. I remember my dear mother's wish to make Aunt Janet happy, and would like to do as she did."
"AUNT Janet?" said father, very properly sneering at his ignorance. "She is not your aunt. Why, even her sister, who was married to your uncle, was only your aunt by courtesy." I could not help feeling that Rupert meant to be rude to my father, though his words were quite polite. If I had been as much bigger than him as he was than me, I should have flown at him; but he was a very big boy for his age. I am myself rather thin. Mother says thinness is an "appanage of birth."
"My Aunt Janet, sir, is an aunt by love. Courtesy is a small word to use in connection with such devoti
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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
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