Carmilla

Capítulo 1

I.

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 associations, 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 roofless, 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 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 from, I might almost say, my infancy. I could not

remember the time when her fat, benignant face was not a familiar

picture in my memory.

This was Madame Perrodon, a native of Berne, whose care and good nature

now 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 Perrodon 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 the 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 upon my mind, which, in fact, never has been effaced, was

one of the very 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 round 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 cracks suddenly, or the flicker of an expiring

candle makes the shadow of a bedpost 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 hearty 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 tables and pluck open

cupboards; and the housekeeper whispered to the nurse: “Lay your hand

along that 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 smallpox, 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 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, though supported by the nurse, did not quite satisfy me.

I remembered, 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’ 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 remembered 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 voice for, what appeared to me, a long

time. I forget 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 by darkness.

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Title: Carmilla

Author: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10007]

Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Suzanne Shell, Sjaani and PG Distributed Proofreaders

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Carmilla

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Copyright 1872

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER I. An Early Fright

CHAPTER II. A Guest

CHAPTER III. We Compare Notes

CHAPTER IV. Her Habits—A Saunter

CHAPTER V. A Wonderful Likeness

CHAPTER VI. A Very Strange Agony

CHAPTER VII. Descending

CHAPTER VIII. Search

CHAPTER IX. The Doctor

CHAPTER X. Bereaved

CHAPTER XI. The Story

CHAPTER XII. A Petition

CHAPTER XIII. The Woodman

CHAPTER XIV. The Meeting

CHAPTER XV. Ordeal and Execution

CHAPTER XVI. Conclusion

PROLOGUE

Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius

has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies with a

reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS.

illuminates.

This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual

learning and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation.

It will form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man’s

collected papers.

As I publish the case, in this volume, simply to interest the “laity,”

I shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and

after due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from

presenting any précis of the learned Doctor’s reasoning, or extract

from his statement on a subject which he describes as “involving, not

improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and

its intermediates.”

I was anxious on discovering this paper, to reopen the correspondence

commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person so

clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my

regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.

She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative which she

communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce,

such conscientious particularity.