Complete Works of Bram Stoker (343 page)

So you see, my dear, that our new home is not without superstitious interests of its own.  It is rather a nice idea, is it not, to have a dead woman cruising round our promontory in a coffin?  I doubt if even at Croom you can beat that.  “Makes the place kind of homey,” as an American would say.  When you come, Aunt Janet, you will not feel lonesome, at any rate, and it will save us the trouble of importing some of your Highland ghosts to make you feel at home in the new land.  I don’t know, but we might ask the stiff to come to tea with us.  Of course, it would be a late tea.  Somewhere between midnight and cock-crow would be about the etiquette of the thing, I fancy!

But I must tell you all the realities of the Castle and around it.  So I will write again within a day or two, and try to let you know enough to prepare you for coming here.  Till then adieu, my dear.

Your loving
Rupert.

From Rupert Sent Leger
,
Vissarion
,
to Janet MacKelpie
,
Croom
.

January
25, 1907.

I hope I did not frighten you, dear Aunt Janet, by the yarn of the lady in the coffin.  But I know you are not afraid; you have told me too many weird stories for me to dread that.  Besides, you have Second Sight  —  latent, at all events.  However, there won’t be any more ghosts, or about ghosts, in this letter.  I want to tell you all about our new home.  I am so glad you are coming out so soon; I am beginning to feel so lonesome  —  I walk about sometimes aimlessly, and find my thoughts drifting in such an odd way.  If I didn’t know better, I might begin to think I was in love!  There is no one here to be in love with; so make your mind easy, Aunt Janet.  Not that you would be unhappy, I know, dear, if I
did
fall in love.  I suppose I must marry some day.  It is a duty now, I know, when there is such an estate as Uncle Roger has left me.  And I know this: I shall never marry any woman unless I love her.  And I am right sure that if I do love her you will love her, too, Aunt Janet!  Won’t you, dear?  It wouldn’t be half a delight if you didn’t.  It won’t if you don’t.  There, now!

But before I begin to describe Vissarion I shall throw a sop to you as a chatelaine; that may give you patience to read the rest.  The Castle needs a lot of things to make it comfortable  —  as you would consider it.  In fact, it is absolutely destitute of everything of a domestic nature.  Uncle Roger had it vetted on the defence side, and so far it could stand a siege.  But it couldn’t cook a dinner or go through a spring-cleaning!  As you know, I am not much up in domestic matters, and so I cannot give you details; but you may take it that it wants everything.  I don’t mean furniture, or silver, or even gold-plate, or works of art, for it is full of the most magnificent old things that you can imagine.  I think Uncle Roger must have been a collector, and gathered a lot of good things in all sorts of places, stored them for years, and then sent them here.  But as to glass, china, delft, all sorts of crockery, linen, household appliances and machinery, cooking utensils  —  except of the simplest  —  there are none.  I don’t think Uncle Roger could have lived here more than on a temporary picnic.  So far as I only am concerned, I am all right; a gridiron and a saucepan are all
I
want  —  and I can use them myself.  But, dear Aunt Janet, I don’t want you to pig it.  I would like you to have everything you can imagine, and all of the very best.  Cost doesn’t count now for us, thanks to Uncle Roger; and so I want you to order all.  I know you, dear  —  being a woman  —  won’t object to shopping.  But it will have to be wholesale.  This is an enormous place, and will swallow up all you can buy  —  like a quicksand.  Do as you like about choosing, but get all the help you can.  Don’t be afraid of getting too much.  You can’t, or of being idle when you are here.  I assure you that when you come there will be so much to do and so many things to think of that you will want to get away from it all.  And, besides, Aunt Janet, I hope you won’t be too long.  Indeed, I don’t wish to be selfish, but your boy is lonely, and wants you.  And when you get here you will be an Empress.  I don’t altogether like doing so, lest I should offend a millionairess like you; but it may facilitate matters, and the way’s of commerce are strict, though devious.  So I send you a cheque for £1,000 for the little things: and a letter to the bank to honour your own cheques for any amount I have got.

I think, by the way, I should, if I were you, take or send out a few servants  —  not too many at first, only just enough to attend on our two selves.  You can arrange to send for any more you may want later.  Engage them, and arrange for their being paid  —  when they are in our service we must treat them well  —  and then they can be at our call as you find that we want them.  I think you should secure, say, fifty or a hundred  —  ’tis an awfu’ big place, Aunt Janet!  And in the same way will you secure  —  and, of course, arrange for pay similarly  —  a hundred men, exclusive of any servants you think it well to have.  I should like the General, if he can give the time, to choose or pass them.  I want clansmen that I can depend on, if need be.  We are going to live in a country which is at present strange to us, and it is well to look things in the face.  I know Sir Colin will only have men who are a credit to Scotland and to Ross and to Croom  —  men who will impress the Blue Mountaineers.  I know they will take them to their hearts  —  certainly if any of them are bachelors the girls will!  Forgive me!  But if we are to settle here, our followers will probably want to settle also.  Moreover, the Blue Mountaineers may want followers also!  And will want them to settle, too, and have successors!

Now for the description of the place.  Well, I simply can’t just now.  It is all so wonderful and so beautiful.  The Castle  —  I have written so much already about other things that I really must keep the Castle for another letter!  Love to Sir Colin if he is at Croom.  And oh, dear Aunt Janet, how I wish that my dear mother was coming out!  It all seems so dark and empty without her.  How she would have enjoyed it!  How proud she would have been!  And, my dear, if she could be with us again, how grateful she would have been to you for all you have done for her boy!  As I am, believe me, most truly and sincerely and affectionately grateful.

Your loving
Rupert.

Rupert Sent Leger
,
Vissarion
,
to Janet MacKelpie
,
Croom
.

January
26, 1907.

My dear Aunt Janet,

Please read this as if it was a part of the letter I wrote yesterday.

The Castle itself is so vast that I really can’t describe it in detail.  So I am waiting till you come; and then you and I will go over it together and learn all that we can about it.  We shall take Rooke with us, and, as he is 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 recognise 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
arrière-pensée
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.