"carmilla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fanu J Sheridan Le)

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 marvellously 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