《【英文文学】Carmilla.docx》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《【英文文学】Carmilla.docx（44页珍藏版）》请在taowenge.com淘文阁网|工程机械CAD图纸|机械工程制图|CAD装配图下载|SolidWorks_CaTia_CAD_UG_PROE_设计图分享下载上搜索。
1、【英文文学】CarmillaChapter 1 An Early FrightIn 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
2、 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 dont see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.My father was in the Austr
3、ian 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
4、, 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
5、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 fifte
6、en 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 villa
7、ge,” because there is, only three miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorfs 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 des
8、olate 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 inhabitan
9、ts of our castle. I dont 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
10、 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 Per
11、rodon, 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 gover
12、ness.” 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,
13、 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 cou
14、rse 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
15、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 trifl
16、ing 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 cant have been more than six years old, when one night I awoke, and l
17、ooking 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
18、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 surpris
19、e, 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, an
20、d 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,
21、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 percei
22、ve 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 no
23、t; 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 nurs
24、ery, 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 h
25、is 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
26、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 kne
27、w the visit of the strange woman was not a dream; and I was awfully frightened.I was a little consoled by the nursery maids 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, tho
28、ugh 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 wer
29、e 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 remember
30、ed 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,
31、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 pha
32、ntasmagoria surrounded by darkness.Chapter 2 A GuestI am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story. It is not only true, nevertheless, but truth of which I have been an eyewitness.It was a sweet summer evening, and my father ask
33、ed me, as he sometimes did, to take a little ramble with him along that beautiful forest vista which I have mentioned as lying in front of the schloss.“General Spielsdorf cannot come to us so soon as I had hoped,” said my father, as we pursued our walk.He was to have paid us a visit of some weeks, a
34、nd we had expected his arrival next day. He was to have brought with him a young lady, his niece and ward, Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt, whom I had never seen, but whom I had heard described as a very charming girl, and in whose society I had promised myself many happy days. I was more disappointed than
35、a young lady living in a town, or a bustling neighborhood can possibly imagine. This visit, and the new acquaintance it promised, had furnished my day dream for many weeks“And how soon does he come?” I asked.“Not till autumn. Not for two months, I dare say,” he answered. “And I am very glad now, dea
36、r, that you never knew Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt.”“And why?” I asked, both mortified and curious.“Because the poor young lady is dead,” he replied. “I quite forgot I had not told you, but you were not in the room when I received the Generals letter this evening.”I was very much shocked. General Spiels
37、dorf had mentioned in his first letter, six or seven weeks before, that she was not so well as he would wish her, but there was nothing to suggest the remotest suspicion of danger.“Here is the Generals letter,” he said, handing it to me. “I am afraid he is in great affliction; the letter appears to
38、me to have been written very nearly in distraction.”We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendor behind the sylvan horizon, and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the steep old bridge I have mentioned,
39、 wound through many a group of noble trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky. General Spielsdorfs letter was so extraordinary, so vehement, and in some places so self-contradictory, that I read it twice over the second time aloud to my father and was still
40、unable to account for it, except by supposing that grief had unsettled his mind.It said “I have lost my darling daughter, for as such I loved her. During the last days of dear Berthas illness I was not able to write to you.“Before then I had no idea of her danger. I have lost her, and now learn all,
41、 too late. She died in the peace of innocence, and in the glorious hope of a blessed futurity. The fiend who betrayed our infatuated hospitality has done it all. I thought I was receiving into my house innocence, gaiety, a charming companion for my lost Bertha. Heavens! what a fool have I been!“I th
42、ank God my child died without a suspicion of the cause of her sufferings. She is gone without so much as conjecturing the nature of her illness, and the accursed passion of the agent of all this misery. I devote my remaining days to tracking and extinguishing a monster. I am told I may hope to accom
43、plish my righteous and merciful purpose. At present there is scarcely a gleam of light to guide me. I curse my conceited incredulity, my despicable affectation of superiority, my blindness, my obstinacy all too late. I cannot write or talk collectedly now. I am distracted. So soon as I shall have a
44、little recovered, I mean to devote myself for a time to enquiry, which may possibly lead me as far as Vienna. Some time in the autumn, two months hence, or earlier if I live, I will see you that is, if you permit me; I will then tell you all that I scarce dare put upon paper now. Farewell. Pray for
45、me, dear friend.”In these terms ended this strange letter. Though I had never seen Bertha Rheinfeldt my eyes filled with tears at the sudden intelligence; I was startled, as well as profoundly disappointed.The sun had now set, and it was twilight by the time I had returned the Generals letter to my
46、father.It was a soft clear evening, and we loitered, speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences which I had just been reading. We had nearly a mile to walk before reaching the road that passes the schloss in front, and by that time the moon was shining brilliantly
47、. At the drawbridge we met Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who had come out, without their bonnets, to enjoy the exquisite moonlight.We heard their voices gabbling in animated dialogue as we approached. We joined them at the drawbridge, and turned about to admire with them the beauti
48、ful scene.The glade through which we had just walked lay before us. At our left the narrow road wound away under clumps of lordly trees, and was lost to sight amid the thickening forest. At the right the same road crosses the steep and picturesque bridge, near which stands a ruined tower which once
49、guarded that pass; and beyond the bridge an abrupt eminence rises, covered with trees, and showing in the shadows some grey ivy-clustered rocks.Over the sward and low grounds a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke, marking the distances with a transparent veil; and here and there we could see the river faintly flashing in the moonlight.No softer, sweeter scene could be imagined. The news I had just heard made it melancholy; but nothing could disturb its character of pro