She thought we had dreamt the first monster. The second was carried in to her, with its horrible transparent legs bristling over the tumbler. She surveyed it hopelessly.
Yet one looks back on it all with a kind of tenderness. It was all so picturesque! What a dwelling might have been made of that antique castle by anyone who had the money and the art to spend it!
But, alas!... In the great stone bedchambers where we lodged there were blinds with Swiss scenes depicted in the most vivid colours: a mountain maiden and a Mont Blanc, and a torrent upon each.... Incongruity could go no farther—except perhaps in the billiard-room, which had been done up by the _Principe_ and was always shown off with great pomp. It was a splendid vaulted apartment, dating from the Barbarossa period; there were four deep niches hewn out of the stone: well, in two of these were placed large Chinese Mandarins, with heads that nodded if anyone could reach high enough to set them going; and, in the other two were plaster statues of the worst garden description: Flora with a basket, Ceres with a lumpy sheaf!
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[Illustration: landscape with man and pets]
There is no ghost in the garden of the Villino. Neither the meek spirit of Susan nor Tom’s saturnine spectre haunts the peaceful glade where they lie. ‹Juvenal has planted a “Tree of Heaven” at the head of his ever-mourned darling and covered the grave with Forget-me-nots!›
My youth ‹these reminiscences are contributed by Loki’s grandmother› was spent in a large country place in Ireland, and to us children—we were six then—certain walks, certain dells in the woods, were assuredly haunted.
The property had long ago belonged to one Lady Tidd, who so adored it that she had herself buried on a hill overlooking it, her coffin upright in its tall square tomb. It was Lady Tidd who was popularly supposed to haunt the fair wooded lands that had come to us. This Dysart Hill, on the top of which the ruined chapel and the deserted graveyard lay, was a favourite walk of our childish days. When our short legs had mastered the difficulties of the slope—and a very stony slope it was, covered towards the summit with a fine mountain grass, than which no footing is more slippery—we never failed to wander round to that singular monument, through the massive granite door of which she who stood in the upright coffin was supposed to be gazing down upon the distant prospect of our own home. It was never without an awful sense of horror and mystery that I pictured those dead eyes, endowed with miraculous vision, piercing through wood and stone to stare out upon what she still loved. Some apprehension of the horror and tragedy of bodily death and of the dread power of the spirit seized hold of my small soul as I contemplated that grave of human folly and of poor human aspiration. There it was, perhaps, that an overpowering dislike of graveyards began in me.