English Accent Posh Old Fashioned Fiction Narration Period
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Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
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Section 17 of wandering ghosts. This is a lie recording. All Libre Vox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer. Please visit Libra Vox dot org recording by Elsbeth Cyprian of written and spoken dot net. Wandering Ghosts by Francis Marion Crawford by The Waters of Paradise. Chapter one, I remember my childhood very distinctly. I do not think that the fact argues a good memory for, I've never been clever at learning words by heart in prose or rhyme so that I believe my remembrance of events depends much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. Perhaps I am too imaginative and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally, a long series of little misfortunes connected with each other. So as to suggest a sort of weird fatality. So worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse and not only myself but my whole family and every individual who bore my name. I was born in the old place where my father and his father and all his predecessors had been born. Beyond the memory of man. It is a very old house and the greater part of it was originally a castle, strongly fortified and surrounded by a deep moat supplied with abundant water from the hills by a hidden aqueduct. Many of the fortifications have been destroyed and the moat has been filled up. The water from the aqueduct supplies great fountains and runs down into huge oblong basins in the terraced gardens, one below the other, each surrounded by a broad pavement of marble between the water and the flower beds. The waste surplus finally escapes through an artificial grotto some 30 yards long into a stream flowing down through the park to the meadows beyond and then to the distant river. The buildings were extended a little and greatly altered more than 200 years ago in the time of Charles the second. But since then, little has been done to improve them though. They have been kept in fairly good repair. According to our fortunes in the garden, there are terraces and huge hedges of box and evergreen. Some of which used to be clipped into shapes of animals in the Italian style. I can remember when I was a lad, how I used to try to make out what the trees were cut to represent and how I used to appeal for explanations to Judith my Welsh nurse. She dealt in a strange mythology of her own and people, the gardens with griffins dragons, good genie and bad and filled my mind with them. At the same time, my nursery windows afforded view of the great fountains at the head of the upper basin and on moon at night, the welsh woman would hold me up to the glass and bid me look at the mist and spray rising into mysterious shapes moving mystically in the white light, like living things. It's the woman of the water she used to say and sometimes she would threaten it if I did not go to sleep, the woman of the water would steal up to the high window and carry me away in her wet arms. The place was gloomy. The broad basins of water in the tall evergreen hedges gave it a funeral look and the damp stained marble causeways by the pools might have been made of tombstones, the gray and weather beaten walls and towers without the dark and massively furnished rooms within the deep mysterious recesses and the heavy curtains all affected my spirits. I was silent and sad from my childhood, there was a great clock tower above from which the hours rang dismally during the day and to like a nail in the dead of night, there was no light nor life in the house for my mother was a helpless invalid and my father had grown melancholy in his long task of caring for her. He was a thin dark man. With sad eyes, kind, I think, but silent and unhappy next to my mother. I believe he loved me better than anything on earth. But he took immense pains and trouble in teaching me and what he taught me. I have never forgotten. Perhaps it was his only amusement. And that may be the reason why I had no nursery governor or teacher of any kind while he lived. I used to be taken to see my mother every day and sometimes twice a day for an hour at a time. Then I sat upon a little stool near her feet and she would ask me what I had been doing and what I wanted to do. I dare say, she saw already the seeds of a profound melancholy in my nature for. She looked at me always with a sad smile and kissed me with a sigh when I was taken away. One night when I was just six years old, I lay awake in the nursery. The door was not quite shut and the welsh nurse was sitting sewing in the next room. Suddenly I heard her groan and say in a strange voice. 1212, I was frightened and I jumped up and ran to the door barefooted as I was. What is it? Judith. I cried, clinging to her skirts. I can remember the look in her strange dark eyes as she answered. 12 leaden coffins fallen from the ceiling. She groomed working herself in her chair, 12, a light coffin, then a heavy coffin falling to the floor. Then she seemed to notice me and she took me back to bed and sang me to sleep with a queer old Welsh song. I did not know how it was, but the impression got hold of me that she'd meant that my father and mother were going to die very soon. They died in the very room where she'd been sitting that night. It was a great room. My day nursery full of sun when there was any and when the days were dark, it was the most cheerful place in the house. My mother grew rapidly worse and I was transferred to another part of the building to make place for her. They thought my nursery was gayer for her, I suppose, but she could not live. She was beautiful when she was dead and I cried bitterly. The light one, the light one, the heavy one to come groomed the welsh woman and she was right. My father took the room after my mother was gone and day by day, he grew thinner and paler and sadder. The heavier one, the heavy one, all of lead moaned. My nurse one night in December standing still just as she was going to take away the light after putting me to bed, then she took me up again and wrapped me in a little gown and led me away to my father's room. She knocked but no one answered. She opened the door and we found him in his easy chair before the fire. Quite white. Very dead. So I was alone with the welsh woman till strange people came and relations whom I'd never seen. And then I heard them saying that I must be taken away to some more cheerful place. They were kind people and I will not believe that they were kind only because I was to be very rich. When I grew to be a man, the world never seemed to be a very bad place to me, nor all the people to be miserable sinners. Even when I was most melancholy, I do not remember that anyone ever did me any great injustice, nor that I was ever oppressed or ill treated in any way. Even by the boys at school, I was sad, I suppose because my childhood was so gloomy and later because I was unlucky in everything I undertook till I finally believed I was pursued by fate. And I used to dream that the old welsh nurse and the woman of the water between them had vowed to pursue me to my end. But my natural disposition should have been cheerful. As I've often thought among lads of my age, I was never last or even among the last in anything, but I was never first. If I trained for a race, I was sure to sprain my ankle on the day. When I was to run. If I pulled an or with others, my or was sure to break if I competed for a prize, some unforeseen accident prevented my winning it at the last moment. Nothing to which I put my hand succeeded. And I got the reputation of being unlucky until my companions felt it was always safe to bet against me. No matter what the appearances might be. I became discouraged and listless in everything. I gave up the idea of competing for any distinction at the university, comforting myself with the thought that I could not fail in the examination for the ordinary degree. The day before the examination began, I fell ill. And when at last I recovered after a narrow escape from death, I turned my back upon Oxford and went down alone to visit the old place where I'd been born feeble in health and profoundly disgusted and discouraged. I was 21 years of age, master of myself and my fortune. But so deeply had the long chain of small and lucky circumstances affected me that I thought seriously of shutting myself up from the world to live the life of a hermit and to die as soon as possible, death seemed the only cheerful possibility in my existence and my thoughts soon dwelled upon it altogether. I had never shown any wish to return to my own home since I'd been taken away as a little boy and no one had ever pressed me to do so. The place had been kept in order after fashion and did not seem to have suffered during the 15 years or more of my absence. Nothing earthly could affect those old gray holes that had fought the elements for so many centuries. The garden was more wild than I remembered it. The marble causeways about the pools looked more yellow and damp than of old and the whole place at first looked smaller. It was not until I had wandered about the house and grounds for many hours that I realized the huge size of the home where I was to live in solitude. Then I began to delight in it and my resolution to live alone grew stronger. The people had turned out to welcome me, of course. And I tried to recognize the changed faces of the old gardener and the old housekeeper and to call them by name. My old nurse I knew at once she had grown very gray since she heard the coffins fall in the nursery 15 years before. But her strange eyes were the same and the look in them woke all my old memories. She went over the house with me. And how is the woman of the water? I asked, trying to laugh a little. Does she still play in the moonlight? She is hungry. Answered the welsh woman in a low voice. Hungry. Then we will feed her. I laughed. But old Judith turned very pale and looked at me strangely, feed her. I, you will feed her well, she muttered, glancing behind her at the ancient housekeeper who tottered after us with feeble steps through the halls and passages. I did not think much of her words. She'd always talked oddly as welsh women will. And though I was very melancholy, I'm sure I was not superstitious and I was certainly not timid only as in a far off dream. I seemed to see her standing with the light in her hand and muttering the heavier one, all of lead and then leading a little boy through the long corridors to see his father lying dead in a great easy chair before a smoldering fire. So we went over the house and I chose the rooms where I would live and the servants I brought with me ordered and arranged everything and I had no more trouble. I did not care what they did provided I was left in peace and was not expected to give directions. But I was more listless than ever. Owing to the effects of my illness at college. I dined in solitary state and the melancholy grandeur of the vast old dining room pleased me. Then I went to the room I had selected for my study and sat down in a deep chair under a bright light to think or to let my thoughts meander through labyrinth of their own, choosing utterly indifferent to the course they might take the tall windows of the room open to the level of the ground upon the terrace. At the head of the garden, it was in the end of July and everything was open for the weather was warm. As I sat alone, I heard the unceasing clash of the great fountains and I fell to thinking of the woman of the water. I rose and went out into the still night and sat down upon a seat on the terrace between two gigantic Italian flower pots. The air was deliciously soft and sweet with the smell of the flowers. And the garden was more congenial to me than the house. Sad people always like running water and the sound of it at night though, I cannot tell why I sat and listened in the gloom for it was dark below and the pale moon had not yet climbed over the hills in front of me though all the air above was light with her rising beams slowly. The white halo in the eastern sky ascended in an arch above the wooded crests making the outline of the mountains more intensely black by contrast, as though the head of some great white saint were rising from behind a screen in a vast cathedral, throwing misty glories from below. I longed to see the moon herself and I tried to reckon the seconds before she must appear, then she sprang up quickly and in a moment more hung round and perfect in the sky. I gazed at her and then at the floating spray of the tall fountains and down at the pools where the water lilies were rocking softly in their sleep on the velvet surface of the moon. That water just then a great swan floated out silently into the midst of the basin and wreathed his long neck, catching the water in his broad bill and scattering showers of diamonds around him. Suddenly as I gazed, something came between me and the light, I looked up instantly between me and the round disk of the moon rose a luminous face of a woman with great strange eyes and a woman's mouth full and soft but not smiling, hooded in black, staring at me as I sat still upon my bench, she was close to me so close that I could have touched her with my hand, but I was transfixed and helpless. She stood still for a moment, but her expression did not change. Then she passed swiftly away and my hair stood upon my head while the cold breeze from her white dress was wafted to my temples as she moved the moonlight shining through the tossing spray of the fountain made traceries of shadow on the gleaming folds of her garments in an instant. She was gone and I was alone. I was strangely shaken by the vision and some time passed before I could rise to my feet for I was still weak from my illness and the sight I had seen would have startled anyone. I did not reason with myself for. I was certain that I had looked on the unearthly and no argument could have destroyed that belief. At last. I got up and stood unsteady gazing in the direction in which I thought the figure had gone. But there was nothing to be seen. Nothing but the broad paths, the tall dark evergreen hedges, the tossing water of the fountains and the smooth pool below. I fell back upon the seat and recalled the face I had seen strange to say now that the first impression had passed. There was nothing startling in the recollection. On the contrary, I felt that I was fascinated by the face and would give anything to see it again. I could retrace the beautiful straight features, the long dark eyes and the wonderful mouth most exactly in my mind. And when I had reconstructed every detail from memory, I knew that the hole was beautiful and that I should love a woman with such a face. I wonder whether she is the woman of the water. I said to myself then rising once more. I wandered down the garden descending one short flight of steps after another from terrace to terrace by the edge of the marble basins through the shadow and through the moonlight. And I crossed the water by the rustic bridge above the artificial grotto and climbed slowly up again to the highest terrace by the other side, the air seemed sweeter and I was very calm so that I think I smiled to myself as I walked, as though a new happiness had come to me, the woman's face seemed always before me. And the thought of it gave me an unwanted thrill of pleasure. Unlike anything I'd ever felt before I turned as I reached the house and looked back upon the scene, it had certainly changed in the short hours since I had come out and my mood had changed with it just like my luck, I thought to fall in love with a ghost. But in old times I would have sighed and gone to bed more sad than ever. At such a melancholy conclusion. Tonight, I felt happy almost for the first time in my life. The gloomy old study seemed cheerful when I went in the old pictures on the walls, smiled at me and I sat down in my deep chair with a new and delightful sensation that I was not alone. The idea of having seen a ghost and of feeling much better for it was so absurd that I laughed softly as I took up one of the books I brought with me and began to read. That impression did not wear off. I slept peacefully. And in the morning I threw open my windows to the summer air and looked down at the garden, at the stretches of green and at the colored flower beds at the circling swallows and at the bright water, a man might make paradise of this place. I exclaimed a man and a woman together from that day, the old castle no longer seemed gloomy and I think I ceased to be sad for some time too. I began to take an interest in the place and to try and make it more alive. I avoided my old welsh nurse that she should doubt my humor with some dismal prophecy and recall my old self by bringing back memories of my dismal childhood. But what I thought of most was the ghostly figure I'd seen in the garden. That first night after my arrival, I went out every evening and wandered through the walks and paths. But try as I might, I did not see my vision again at last. After many days, the memory grew more faint and my old moody nature gradually overcame the temporary sense of lightness I had experienced the summer turned to autumn and I grew restless. It began to rain, the dampness pervaded the gardens and the outer holes smelled musty like tombs. The gray sky oppressed me intolerably. I left the place as it was and went abroad. Determined to try anything which might possibly make a second break in the monotonous melancholy from which I suffered. End Section 17 recording by Elsbeth Cyprian of written and spoken dot net.