near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old
chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down
upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for
the proud house whose honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle
walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling
under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one
of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its
machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had
been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the
invader.
But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the
level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation
by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from
maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the
walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the
ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging
floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all tell a
gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of
the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower
housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.
It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I,
Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of
day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy
forests, the wild ravines and grottos of the hillside below, were spent the
first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been
killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a
stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle. And my
mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one
remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose
name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of companionship
which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by
my aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose
abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of
the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me
because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company.
Now I know tht its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the
dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the simple
tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage
hearths.
Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my
childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted
library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the
perpetual dust of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its
foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired
a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and
occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention.
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