It was a surprising thing that a house could be cheerful in such surroundings: forest and gray shore and dark blue-green water. The house itself was gray in hue, the columns snowy white, the roof dark green and blending wonderfully with the emerald water. Flowers made a riot of color between the structure and the formal lawns.
But more interesting than the house itself was the peculiar physical formation of its setting. The structure had been erected overlooking a long inlet that was in reality nothing less than a shallow lagoon. A natural sea-wall stretched completely across the neck of the inlet, cutting off the lagoon from the open sea. There are many natural sea-walls along the Floridan coast, built mostly of limestone or coraline rock, but I had never seen one so perfect and unbroken. Stretching across the mouth of the lagoon it made a formidable barrier that not even the smallest boat could pass.
It was a long wall of white crags and jagged rocks, and I thought it likely that it had suggested the name of the estate. It was plain, however, that the wall did not withstand the march of the tides. The tide was running in as I drew near, and the waves broke fiercely over and against the barrier, and little rivulets and streams of water were evidently pouring through its miniature crevices. The house was built two hundred yards from the shore of the lagoon, perhaps three hundred yards from the wall, and the green lawns went down half-way to it. Beyond this—except of course for the space occupied by the lagoon itself—stretched the gray, desolate sand.
Beyond the wall the inlet widened rapidly, and the rolling waves gave the impression of considerable depth. I had never seen a more favorable place for a sportsman’s home. Besides the deep-sea fishing beyond the rock wall, it was easy to believe that the lagoon itself was the home of countless schools of such hard-fighting game-fish as loved such craggy seas. The lagoon was fretful and rough from the flowing tide at that moment, offering no inducements to a boatman, but I surmised at once that it would be still as a lake in the hours that the tide ebbed. The shore was a favorable place for the swift-winged shorebirds that all sportsmen love—plover and curlew and their fellows. And the mossy, darkling forest, teeming with turkey and partridge, stretched just behind.
Yet the whole effect was not only of beauty. I stood still, and tried to puzzle it out. The atmosphere talked of in great country houses is more often imagined than really discerned; but if such a thing exists, Kastle Krags was literally steeped in it. Like Macbeth’s, the castle has a pleasant seat—and yet it moved you, in queer ways, under the skin.
I am not, unfortunately, a particularly sensitive man. Working from the ground up, I have been so busy preserving the keen edges of my senses that I have quite neglected my sensibilities. I couldn’t put my finger on the source of the strange, mental image that the place invoked; and the thing irritated and disturbed me. The subject wasn’t worth a busy man’s time, yet I couldn’t leave it alone.
The house was not different from a hundred houses scattered through the south. It was larger than most of the larger colonial homes, and constructed with greater artistry. If it had any atmosphere at all, other than comfort and beauty, it was of cheer. Yet I didn’t feel cheerful, and I didn’t know why. I felt even more sobered than when the moss of the cypress trees swept over my head. But soon I thought I saw the explanation.
The image of desolation and eery bleakness had its source in the wide-stretching sands, the unforgettable sea beyond, and particularly the inlet, or lagoon, up above the natural dam of stone. The rocks that enclosed the lagoon would have been of real interest to a geologist—to me they were merely bleak and forbidding, craggy and gray and cold. Unquestionably they contained many caverns and crevices that would be worth exploring. And I was a little amazed at the fury with which the incoming waves beat against and over the rocky barrier. They came with a veritable ferocity, and the sea beyond seemed hardly rough enough to justify them.