It was no ghost after all! only the under Vahtimestari who, having spent the evening on shore, shouted as usual to be admitted. It was his strange voice echoing through those empty corridors and vaulted chambers that had waked us from our first sleep. His cries not being heard by reason of thunder roaring and rolling, he had called and called again with increasing energy till admitted.
What an unromantic ending to a most weird story, with every surrounding at hand, every element ready except the actual ghost himself! A happy ending. Stay, now it is over, I almost wish the ending had been less happy and more romantic.
Woman is seldom satisfied, and man never! One woman, however, I am not ashamed to say, was never in all her previous life so frightened as during that midnight hour at Nyslott.
Happy days followed after this terrifying episode. We explored dark chambers with a candle and matches, we cooked coffee on the stove for breakfast, and boiled eggs in an enormous tea-kettle, aided in our pleasant toil by two smiling much-interested watchmen, and afterwards ate our meal among tangled shrubs in a courtyard shaded from the sun's heat by a linden tree.
We idled generally; wrote letters, scribbled up our diaries, chatted or made sketches in the Bastion Dick with its eight windows, each of which are at the narrow end of a wall measuring fifteen feet thick, thus forming the deep recesses of a large octagonal chamber with long benches stretching down the side of each of the fifteen feet walls. A wondrous and remarkable hall, always cool even on a hot day with its windowless look-outs over that beautiful lake.
Up the centre of this huge hall was a column of solid masonry coming from the chamber below, and rising some thirty feet to support the arched roof.
We enjoyed it all; but, be it owned, the life was very primitive, and to many people would have seemed ghastly.
For dinner (which is always between two and four in Finland), we were obliged to cross to the Kasino or Societetzhuset (Hotel), our commissariat and chef de cuisine not rising to the requirements of such a meal.
We learnt how ugly ordinary small Finnish towns are, with their one-storey wooden houses, ill-paved roads, totally devoid of side paths—how very like cheap wooden Noah's arks, such as children have; all straight and plain with glaring windows painted round with white paint, no gardens of any kind, while every casement is blocked with a big indiarubber plant. Generally they possess a huge stone or brick school-house, large enough to contain all the thousand inhabitants in the district, instead of the town's two hundred children, but then it is built ready for contingencies.
All this hideous inartistic modernity contrasted sadly with the massive beauty and vast strength of our castellated home.