University of Virginia Library

1. No. I.
THE DISTURBED VIGIL.

Such a night! It was like a festival of Dian. A
burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or
two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating
rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and
the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and
the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight
and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night's
beauty. There was no atmosphere—nothing between
the eye and the pearly moon,—and she rode
through the heavens without a veil, like a queen as
she is, giving a glimpse of her nearer beauty for a
festal favour to the worshipping stars.

I was a student at the famed university of Connecticut,
and the bewilderments of philosophy and
poetry were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite
natural beauty, and the absence of all other
temptation, secure to the classic neophite an almost

supernatural wakefulness of fancy. I contracted a
taste for the horrible in those days, which still clings
to me. I have travelled the world over, with no object
but general observation, and have dawdled my
hour at courts and operas with little interest, while the
sacking and drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus,
the impalement of a robber on the Nile, and the insane
hospitals from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in
my capricious journal with the vividness of the most
stirring adventure.

There is a kind of crystallization in the circumstances
of one's life. A peculiar turn of mind draws
to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is
frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets
with more remarkable things than another, when it is
owing merely to a difference of natural character.

It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty.
I was watching a corpse. In that part of the United
States the dead are never left alone till the earth is
thrown upon them, and, as a friend of the family, I
had been called upon for this melancholy service on
the night preceding the interment. It was a death
which had left a family of broken hearts; for, beneath
the sheet which sank so appallingly to the outline of
a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness
whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened
the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching
loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only
a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my
memory even yet, and mingles with every conception
of female beauty.

Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share
my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having
read them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed
my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the
corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled

into the garden to enjoy the quiet of the summer
night. The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops,
and the air was breathless.

The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden
flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from
the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room,
and my own predisposition to invest death with a supernatural
interest, had raised my heart to my throat.
I walked backwards and forwards in the garden-path;
and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even
the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed
weird and fearful.

The clock struck, and I re-entered. My companions
still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber. I
trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the white
heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow of the
curtains; and my blood seemed to freeze. At the moment
when I was turning away with a strong effort at
a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter of wings,
followed by a rush and a sudden silence, struck on my
startled ear. The street was as quiet as death, and the
noise, which was far too audible to be a deception of
the fancy, had come from the side toward an uninhabited
wing of the house. My heart stood still. Another
instant, and the fire-screen was dashed down, and
a white cat rushed past me, and with the speed of light
sprang like a hyena upon the corpse. The flight of a
vampyre into the chamber would not have more
curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder ran cold
over me, but recovering my self-command, I rushed
to the animal, (of whose horrible appetite for the flesh
of the dead I had read incredulously,) and attempted
to tear her from the body. With her claws fixed in the
breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infernal spirit,
she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the stains already
upon the sheet convinced me that it would be impossible

to remove her without shockingly disfiguring the
corpse. I seized her by the throat, in the hope of
choking her, but with the first pressure of my fingers,
she flew into my face, and the infuriated animal seemed
persuaded that it was a contest for life. Half-blinded
by the fury of her attack, I loosed her for a moment,
and she immediately leaped again upon the corpse,
and had covered her feet and face with blood before I
could recover my hold upon her. The body was no
longer in a situation to be spared, and I seized her with
a desperate grasp to draw her off; but to my horror,
the half-covered and bloody corpse rose upright in her
fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat with drooping
arms, and head fallen with ghastly helplessness over
the shoulder. Years have not removed that fearful
spectacle from my eyes.

The corpse sank back, and I succeded in throttling
the monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the
window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid
the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead,
and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the
violated remains, and left them again to their repose.
My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I
paced the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible
relief, dawned over the mountains.