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 favor 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 backward and forward 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 an 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 succeeded 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.