Carmilla

She sat down. Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even

terrified me for a moment. It darkened, and became horribly livid; her

teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips,

while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over

with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies

seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly

tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her,

and gradually the hysteria subsided. "There! That comes of strangling

people with hymns!" she said at last. "Hold me, hold me still. It is

passing away."

And so gradually it did; and perhaps to dissipate the somber impression

which the spectacle had left upon me, she became unusually animated and

chatty; and so we got home.

This was the first time I had seen her exhibit any definable symptoms of

that delicacy of health which her mother had spoken of. It was the first

time, also, I had seen her exhibit anything like temper.

Both passed away like a summer cloud; and never but once afterwards did

I witness on her part a momentary sign of anger. I will tell you how

it happened.

She and I were looking out of one of the long drawing room windows, when

there entered the courtyard, over the drawbridge, a figure of a wanderer

whom I knew very well. He used to visit the schloss generally twice

a year.

It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that

generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was

smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in

buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I

could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a

magic lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a

salamander, and in the other a mandrake. These monsters used to make my

father laugh. They were compounded of parts of monkeys, parrots,

squirrels, fish, and hedgehogs, dried and stitched together with great

neatness and startling effect. He had a fiddle, a box of conjuring

apparatus, a pair of foils and masks attached to his belt, several other

mysterious cases dangling about him, and a black staff with copper

ferrules in his hand. His companion was a rough spare dog, that followed

at his heels, but stopped short, suspiciously at the drawbridge, and in

a little while began to howl dismally.

In the meantime, the mountebank, standing in the midst of the courtyard,

raised his grotesque hat, and made us a very ceremonious bow, paying his

compliments very volubly in execrable French, and German not

much better.

Then, disengaging his fiddle, he began to scrape a lively air to which

he sang with a merry discord, dancing with ludicrous airs and activity,

that made me laugh, in spite of the dog's howling.