The phantasmagoric effect was
      vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong
      continual current of wind behind the draperies—giving a hideous
      and uneasy animation to the whole. In halls such as these—in a bridal chamber such as this—I passed,
      with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first
      month of our marriage—passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper—that she
      shunned me and loved me but little—I could not help perceiving;
      but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with
      a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew
      back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the
      beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in
      recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her
      ethereal nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now,
      then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the
      fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was
      habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call
      aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among
      the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the
      wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my
      longing for the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she
      had abandoned—ah, could it be forever?—upon the earth. About the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the
      Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her
      recovery was slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her
      nights uneasy; and in her perturbed state of half-slumber, she
      spoke of sounds, and of motions, in and about the chamber of the
      turret, which I concluded had no origin save in the distemper of
      her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric influences of the
      chamber itself. She became at length convalescent—finally well. Yet but a brief period elapsed, ere a second more violent
      disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering; and from this
      attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether
      recovered. Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming
      character, and of more alarming recurrence, defying alike the
      knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians. With the
      increase of the chronic disease which had thus, apparently, taken
      too sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by human
      means, I could not fail to observe a similar increase in the
      nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her excitability by
      trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more frequently
      and pertinaciously, of the sounds—of the slight sounds—and of the
      unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly
      alluded. One night, near the closing in of September, she pressed this
      distressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my
      attention. She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I
      had been watching, with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague
      terror, the workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by the
      side of her ebony bed, upon one of the ottomans of India. She
      partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds
      which she then heard, but which I could not hear—of motions which
      she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was
      rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her
      (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those
      almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations
      of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of
      that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor,
      overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to
      reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting, and
      no attendants were within call. I remembered where was deposited
      a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her
      physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But,
      as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances
      of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that
      some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my
      person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the
      very middle of the rich lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow—a
      faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect—such as might be
      fancied for the shadow of a shade. But I was wild with the
      excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and heeded these
      things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having found the
      wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a gobletful, which
      I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially
      recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank
      upon an ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall
      upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter,
      as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw,
      or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if
      from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three
      or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If
      this I saw—not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly,
      and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after
      all, I considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid
      imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady,
      by the opium, and by the hour. Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediately
      subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the
      worse took place in the disorder of my wife; so that, on the
      third subsequent night, the hands of her menials prepared her for
      the tomb, and on the fourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded body,
      in that fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride. Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles of the
      room, upon the varying figures of the drapery, and upon the
      writhing of the parti-colored fires in the censer overhead. My
      eyes then fell, as I called to mind the circumstances of a former
      night, to the spot beneath the glare of the censer where I had
      seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no
      longer; and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances
      to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed.