“Besides, how can you tell that your religion and mine
are the same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why you must die—_everyone_ must die; and all are happier when they do. Come home.”

“My father has gone on with the clergyman to the churchyard. I thought
you knew she was to be buried today.”

“She? I don’t trouble my head about peasants. I don’t know who she is,”
answered Carmilla, with a flash from her fine eyes. “She is the poor girl who fancied she saw a ghost a fortnight ago, and
has been dying ever since, till yesterday, when she expired.”

“Tell me nothing about ghosts. I shan’t sleep tonight if you do.”

“I hope there is no plague or fever coming; all this looks very like
it,” I continued. “The swineherd’s young wife died only a week ago, and
she thought something seized her by the throat as she lay in her bed,
and nearly strangled her. Papa says such horrible fancies do accompany
some forms of fever. She was quite well the day before. She sank
afterwards, and died before a week.”

“Well, _her_ funeral is over, I hope, and _her_ hymn sung; and our ears
shan’t be tortured with that discord and jargon. It has made me
nervous. Sit down here, beside me; sit close; hold my hand; press it
hard-hard-harder.”

We had moved a little back, and had come to another seat. 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. Then he advanced to the window with many smiles and salutations, and
his hat in his left hand, his fiddle under his arm, and with a fluency
that never took breath, he gabbled a long advertisement of all his
accomplishments, and the resources of the various arts which he placed
at our service, and the curiosities and entertainments which it was in
his power, at our bidding, to display. “Will your ladyships be pleased to buy an amulet against the oupire,
which is going like the wolf, I hear, through these woods,” he said
dropping his hat on the pavement. “They are dying of it right and left
and here is a charm that never fails; only pinned to the pillow, and
you may laugh in his face.”

These charms consisted of oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic
ciphers and diagrams upon them. Carmilla instantly purchased one, and so did I. He was looking up, and we were smiling down upon him, amused; at least,
I can answer for myself. His piercing black eye, as he looked up in our
faces, seemed to detect something that fixed for a moment his
curiosity,

In an instant he unrolled a leather case, full of all manner of odd
little steel instruments. “See here, my lady,” he said, displaying it, and addressing me, “I
profess, among other things less useful, the art of dentistry. Plague
take the dog!” he interpolated. “Silence, beast! He howls so that your
ladyships can scarcely hear a word. Your noble friend, the young lady
at your right, has the sharpest tooth,—long, thin, pointed, like an
awl, like a needle; ha, ha! With my sharp and long sight, as I look up,
I have seen it distinctly; now if it happens to hurt the young lady,
and I think it must, here am I, here are my file, my punch, my nippers;
I will make it round and blunt, if her ladyship pleases; no longer the
tooth of a fish, but of a beautiful young lady as she is. Hey? Is the
young lady displeased? Have I been too bold? Have I offended her?”

The young lady, indeed, looked very angry as she drew back from the
window. “How dares that mountebank insult us so? Where is your father? I shall
demand redress from him. My father would have had the wretch tied up to
the pump, and flogged with a cart whip, and burnt to the bones with the
cattle brand!”

She retired from the window a step or two, and sat down, and had hardly
lost sight of the offender, when her wrath subsided as suddenly as it
had risen, and she gradually recovered her usual tone, and seemed to
forget the little hunchback and his follies. My father was out of spirits that evening. On coming in he told us that
there had been another case very similar to the two fatal ones which
had lately occurred. The sister of a young peasant on his estate, only
a mile away, was very ill, had been, as she described it, attacked very
nearly in the same way, and was now slowly but steadily sinking.