with a terrific effort he breaks the spell and denounces her unhallowed fascination in burning words. However, his victory is short indeed. She persecutes him most bitterly, and when he unburdens his troubles to his college professor the only result is a prescription of chloral and bromide, which promptly goes into the gutter. With devilish craft the vampire destroys his reputation as a scholar, and brings about ill-natured gossip and comment. She is able to confuse his brain during his lectures, so that he talks unintelligible nonsense and his classes become the laughing-stock of the university, until at length the authorities are obliged to suspend him from his position. Almost in despair he cries: “And the most dreadful part of it all is my loneliness. Here I sit in a common-place English bow-window looking out upon a common-place English street, with its garish buses and its lounging policemen, and behind me there hangs a shadow which is out of all keeping with the age and place. In the home of knowledge I am weighed down and tortured by a power of which science knows nothing. No magistrate would listen to me. No paper would discuss my case. No doctor would believe my symptoms. My own most intimate friends would only look upon it as a sign of brain derangement. I am out of all touch with my kind.”
The unfortunate victim is driven even deeper still by this unhallowed influence, which causes him to rob a bank, violently assault a friend, and finally to come within an ace of mutilating the features of his betrothed. At length the persecution ceases with the sudden death of the vampire, Miss Penelosa.
The True Story of a Vampire is a pathetic little story, very exquisitely told, in Studies of Death, by Stanislaus Eric, Count Stenbock, who wrote some verses of extraordinary charm in Love, Sleep, and Dreams; Myrtle, Rue, and Cypress; The Shadow of Death; and who at least once in The Other Side told a macabre legend with most powerful and haunting effect. A mysterious Count Vardaleh visits the remote styrian castle of old Baron Wronski, and before long attains an occult influence over the boy heir, Gabriel. The lad wastes away, and Count Vardaleh is heard to murmur: “My darling, I fain would spare thee; but thy life is my life, and I must live, I who would rather die. Will God not have any mercy on me? Oh, oh! life; oh, the torture of life! … O Gabriel, my beloved! My life, yes, life—oh, my life? I am sure this is
