SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM;OR,THE HISTORY OF ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN.
SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM;OR,THE HISTORY OF ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN.
CHAPTER I.THE GIRLHOOD OF ETHERIAL.
“Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned?”
In a mean and sterile district of Vermont, which shall be nameless, but which exhibits on every side stretches of bare land, with here and there the variety of clumps of gnarled and stunted oaks, Etherial Softdown was born. If mountains give birth to heroes, what ought to have been the product of a low-lying land like this, on whose dreary basins the summer’s sun wilted the feeble vegetation, and the bleak winds of winter wrestled fiercely with the scrubby oaks, whose crooked and claw-like limbs seemed talons of some hideous, gaunt and reptile growth?
On the edge of one of the most desolate of these stretches, and beneath the shelter of the most ugly of these demonised oaks, were scattered the storm-blackened sheds of a miserable hamlet, in one of which, for there were no degrees in their comfortless dilapidation, the family of our heroine, the Softdowns, resided, and another yet smaller and at some distance apart from the rest, was occupied by her father, who was a shoemaker, asa workshop. This was one of those strange, out-of-the-way, starved and dismal looking places that you sometimes stumble upon in our prosperous land—which ought long since to have been deserted with the vanished cause of the temporary prosperity which had given it birth—but in which the people seem to be petrified into a morbid serenity of endurance, and look as if under the spell of some great Enchanter they awaited his awakening touch.
The child, which was the birth of a coarsely organised mother, was as drolly deformed with its squint eye and stooping shoulders as fancy could depict the elfin genius of such a scene. Dirty, bedraggled and neglected, with unkempt locks tangled and writhing like snakes about her face, and sharp, gray animal eyes gleaming from beneath, the ill-conditioned creature darted impishly hither and yon amidst the hamlet hovels, or peering from some thicket of weird oaks, started the stolid neighbors with the dread that apparitions bring.
Indeed, so wilful, unexpected and eccentric were her movements, that the people, in addition to regarding the oaf-like child with a half feeling of dread, gave her the credit of being half-witted as well. There was a hungry sharpness in her eye that made them shrink; a furious, raging, craving lust for something, they could not understand what, which startled them beyond measure; for, as in their stagnant lives, they had never been much troubled with souls themselves, they could not understand this soul-famine that so whetted those fierce eager eyes.
The father, Softdown, who appears to have been something more developed than the mother, and to have possessed a grotesque and rugged wit, more remarkable for its directness than its delicacy, became the sole instructor and companion of the distraught child, who readily acquired from him an uncouth method of enouncing trite truisms unexpectedly, which was to constitute in after life one of her chief, because most successful weapons.
Etherial early displayed a passion for acquiring not knowledge,but a facility of gibberish, which proved exhausting enough to the shallow receptacles around her, especially as her mode of getting at the names and properties of things so closely resembled the monkey’s method of studying physical laws. She had first to burn her fingers before she could be made to comprehend that fire was hot, but that was enough about fire for this wise child; she remembered it ever after as a physical sensation, and therefore it had ever after a name for her; and so with all other experiences, they were to her sensational, not spiritual or intellectual. The name of a truth could come to her with great vividness through a blow or pain of whatever character that might be purely physical, but through no higher senses, for these she did not yet possess. Of a moral sense she seemed now to develop no more consciousness than any other wild animal, but in her thememory of sensationtook the place of mind and soul.
Thus passed the girlhood of our slattern oaf—shy and sullen—avoiding others herself, and gladly avoided by them, with the single exception of her father, from whom her strong imitative or sympathetic faculty was daily acquiring a rough, keen readiness of repartee, in the use of which she found abundant home-practice in defending herself against the smarting malignity of the matron Softdown, who charmingly combined in her person and habits all and singly the cleanly graces of the fishwife.
At sixteen, with no advance in personal loveliness, with passions fiercely developed, a mind nearly utterly blank, a taste for tawdry finery quite as drolly crude as that displayed by the plantation negresses of the South, and manners so fantastically awkward and eccentric as to leave the general impression that she was underwitted, Etherial suddenly married a lusty and good-looking young Quaker, threw off her bedraggled plumes, and became a member of that prim order.
Now her career commences in earnest, for this was the first great step in her life in which she seems to have attained tosome gleams of the knowledge of that extraordinary power of Odic irradiation and absorption which was afterwards to be exercised with such remarkable results.
She did not make her great discovery without comprehending its meaning quickly. She first perceived that, day by day, she grew more comely to look upon—that her figure was becoming erect, and losing its harsh angularities—the pitiless obliquity of her features growing more reconciled to harmonious lines—and last, and most astounding, that the immediate result of the contact of marriage had been a rapid increase of her own spiritual and mental illumination, accompanied as well by a corresponding decline on the part of the husband in both these respects.
Here was a secret for you with a vengeance! Like an electric flash, a new light burst upon Etherial; and, as there was only one feeling of which her being was capable towards man, she chuckled over the delicious secret which now opened out before her with a terrible gloating.
Glorious discovery! Hah! the spiritual vampire might feed on his strength—might grow strong on this cannibalism of the soul! and what of him if she dragged him down into idiocy? Served him right! Did Etherial care that his spiritual death must be her life? She laughed and screamed with the joy of unutterable ferocity! Eureka! Eureka! They shall all be my slaves! They taunt me with being born without a soul, with being underwitted! I shall devour souls hereafter by the hundreds! I shall grow fat upon them! We shall see who has the wit! Their thoughts shall be my thoughts, their brains shall work for me, their spirits shall inform my frame! Ah, glorious! glorious! I shall live on souls hereafter! I shall go up and down in the land, seeking whom I may devour! Delicious! Delectable Etherial!