A Rogue's Tragedy by Bernard Capes — Read

Louis-Marie was really ill, though his complaint, it seemed, baffled diagnosis. He was sunk in an extreme debility, which from a moral had become a physical one. There appeared nothing wrong with him constitutionally; but he dreamt, and saw vampires, and the substance of his eternal illusions figured in "blood-boltered" forms. Nightly they sucked him, and daily his increasing wanness testified to their inhuman appetites. He faded to a frail image of himself, very pitiful in its suggestion of a sick prince of porcelain. Any sudden noise, like the opening of a door, was enough now to make him start and shake with terror. A footstep outside the window vibrated in his nerves for minutes after it had passed. His heart was become a very seismograph to record alarms. But the unexpected entrance of anyone into the room most perturbed him. A furtive aghast look, an artificial rally and instant physical collapse, were the almost certain consequences of such an intrusion. Once, at a chance mention of Bonito's name, he sunk back in his chair as if under a stroke. Cartouche, who was present and distressfully concerned, attributed his state to a sort of hysterical resentment against that minister of ill-luck, and struggled to overlay some conscious contempt of it with a real anxious commiseration.

"Have you soothed him, reassured him?" he asked of Molly Bramble, when that frail sweet of Nature came down to him to report upon the invalid.