Bram Stoker

, what a wealth of sor­row in a few words! Poor Mrs. Westenra! poor Lucy!

But he is right enough about the beds and windows and things

What I saw was the Count’s head com­ing out from the win­dow. I did not

I was not alone. The room was the same, un­changed in any way since I came into it; I could see along the floor, in the bril­liant moon­light, my own foot­step

Good night, every­body.

When I went into the room, I told the man that a lady would like to see him; to which he simply answered: “Why?”

“She is go­ing through the house, and wants to see every­one in it,” I answered. “Oh, very well,” he said; “let her come in, by all means; but just wait a minute till I tidy up the place.” His method of tidy­ing was pe­cu­liar: he simply swal­lowed all the flies and spiders in the boxes be­fore I could stop him. It was quite evid­ent that he feared, or was jeal­ous of, some in­ter­fer­ence. When he had got through his dis­gust­ing task, he said cheer­fully: “Let the lady come in,” and sat down on the edge of his bed with his head down, but with his eye­lids raised so that he could see her as she entered.

“How did you know I wanted to marry any­one?” His reply was simply con­temp­tu­ous, given in a pause in which he turned his eyes from Mrs. Harker to me, in­stantly turn­ing them back again:―

“What an as­in­ine ques­tion!”

“I don’t see that at all, Mr. Ren­field,” said Mrs. Harker, at once cham­pi­on­ing me. He replied to her with as much cour­tesy and re­spect as he had shown con­tempt to me:―

“You will, of course, un­der­stand, Mrs. Harker, that when a man is so loved and hon­oured as our host is, everything re­gard­ing him is of in­terest in our little com­munity. Dr. Se­ward is loved not only by his house­hold and his friends, but even by his pa­tients, who, be­ing some of them hardly in men­tal equi­lib­rium, are apt to dis­tort causes and ef­fects. Since I my­self have been an in­mate of a lun­atic asylum, I can­not but no­tice that the soph­istic tend­en­cies of some of its in­mates lean to­wards the er­rors of non causa and ig­nor­atio elen­chi.” I pos­it­ively opened my eyes at this new de­vel­op­ment. Here was my own pet lun­atic—the most pro­nounced of his type that I had ever met with—talk­ing ele­mental philo­sophy, and with the man­ner of a pol­ished gen­tle­man. I won­der if it was Mrs. Harker’s pres­ence which had touched some chord in his memory. If this new phase was spon­tan­eous, or in any way due to her un­con­scious in­flu­ence, she must have some rare gift or power.

“Why, I my­self am an in­stance of a man who had a strange be­lief. Indeed, it was no won­der that my friends were alarmed, and in­sisted on my be­ing put un­der con­trol. I used to fancy that life was a pos­it­ive and per­petual en­tity, and that by con­sum­ing a mul­ti­tude of live things, no mat­ter how low in the scale of cre­ation, one might in­def­in­itely pro­long life. At times I held the be­lief so strongly that I ac­tu­ally tried to take hu­man life. The doc­tor here will bear me out that on one oc­ca­sion I tried to kill him for the pur­pose of strength­en­ing my vi­tal powers by the as­sim­il­a­tion with my own body of his life through the me­dium of his blood—re­ly­ing, of course, upon the Scrip­tural phrase, ‘For the blood is the life.’ Though, in­deed, the vendor of a cer­tain nos­trum has vul­gar­ised the tru­ism to the very point of con­tempt. Isn’t that true, doc­tor?” I nod­ded as­sent, for I was so amazed that I hardly knew what to either think or say; it was hard to ima­gine that I had seen him eat up his spiders and flies not five minutes be­fore.

“Ah, that won­der­ful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain—a brain that a man should have were he much gif­ted—and a wo­man’s heart. The good God fash­ioned her for a pur­pose, be­lieve me, when He made that so good com­bin­a­tion.

I agreed heart­ily with him, and then I told him what we had found in his ab­sence: that the house which Drac­ula had bought was the very next one to my own. He was amazed, and a great con­cern seemed to come on him. “Oh that we had known it be­fore!” he said, “for then we might have reached him in time to save poor Lucy. However, ‘the milk that is spilt cries not out af­ter­wards,’ as you say. We shall not think of that, but go on our way to the end.”