"Yes, very good… a letter…" Here it was, still in her hand.
"That is excellent. I worry, too, for all young lovers." To Mina's surprise, the good doctor suddenly began to sing, and before she understood exactly what was happening or why, his arm—that of a gentlemanly dancing partner—had gone around her, and the two of them were waltzing on the terrace, under the bemused gaze of Jack Seward.
Abruptly the dance was over. Van Helsing, with something mesmeric in his eyes, was gazing directly into Mina's. Softly he said: "There are darknesses in life, and there are lights. You are one of the lights, dear Mina. Go now, see your friend."
Moments later, sitting down beside the bed in Lucy's room, Mina took hold of the poor wasted hand. There was good news to relate, news that at least to its bearer seemed important enough to justify waking the patient.
Somewhere a door, escaping from some servants careless hand, banged shut. Outside in the great curve of drive, a horse's hooves scuffed gravel. Presently Lucy stirred. Her eyes opened slowly, then focused with some difficulty.
Her voice was soft and tentative. "Mina, dearest… where have you been?"
"You're freezing cold, Luce." Mina, distracted from her own good news by Lucy's sad condition, gently rubbed the cold hand she was holding, trying thus to encourage life.
Lucy pulled herself up a little in the bed and summoned up a trace of her old coquettishness.
"And you're so warm. Did you know, dear, Jack Seward has been playing doctor with me?"
"I know."
"Did you meet him? I've told him all about you."
"Yes, I met Dr. Seward, Lucy. At the party, weeks and weeks ago, remember?" Mina reached to pull an untouched food tray closer on the bedside table. "He's a doctor for lunatics, and you are not a lunatic. What you need is proper care. Now eat your porridge, Goldilocks."
Weakly Lucy turned her head away, rejecting the spoon as if its contents were disgusting. She whispered: "I'm too fat. Arthur loathes me fat."
Mina felt a chill as she contrasted those words with the fact of the almost cadaverous form before her. Gently but firmly, as if dealing with a baby, she got a spoonful of oatmeal into Lucy's mouth.
The girl made a face, but swallowed. Then she squinted questioningly at her caretaker.
"What is it, Mina? You actually look happy for a change."
Mina flushed slightly.
Lucy managed to produce a smile. "You've heard from Jonathan. Is that it?"
Mina nodded. Now her good news came pouring out in a rush. "Not exactly from him, but yes, he's safe.
He's been six weeks—longer, now—in a hospital in Budapest. A letter came just now from one of the good sisters who are caring for him. They say he needs me badly, and I must go to him at once—but I do so hate to leave you like this—"
Making a great effort, Lucy pushed herself further up in the bed to hug Mina with failing arms. Softly she murmured in Mina's ear: "Mina—go to him. Love him, and marry him, right then and there. Don't waste another precious moment of life without each other."
Exhausted, Lucy fell back on her pillows. The two girls stared at each other in silence for a long moment, seeming to exchange important confidences without the need for speech.
Then Lucy pulled off her engagement ring. The diamonded gold slid easily from her wasted finger.
She held it out to her friend. "Take this, sister… Let it be my wedding gift to you—and Jonathan. Take it…"
Mina, overwhelmed and unable to speak, kept shaking her head, trying to refuse.
"Bad luck if you say no." Lucy's voice had fallen back into a terrible whisper. Her strength was obviously failing.
Again she rallied, briefly. "Tell Jonathan… oceans of love from me… millions of kisses…"
On the evening of the day of Mina's departure Dracula, sitting impatient and alone in the private dining room at Rule's Cafe, his sensitive hearing tuned to every opening of the street door of the restaurant, was brought a note by a waiter.
As he accepted the paper a shadow crossed the youthful face of the elegantly dressed man; he had not for a moment really expected that the woman he loved (and who, he knew, loved him, despite all her formal protestations about a fiancé) would temporize, play coy, and quibble about coming to him again. But perhaps some truly unavoidable circumstance had arisen—
Tipping the waiter with a common coin, he tore open the envelope to discover that as he had expected, it came from Mina. It was the content of the message that brought total shock.
My dearest Prince, forgive me, but I cannot be with you now or any other time. I have received word from my fiancé in Budapest. I am on my way to join him. We are to be married.
Forever your love,
Mina.
Convulsively the prince's hand crumpled the note. All thoughts of love and tenderness were gone, wiped out in an instant, in a collision with a red wall of rage and injury.
He could hear himself, and others outside his room of privacy could hear him, breathing with the sounds of a wounded animal.
The note had not been delivered until well past midnight, and by then Mina was almost a full day along on her trip by train to Budapest. She was following the route taken months ago by her beloved Jonathan; from London, via Dover, to Paris, and thence eastward.
Once more she opened and reread the letter from Budapest, concentrating now upon its closing sentences.
P.S. My patient being asleep, I open this to let you know something more. He has told me all about you, and that you are shortly to be his wife. All blessings to you both! He has had some fearful shock—so says our doctor—and in his delirium his ravings have been dreadful; of wolves and poison and blood; of ghosts and demons; and I fear to say of what. Be careful of him always that there may be nothing of this kind to excite him for a long time to come; the traces of an illness such as his do not lightly die away. We should have written long ago, but we knew nothing of his friends. He came in the train from Klausenburg, and the guard was told by the stationmaster there that he rushed into the station shouting for a ticket for home. Seeing from his violent demeanor that he was English, they gave him a ticket for the farthest station on the way thither that the train reached.
Be assured that he is well cared for. He is truly getting on well, and I have no doubt in a few weeks will be all himself. But be careful of him for safety's sake. There are, I pray God and St. Joseph and Ste. Mary, many, many happy years for you both.
While Mina Murray rode ever farther into the east, at Hillingham the bitter struggle went on, day after day, night after night. There were afternoon hours when Lucy seemed on the road to recovery, times in the morning when she appeared to linger at the point of death. One day Mrs. Westenra, tottering in to see her daughter when the doctors were absent, was offended by the rank smell of garlic and ordered Van Helsing's daily crop of small white garlic flowers thrown away; a loss that caused the professor great consternation when he discovered it.
Three days after the first transfusion of blood, another became necessary; this time Dr. Seward was the donor. Taking his turn in the chair at Lucy's bedside, he thought that no man could know, until he experienced it, what it was to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loved.
And in another three days, a fresh deterioration in the condition of the patient required a third transfusion, this time from Van Helsing's veins.
And almost a week after that, on Sunday, the eighteenth of September, when Arthur Holmwood was in attendance at his father's deathbed, the operation was yet once more repeated, and Quincey Morris became the fourth man to contribute blood to Lucy.
On the night of the next day the Texan, a trifle pale but maintaining that he had regained sufficient strength for any kind of action, was cradling a Winchester rifle in his arms as he walked beside Jack Seward down the stair into the great hall of Hillingham.
Quincey was saying to his old hunting comrade: "Jack, you know I love that girl same as you."
"I have no doubt of it, old fellow."
"That ol' Dutchman really know what he's doin'? How much blood have we given her, and where's it all goin'?"
Seward shook his head wearily. "I learned years ago that I'm not wise enough to question Van Helsing's methods… Frankly, Quincey, I'm at my wit's end."
Quincey rubbed his arm, still sore from the professor's needle. "Well, he could outspook a Borneo witch doctor, if ya ask me. Know what this reminds me of? I had a fine mare down in the pampas once, and one of those big bats they call vampires got at her in the night. What with the bat feeding and the vein left open, there wasn't enough blood in her to let her stand up, and I had to shoot her. Damn fine animal."
Van Helsing, putting on his coat in preparation to go out, joined the two men at the front door. If he had heard Quincey's comments, he gave no sign of any reaction to them.
The old doctor said: "Jack, hurry, man, I have much to tell you—and important things I must learn for myself tonight." He shifted his gaze to the other. "Guard her well, Mr. Morris!"
"Reckon I will. " Quincey's tone and manner made it plain that he did not care much for this old man.
Van Helsing laughed, oblivious to what the Texan thought of him. The professor, despite the setbacks and the protracted struggle, was still caught up in the joy of battle, the elation of discovery. "If we fail, your precious Lucy becomes the devil's whore. I advise you, rely more on the garlic and the crucifix than on your rifle."
Quincey, now ready to punch the old man out, moved forward half a step. "You're a sick old buzzard—"
Van Helsing sobered. "And I suppose that you are sane men, both of you. If so, hear me out! The truth, as I have tried repeatedly to tell you, is that Lucy invites the beast into her bedchamber! She suckles the beast's own diseased blood, and it must transform her, make her what it is!"
The Texan, feeling helpless, taken aback by the earnest intensity with which the old man made this monstrous assertion, looked to Seward for counsel, but got none.
Van Helsing laughed again, a sound containing more than a touch of hysteria, while the two younger men now stared at him as if both of them were paralyzed.
"Into the coach, Jack," his mentor ordered, recovering from his emotional fit. "We must talk. And I must go where I can learn. What we have done for our young Miss Lucy so far is not enough."
"Where is that, sir—where you can learn?"
"I have had word from an old friend. In the British Museum there is a room where he will allow me entrance, where certain secrets may be made known to me, if I know where to look. I do not want to waste an hour. We go now!"
Arthur Holmwood's father still clung to life, in another sickbed in another house, at Ring. Meanwhile, tonight, Arthur was watching at the bedside of his beloved Lucy. Aware of Van Helsing's warnings, though far from understanding them, Holmwood kept his vigil with a brace of loaded pistols handy on the table, beside the vase holding the old professor's daily crop of garlic flowers.
But on Arthur the long days of futile struggle against he knew not what, of bitter grief as both his father and the woman he loved lingered at the point of death, had taken their inevitable toll. He was having trouble staying awake.
And now, even as Arthur dozed off, Lucy suddenly awakened. The young woman's eyes were open in an instant, and she experienced a surge of joy and demonic energy. She scarcely glanced at the figure of her fiancé nodding beside her bed. But she still lay quietly—because she knew—knew with a deep, unholy happiness—that there was no need to move.
Her vampire lover was approaching, and he would certainly find her, as he had so many times before. No watch set by ordinary men, no barriers they might put up, no scheme they might devise, could keep him out.
Quincey Morris had at last been persuaded by the old man's repeated references to a bloodsucking beast. It was for this reason that the Texan tonight had taken up his lonely, self-appointed vigil on the grounds. Quincey—most often with Seward and Holmwood as his companions—had hunted large predators from Sumatra to Siberia, and it was a game he well understood.
Or so he had thought.
It was a quiet night, though a trifle windy now—no sign of any intruders on the grounds. Of course there never was. And yet, no matter what kind of defenses were arranged, it seemed that the enemy—if there was a real, predatory enemy, and Van Helsing was not a lunatic—somehow, one way or another, got through.
Quincey, lost in contemplation of the seemingly unresolvable problem, was yet alerted by his keen hearing, or by some hunter's instinct. He turned, in time to glimpse the onrushing presence of a shadowy, inhuman figure. In the next instant he had snapped up his rifle and fired at it—accurately, his instinct told him, yet without effect.
In the next moment Quincey Morris had been knocked down, and knocked out, by some superhuman embodiment of force that rushed on past him in the direction of the house.
The leaping form of a wolf came smashing straight in through the glass of Lucy's French window. The shock and noise of crashing glass instantly brought Holmwood wide-awake in his bedside chair; but Arthur's awakening came too late, and in any case he was ill prepared to take any effective action. In a moment he had been hurled aside by the same force that had struck down Quincey, and crumpled unconscious in a corner of the room.
In the next instant the great gray beast shape, slavering, leaped upon the bed, where Lucy, laughing, crooning, fiercely rejoicing, welcomed it with open arms.
Gripping the short fur of the huge head in both her hands, she pulled the wolf fangs hungrily against her body…
It was at almost the same moment that a carriage pulled to a stop in Great Russell Street, near the middle of London. In a moment the vehicle had discharged two passengers before the British Museum, the huge bulk of the building at this hour almost entirely dark.
Late on the previous evening, as usual, the endless book stacks of the reading room had been closed to ordinary visitors. But now, in the small hours of the morning, one of the museum's elderly senior curators was soon guiding a pair of urgent seekers after knowledge through part of the vast building: one visitor was the curator's old friend Abraham Van Helsing, and the second was the worried Dr. Seward.
The destination sought by the three men was a small and very private reading room, whose unmarked door the curator had to unlock with a private key to allow them access.
The door of the comparatively small room creaked in on rusty hinges. At once Van Helsing, muttering under his breath, plunged in urgently among the tall dusty stacks and shelves, immersing himself in the smell of old paper and old wood, while the curator muttered words of guidance, and Seward held a pair of lamps.
The professor was soon elated to discover the very book he had come looking for.
It was an old and heavy volume, fastened with a locked clasp, which the curator had to produce another key to open.
Eagerly Van Helsing blew dust from his find, then propped it on a reading stand and began turning the stiff pages. The bulk of the printed text, he saw without surprise, was in German, the rest in other languages from farther east, tongues far less commonly understood in London. But most of them the professor could read, at least sufficiently to guide him in his search.
With Seward anxiously hanging over his shoulder, continuing to hold a lamp where it would be most useful, Van Helsing read, tracing lines of text with his finger, muttering to himself, translating scraps of information aloud into English.
"Here begins the frightening and shocking story of the wild berserker Prince Dracula. How he impaled people and roasted them and boiled their heads in a kettle and skinned people and hacked them to pieces and drank their blood."
Grim satisfaction grew in the old man. What he was reading confirmed what he had all along suspected. It gave him a better grip upon the fantastic and yet sobering truth.
But neither of the physicians realized that the knowledge they were gaining came too late to do their patient any good.
That b
attle was already lost.
12
Sunrise had come to Hillingham, on the morning after the final monstrous assault on Lucy. Everyone in the house—except perhaps Mrs. Westenra, from whom the bitter defeat was still concealed—knew by now that the long, agonizing weeks of struggle for the young woman's life were finally drawing to their grim conclusion. The ugly truth seemed to hang in the air, though no one voiced it openly, and almost no one had any real understanding of its nature.
Among those who had fought to save the girl, only one man, Van Helsing, had any real comprehension of the horror that menaced her. And for him that knowledge was very hard to act upon successfully, not least because it was almost impossible to communicate to others. How, without himself being confined as a madman, to convince the skeptical moderns of these last years of the enlightened nineteenth century? Indeed, there were hours when the professor almost despaired of ever being able to convey the truth.
Quincey Morris had suffered no serious injury from his mysterious assailant. On recovering his wits to find himself sprawled on the dewy lawn, a trifle bruised but otherwise unharmed, the Texan had become an enthusiastic convert to Van Helsing's announced view that a great beast of some kind must be responsible for Lucy's condition—a beast that was somehow devilishly immune to Winchesters. On that point Morris now stood ready to offer personal testimony.
To no one's surprise, Arthur Holmwood's father, Lord Godalming, had passed away during the night, in his ancestral home at Ring. Very early this morning Arthur had received the news by special messenger. Now, struggling to cope with his father's death—long expected but no lighter a burden for that—Arthur was trying to catch some sleep on a sofa in a room near Lucy's.
Bram Stoker's Dracula Page 12
