Source: Dracula ✓✓

“But, dear one,” she said, with such spiritual intensity that her eyes were like pole stars, “it is I who wish it; and it is not for myself. You can ask Dr. Van Helsing if I am not right; if he disagrees you may do as you will. Nay, more, if you all agree, later, you are absolved from the promise.”

He looked very sad at this, so I said that he must clear out some of them, at all events. He cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave him the same time as before for reduction.

For a man who was never in the country, and who did not evidently do much in the way of business, his knowledge and acumen were wonderful.

Lucy frets at the postponement of seeing him, but it does not touch her looks; she is a trifle stouter, and her cheeks are a lovely rose-pink. She has lost that anæmic look which she had.

You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!

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!”

It is not only that he feels sorrow, deep sorrow, for the dear, good man who has befriended him all his life, and now at the end has treated him like his own son and left him a fortune which to people of our modest bringing up is wealth beyond the dream of avarice, but Jonathan feels it on another account.

But, I beseech you, do not go forth in anger with me.

Van Helsing did not seem to notice my silence; at any rate, he showed neither chagrin nor triumph.

The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One.

In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a “bloofer lady.”

To me, a doctor’s preparations for work of any kind are stimulating and bracing, but the effect of these things on both Arthur and Quincey was to cause them a sort of consternation. They both, however, kept their courage, and remained silent and quiet.

Frankly we did our best to prevent such a testamentary disposition, and pointed out certain contingencies that might leave her daughter either penniless or not so free as she should be to act regarding a matrimonial alliance.

One of his neighbours, who did not seem to bear him any affection, said that he had gone away two days before, no one knew whither. This was corroborated by his landlord, who had received by messenger the key of the house together with the rent due, in English money.

Jonathan was holding me by the arm, the way he used to in old days before I went to school. I felt it very improper, for you can’t go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit; but it was Jonathan, and he was my husband, and we didn’t know anybody who saw us—and we didn’t care if they did—so on we walked.

God grant that we may be guided aright, and that He will deign to watch over my husband and those dear to us both, and who are in such deadly peril. As for me, I am not worthy in His sight. Alas! I am unclean to His eyes, and shall be until He may deign to let me stand forth in His sight as one of those who have not incurred His wrath.

I told her I should ask you to see her, and though she demurred at first—I know why, old fellow—she finally consented.

“If you wish,” I answered as demurely as I could.

It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realise all the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all.

“I don’t want an elephant’s soul, or any soul at all!” he said. For a few moments he sat despondently.

He is a young man, full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition.

It has the same tiny wound in the throat as has been noticed in other cases. It was terribly weak, and looked quite emaciated.

There is this peculiarity in criminals. It is so constant, in all countries and at all times, that even police, who know not much from philosophy, come to know it empirically, that it is.

Henceforth no effort of mine, no piteous cry or agonised entreaty, would make them even look at me.

Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic, when the fit of escaping is upon him!

He really did look serious when he was saying it, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit serious too—I know, Mina, you will think me a horrid flirt—though I couldn’t help feeling a sort of exultation that he was number two in one day.

I suppose he saw something in my face which checked him, for he suddenly stopped, and said with a sort of manly fervour that I could have loved him for if I had been free...

All last night she slept fitfully, being always afraid to sleep, and something weaker when she woke from it.

It was a strange thing that the patient had humour enough to see their distrust, for, coming close to me, he said in a whisper, all the while looking furtively at them:— “They think I could hurt you! Fancy me hurting you! The fools!”

He looked wild-eyed and haggard, and I greatly fear his reason has given way.

I know that if he tells me to come in secret, I must come by wile; by any device to hoodwink—even Jonathan.

But you do not find the good husbandman dig up his planted corn to see if he grow; that is for the children who play at husbandry, and not for those who take it as of the work of their life.

How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway.

Jonathan’s impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him; instinctively they cowered aside and let him pass.

In all our hunting parties and adventures in different parts of the world, Quincey Morris had always been the one to arrange the plan of action, and Arthur and I had been accustomed to obey him implicitly.

Finally she went down on her knees and implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting.

These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent Being.

When Van Helsing had seen her, he went out for a walk, leaving me in charge, with strict injunctions that I was not to leave her for a moment.

It is needless to say that the dead steersman has been reverently removed from the place where he held his honourable watch and ward till death—a steadfastness as noble as that of the young Casabianca—and placed in the mortuary to await inquest.

He didn’t git angry, as I ’oped he would, but he smiled a kind of insolent smile, with a mouth full of white, sharp teeth.

The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:— “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!”

“Me too,” said Quincey Morris laconically.

She complains of difficulty in breathing satisfactorily at times, and of heavy, lethargic sleep, with dreams that frighten her, but regarding which she can remember nothing.

His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them.

On looking at it I found in certain places little rings marked, and on examining these I noticed that one was near London on the east side, manifestly where his new estate was situated; the other two were Exeter, and Whitby on the Yorkshire coast.

This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along thought—that there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the dining-room, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them.

They were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way.

I attended to all the ghastly formalities, and the urbane undertaker proved that his staff were afflicted—or blessed—with something of his own obsequious suavity.

You are overwrought and perhaps over-anxious.

For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

His waxen hue became greenish-yellow by the contrast of his burning eyes, and the red scar on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound.

What I think of on this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal force is balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only accident or a series of accidents can balance it.

We had a sort of perfunctory supper together, and I think it cheered us all up somewhat.

The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything!

“Come,” he said at last, “tell me of London and of the house which you have procured for me.”

The wicked wolf that for half a day had paralysed London and set all the children in the town shivering in their shoes, was there in a sort of penitent mood, and was received and petted like a sort of vulpine prodigal son.

Then I descended from the side of the coach, as the calèche was close alongside, the driver helping me with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious.

The foolhardiness or ignorance of her officers was a prolific theme for comment whilst she remained in sight, and efforts were made to signal her to reduce sail in face of her danger.

Let me be prosaic so far as facts can be; it will help me to bear up, and imagination must not run riot with me.

The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace.

Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.

With an apology for my remissness, I went into my own room to get the papers from my bag.

They gave as another reason for their defeat the extraordinary state of drouth to which they had been reduced by the dusty nature of their occupation and the reprehensible distance from the scene of their labours of any place of public entertainment.

“Look! Isten szek!”—“God’s seat!”—and he crossed himself reverently.

There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing.

It seemed to me that we were simply going over and over the same ground again; and so I took note of some salient point, and found that this was so.

He has chosen this earth because it has been holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more holy still. It was sanctified to such use of man, now we sanctify it to God.

I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentally-accomplished finish; a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish.

Somehow his words and his look did not seem to accord, or else it was that his cast of face made his smile look malignant and saturnine.

His attitude to me was the same as that to the attendant; in his sublime self-feeling the difference between myself and attendant seemed to him as nothing. It looks like religious mania, and he will soon think that he himself is God.

To her I have explained my situation, but without the horrors which I may only surmise.

The blush that rose to my own cheeks somehow set us both at ease, for it was a tacit answer to her own.

Before the night shut down she was seen with sails idly flapping as she gently rolled on the undulating swell of the sea, “As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

In fact, so far as our powers extend, they are unfettered, and we are free to use them.

Lucy turned crimson, though it was only momentarily, for her poor wasted veins could not stand for long such an unwonted drain to the head.

The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner!

Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat tombstones—“thruff-steans” or “through-stones,” as they call them in the Whitby vernacular—actually project over where the sustaining cliff has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.

He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well.

I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay.

There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in his hands.