18 September
"My dearest Lucy,
"Such a sad blow has befallen us. Mr. Hawkins has died very suddenly.
Some may not think it so sad for us, but we had both come to so love him that
it really seems as though we had lost a father. I never knew either father or
mother, so that the dear old man's death is a real blow to me. Jonathan is
greatly distressed. 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. He says the amount of responsibility which it puts upon him
makes him nervous. He begins to doubt himself. I try to cheer him up, and my
belief in him helps him to have a belief in himself. But it is here that the
grave shock that he experienced tells upon him the most. Oh, it is too hard
that a sweet, simple, noble, strong nature such as his, a nature which enabled
him by our dear, good friend's aid to rise from clerk to master in a few years,
should be so injured that the very essence of its strength is gone. Forgive me,
dear, if I worry you with my troubles in the midst of your own happiness, but
Lucy dear, I must tell someone, for the strain of keeping up a brave and
cheerful appearance to Jonathan tries me, and I have no one here that I can confide
in. I dread coming up to
"Your loving
Mina Harker" DR. SEWARD' DIARY
20 September.--Only resolution and habit can let me make an entry tonight. I am too miserable, too low spirited, too sick of the world and all in it, including life itself, that I would not care if I heard this moment the flapping of the wings of the angel of death. And he has been flapping those grim wings to some purpose of late, Lucy's mother and Arthur's father, and now . . .Let me get on with my work.
I duly relieved Van Helsing in his watch over Lucy. We wanted Arthur to go to rest also, but he refused at first. It was only when I told him that we should want him to help us during the day, and that we must not all break down for want of rest, lest Lucy should suffer, that he agreed to go.
Van Helsing was very kind to him. "Come, my child," he said. "Come with me. You are sick and weak, and have had much sorrow and much mental pain, as well as that tax on your strength that we know of. You must not be alone, for to be alone is to be full of fears and alarms. Come to the drawing room, where there is a big fire, and there are two sofas. You shall lie on one, and I on the other, and our sympathy will be comfort to each other, even though we do not speak, and even if we sleep."
Arthur went off with him, casting back a longing look on Lucy's face, which lay in her pillow, almost whiter than the lawn. She lay quite still, and I looked around the room to see that all was as it should be. I could see that the Professor had carried out in this room, as in the other, his purpose of using the garlic. The whole of the window sashes reeked with it, and round Lucy's neck, over the silk handkerchief which Van Helsing made her keep on, was a rough chaplet of the same odorous flowers.
Lucy was breathing somewhat stertorously, and her face was at its worst, for the open mouth showed the pale gums. Her teeth, in the dim, uncertain light, seemed longer and sharper than they had been in the morning. In particular, by some trick of the light, the canine teeth looked longer and sharper than the rest.
I sat down beside her, and presently she moved uneasily. At the same moment there came a sort of dull flapping or buffeting at the window. I went over to it softly, and peeped out by the corner of the blind. There was a full moonlight, and I could see that the noise was made by a great bat, which wheeled around, doubtless attracted by the light, although
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