"You think to baffle me, you bastards!" I called back to them. "With your pale faces all there in a row, like sheep in a butcher's! You shall be sorry yet, each one of you. You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more." To date, you see, they had found forty-nine of my fifty boxes, and desecrated Hosts within them; my idea was to keep them thinking about the one box they had not found, and turn their minds away from speculation on whether some of the forty-nine might be fakes, or might still be quite comfortable to me despite the sacrilegious treatment to which they had been subjected.
"My revenge has just begun!" I raved on, waving my fist, shouting with what I hoped would sound like the bravado often used to cover a forced retreat. "I spread it over centuries, for time is on my side, and I can afford to wait. Your girls that you all love are mine already, and through them you and others shall yet be mine-my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!"
With a final threatening wave I turned and fled. Of course I wanted to leave the impression that I was getting out of the country, but it would hardly have done to come right out and say so, and expect to be believed. I retired a short distance beyond Piccadilly Circus, into Soho, where I paused in a secret place to make sure that my fiftieth original box was still secure, then went to hire a cart to transport it to the docks.
Van Helsing and his crew meanwhile returned to the asylum. Mina naturally heard of the day's exploits with breathless interest. Seward records in his diary that "she grew snowy white at times when danger had seemed to threaten her husband, and red at others when his devotion to her was manifest."
She also tried, in accordance with my plan, to encourage an end to hostilities. She hardly dared speak openly in my favor, of course, but attempted to at least plant some seed of sympathy:
"Jonathan… and you, all my true, true friends… I know that you must fight, that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. The poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all… you must be pitiful to him too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction."
Harker leapt to his feet for his reply: "May God give him into my hand just long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond it I could send his soul forever and ever to burning hell I would do it!"
And Mina: "Oh, hush!… you will crush me with fear and horror… I have been thinking all this long, long day of it-that perhaps… someday… I too may need such pity. And that some other like you-and with equal cause for anger-may deny it to me!"
According to Seward this appeal left the "men all in tears," and Mina "wept too, to see that her sweeter counsels had prevailed." Alas for her hopes, that gang of scoundrels was as determined as ever to impale me one day on a stake: that they might now be willing to murmur a prayer or shed a tear whilst murdering me was not, from my point of view, such a very great improvement.
Meanwhile I had got my fiftieth box hauled to Doolittle's Wharf, where I was pleased to locate the Czarina Catherine, a Russian ship bound for the Black Sea and thence on up the Danube. Visiting the docks, I wore a straw hat so that I could hardly fail to be noticed and engaged Czarina's captain in a rather conspicuous argument, even summoning up some fog to shroud his ship until I should have my box safely on board; subtlety of an order to challenge Sherlock Holmes was hardly in order against my present foe. The box I had conspicuously addressed to Count Dracula, Galatz, via Varna; and before leaving London I wrote to my agent Hildesheim in Galatz with instructions for its reception.
I of course booked no passage for myself, the idea being that my hunters were to think I was in the box, even as I had made the outward trip. But at the turn of the tide I boarded the ship, ostensibly to see to the box's storage. This was after sunset, and none of the crew saw me again. They cast off, thinking I had gone ashore. Soon they were right, for when the tide next turned-to transport myself over flowing water is much easier at the turning-I flew in bat-shape back to Southend-on-Sea, and thence made my way back to Purfleet before dawn, to obtain some much-needed rest in my hidden lair on the overgrown grounds of Carfax. I had taken care to bring with me from the ship some small splinters from her main mast and planks, and a little soil and mold from crevices below. With these materials at hand I could from afar keep track of Czarina Catherine's movements, and even provide her with my choice of winds.
Before sinking into a stupor at dawn I managed to transfer from my mind to Mina's, in her bedroom only a few yards away, my assurances that all was going well so far and also my idea for the next step in our little game.
She thought it a clever plan and at once had Van Helsing awakened. She then suggested to the professor, as her own idea, that he should try to hypnotize her in order to discover my location through the mental bond that our exchange of blood was known to have forged between us. From a faked trance she soon reported darkness, and "the lapping of water. It is gurgling by, and little waves leap…"
Mina's imitation of the hypnotic state was superbly done, or at any rate done well enough to make Van Helsing take the bait. He soon pronounced that now he knew: what was in the count's mind when he seized that money, though Jonathan's so fierce knife put him in danger… He meant escape. Hear me, ESCAPE! He saw that with but one earth box left, and a pack of men following like dogs after a fox, this London was no place for him. He have take his last earth box on board a ship… Tally Ho!… Now more than ever we must find him if we have to follow him to the jaws of hell!
This was not the hoped-for reaction and Mina grew paler as she asked faintly: "Why?"
"Because," Van Helsing answered solemnly, "he can live for centuries, and you are but mortal woman. Time is now to be dreaded-since once he put that mark upon your throat."
And Mina, not knowing how else to reply, fell down in a faint beneath the professor's bright-eyed scrutiny. She was game, though, and tried him once more, later in the day, after the men had learned about Czarina's departure carrying an odd box placed aboard her by a vampirish man.
I asked him if it were certain that the count had remained on board the ship. He replied: "We have the best proof of that-your own evidence when in the hypnotic trance this morning." I asked him again if it were really necessary that they should pursue the count, for oh! I dread Jonathan leaving me, and I know that he would surely go if the others went.
Again Van Helsing's answer was yes. I paraphrase, omitting some five hundred words.
Mina persisted: "But will not the count take his rebuff wisely? Since he has been driven from England, will he not avoid it, as a tiger does the village from which he has been hunted?"
Van Helsing, who had now somewhat modified his earlier ideas of my "cunning more than mortal," would not entertain the thought. "Look at his persistence and endurance. With the child-brain that was of him he have long since conceive the idea of coming to a great city… the glimpse that he have had, whet his appetite only and enkeen his desire…"
The other men, except for Mina's outraged husband, who was ready to take any risk to be avenged on me, were as I had expected losing their enthusiasm for the chase. Certainly by October fifth, only two days after I had supposedly fled the country, Seward for one was already having second thoughts: