Three nights later Harker saw me leave again by the same means, and when I was absent he attempted to get out of the castle by the main entrance. I had left the door securely locked, for his own good, and he turned away, baffled, to seek another exit.
A door that I had neglected to fasten quite securely led him into the west wing. This was, he surmised, "the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days." He was led to this conclusion by the presence of "great windows… and consequently light and comfort" here where "sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach" because of the height and steepness of the cliffs below. Here he supposed that "of old, ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars." Fortunately the ladies of old were, like those of his own time, somewhat tougher and more capable than he ever gave them credit for being. His understanding of this point would have made a great difference, not only in his life but in my own. But I am getting ahead of my story.
Having forced his way into these closed-off rooms, Harker for a while admired their spacious, moonlit windows, and the furniture, which had "more air of comfort" than any he had seen elsewhere in the castle. Although he found in the suite "a dread loneliness" which chilled his heart, "still it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of Count Dracula, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me."
Of course, notwithstanding my most solemn warnings, the clodpate schooled his nerves until he fell asleep. I returned in time to save him, though barely, and even I was struck speechless for a moment by the extent of his folly.
Without even putting down the burden with which I had reentered the castle, I listened for his breathing in his own rooms and heard it not; then I sped, faster and faster, through the dark corridors, looking and listening for my guest, with ever-growing concern. When I found the open door to the west wing, which I had thought securely locked, I could only pray that I was not too late.
Barely in time for him, I say, I came upon them, in a chamber thick with moonlight that laid enchantment upon the prosaic ruin wrought by lime. Harker supine upon an ancient couch, where he had lain down oblivious to the dust. Wanda and Melisse stood at a little distance, Biding their time, waiting their turns, whilst over him crouched fair Anna, who had actually laid the pinpoints of her canines upon his throat. I came in man-form up beside her and put my hand around that fair white neck of hers; raised her soft body that had in it the strength of ten good normal men and hurled her staggering back, halfway across the room.
I shot a glance down at Harker and saw that his vessels had not yet been tapped. He was nearly unconscious at the time, in sleep and trance commingled; lips half parted in a fatuous smile and a sliver of eyeball gleaming beneath each sagging lid. Hoping that he would not remember this scene upon the morrow, or would recall it only as a dream, I held my voice to a whisper despite my rage.
"How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I have forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me."
Fair Anna, no doubt aching with frustration at being robbed of her delight when it had seemed so certain, let out a sick and bitter laugh and dared to answer back: "You yourself never loved; you never love!" And in her laughter the other women joined, when they saw I had not moved at once to punish her.
"Yes, I too can love," I answered softly. And in that moment my thoughts went back to a far different world, a world once sunlit and alive within that castle, within that very chamber that now held only dust and mold and ruin beneath the glamor of the moon.
But that world held in my memory was none of theirs, nor did I mean to give them material for mockery. "Yes, I can love," I said. "You yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go, go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done." These lies I told to be rid of the women without punishing them. I had no real wish to punish them for Harker's stupidity. I dislike cruelty, and am not cruel unless it is quite justifiable.
"Are we to have nothing tonight?" Melisse whined, pointing to the bag that I had brought, which now lay moving slightly on the floor. It contained the relatively poor results of my foraging expedition-a rather lean pig offered up to me by a peasant woman in hopes of my doing, in return, some damnable evil upon one of her rivals in love. I nodded, and the women sprang to surround the bag, and bore it away with them.
At this a faint gasp issued from Harker's recumbent form. I looked round sharply and could now be sure that he was quite dead to the world. What I did not then know was that he had witnessed the women pouncing upon my shopping bag, and had interpreted the porcine squealing therefrom, if his "ears did not deceive" him, as "a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child." My unimaginative solicitor had fainted.
Needless to say, there was no possibility of doing business with him that night, even if I had been so minded. I carried him, still oblivious to the world, back to his room and put him to bed; it was still my hope that he might interpret his evening with the girls as a mere nightmare if he remembered it at all. I also took the liberty of going through his pockets, and got my first look at his journal. But it was kept in shorthand, a code I did not understand until much later, and after pondering briefly I left the little book where I had found it.
"If I be sane," he wrote in it the next day, "then surely it is maddening to think that of the foul things that lurk in this hateful place the count is the least dreadful to me; that to him alone can I look for safety, even though this be only whilst I serve his purpose." And it had been my thought that, should he remember anything of the moonlit horrors he had so narrowly escaped, he would upon waking bless me as his protector and friend. Alas, for my innocent and long-persisting faith in human nature.
I began to realize that my problem was no longer so much how to win Harker's friendship as it was what to do with him, or do about him. Were I to send him home at once, he must at the very least have some strange stories to tell about me when he got there. My own departure was scheduled for June thirtieth, still more than a month away, and Harker could easily be back in London within a week, there to prepare for me a reception of the most unpleasant kind. His knowledge of my business affairs in England was so great that I could not hope to avoid such an outcome if he left Castle Dracula as my enemy and were given a head start. At the same time, he was as yet my guest, my responsibility, and honor and justice alike forbade that I should do him any harm. I yearned that he would either come out with open accusations to which I might openly reply, and demand his freedom if he minded the locked doors, or else that he would show himself my enemy, in order that I could justly kill him.
We came near reaching the latter solution when I discovered that he was attempting to smuggle out a secret letter. It was addressed to his fiancee, Miss Mina Murray, to whom he had written openly at my request only the day before. Harker threw this clandestine letter, along with another one, addressed to Hawkins, out the window along with gold, to some of my gypsys, who of course brought the letters to my attention.
The secret letter to Hawkins was very brief, and merely asked him to communicate with Mina Murray; but the letter to her was written in code, the same shorthand as Harker's secret journal. When I had examined it I came near going to his rooms to do him violence. I had to remind myself forcibly that my guest was still my guest, that he was in strange circumstances for an ordinary, untraveled Englishman, and that I did not really know that the coded missive contained anything untruthful about me or meant to cause me harm.