Mina
Harker's Journal29 September After I had tidied myself, I went down
to Dr. Seward's study. At the door I paused a moment, for I thought I heard him
talking with some one. As, however, he had pressed me to be quick, I knocked at
the door, and on his calling out, "Come in," I entered. To my
intense surprise, there was no one with him. He was quite alone, and on the table
opposite him was what I knew at once from the description to be a phonograph.
I had never seen one, and was much interested. "I hope I did not keep
you waiting," I said, "but I stayed at the door as I heard you talking,
and thought there was someone with you." "Oh," he replied
with a smile, "I was only entering my diary." "Your diary?"
I asked him in surprise. "Yes," he answered. "I keep it in
this." As he spoke he laid his hand on the phonograph. I felt quite excited
over it, and blurted out, "Why, this beats even shorthand! May I hear it
say something?" "Certainly," he replied with alacrity, and
stood up to put it in train for speaking. Then he paused, and a troubled look
overspread his face. "The fact is," he began awkwardly, "I
only keep my diary in it, and as it is entirely, almost entirely, about my cases
it may be awkward, that is, I mean . . ." He stopped, and I tried to help
him out of his embarrassment. "You helped to attend dear Lucy at the
end. Let me hear how she died, for all that I know of her, I shall be very grateful.
She was very, very dear to me." To my surprise, he answered, with a
horrorstruck look in his face, "Tell you of her death? Not for the wide world!" "Why
not?" I asked, for some grave, terrible feeling was coming over me. Again
he paused, and I could see that he was trying to invent an excuse. At length,
he stammered out, "You see, I do not know how to pick out any particular
part of the diary." Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon
him, and he said with unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the
naivete of a child, "that's quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian!" I
could not but smile, at which he grimaced. "I gave myself away that time!"
he said. "But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months
past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it
in case I wanted to look it up?" By this time my mind was made up that
the diary of a doctor who attended Lucy might have something to add to the sum
of our knowledge of that terrible Being, and I said boldly, "Then, Dr. Seward,
you had better let me copy it out for you on my typewriter." He grew
to a positively deathly pallor as he said, "No! No! No! For all the world.
I wouldn't let you know that terrible story!" Then it was terrible.
My intuition was right! For a moment, I thought, and as my eyes ranged the room,
unconsciously looking for something or some opportunity to aid me, they lit on
a great batch of typewriting on the table. His eyes caught the look in mine, and
without his thinking, followed their direction. As they saw the parcel he realized
my meaning. "You do not know me," I said. "When you have
read those papers, my own diary and my husband's also, which I have typed, you
will know me better. I have not faltered in giving every thought of my own heart
in this cause. But, of course, you do not know me, yet, and I must not expect
you to trust me so far." He is certainly a man of noble nature. Poor
dear Lucy was right about him. He stood up and opened a large drawer, in which
were arranged in order a number of hollow cylinders of metal covered with dark
wax, and said, "You are quite right. I did not trust you because I
did not know you. But I know you now, and let me say that I should have known
you long ago. I know that Lucy told you of me. She told me of you too. May I make
the only atonement in my power? Take the cylinders and hear them. The first half-dozen
of them are personal to me, and they will not horrify you. Then you will know
me better. Dinner will by then be ready. In the meantime I shall read over some
of these documents, and shall be better able to understand certain things." He
carried the phonograph himself up to my sitting room and adjusted it for me. Now
I shall learn something pleasant, I am sure. For it will tell me the other side
of a true love episode of which I know one side already. | 
