Dracula: Reunited

Mina’s letter to Lucy described how she had finally reached Jonathan in Budapest, only to find him painfully thin, pale, and weak, with none of his old steady confidence left in his eyes.He remembered almost nothing of what had happened to him, and the kind nun caring for him, Sister Agatha, said only that his fevered ravings had not been about any wrongdoing of his own, but about things too terrible and strange for her to repeat.Mina sat by his bedside, relieved beyond words simply to have found him alive.

When Jonathan woke, he asked for his coat and drew out a small notebook, holding it tightly as he spoke to her with unusual solemnity.He told her he had suffered a terrible shock, and did not know himself whether it had truly happened or had only been the fever’s dreaming — and that he did not want to know, only to begin their married life together.He asked if she was willing to share his ignorance, and handed her the notebook, telling her to keep it, read it if she wished, but never speak of it to him unless some solemn duty demanded it.

Mina agreed at once, and within the hour a chaplain was sent for so they could be married that very afternoon, before Jonathan had even fully recovered his strength.Propped up on pillows in his hospital bed, he answered his vows firmly, and Mina found she could hardly speak for happiness.It was, she wrote to Lucy, the first time in her whole life she had written the words “my husband.”

Once they were alone, Mina wrapped the notebook in white paper, tied it with a pale blue ribbon from around her own neck, and sealed the knot with wax, pressing her new wedding ring into it as a seal.She promised Jonathan she would never open it unless it were for his own sake, or for some grave and pressing duty — a visible sign, she told him, that they would always trust one another completely.Lucy wrote back with happy news of her own: she had stopped walking in her sleep entirely, and she and Arthur were to be married on the twenty-eighth of September.

Far away at the asylum, Dr. Seward noticed something strange settling over Renfield: each night, the moment the moon rose, his violence quieted, and he murmured only, “Now I can wait; now I can wait.”By dawn the calm always broke, and he grew wild again — a pattern so regular that Dr. Seward began to suspect some outside influence was coming and going with the moon itself.One night, hoping to learn more, Dr. Seward let Renfield’s door stand open — but instead of testing his freedom, the patient escaped anyway, slipping past an attendant and racing straight for the old chapel door at Carfax.

As the attendants struggled to hold him, Renfield suddenly grew calm and still, his eyes fixed on the night sky, where Dr. Seward could see nothing but a single large bat flying steadily westward, as if it knew exactly where it was going.“You needn’t tie me; I shall go quietly,” Renfield said — and though the patient walked back peacefully enough, Dr. Seward could not shake the feeling that there was something deeply ominous in his sudden calm.