Note:
Jonathan HarkerSeven years ago we all went through the flames. And the
happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.
It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the same day as
that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief
that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names
links all our little band of men together. But we call him Quincey. In the
summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground
which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost
impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and
heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was
blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation. When
we got home we were talking of the old time, which we could all look back on without
despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. I took the papers
from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck
with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed,
there is hardly one authentic document. Nothing but a mass of typewriting, except
the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum.
We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of
so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his
knee. "We want no proofs. We ask none to believe us! This boy will
some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her
sweetness and loving care. Later on he will understand how some men so loved her,
that they did dare much for her sake." JONATHAN HARKER |
