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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 some one 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 naïveté
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 realised 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....
_Dr. Seward's Diary._
_29 September._--I was so absorbed in that wonderful diary of Jonathan
Harker and that other of his wife that I let the time run on without
thinking. Mrs. Harker was not down when the maid came to announce
dinner, so I said: "She is possibly tired; let dinner wait an hour," and
I went on with my work. I had just finished Mrs. Harker's diary, when
she came in. She looked sweetly pretty, but very sad, and her eyes were
flushed with crying. This somehow moved me much. Of late I have had
cause for tears, God knows! but the relief of them was denied me; and
now the sight of those sweet eyes, brightened with recent tears, went
straight to my heart. So I said as gently as I could:--
"I greatly fear I have distressed you."
"Oh, no, not distressed me," she replied, "but I have been more touched
than I can say by your grief. That is a wonderful machine, but it is
cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of your heart.