THE FOLLOWING CHAPTER IS BASED ON A JOURNAL written by Dr. Seward332—the Directing Physician at the asylum in Parfleet—who was previously mentioned in this story.
The mental hospital where Seward was Director stood directly opposite the Carfax building that Count Dracula had purchased.
Barrington now set off to visit the doctor and find out what was happening at Carfax.
Dr. Seward told him that a lot of work had recently been done to Carfax, and that costly furnishings had been moved in. He saw lavishly decorated carriages arrive there with some regularity—far more luxurious than was usual in this part of the city.
When Barrington asked Seward whether he’d perhaps noticed a carriage that set itself apart from the others, the doctor told him about a particularly extravagant carriage drawn by grey horses, carrying servants in grey uniforms—and a ravishing young woman, whose face indeed had an extraordinarily striking look about it. From Seward’s description, Barrington believed her to be the French Ambassador’s wife.
“Yet it was not the sight of the magnificent carriages that caught my attention most of all, but rather the strange and suspicious chaps moving about Carfax, especially in the evening.”
Before he left, Barrington thanked the doctor for the information and asked him to keep an eye on Carfax and the goings on there.
Later that day, as the doctor sat down for dinner, he was handed a calling card bearing the name of a certain Countess Ida Varkony. The card had been delivered by a servant in uniform, carrying a message from the Countess asking the doctor to call on her as she was suffering a bout of some malady she was susceptible to. She apologized for sending for him at such a late hour but hoped he would come all the same, as she lived right across from him at Carfax.
The doctor was very curious to look around the old house, which had been uninhabited for a long time, so he went along with the servant without delay. When he arrived at the door another attendant welcomed him inside, and as he entered a French maid greeted him and showed him into a grand hall with old embroidered tapestries.
When the doctor arrived a woman rose from a divan and came to meet him.
It was no surprise that the doctor—though well known for being a calm and controlled man, averse to frivolity—was so taken aback that he lost all composure and manner;333 he’d never before seen a woman of such strange, indescribable beauty. To him, she seemed so different from other pretty women, as if she had come from another world. She was tall and sleek, both graceful and radiant. Her hair was thick and black; her eyes unusually large and deep, with long black lashes.
But despite her being of such exquisite beauty, the doctor felt a pang of alarm upon seeing her, as though he’d laid eyes upon some wonder of nature that might prove dangerous.
After the Countess had greeted the doctor she sat back down on the divan. She spoke French with a foreign accent.
The doctor asked some questions about her health, and she answered them all if rather casually. He soon learned that she had a habit of fainting334 and was suffering from insomnia, cardiac arrhythmia and convulsive seizures. She said she’d recently recovered from a fit and had a hard time sleeping after that, so she would like to be hypnotized. Dr. Seward knew the technique very well—though he rarely practiced it. This time, however, he yielded to persuasion, but putting the patient into mesmeric sleep turned out to be harder than usual. In fact, he didn’t succeed until he took the lady’s hand. He then gave her a hypnotic suggestion: after going to bed she would fall asleep and sleep well all through the night, and then she would wake up again in the morning feeling refreshed and revitalized. After the procedure he woke her from her trance, and she thanked him dearly for his help, saying that she hoped he would do this for her again soon.
The hypnotic treatment had an unusual effect on the doctor himself. He felt weary the day after, and he thought of nothing else but the Countess and what had happened between themin the house across the way.
Towards the end of the day, he went to visit her and was escorted to her bedroom.
She was lying on the bed as though she were dead and didn’t open her eyes, yet she seemed to be speaking, her voice sounding as if it were coming through the ceiling:
“Good evening, Doctor. She is dead now, but you must revive her. Do whatever you can.”335
He couldn’t find any signs of life.
“You must first hypnotize her,” said the voice.
After many attempts to revive her and massaging her limbs,336 he managed to bring her back to life, but it had the same effect on him as before, as if he were losing much of his own life force; as though his blood were seeping away from him, just like when the Dutch professor had drawn his blood for Lucia. He even had the impression that it was Lucia herself resting there in the bed.
Finally he came to his senses, as if waking up from a stupor, and at that same moment the Countess awoke as well. She made him promise to return the next day then asked the parlormaid to show him to her brother in the next room. He introduced himself as Prince Koromezzo337 and enquired as to how the lady was feeling, but the doctor said he wasn’t yet able to judge her condition. Prince Koromezzo asked the doctor to become her personal physician and requested that he do them the favor of returning at nine o’clock in the evening.338 She would by then have recovered enough to receive him.