"stoker-dracula-168" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stoker Bram)

wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were
positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the
flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and
the lines of it were hard like drawn wires; the thick eyebrows that
met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal.
With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then
motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back; it was
the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. In a
voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to cut
through the air and then ring round the room as he said:-

"How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him
when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!
Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me." The
fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him:-

"You yourself never loved; you never love!" On this the other
women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang
through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed
like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at
my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:

"Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is
it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you
shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for
there is work to be done."

"Are we to have nothing to-night?" said one of them, with a low
laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor,
and which moved as though there were some living thing within it.
For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and
opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low
wall, as of a half-smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I
was aghast with horror; but as I looked they disappeared, and with
them the dreadful bag. There was no door near them, and they could not
have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into
the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could
see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely
faded away.

"Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious."

CHAPTER IV.

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL.

I awoke in my own bed. If it be that I had not dreamt, the Count
must have carried me here. I tried to satisfy myself on the subject,
but could not arrive at any unquestionable result. To be sure, there
were certain small evidences, such as that my clothes were folded