The old man stood unblinking, hand clasped calmly around the dark lantern, while his eyes seemed to tremble with a combination of loathing and hilarity. The young man stooped over the lantern and peered into the old man's face.
"Don't you wish," he breathed, "don't you wish?"
Van Helsing could not refrain from smiling. "Wish?" he repeated, feigning curiosity.
The count stepped back, laughing with his eyes while his lips remained compressed. "Yes, professor," he blinked. "Don't you wish you might have your youth again?"
The old man could just make out her form through the darkness: a tragic face and a long, lovely white throat, breathing a death so alive that her long black hair seemed to writhe with it. She had been staring at him matter-of-factly—blankly, even—while her immortal beauty approached him, seeming to stand between him and the count.
"Your short, squandered youth," the latter continued. "The youth you threw away for the pursuit—of what? Not women, not beauty, but knowledge! Ugly, eternal knowledge. It is long-lived, yes, but what life is that? It is not life; it is a different kind of death. It is the burial of all that is excellent into all that is dead; humanity is dead. Abraham Van Helsing, would you not wish to make your choice again? Would you not wish to now, even now, embrace the life you threw away?"
The count had stepped closer; the phantom of immortal beauty hung at his shoulder, staring closely at the old man. Van Helsing's peal of nervous laughter made her turn back, but the count's face grew red, then pale.
"My dear count, you are too good. Too good," Van Helsing laughed, burying his forehead in his palm. "Really, you have taken the very words from my mouth. Had I the power to offer you life, I should have done so, in perhaps some sparer words. Ah, my dear young friend—I would not give a single white hair from my head for two lifetimes of your false, your artificial youth. I would not give a drop of blood for a millennium of your infinite vigor (if so it can be called) and your face without lines of care. As for her beauty, perhaps it is this absence of light, but I do not see it, nor have I ever known beauty to be something seen or felt. Yet I have known truly ageless beauty. It is that very search for knowledge you disdain, and it is in the mind of a woman who would pursue such a knowledge! But she, this bride of yours, does not live in this day and age, no more than do you. You, Dracula, are the relic of the deadly past—and that is all!"