SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE
That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre
spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday,
when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity
on his reading desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the
hour of twelve, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night
however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went
into his business room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private
part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll’s Will and sat
down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for
Mr. Utterson though he took charge of it now that it was made, had refused to
lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided not only that, in case
of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., all his
possessions were to pass into the hands of his “friend and benefactor Edward
Hyde,” but that in case of Dr. Jekyll’s “disappearance or unexplained absence
for any period exceeding three calendar months,” the said Edward Hyde
should step into the said Henry Jekyll’s shoes without further delay and free
from any burthen or obligation beyond the payment of a few small sums to the
members of the doctor’s household. This document had long been the lawyer’s
eyesore. It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and
customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest. And hitherto
it was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by a
sudden turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name
was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when it began
to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the shifting,
insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there leaped up the sudden,
definite presentment of a fiend.
“I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper in
the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.”
With that he blew out his candle, put on a greatcoat, and set forth in the
direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine, where his friend, the
great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding patients. “If
anyone knows, it will be Lanyon,” he had thought.
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