SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE
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The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was subjected to no stage
of delay, but ushered direct from the door to the dining-room where Dr.
Lanyon sat alone over his wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced
gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and
decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up from his chair and
welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the man, was
somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed on genuine feeling. For these
two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both thorough
respectors of themselves and of each other, and what does not always follow,
men who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.
After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject which so
disagreeably preoccupied his mind.
“I suppose, Lanyon,” said he, “you and I must be the two oldest friends
that Henry Jekyll has?”
“I wish the friends were younger,” chuckled Dr. Lanyon. “But I suppose
we are. And what of that? I see little of him now.”
“Indeed?” said Utterson. “I thought you had a bond of common interest.”
“We had,” was the reply. “But it is more than ten years since Henry Jekyll
became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though
of course I continue to take an interest in him for old sake’s sake, as they say, I
see and I have seen devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash,”
added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, “would have estranged Damon
and Pythias.”
This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to Mr. Utterson. “They
have only differed on some point of science,” he thought; and being a man of
no scientific passions (except in the matter of conveyancing), he even added:
“It is nothing worse than that!” He gave his friend a few seconds to recover his
composure, and then approached the question he had come to put. “Did you
ever come across a protégé of his—one Hyde?” he asked.
“Hyde?” repeated Lanyon. “No. Never heard of him. Since my time.”
That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried back with him
to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and fro, until the small hours of
the morning began to grow large. It was a night of little ease to his toiling
mind, toiling in mere darkness and besieged by questions.
Six o’clock struck on the bells of the church that was so conveniently near
to Mr. Utterson’s dwelling, and still he was digging at the problem. Hitherto it
had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also
was engaged, or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness M
of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind
in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be aware of the great field of lamps of
a nocturnal city; then of the figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child
running from the doctor’s; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod
the child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he would see
a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep, dreaming and smiling at
his dreams; and then the door of that room would be opened, the curtains of
the bed plucked apart, the sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his
side a figure to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must
rise and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all
night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more
stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more
swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at
every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the figure
had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face, or
one that baffled him and melted before his eyes; and thus it was that there
sprang up and grew apace in the lawyer’s mind a singularly strong, almost an
inordinate, curiosity to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could
but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps
roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well
examined. He might see a reason for his friend’s strange preference or
bondage (call it which you please) and even for the startling clause of the will.
At least it would be a face worth seeing: the face of a man who was without
bowels of mercy: a face which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind
of the unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.
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