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Utterson asked to see his face. Hyde hesitated, then faced about with an air of defiance. They stared at each other fixedly for a few seconds. Hyde gave his address in Soho, and the lawyer, keeping his feelings to himself, took his leave with the unsettling thought: Can he, too, have been thinking of the will?
Round the corner from the by-street Utterson knocked at a square of decayed handsome houses, where Dr. Jekyll’s butler Poole admitted him into a large, low-roofed hall, warmed by an open fire and furnished with costly oak cabinets. The firelight flickered unpleasantly upon the polished wood, and Utterson, who usually felt at home in this pleasantest room in London, suffered instead a rare nausea and distaste of life, the face of Hyde sitting heavy on his memory.
“Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?”
No, sir. Dr. Jekyll was gone out.
“I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting room, Poole. Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home?”
“Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir. Mr. Hyde has a key.”
“Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man, Poole.”
“Yes, sir, he does indeed. We have all orders to obey him.”
“He never dines here,” Poole added. “He mostly comes and goes by the laboratory.”
Utterson went homeward with a heavy heart, thinking: Poor Harry Jekyll, my mind misgives me he is in deep waters!
A fortnight later, after one of Dr. Jekyll’s pleasant dinners, Utterson contrived to remain behind. The doctor, a large well-made smooth-faced man of fifty, sat opposite him by the fire with an evident affection for his dry old friend.
“I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll,” Utterson began. “You know that will of yours?”
The doctor carried it off gaily, lamenting only that his two old friends were both distressed. He called Lanyon a hide-bound pedant, ignorant and blatant, and roundly dismissed the will as an old topic they had agreed to drop.
“You know I never approved of it,” Utterson pursued ruthlessly. “I have been learning something of young Hyde.”
The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to the very lips. “I do not care to hear more,” said he. “This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop.”
But at last, won by Utterson’s honest offers of help, Jekyll unbent so far as to say, “the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. I give you my hand upon that.” He begged Utterson, however, to let the matter sleep, and when pressed for a promise that in case of his own absence his friend would bear with Hyde and see his rights protected, Utterson at last consented. “I only ask you to help him for my sake, when I am no longer here.”
Nearly a year later, in October of 18—, London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity. A maid servant, sitting in a moonlit lane, saw an aged, beautiful, white-haired gentleman accosted by a small man whom she recognised as a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. Hyde suddenly broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping, brandishing his cane, clubbing the old gentleman to the earth and then, with ape-like fury, trampling him under foot until the bones were audibly shattered. The maid fainted.
When she came to herself at two o’clock and called the police, the murderer was long gone, but the victim, Sir Danvers Carew, lay mangled in the lane. A purse and gold watch were found upon him, and a sealed envelope bearing Mr. Utterson’s name and address.
Utterson hurried to the police station, recognised the body, and was shown the broken stick. Broken and battered as it was, he knew it at once for one he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.
“If you will come with me in my cab,” he told the inspector, “I think I can take you to his house.”
Through the season’s first great fog, with its chocolate-coloured pall and shifting lights, Utterson led the officer to a dingy Soho street and Hyde’s lodgings. The ivory-faced old woman who opened the door confirmed that Hyde had been in very late but gone again within the hour. The rooms themselves, luxuriously furnished, bore every mark of being recently and hurriedly ransacked. From the ashes on the hearth the inspector disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, the other half of the stick was found behind the door, and at the bank several thousand pounds lay to the murderer’s credit.
“You may depend upon it, sir,” the inspector told Utterson: “I have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left the stick or, above all, burned the cheque book. Why, money’s life to the man.”
The difficulty would be in identifying him, for Hyde had numbered few familiars, never been photographed, and was known by that haunting sense of unexpressed deformity which he left on all beholders.
Late that same afternoon Utterson made his way, through kitchen offices and across a yard that had once been a garden, to the building known indifferently as the laboratory or dissecting rooms. He was admitted at last to Dr. Jekyll’s cabinet, a large room lined with glass presses and looking out through dusty barred windows upon the court. There, close to the fire, sat the doctor, looking deathly sick.
“And now,” said Utterson, “you have heard the news?”
“They were crying it in the square,” said Jekyll. “I heard them in my dining-room.”
When pressed, the doctor swore by God that he would never set eyes on Hyde again. The matter was at an end. He had, however, received a letter that very day, and wished to leave it in Utterson’s hands. The letter, written in an odd upright hand and signed Edward Hyde, briefly signified that the writer’s benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, need labour under no alarm for his safety, as he had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence.
Utterson liked the letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for. Then he asked one last question: “It was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that disappearance?”
The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness. He shut his mouth tight and nodded.
“I knew it,” said Utterson. “He meant to murder you. You had a fine escape.”
“I have had what is far more to the purpose,” returned the doctor solemnly: “I have had a lesson—O God, Utterson, what a lesson I have had!”
And he covered his face for a moment with his hands.
On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word with Poole. “There was a letter handed in to-day: what was the messenger like?” But Poole was positive nothing had come except by post; and only circulars by that.
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