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Lanyon, affecting a coolness he did not feel, answered that he had come too far in the way of inexplicable services to turn back now. The visitor replied that he must remember his vows as a physician, that what followed was under the seal of their profession, and that he who had so long denied the virtue of transcendental medicine should now behold.
He raised the glass to his lips and drank it at a single gulp.
A cry tore from his throat. He reeled, clutched the table, his eyes starting from his head, his mouth gaping in agony. And as Lanyon watched in mounting horror, the man seemed to swell; his face blackened; the features seemed to melt, to alter, to flow one into another like wax before a flame. Lanyon leaped back against the wall, arms raised in futile defense, his mind drowning in terror. And then, where the dwarfish creature had stood, there rose trembling, pale, and half-fainting, his hands groping before him like a man restored from death—the figure of Henry Jekyll.
What Jekyll told him in the next hour, Lanyon could not bring himself to set down on paper. The sight faded, the words faded, and his soul sickened at the memory. Sleep had left him forever. The deadliest terror sat by him at all hours, and he felt his days were numbered. He would die incredulous. He would say only one thing to his friend Utterson: the creature who had crept into his house that night was, on Jekyll’s own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted in every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.
And with that, Dr. Hastie Lanyon laid down his pen, for his confession was finished and his death close at hand.
What follows is Henry Jekyll’s own full and astonishing statement of the case, written in his own hand.
He had been born to a large fortune, blessed with excellent parts, inclined to industry, and fond of the respect of his fellow men. Yet from the earliest days, a fault had lurked within him: an impatient gaiety of disposition, which, while it had made the happiness of others, he found hard to reconcile with the grave countenance he wished to present to the world. So it was that he concealed his pleasures, and by the time he reached years of reflection, he found himself already committed to a profound duplicity of life. It was not the degradation of his faults but the exacting nature of his aspirations that had severed in him those provinces of good and ill which divide the dual nature of man.
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