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“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.
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