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Then came the change. On the 8th of January, Utterson dined at the doctor’s with a small party; Lanyon was there, and the host looked from one to the other as in the old days when the three had been inseparable. But on the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door was shut against the lawyer. “The doctor is confined to the house,” Poole said, “and sees no one.” On the 15th, Utterson tried again and was refused. After two months of seeing his friend almost daily, the return of solitude weighed upon his spirits. The sixth night he betook himself to Dr. Lanyon’s.
There at least he was not denied admittance; but he was shocked at the change in the doctor’s appearance. The rosy man had grown pale, his flesh had fallen away, he was visibly balder and older. Yet it was less these tokens of physical decay than a look in the eye and quality of manner that arrested the lawyer’s notice—a deep-seated terror of the mind. When Utterson remarked on his ill looks, Lanyon declared himself a doomed man with a strange firmness.
“I have had a shock,” he said, “and I shall never recover. It is a question of weeks.”
“Jekyll is ill, too. Have you seen him?”
Lanyon’s face changed, and he held up a trembling hand. “I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll. I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead.”
“Some day, Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you. And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other things, for God’s sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep clear of this accursed topic, then in God’s name go, for I cannot bear it.”
As soon as he got home, Utterson wrote to Jekyll, asking the cause of this unhappy break. The next day brought a long answer, often pathetically worded, and darkly mysterious in drift. “I do not blame our old friend,” Jekyll wrote, “but I share his view that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence.”
A week afterward Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in something less than a fortnight he was dead. The night after the funeral, Utterson sat in his business room by a melancholy candle, and drew out an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend: “PRIVATE: for the hands of G. J. Utterson ALONE, and in case of his predecease to be destroyed unread.” He condemned the dread as a disloyalty, and broke the seal. Within was another enclosure, likewise sealed, marked “not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll.”
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