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Page 36
97)
severity as I had never before attained to, and enjoyed the
compensations of an approving conscience. But time began at last
to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of
conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be
tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after
freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again
compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon
his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the
dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility;
neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough
allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate
readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward
Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been
long caged, he came out roaring. I was conscious, even when I
took the draught, of a more unbridled, a more furious propensity
to ill. It must have been this, I suppose, that stirred in my
soul that tempest of impatience with which I listened to the
civilities of my unhappy victim; I declare, at least, before God,
no man morally sane could have been guilty of that crime upon so
pitiful a provocation; and that I struck in no more reasonable
spirit than that in which a sick child may break a plaything. But
I had voluntarily stripped myself of all those balancing
instincts
98)
by which even the worst of us continues to walk with some degree
of steadiness among temptations; and in my case, to be tempted,
however slightly, was to fall.
Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a
transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight
from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to
succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium,
struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. A mist
dispersed; I saw my life to be forfeit; and fled from the scene
of these excesses, at once glorying and trembling, my lust of
evil gratified and stimulated, my love of life screwed to the
topmost peg. I ran to the house in Soho, and (to make assurance
doubly sure) destroyed my papers; thence I set out through the
lamplit streets, in the same divided ecstasy of mind, gloating on
my crime, light-headedly devising others in the future, and yet
still hastening and still hearkening in my wake for the steps of
the avenger. Hyde had a song upon his lips as he compounded the
draught, and as he drank it, pledged the dead man. The pangs of
transformation had not done tearing him, before Henry Jekyll,
with streaming tears of gratitude and remorse, had fallen upon
his knees and lifted his clasped hands to God. The veil of
self-indulgence was rent from head to foot, I saw my life as a
whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I had
walked
99)
with my father's hand, and through the self-denying toils of my
professional life, to arrive again and again, with the same sense
of unreality, at the damned horrors of the evening. I could have
screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down
the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory
swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly
face of my iniquity stared into my soul. As the acuteness of this
remorse began to die away, it was succeeded by a sense of joy.
The problem of my conduct was solved. Hyde was thenceforth
impossible; whether I would or not, I was now confined to the
better part of my existence; and oh, how I rejoiced to think it!
with what willing humility, I embraced anew the restrictions of
natural life! with what sincere renunciation, I locked the door
by which I had so often gone and come, and ground the key under
my heel!
The next day, came the news that the murder had been overlooked,
that the guilt of Hyde was patent to the world, and that the
victim was a man high in public estimation. It was not only a
crime, it had been a tragic folly. I think I was glad to know it;
I think I was glad to have my better impulses thus buttressed and
guarded by the terrors of the scaffold. Jekyll was now my city of
refuge; let but Hyde peep out an instant, and the hands of all
men would be raised to take and slay him.
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