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Page 7
"I wish the friends were younger," chuckled Dr. Lanyon. "But
I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of him now."
"Indeed?" said Utterson. "I thought you had a bond of common
interest."
"We had," was the reply. "But it is more than ten years since
Henry Jekyll became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong,
wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest
in him for old sake's sake, as they say, I see and I have seen
devilish little of the man. Such unscientific balderdash," added
the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged Damon
and Pythias."
This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to
Mr. Utterson. "They have only differed on some point of science,"
he thought; and being a man of no scientific passions (except in
the matter of conveyancing), he even added: "It is nothing worse
than that!" He gave his friend a few seconds to recover his
composure, and then approached the question he had come to put.
"Did you ever come across a protege of his--one Hyde?" he asked.
"Hyde?" repeated Lanyon. "No. Never heard of him. Since my
time."
That was the amount of information that the lawyer carried
back with him to the great, dark bed on which he tossed to and
fro, until the small hours of the morning began to grow large. It
was a night of little ease to his toiling mind, toiling in mere
darkness and beseiged by questions.
Six o'clock struck on the bells of the church that was so
conveniently near to Mr. Utterson's dwelling, and still he was
digging at the problem. Hitherto it had touched him on the
intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged,
or rather enslaved; and as he lay and tossed in the gross darkness
of the night and the curtained room, Mr. Enfield's tale went by
before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures. He would be
aware of the great field of lamps of a nocturnal city; then of the
figure of a man walking swiftly; then of a child running from the
doctor's; and then these met, and that human Juggernaut trod the
child down and passed on regardless of her screams. Or else he
would see a room in a rich house, where his friend lay asleep,
dreaming and smiling at his dreams; and then the door of that room
would be opened, the curtains of the bed plucked apart, the
sleeper recalled, and lo! there would stand by his side a figure
to whom power was given, and even at that dead hour, he must rise
and do its bidding. The figure in these two phases haunted the
lawyer all night; and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to
see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the
more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness,
through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city, and at every street
corner crush a child and leave her screaming. And still the
figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams,
it had no face, or one that baffled him and melted before his
eyes; and thus it was that there sprang up and grew apace in the
lawyer's mind a singularly strong, almost an inordinate, curiosity
to behold the features of the real Mr. Hyde. If he could but once
set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps
roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when
well examined. He might see a reason for his friend's strange
preference or bondage (call it which you please) and even for the
startling clause of the will. At least it would be a face worth
seeing: the face of a man who was without bowels of mercy: a face
which had but to show itself to raise up, in the mind of the
unimpressionable Enfield, a spirit of enduring hatred.
From that time forward, Mr. Utterson began to haunt the door
in the by-street of shops. In the morning before office hours, at
noon when business was plenty, and time scarce, at night under the
face of the fogged city moon, by all lights and at all hours of
solitude or concourse, the lawyer was to be found on his chosen
post.
"If he be Mr. Hyde," he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek."
And at last his patience was rewarded. It was a fine dry
night; frost in the air; the streets as clean as a ballroom floor;
the lamps, unshaken by any wind, drawing a regular pattern of
light and shadow. By ten o'clock, when the shops were closed the
by-street was very solitary and, in spite of the low growl of
London from all round, very silent. Small sounds carried far;
domestic sounds out of the houses were clearly audible on either
side of the roadway; and the rumour of the approach of any
passenger preceded him by a long time. Mr. Utterson had been some
minutes at his post, when he was aware of an odd light footstep
drawing near. In the course of his nightly patrols, he had long
grown accustomed to the quaint effect with which the footfalls
of a single person, while he is still a great way off, suddenly
spring out distinct from the vast hum and clatter of the city.
Yet his attention had never before been so sharply and decisively
arrested; and it was with a strong, superstitious prevision of
success that he withdrew into the entry of the court.
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