always regarded your highness as a perfect man; and in your altered
circumstances, of which I have already heard with deep regret, I will
beg you to consider my respect increased instead of lessened."
"I have found it so," returned the prince, "with every class of my
acquaintance. But, madam, I pray you to be seated. My business is of a
delicate order, and regards your daughter."
"In that case," said Mrs. Luxmore, "you may save yourself the trouble of
speaking, for I have fully made up my mind to have nothing to do with
her. I will not hear one word in her defence; but as I value nothing so
particularly as the virtue of justice, I think it my duty to explain to
you the grounds of my complaint. She deserted me, her natural protector;
for years she has consorted with the most disreputable persons; and, to
fill the cup of her offence, she has recently married. I refuse to see
her, or the being to whom she has linked herself. One hundred and twenty
pounds a year, I have always offered her: I offer it again. It is what I
had myself when I was her age."
"Very well, madam," said the prince; "and be that so! But to touch upon
another matter: what was the income of the Reverend Bernard Fanshawe?"
"My father?" asked the spirited old lady. "I believe he had seven
hundred pounds in the year."
"You were one, I think, of several?" pursued the prince.
"Of four," was the reply. "We were four daughters; and, painful as the
admission is to make, a more detestable family could scarce be found in
England."
"Dear me!" said the prince. "And you, madam, have an income of eight
thousand?"
"Not more than five," returned the old lady; "but where on earth are you
conducting me?"
"To an allowance of one thousand pounds a year," replied Florizel,
smiling. "For I must not suffer you to take your father for a rule. He
was poor, you are rich. He had many calls upon his poverty: there are
none upon your wealth. And indeed, madam, if you will let me touch this
matter with a needle, there is but one point in common to your two
positions: that each had a daughter more remarkable for liveliness than
duty."
"I have been entrapped into this house," said the old lady, getting to
her feet. "But it shall not avail. Not all the tobacconists in
Europe...."
"Ah, madam," interrupted Florizel, "before what is referred to as my
fall, you had not used such language! And since you so much object to
the simple industry by which I live, let me give you a friendly hint. If
you will not consent to support your daughter, I shall be constrained to
place that lady behind my counter, where I doubt not she would prove a
great attraction; and your son-in-law shall have a livery and run the
errands. With such young blood my business might be doubled, and I might
be bound, in common gratitude, to place the name of Luxmore beside that
of Godall."
"Your highness," said the old lady, "I have been very rude, and you are
very cunning. I suppose the minx is on the premises. Produce her."
"Let us rather observe them unperceived," said the prince; and so saying
he rose and quietly drew back the curtain.
Mrs. Desborough sat with her back to them on a chair; Somerset and Harry
were hanging on her words with extraordinary interest; Challoner,
alleging some affair, had long ago withdrawn from the detested
neighbourhood of the enchantress.
"At that moment," Mrs. Desborough was saying, "Mr. Gladstone detected
the features of his cowardly assailant. A cry rose to his lips: a cry of
mingled triumph...."
"That is Mr. Somerset!" interrupted the spirited old lady, in the
highest note of her register. "Mr. Somerset, what have you done with my
house-property?"
"Madam," said the prince, "let it be mine to give the explanation; and
in the meanwhile, welcome your daughter."
"Well, Clara, how do you do?" said Mrs. Luxmore. "It appears I am to
give you an allowance. So much the better for you. As for Mr. Somerset,
I am very ready to have an explanation; for the whole affair, though
costly, was eminently humorous. And at any rate," she added, nodding to
Paul, "he is a young gentleman for whom I have a great affection, and
his pictures were the funniest I ever saw."
"I have ordered a collation," said the prince. "Mr. Somerset, as these
are all your friends, I propose, if you please, that you should join
them at table. I will take the shop."
STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
_TO
KATHARINE DE MATTOS_
_It's ill to loose the bands that God decreed to bind;
Still will we be the children of the heather and the wind.
Far away from home, O it's still for you and me
That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie._
STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
STORY OF THE DOOR
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was
never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse;
backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow
lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste,
something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which
never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these
silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in
the acts of his life. He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was
alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the
theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years. But he had
an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy,
at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any
extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. "I incline to Cain's
heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in
his own way." In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the
last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of
down-going men. And to such as these, so long as they came about his
chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.
No doubt the feat was easy to Mr. Utterson; for he was undemonstrative
at the best, and even his friendships seemed to be founded in a similar
catholicity of good-nature. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his
friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was
the lawyer's way. His friends were those of his own blood, or those whom
he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of
time, they implied no aptness in the object. Hence, no doubt, the bond
that united him to Mr. Richard Enfield, his distant kinsman, the
well-known man about town. It was a nut to crack for many, what these
two could see in each other or what subject they could find in common.
It was reported by those who encountered them in their Sunday walks that
they said nothing, looked singularly dull, and would hail with obvious
relief the appearance of a friend. For all that, the two men put the
greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each
week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted
the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted.
It chanced on one of these rambles that their way led them down a
by-street in a busy quarter of London. The street was small, and what is
called quiet, but it drove a thriving trade on the week-days. The
inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to
do better still, and laying out the surplus of their gains in coquetry;
so that the shop-fronts stood along that thoroughfare with an air of
invitation, like rows of smiling saleswomen. Even on Sunday, when it
veiled its more florid charms and lay comparatively empty of passage,
the street shone out in contrast to its dingy neighbourhood, like a fire
in a forest; and with its freshly painted shutters, well-polished
brasses, and general cleanliness and gaiety of note, instantly caught
and pleased the eye of the passenger.
Two doors from one corner on the left hand going east, the line was
broken by the entry of a court; and just at that point a certain
sinister block of building thrust forward its gable on the street. It
was two stories high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower
story and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in
every feature the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door,
which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and
distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and struck matches on the
panels; children kept shop upon the steps; the schoolboy had tried his
knife on the mouldings; and for close on a generation no one had
appeared to drive away these random visitors or to repair their ravages.
Mr. Enfield and the lawyer were on the other side of the by-street, but
when they came abreast of the entry, the former lifted up his cane and
pointed.
"Did you ever remark that door?" he asked; and when his companion had
replied in the affirmative, "it is connected in my mind," added he,
"with a very odd story."
"Indeed?" said Mr. Utterson, with a slight change of voice, "and what
was that?"
"Well, it was this way," returned Mr. Enfield: "I was coming home from
some place at the end of the world, about three o'clock of a black
winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was
literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street, and all the
folks asleep--street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession
and all as empty as a church--till at last I got into that state of mind
when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a
policeman. All at once I saw two figures: one a little man who was
stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe
eight or ten, who was running as hard as she was able down a cross
street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the
corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man
trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the
ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't
like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a view-holloa,
took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where
there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was
perfectly cool, and made no resistance, but gave me one look so ugly
that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had
turned out were the girl's own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for
whom she had been sent, put in his appearance. Well, the child was not
much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones; and there
you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious
circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So
had the child's family, which was only natural. But the doctor's case
was what struck me. He was the usual cut-and-dry apothecary, of no
particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent, and about as
emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every
time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white
with the desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he
knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the
next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of
this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other.
If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose
them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red-hot, we were
keeping the women off him as best we could, for they were as wild as
harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the
man in the middle, with a kind of black sneering coolness--frightened,
too, I could see that--but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. 'If
you choose to make capital out of this accident,' said he, 'I am
naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,' says he.
'Name your figure.' Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the
child's family; he would have clearly liked to stick out; but there was
something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he
struck. The next thing was to get the money; and where do you think he
carried us but to that place with the door?--whipped out a key, went in,
and presently came back with the matter of ten pounds in gold and a
cheque for the balance on Coutts's, drawn payable to bearer and signed
with a name that I can't mention, though it's one of the points of my
story, but it was a name at least very well known and often printed. The
figure was stiff; but the signature was good for more than that, if it
was only genuine. I took the liberty of pointing out to my gentleman
that the whole business looked apocryphal, and that a man does not, in
real life, walk into a cellar-door at four in the morning and come out
of it with another man's cheque for close upon a hundred pounds. But he
was quite easy and sneering. 'Set your mind at rest,' says he, 'I will
stay with you till the banks open and cash the cheque myself.' So we all
set off, the doctor, and the child's father, and our friend and myself,
and passed the rest of the night in my chambers; and next day, when we
had breakfasted, went in a body to the bank. I gave in the cheque
myself, and said I had every reason to believe it was a forgery. Not a
bit of it. The cheque was genuine."
"Tut-tut," said Mr. Utterson.
"I see you feel as I do," said Mr. Enfield. "Yes, it's a bad story. For
my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable
man: and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the
proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your
fellows who do what they call good. Blackmail, I suppose; an honest man
paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail
House is what I call that place with the door, in consequence. Though
even that, you know, is far from explaining all," he added, and with the
words fell into a vein of musing.
From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather suddenly: "And
you don't know if the drawer of the cheque lives there?"
"A likely place, isn't it?" returned Mr. Enfield. "But I happened to
have noticed his address; he lives in some square or other."
"And you never asked about--the place with the door?" said Mr. Utterson.
"No, sir: I had a delicacy," was the reply. "I feel very strongly about
putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of
judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit
quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others;
and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of)
is knocked on the head in his own back-garden and the family have to
change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks
like Queer Street, the less I ask."
"A very good rule too," said the lawyer.
"But I have studied the place for myself," continued Mr. Enfield. "It
seems scarcely a house. There is no other door, and nobody goes in or
out of that one but, once in a great while, the gentleman of my
adventure. There are three windows looking on the court on the first
floor; none below; the windows are always shut, but they're clean. And
then there is a chimney which is generally smoking; so somebody must
live there. Yet it's not so sure; for the buildings are so packed
together about that court that it's hard to say where one ends and
another begins."
The pair walked on again for a while in silence; and then, "Enfield,"
said Mr. Utterson, "that's a good rule of yours."
"Yes, I think it is," returned Enfield.
"But for all that," continued the lawyer, "there's one point I want to
ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child."
"Well," said Mr. Enfield, "I can't see what harm it would do. He was a
man of the name of Hyde."
"H'm," said Mr. Utterson. "What sort of a man is he to see?"
"He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his
appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I
never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be
deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I
couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary-looking man, and yet
I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of
it; I can't describe him. And it's not want of memory; for I declare I
can see him this moment."
Mr. Utterson again walked some way in silence and obviously under a
weight of consideration. "You are sure he used a key?" he inquired at
last.
"My dear sir----" began Enfield, surprised out of himself.
"Yes, I know," said Utterson; "I know it must seem strange. The fact is,
if I do not ask you the name of the other party it is because I know it
already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been
inexact in any point, you had better correct it."
"I think you might have warned me," returned the other with a touch of
sullenness. "But I have been pedantically exact, as you call it. The
fellow had a key; and what's more, he has it still. I saw him use it not
a week ago."
Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the young man
presently resumed. "Here is another lesson to say nothing," said he. "I
am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to
this again."
"With all my heart," said the lawyer. "I shake hands on that, Richard."
SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE
That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre
spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a
Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of
some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the
neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go
soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, as soon as the
cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his
business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part
of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll's Will, and sat
down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph,
for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that it was made, had
refused to lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided
not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L.,
LL.D., F.R.S., &c., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of
his "friend and benefactor Edward Hyde," but that in case of Dr.
Jekyll's "disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding
three calendar months," the said Edward Hyde should step into the said
Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or
obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the
doctor's household. This document had long been the lawyer's eyesore. It
offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary
sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest. And hitherto it
was his ignorance of Mr. Hyde that had swelled his indignation; now, by
a sudden turn, it was his knowledge. It was already bad enough when the
name was but a name of which he could learn no more. It was worse when
it began to be clothed upon with detestable attributes; and out of the
shifting, insubstantial mists that had so long baffled his eye, there
leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.
"I thought it was madness," he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper
in the safe, "and now I begin to fear it is disgrace."
With that he blew out his candle, put on a great-coat, and set forth in
the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine, where his
friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding
patients. "If any one knows, it will be Lanyon," he had thought.
The solemn butler knew and welcomed him; he was subjected to no stage of
delay, but ushered direct from the door to the dining-room, where Dr.
Lanyon sat alone over his wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper,
red-faced gentleman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a
boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mr. Utterson, he sprang up
from his chair and welcomed him with both hands. The geniality, as was
the way of the man, was somewhat theatrical to the eye; but it reposed
on genuine feeling. For these two were old friends, old mates both at
school and college, both thorough respecters of themselves and of each
other, and, what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each
other's company.
After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject which so
disagreeably preoccupied his mind.
"I suppose, Lanyon," said he, "you and I must be the two oldest friends
that Henry Jekyll has?"
"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 spirt 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 besieged 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 clauses of the will. And 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."