He was a young man, but appearing careworn and prematurely aged. His
face had a spoiled and dingy look such as an actor’s bears by
daylight, when for the paint and glow and glamour of the boards are
substituted the grey and gripping realities of existence. The
fruitlessness of all hope, of all cheery effort, seemed typified for
him in the stagnant November fog which brooded over the City without.
As he gazed through his window into the dreary murk, the dull roar
which reached his ears from Fleet Street and its adjacent market
sounded to him like the boom of surf to a castaway in a desolate land.
He was stranded, he felt, among the waste places of life, and no
prospect of release was ever more to be his.
He had started his professional career with high expectations and a
confidence born of capital possession. They had all, hopes and
confidence and capital, gone to wreck on the shoals of a giant fraud.
What solace to him was it that the law had ended by claiming its own?
It had been a greater mercy had it remained eternally blind, and left
him, one of many victims, to live on content in his fool’s paradise.
Though his substance had been dissipated, the interest, regularly
paid, had served him for his needs. It had been all the sinews he
desired in his wrestle with fortune. Was it not in the bitter irony of
things that his high rectitude should be expected to rejoice in that
vindication of justice which had left him a pauper?
He recalled, in a sudden impotent fury, the occasion, or the suspected
occasion, which had marked him down for ruin. His capital had been all
invested in Bank of England stock, and the securities had been
deposited with Fauntleroy, the now notorious banker of Berners Street.
It had been this villain’s practice to forge powers of attorney
enabling him to dispose of his clients’ property, and the man’s cool
audacity had even, it was said, carried him so far as to the
occasional appending of a customer’s name to a fraudulent deed in the
customer’s own presence, and the then sending it, with its ink still
wet, as though from the visitor’s hand, into the clerks’ department.
Such, he fully believed, had been the case with him during a business
call he had made one day upon the head of the house. He remembered,
cursing the memory, the sleek, plausible figure in its black tights
and broadcloth, the spotless frill at its bosom, the smile on its
prosperous face, the pen travelling in its plump fingers while the
voice went on, even, polite, and interested. To be signing away so
inhumanly the fortune, the happiness, the soul of a fellow-creature,
and never all the while to flush or falter. Damn him!
Well, he was damned maybe. A glutton, a sybarite, a voluptuary, he had
come to the end of his feasting, and only for Lazarus remained the
scraps and dregs of the banquet.
A rap at the door broke in upon his miserable reverie, and a small
servant entered the room. Two gentlemen, she said, desired
particularly to see him. Who were they? She did not know, they would
give no name. Where were they? In the surgery, which opened on the
back. They had brought _something_ with them, _something_ on a
hand-cart, and then other men, who had deposited the something, had
left. She was used to the traffic, or had been, and showed no
agitation or alarm.
Resurrection-men! He had no desire to pay their price, and, if he had,
no means. The very house in which he lived, an inheritance, was
already under treaty for sale. Frowning and compressing his lips, he
descended to the room below. The _something_, stark and obvious under
a black cloth, was laid already on the dissecting-table. Two gentlemen
turned to greet him.
They were both grave, formal, unconvincing; yet perfectly refined in
manner. One, who constituted himself the spokesman, began to address
him at once in a low voice:
“You will please to pardon, sir, on the ground of extreme urgency,
this unceremonious visit. I must say at once that we do not wish to
state our names, and I will admit unhesitatingly that we are
disguised. This”--he signified the silent shape--“is the subject of
our visit. We desire your acceptance of it in the interests of
science. No return is required, and no condition made, save that you
undertake to convince yourself, beyond the possibility of a doubt, and
before proceeding to extremities, that no flicker of life survives to
it.”
Professionally self-possessed, the young doctor had yet to rally all
his nerve-power to meet so amazing a charge. He delayed to answer for
some moments.
“And if it did?” he said.
“Then you will have no reason to regret your caution,” answered the
gentleman.
“I cannot pretend to understand you.”
“I must urge upon you the necessity of a quick decision,” said the
stranger. “Will it satisfy you to be told that the subject”--he again
pointed to the hidden form--“expressly desired that this task should
be deputed to you?”
“Are you mad?” said the young surgeon, “or am I, or do you think me
so? What task--and who desired it?”
“The task,” said the gentleman, “of ascertaining, in the first
instance, that life is indisputably extinct, and of then devoting the
remains, at your complete discretion, to the interests of science. I
may tell you”--he seemed to hesitate a moment--“that the subject
suffered under a morbid apprehension of premature burial.”
“His apprehensions,” said the surgeon, “could be easily set at rest.”
“I hope so,” answered the stranger.
“But--but,” cried the surgeon in desperation--he made a movement as if
clutching at his hair--“you must see, gentlemen, that I cannot
possibly undertake the responsibility on these vague premises.”
“Question me, sir, if you will, and I will endeavour to answer to your
satisfaction.”
“Tell me then. Who is this man? What was his complaint--presumably
mortal? Was he a patient of mine that he selected me for this
extraordinary business?”
The gentleman again seemed to hesitate.
“He was,” he said, “--yes, I may call him a patient of yours, inasmuch
as you attended him during the course of a distemper or aberration
with which he was seized. He considered that he owed you a return for
his somewhat cavalier exploitation of your services, and, at the last,
these were the only means he could devise for giving some effect
to--well, shall we call it his remorse? The sentiment, combined with
the fact that his demise, or his assumed demise, occurred in this
neighbourhood, decided our choice.”
The young surgeon, forcing all his wits to a focus, fixed his eyes
searchingly on the speaker.
“He was murdered,” he said. “Is that it?”
The other shrugged his shoulders, with a scarce perceptible smile.
“O, sir,” he said, “if you take that view! But a moment’s examination
will convince you.”
“Let me make it, then.”
The stranger interposed his body, quietly but resolutely.
“After we are gone.”
“Why will you not give me your names?”
“Because, sir, we do not wish to associate ourselves with an act which
might prove difficult of explanation, and which, given publicity, must
most certainly defeat its own object. You must accept our word for it
that we were both close personal friends of the deceased, and that we
have undertaken this difficult charge out of pure regard for an
intimacy which contains for us many endearing recollections.”
“What was the cause of death? Will you tell me so much?”
“It was the result of a fall.”
The surgeon, wavering between conscience and professional
acquisitiveness, gnawed his forefinger in an agitated way.
“But why,” he said--“why should not a post-mortem examination at his
own house have sufficed for his apprehensions?”
“There is no calculating,” answered the stranger, “the lengths to
which such diseased imaginativeness will carry a man. Safety, no
doubt, to his mind, consisted in nothing short of dismemberment.” He
looked at his watch in a hurried way. “Time, sir,” he said, “presses.
If our natural scruples shrink, as I say, from association with this
business, no such sentiment need apply to you. Gentlemen of your
profession, I understand, are not expected to be over-inquisitive as
to the material provided for their anatomical studies. You may rest
completely satisfied that nothing discreditable to ourselves or
harmful to you attaches to this case. Very well. Subjects, I believe,
are costly. Here is one to your hand for nothing. But should our
friend’s terrors prove actually justified, and this to be a case of
suspended animation, in that event, sir, I will answer for it that the
patient’s gratitude would take a form upon which you would have
plentiful reason to congratulate yourself. And in the meantime every
wasted minute is a reproach to us. Answer, sir, will you accept the
conditions or not?”
“You will not tell me your name?”
“No.”
“Nor his there?”
“I must not, indeed.”
“Nor where to communicate with you, in case----?”
“No purpose would be served thereby. We have done what he desired of
us, and there our duty to him ends. The rest lies between you and
him.”
The surgeon, with a gesture which might have implied resignation or
repudiation, turned his back. When he looked round again he was alone.
He made a movement towards the door, as if in a pretence to himself to
recall his visitors, but stopped on the instant, biting his lip.
“I will not be such a hypocrite,” he muttered. He knew perfectly well,
indeed, what was at the bottom of his heart--hope; a vague,
indefinable feeling that all here was not as intimated; that out of
the very strangeness and mystery of the affair might come profit and
perhaps salvation to himself, a desperate man.
With a somewhat haggard face he moved on tiptoe to lock both the
surgery door and that leading into the yard at the back. Then, feeling
awed against his will, he turned to the hidden form.
It was still early morning, but the fog made a thick, dingy twilight
in the room. Not a sound broke the dead stillness; nothing moved.
Yes, something--the thing under the cloth!
Was he overwrought--victim to some wild delusion? He could have sworn
it; and yet the motion had been so slight, so hardly perceptible, it
might have been the mere contraction or dilation of a shadow.
Again!
With a gasp of horror he leaped to the table, tore away the cloth, and
revealed the face, blotched and livid, of Fauntleroy the forger.
The truth rushed upon him as he stood there, pallid and staring, and
with it an understanding of each one of his visitor’s studied
ambiguities. The great criminal, he remembered now, was to have been
executed that morning. Where had he heard it--that whisper, that
incredible rumour, hinting of a hangman extravagantly bribed by
friends of the criminal, and of a silver tube to be passed into the
condemned gullet? A thing impracticable--preposterous--he had
dismissed it as a canard; yet, somehow, it appeared, accomplished.
Either that way or another--what did it matter? The man had been
hanged, patently on the evidences before him, and as patently he still
lived--only as yet the merest flicker of vitality, expressed in the
pulsing of the purple œdematous swelling about the throat. A little
either way, and the spark were coaxed into flame or quenched for ever.
Which way, then? He stood for minutes, quite rigid, battling with his
emotions. His wrongs; his diabolical opportunity; his perfect immunity
from detection; his justification, inasmuch as this life was already
forfeit to the law. Hyde roared in him, and Jekyll pleaded. The very
clothes of the thing, unaltered in their black neatness, sleekness,
hypocrisy, filled him with an indescribable loathing. He stepped
forward, his fingers crooked.
At that moment the laugh of a baby sounded in the yard outside. He
paused, and stood listening. Suddenly his face lightened:
“Not guilty!” he cried, “not guilty, little one!” and hurried to the
succour of his enemy.