The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 05Stevenson, Robert Louis
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The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 05
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century; Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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