From the Pages of The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde and Other Stories

“You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning.” (from “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” page 36)

All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

(from “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde,” page 70)

“Now you know me as well as I know myself: a fool, but consistent in his folly; and, as I will ask you to believe, neither a whimperer nor a coward.” (from “The Suicide Club,” page 110)

In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity.

(from “Thrawn Janet,” page 187)

Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he had been obliged to swallow. (from “The Body-Snatcher,” page 212)

Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer. (from “Markheim,” page 229)

He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould of their succession? (from “Markheim,” page 234)

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was first published in 1886.
“A Lodging for the Night” first appeared in 1877, “The Suicide Club” in 1878,
“Thrawn Janet” in 1881, “The Body-Snatcher” in 1884, and “Markheim” in 1886.

Published in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,
Notes, Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions, and For
Further Reading. This trade paperback edition published in 2004

Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading

Copyright @ 2003 by Jenny Davidson.

Note on Robert Louis Stevenson, The World of Robert Louis Stevenson,
Inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories,
and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2003 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories

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eISBN : 978-1-411-43321-2

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Robert Louis Stevenson

The name Robert Louis Stevenson is synonymous with adventure, romance, and the exotic—qualities that characterized the author’s life as well as his fiction. Born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, Stevenson contracted in his early years what was probably tuberculosis, a condition that would cause repeated bouts of illness throughout his life. But frequent confinement to the sickbed did not stifle the child’s imagination. The young boy wrote tales based on biblical passages and Scottish history and soon gained a reputation as a storyteller.

In 1867 Stevenson enrolled in Edinburgh University. His family expected that he would join the distinguished line of Stevenson engineers; instead he chose to study the law. But conventional study was, he later claimed, the farthest thing from his mind. “To play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men”—these were Stevenson’s youthful pursuits, which he sought despite academic and familial consequences.

This self-professed idler was a devoted student of the curriculum he devised for himself. Sometimes on the verge of grave illness, Stevenson wandered through the wilder quarters of Edinburgh, and worked at honing his writing skills by imitating his favorite authors, among them Defoe, Hazlitt, and Montaigne. In 1875 he passed the bar exam, but rather than take up legal practice, he set out for the European continent; his time there is recounted in early essays and travel narratives. While in France Stevenson fell in love with Fanny Osbourne, a married American woman ten years his senior. He joined Fanny in the United States in 1879. Upon her divorce in 1880 she and Stevenson were married; they lived for a short time afterward in northern California.

Stevenson then returned to Edinburgh with Fanny and her son from her first marriage, Lloyd Osbourne. Stevenson’s health was so fragile for the next several years that sometimes he was bedridden; at other times he and his family traveled to the south of France and Switzerland in hopes of restoring his well-being. As in his youth, sickness galvanized rather than diminished his imagination; during this period he composed such classics as Treasure Island (1883), A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped (both 1886). From 1884 to 1887 the family lived in Bournemouth, a resort on England’s south coast.

After his father’s death in 1887, Stevenson and his mother, wife, and stepson moved to America. The author’s vagabond spirit and quest for better health led the family on a South Seas voyage that would prove to be his greatest adventure; in 1888 they visited the islands of the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii. During the journey Stevenson suffered a lung hemorrhage, and the family settled in Samoa to attend to his failing health. Stevenson’s works of the period include In the South Seas (1890), which chronicles the clash between Eastern and Western cultures and champion the Samoan people; these writings shocked his friends in Scotland, drew fire from local warring political factions, and nearly provoked his banishment from Samoa.

As Stevenson’s health seriously worsened he felt nostalgia for his native country, although he knew he would not survive a voyage home to Scotland. He collapsed from a brain hemorrhage while at work on his unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston and died on December 3, 1894, in Samoa.

The World of Robert Louis Stevenson and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories

1850
Robert Louis Stevenson is born on November 13 in Edinburgh, the only child of Thomas and Margaret (née Balfour) Stevenson. As a child, he suffers from an illness, probably tuberculosis, which will plague him throughout his life.

1858
Poor health keeps Stevenson bedridden, and he attends school infrequently; tutors educate him at home.

1859
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published, as is Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

1865
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is pub lished.

1867
Thomas Stevenson enrolls his son in Edinburgh Uni versity with the hope that he will join the family engi neering firm. The romantic, often sickly young man delights his professors but takes his formal studies lightly. Instead he fraternizes with the citizens of Ed inburgh and spends time imitating the writing style of Michel de Montaigne, William Hazlitt, and Daniel De foe.

1871
To his father’s dismay, Stevenson leaves his engineering studies to pursue a law degree. He continues to develop his true interest, writing. Royal Albert Hall opens in London.

1872
ewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and George El iot’s Middlemarch are published.

1874
Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd appears.

1875
Stevenson passes the bar but decides not to practice law, choosing instead to write and to travel to Europe.

1876
A boat trip down the river Oise in France inspires Ste venson to write the travel narrative An Inland Voyage. In France he meets Fanny Osbourne, a married American woman ten years his senior; the two fall in love.

1878
An Inland Voyage is published. Fanny returns to the United States, leaving Stevenson depressed and mel ancholy. He sets out on a journey through the moun tains of France’s Massif Central and documents it in a narrative that becomes the book Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, published the following year.

1879
In August Stevenson sets out for California to see Fanny. A severe chest infection leaves him on the verge of death.

1880
Having been granted a divorce, Fanny weds Stevenson and nurses him in northern California. The two then return to Edinburgh. During the next four years, be tween bouts of illness, the couple travels to southern France and Switzerland.

1881
Stevenson, inspired by a map he made with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, begins thinking about the plot for a story about a search for buried treasure.

1883
Treasure Island is published in book form and becomes a favorite among British readers.

1884
While traveling in southern France, Stevenson is struck by illness. He, Fanny, and Lloyd return to Britain and live from 1884 to 1887 in Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England. Stevenson composes nu merous works in the following two years. He also de velops a friendship with Henry James.

1885
A Child’s Garden of Verses is published.

1886
The Strange Case of Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped are published.

1887
Stevenson’s father dies in May. The remaining family members—Stevenson’s mother, wife, and stepson—journey to America. Memories and Portraits is published.

1888
Stevenson, Fanny, her son, and Stevenson’s mother set sail for the South Seas on the Casco. The family visits many islands, including those of the Marquesas, Tahiti, and Hawaii.

1889
Stevenson visits a leper colony in Molokai to investi gate—and exonerate—a missionary named Father Da mien. The Master of Ballantrae is published.

1890
Stevenson sails throughout the Eastern Pacific until a lung hemorrhage leads him to settle in Samoa. In the South Seas and Father Damien are published.

1891
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, is published.

1892
Stevenson begins to campaign for Samoan rights against the encroaching Western powers; he publishes A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa.

1893
Stevenson is accused of sedition when he supports the position of a Samoan chief, nearly causing his banish ment from Samoa. Knowing his health will not permit him to return to Scotland, Stevenson feels deep nostal gia for his native country.

1894
Samoa experiences peace, and Stevenson is hailed as a hero. While working on his novel Weir of Hermiston, Ste venson dies of a brain hemorrhage on December 3. He is buried atop Mount Vaea in Samoa.

Introduction

Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde is at once a sharply conceived allegory about the psychological costs of living the respectable life and a thrilling page-turner as compelling as anything written by such modern masters of horror as Clive Barker and Stephen King. Published in January 1886, Stevenson’s story quickly became a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic.

The American actor-manager Richard Mansfield purchased the copyright to Stevenson’s novella with the goal of maintaining exclusive rights for theatrical adaptation, but the copyright laws failed to prevent a host of other impresarios from mounting competing productions; one producer touring in New England advertised that his Mr. Hyde was so terrifying that he had to be kept chained in a boxcar on the way to the theater. Though the text of the adaptation, by playwright Thomas Russell Sullivan, would seem dated and melodramatic to modem readers—as does the trick photograph in which Mansfield’s Hyde crouches behind his Jekyll, ready to spring—the actor’s performance brought to life for his contemporaries all the most terrifying aspects of Stevenson’s story. First acted at the Boston Museum on May 9, 1887, as Mansfield’s biographer Paul Wilstach recounts, Jekyll and Hyde had immensely powerful effects on its audience: “Strong men shuddered and women fainted and were carried out of the theatre.... People went away from ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ afraid to enter their houses alone. They feared to sleep in darkened rooms. They were awakened by nightmare. Yet it had the fascination of crime and mystery, and they came again and again” (Richard Mansfield, the Man and the Actor, pp. 146- 147; see “For Further Reading”).

Spectators found it difficult to believe that Mansfield transformed himself without chemical assistance, and he was charged with using acids, phosphorus, or even an inflatable rubber suit to facilitate the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde. The truth of the matter, Wilstach goes on to say, was that “his only change was in the muscles of his face, the tones of his yielding voice, and the posture of his body” (pp. 147- 148). The account of Mansfield’s friend and fellow actor De Wolf Hopper confirms the effectiveness of the performance. As the two men sat one evening in a darkened room at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, Hopper asked Mansfield what he did and how he did it: “ ‘And then and there, only four feet away, under the green light, as that booming clock struck the hour—he did it—changed to Hyde before my very eyes—and I remember that I, startled to pieces, jumped up and cried that I’d ring the bell if he didn’t stop!’ ” (Wilstach, p. 155) .

The great Victorian actor Henry Irving soon invited Mansfield to bring his production to the Lyceum Theatre in London, and Jekyll and Hyde opened there on August 4, 1888. On the last day of August, however, an event took place that would transform the significance of Mansfield’s production and, indeed, of Stevenson’s story as well. The mutilated corpse of a prostitute was discovered in the East End of London, the first in a series of five or more murders attributed to the terrifying figure who would come to be known as Jack the Ripper. The Ripper cut his victims’ throats, sliced open their torsos, and removed their organs; he was suspected of having trained as either a butcher or a medical man.

As subsequent bodies were discovered, London went wild with fear. Reporters drew public attention to the extraordinary poverty and squalor of Whitechapel in the East End, where most of the murders took place, and pointed to the hypocrisy of a society that allowed such neighborhoods to exist in the face of the nation’s great prosperity, thereby encouraging the emergence of a monster like the Ripper. Amid riots and public frenzies, many citizens wrote letters to the newspapers and the police suggesting precautions that might be taken to prevent more murders. These suggestions ranged from providing better street lighting and giving policemen whistles as a rapid warning system, to arming prostitutes with revolvers, or even dressing up police officers as prostitutes and protecting their throats and torsos with metal corsets, perhaps attached to batteries that would electrocute the unwary attacker. Many of these letters singled out prominent members of society as suspects in the Ripper murders. At the peak of the frenzy the police received more than a thousand letters a week, and the actor Richard Mansfield was among those charged with being responsible for the Whitechapel murders. As Donald Rumbelow relates in his history of the crimes, “The writer accusing Mansfield had not been able to rest for a day and a night after seeing the performance, claiming that no man could disguise himself so well and that, since Mansfield worked himself up to such a frenzy on stage, he probably did the real life murders too” (The Complete, jack the Ripper, p. 124).

Just as Mansfield’s performance blurred the boundaries between theater and real life, so, too, did Stevenson’s tale seem paradoxically to invent the figure of the modern serial killer, a male predator who lived a respectable life by day but whose respectability not only enabled, but actively produced, his violent excesses of the night. Literally dozens of films based on Stevenson’s novella were produced between 1908 and 1939—Harry M. Geduld offers an exhaustive list in The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion—and the MGM classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (released in 1941 and starring Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman) is still well worth seeing. More easily mocked than the story of Jack the Ripper, Stevenson’s tale has generated countless parodies, from early print caricatures to such gems as the Hanna-Barbera animated short Dr. jekyll and Mr. Mouse (1947). Not that the Ripper story is altogether immune from satirization: The band members in Rob Reiner’s “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap (1984) conduct an earnest conversation at the end-of-tour party about “Saucy Jack,” the title song of the band’s projected rock musical about the life of Jack the Ripper.

The murders continue to hold our imagination; most recently, best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell spent a reported $6 million of her own money applying forensic techniques to the evidence in the Ripper case, a historical investigation described in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Rippper—Case Closed. Likewise, the names Jekyll and Hyde have entered the language, familiar even to those who have never read Stevenson’s story: They are “used allusively,” reports the Oxford English Dictionary, “in reference to opposite sides of a person’s character or to persons or things of a dual character, alternately good and evil.” Moreover, perhaps because Stevenson anticipated aspects of the Ripper episode in his vision of the double life, the two stories are often con flated, along with a third dark episode in nineteenth-century British history, in which two Irish-born men called William Burke and William Hare killed at least fifteen people and sold their corpses to surgeon Robert Knox for dissection in his Edinburgh school of anatomy. The 1971 film Dr. jekyll and Sister Hyde merges all three stories: Using hormones obtained from cadavers in the morgue, this movie’s Dr. Jekyll inadvertently turns himself into a woman—Sister Hyde—and becomes the perpetrator of the Whitechapel murders.

While Jekyll and Hyde shares a London setting with the Ripper murders, the Burke and Hare murders took place in Edinburgh, where Stevenson was born in 1850. Robert Louis Stevenson was the only child of Thomas and Margaret Balfour Stevenson; his father and grandfather were prominent civil engineers who built many of the lighthouses in Scotland, and there was a very general expectation that Robert would follow in their footsteps. The Edinburgh where Stevenson was raised was distinctively different from London, in both psychological and urban-planning terms. Edinburgh life was dominated by Presbyterianism, a version of Calvinism that emphasizes the natural depravity of man and the doctrine of predestination—the belief that God has foreknowledge of all events—and makes stark distinctions between sinners and those destined for salvation. It is a religion whose members tend to take material prosperity as evidence of God’s grace, and is often called characteristically bourgeois. Edinburgh’s geography features a striking division between the Old Town and the New Town, the former a picturesque but squalid slum then known for its violence and general immorality and the latter—where Stevenson was raised—a section of elegant Georgian houses built in the early years of the nineteenth century and home to many respectable professional families. Joined by the North Bridge, the two towns of Edinburgh made visible the divisions between old and new, sordid and respectable; they also symbolized for many observers the psychic contradictions of Calvinism itself.

Stevenson suffered from poor health as a child (some of his experiences as an invalid are chronicled in A Child’s Garden of Verses [1885]), and his schooling was often interrupted as a result, but it was not until his entrance to Edinburgh University at the age of seventeen that the extent of his hostility toward his parents’ values became apparent. (There were limits to Stevenson’s rebelliousness. Despite serious differences with his father, the writer accepted substantial financial support from his parents up to the time of his father’s death.) Stevenson soon adopted a role more commonly associated with the 1970s than the 1870s, that of liberal bohemian, rejecting his parents’ religious beliefs, pursuing illicit sexual liaisons, and condemning the hypocrisy and cruelty he associated with Scottish bourgeois respectability. Rejecting engineering as a profession, Stevenson took up the study of law, though he would never practice.

Due to a combination of wanderlust and ill health, he traveled a great deal in his twenties, visiting France and, later, Switzerland, for his lung ailments, and publishing travel narratives such as An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes in the late 1870s. He also began during these years to make a name for himself as an essayist. In 1876 Stevenson met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American woman ten years his senior who prompted wild extremes of love and hate, not just in Stevenson’s friends and family but in the work of subsequent critics and biographers as well. When Fanny returned to her home in California, Stevenson pursued her there, and they were married following Fanny’s divorce in 1880. Northern California was the first in a series of then-exotic locations Stevenson would describe in his writing, in an international odyssey that would end only with his death in Samoa in 1894, at the age of forty-four.

Depending on one’s point of view, Stevenson was either immensely charismatic or maddeningly self-involved, or both; he was a close friend of many of the great literary men of his day, including Leslie Stephen, W. E. Henley, and Edmund Gosse, as well as Henry James, with whom Stevenson spent a great deal of time during the years they both lived in Bournemouth, a resort on the southern coast of England where Stevenson and his family took up residence in the hope of improving his always poor health. Bournemouth was the setting in which, following the success of Treasure Island (1883), Stevenson wrote his compelling historical novel Kidnapped (1886) , as well as Jekyll and Hyde and some of the other stories included in this collection.

After the death of his father in May 1887, Stevenson set out for America with his mother, his wife, and his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. He found himself a celebrity in New York, but soon headed west. It was during this period that he began writing The Master of Ballantrae, published in 1889.

In 1888 Stevenson chartered a yacht and took off from San Francisco for the South Seas, taking in the Marquesas Islands, the Fakarava atoll, Tahiti, Honolulu, and the Gilbert Islands before coming to rest in Samoa. This trip provided the set tings for a series of stories, the most remarkable of which is “The Beach of Falesá,” which bears comparison to the best writing of Stevenson’s now far better known contemporary Joseph Conrad. The late work Stevenson produced at his house, Vailima, in Samoa includes Catriona, the 1893 sequel to Kidnapped; The Ebb-Tide (1894); and the unfinished Weir of Hermiston, published posthumously in 1896.

Stevenson’s reputation as a writer oscillated a great deal over the century following his death (a useful summary of the critical reception is provided by Richard Dury’s Stevenson website; see “For Further Reading”). While stories such as Treasure Island, Jekyll and Hyde, Kidnapped, and Catriona continued to be popular with readers, especially younger ones, Stevenson was not particularly well regarded by the generation that followed him. His writing was attacked in the 1910s and 1920s by Frank Swinnerton, E. F. Benson, and John A. Steuart; H. L. Mencken notoriously wrote in the American Mercury (Nov. 1924) that Stevenson “wrote a great deal of third-rate stuff’ and that ”an air of triviality hangs about all his work and even at times, an air of trashiness” (p. 378) . Stevenson began to be rehabilitated by critics in the middle of the twentieth century, though his stories and novels have yet to be taken as seriously as those of his contemporaries Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Beyond the fact that much of his fiction (whether or not it was written for children) falls into the relatively low prestige category now known as ”young adult“ literature, responses to Stevenson’s work have always been mediated in problematic ways through his biography. Friends and family members published extensive records of the man, often depicting Stevenson as a bohemian saint, and the mythologizing tendency among his contemporaries (especially family members) led to corresponding vilification by former friends and others whose stomachs were turned by the hagiographic elements of Stevenson’s reception, particularly in the years following his death. Stevenson continues to provoke both hatred and idolatry, and there are by now well over one hundred biographical books and essays on Stevenson and his circle.

Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, and his stepson, Lloyd, both wrote accounts of the composition of Jekyll and Hyde that clearly reveal the tendency to mythologize. (The full narratives are given in Alanna Knight’s useful compilation The Robert Louis Stevenson Treasury, supplemented here by additional material from Ian Bell’s biography Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile [Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1992.] Lloyd Osbourne reports, in a passage quoted only by Bell, that Stevenson “said he was working with extraordinary success on a new story that had come to him in a dream, and that he was not to be interrupted or disturbed even if the house caught fire” (p. 187). After a three-day silence, Stevenson read the story aloud to his wife and stepson. Fanny Stevenson responded to the draft with harsh criticism (the quotations here follow Knight): “He had missed the point, she said; had missed the allegory; had made it merely a story—a magnificent bit of sensationalism—when it should have been a masterpiece” (p. 49). Stevenson, in what may have been either irritation or agreement with her judgment, threw the manuscript into the fire and rewrote the story from scratch. Osbourne then observes:

The writing of it was an astounding feat, from whatever aspect it may be regarded. Sixty-four thousand words in six days; more than ten thousand words a day. To those who know little of such things I may explain that a thousand words a day is a fair average for any writer of fiction. Anthony Trollope set himself this quota; it was Jack London’s; it is—and has been—a sort of standard of daily literary accomplishment. Stevenson multiplied it by ten; and on top of that copied out the whole in another two days, and had it in the post on the third (p. 50) .

Fanny Stevenson’s description gives an even clearer picture of the circumstances in which the story was composed: “That an invalid in my husband’s condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone ... seems incredible. He was suffering from continual haemorrhages, and was hardly allowed to speak, his conversation usually being carried on by means of a slate and pencil” (p. 50) .

Whether Stevenson wrote in England, California, or Samoa, Scotland remained central to his fiction, not just in his great historical novels (most often set in the eighteenth-century Scotland of covenanters, clan chieftains, and Stuart loyalists), but also in jekyll and Hyde, ostensibly set in London but—as the novelist G. K. Chesterton first commented—owing a great deal to the Presbyterian Edinburgh of Stevenson’s youth. Commenting on the paradoxical attraction of Puritanism to “repellent things” (Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 50), Chesterton attributes the origin of the story of Jekyll and Hyde to Calvinism’s pathological rendering of the relationship between good and evil. He goes on to suggest “that the story of Jekyll and Hyde, which is presumably presented as happening in London, is all the time very unmistakably happening in Edinburgh,” and his evidence includes the observation that there is “something decidedly Caledonian [Scottish] about Dr. Jekyll”: “The particular tone about his respectability, and the horror of mixing his reputation with mortal frailty, belongs to the upper middle classes in solid Puritan communities” (p. 51).

Though Jekyll and Hyde is narrated in the third person, the events recounted in the story are consistently presented from the point of view of the lawyer Mr. Utterson. As the word “utter” suggests, he will be the only character left to bear witness at the story’s conclusion, though he too is silenced by the end of the book. Utterson is a neutral or repressed character who seems to exist in symbiosis with the disreputable individuals who visit his practice; Stevenson describes him as “the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing men” (p. 5). Utterson is a good man, in other words, but one whose virtue is so passive as to be almost negative: “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” (p. 5). In this Calvinistic practice of self-denial, Utterson resembles the respectable Puritans of Stevenson’s Edinburgh upbringing; he may even represent the system of repression that gives rise to a Mr. Hyde. While Utterson knows Dr. Jekyll well at the story’s outset, he is initially introduced to Hyde only by proxy, in the account of his friend and cousin Richard Enfield. As they pass “a certain sinister block of building” in a busy part of Soho, Enfield tells Utterson a curious story about the stained and blistered door by which they have paused. One night at three in the morning, Enfield had seen “ ‘a little man who was stumping along eastward . . . and a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street.’ ”

“ ‘Well, sir,’ ” Enfield continues, ” ‘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’ ” (p. 7). Enfield confesses that he had “ ‘taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight,’ ” and that the no-nonsense doctor who arrives to care for the child is similarly moved: “ ’Every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him’ ” (p. 8). Having tracked down the offender, Enfield and the doctor “ ‘screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family’ ”: In a strange reversal of roles, it is not Hyde but the two respectable professional men who practice a form of blackmail. The villain then lets himself in through the door to the house and emerges shortly afterward with “ ‘ten pounds in gold and a cheque for the balance on Coutts’s [a highly respectable London bank], 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’ ” (pp. 8-9). Though Enfield suspects the check must be a forgery, he discovers at the bank that it is quite genuine. “ ‘Yes, it’s a bad story,’ ” he tells Utterson in conclusion:

“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. Black mail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth” (p. 9).

Enfield’s account raises a number of questions that will become increasingly relevant as the story develops. In addition to that strange displacement whereby Hyde—himself accused of blackmail and all manner of other crimes—actually prompts Enfield and the doctor to blackmail him, there is something very odd about the offense described in this scene. As chilling as the description of Hyde running down the child may be, the narrative does not accuse him of the more obvious offense that a man might inflict on an eight or ten-year-old girl in a London slum. Though social reformers during this period often expressed concern about the prevalence of sexual contact between children and adults (and of child prostitution) in London’s poorest neighborhoods, Hyde’s is not an explicitly sexual offense, and Stevenson seems to have gone to some trouble to exclude sex from his story. In part this was due to his acute sense of what the market would bear—Ste—venson had no desire to write a story that would be considered obscene or inappropriate for young readers. But the exclusion of sex (though it is implied that Jekyll’s early sexual transgressions are the seed of the later split in his personality) may also be motivated by Stevenson’s somewhat polemical desire to decouple sex and sin in the face of respectable society’s determination to make the two synonymous. Stevenson explores this theme in a letter of November 1887 to American journalist John Paul Bocock, who had seen Mansfield’s theatrical production and expressed curiosity as to whether Hyde was really meant to be younger than Jekyll:

You are right as to Mansfield: Hyde was the younger of the two. He was not good looking however; and not, Great Gods! a mere voluptuary. There is no harm in a voluptuary; and none, with my hand on my heart and in the sight of God, none—no harm whatever—in what prurient fools call “immorality.” The harm was in Jekyll, because he was a hypocrite—not because he was fond of women; he says so himself; but people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality. The Hypocrite let out the beast Hyde—who is no more sexual than another, but who is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice: and these are the diabolic in man—not this poor wish to have a woman, that they make such a cry about. I know, and I dare to say, you know as well as I, that bad and good, even to our human eyes, has no more connection with what is called dissipation than it has with flying kites. But the sexual field and the business field are perhaps the two best fitted for the display of cruelty and cowardice and selfishness (Mehew, ed., Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 352).

Stevenson insists here that sex is not in itself sinful, and that it is “inverted lust”—the corrupt Puritan love affair with a sexuality it ostensibly condemns—rather than sexuality that produces the “diabolic” in man. Hypocrisy, not sexuality, is here held to blame for the production of the monster Hyde, and Stevenson uses the word “hypocrisy” as a shorthand for the entire system of repression and respectability exposed in the story of Jekyll and Hyde.

While Enfield tells Utterson the name of the villain—Hyde—he is unwilling to disclose that of the respectable man he has conjecturally identified as a victim of blackmail. But this information is unnecessary: Utterson has already recognized the name Hyde as the beneficiary of the troubling will of his friend and client Dr. Henry Jekyll, which provides that in the event of the latter’s death or disappearance of more than three months, all of Jekyll’s possessions will pass to Edward Hyde. This idea strikes Utterson as fanciful at best, dangerous at worst. The notion of blackmail still in his head, Utterson digs at the problem of Enfield’s story to the point of insomnia: “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” (pp. 14- 15). The “scroll of lighted pictures” is an inherently sensational medium (the title character of “Markheim” is physically overwhelmed by the memory of a long-ago picture show featuring famous murders of the nineteenth century (p. 232). While the technology for cinematic film had yet to be developed, magic lantern shows were common throughout the nineteenth century, and the picture show represents an addictive mass-market pleasure akin to gin or laudanum. What is described here sounds almost like a drug-induced fantasy. Hyde operates on Utterson’s imagination like alcohol or opium on the addict, enslaving his mind and producing visual scenes of hallucinatory intensity. (Perhaps Stevenson’s story exerts a similar fascination over the mind of the reader: The language of Richard Mansfield’s biographer certainly suggests that the theatrical adaptation itself represented a kind of drug, and that Mansfield regularly “gave the public less of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ than was wanted, and so kept the appetite stimulated” [Wilstach, p. 152].)

Indeed, after a night of strange dreams in which Utterson is able to see Hyde’s figure but not his face (his identity, symbolically speaking), “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” (p. 15). Like Bluebeard’s wife, drawn to the prohibited chamber of horrors under a kind of compulsion, Utterson has been infected by his proximity to Hyde with a curiosity that brings him into psychological danger. We may question Utterson’s judgment here: On the basis of the small scraps of information he possesses, is the lawyer really justified in “haunt[ing] the door in the by-street” (p. 15) with the goal of discovering Hyde’s identity, or has he become a stalker?

When Utterson finally lays eyes on Hyde, his observations only confirm the sense of mysterious deformity noted by earlier witnesses:

Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him (p. 18).

This sighting gives Utterson little insight, however, into the basis of the relationship between Jekyll and the “ ‘hardly human’ ” Hyde. He remains convinced that the root of it must be blackmail resulting from some lapse in Jekyll’s past: “ ‘He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault’ ” (pp. 19-20). Utterson clearly feels solidarity with Jekyll, on the grounds of their shared professional status and of the generous premise that sin can be effaced by many years of virtuous living. He worries, however, that Jekyll may have already given himself over completely into Hyde’s power—a fear supported by the evidence of the will.

When Utterson next sees Jekyll—memorably described on his first appearance as “a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness” (p. 21)—he presses Jekyll to confide in him. Jekyll resists: “ ‘Indeed it isn’t what you fancy; it is not as bad as that; and just to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde’ ” (p. 22). Jekyll’s words sound rather like an addict’s increasingly implausible denials of dependence on the drug. Like Utterson, the reader suspects that Jekyll expresses a fantasy, not a reality, and that it will be almost impossible for Jekyll to rid himself of Hyde. Under pressure, Utterson promises Jekyll that he will support Hyde’s rights in the will, though even this concession leaves the lawyer deeply uneasy.

More than a year passes before the story’s next major incident, recounted in the chapter titled “The Carew Murder Case”: “a crime of singular ferocity . . . rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim” (p. 24) . The murder is witnessed by a maidservant who sees every detail of the violent encounter between Hyde and Sir Danvers Carew, “an aged beautiful gentleman with white hair” (p. 24) who represents all the civic virtues Hyde loathes. When Sir Danvers steps back in the face of Hyde’s rage, the narrative recounts, “Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway” (p. 25). Utterson is called in because the victim lacks identification but has in his pocket “a sealed and stamped envelope ... which bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson.” Utterson not only identifies the victim but recognizes in the murder weapon, “broken and battered as it was ... [a stick] that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll” (p. 26). It is curious not just that Utterson’s name is found on the corpse—we never learn the contents of the letter—but that the stick itself originally came from Utterson, confirming the reader’s sense that Utterson is somehow psychologically implicated in Hyde’s crimes. Does Hyde’s violence spring from an impulse suppressed not just in Jekyll but in Utterson as well? As Utterson and the police inspector travel together to Hyde’s residence, through the dramatic setting of a fog that renders morning twilight and Soho “like a district of some city in a nightmare,” we learn that Utterson “was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest” (p. 26).

At Hyde’s lodgings they find a pile of ashes in the hearth containing the remnants of the murder weapon and of Hyde’s own checkbook, that essential accessory of identity in the modern world. Yet Hyde himself has vanished:

His family could nowhere be traced; he had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders (p. 28).

In contrast, Utterson finds Jekyll at home the same afternoon, visiting him in “the building which was indifferently known as the laboratory or dissecting rooms” (p. 29). It is no coincidence that Jekyll’s chemical experiments are conducted in a former dissecting room and surgical theater. Though it is not explicitly mentioned, Stevenson’s description invokes the violent and sordid history of anatomy: Not all resurrection men (as they were often called) obtained cadavers like Burke and Hare by murdering their victims, of course, but they very commonly robbed graves to obtain corpses for dissection, with the full knowledge and complicity of the surgeons who purchased them. (Stevenson’s preoccupation with Burke and Hare features more prominently in “The Body-Snatcher,” also included in this collection.) The shades of Burke and Hare hang over Jekyll’s workplace, representing the coupling of medicine and murder in the dark of night: “The doctor had bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical, had changed the destination of the block at the bottom of the garden.” The place is dingy and windowless, “the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw” (p. 29).

Jekyll himself looks “deathly sick” when Utterson is admitted to see him, and when the lawyer asks him whether he has been mad enough to hide the murderer, Jekyll swears a solemn oath that he is done with Hyde: “ ‘I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world’ ” (p. 30) . In support of this, Jekyll also gives Utterson a letter to clear him of any suspicion in the murder:

The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed “Edward Hyde”: and it signified, briefly enough, that the writer’s benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a thousand generosities, need labour under no alarm for his safety, as he had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked this letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for; and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions (pp. 30-31) .

Yet Utterson’s attention is also caught by a number of suspicious details. Though Jekyll claims the letter was hand-delivered that day, the doctor’s butler testifies that nothing came by messenger to the front door. Moreover, Utterson’s head clerk happens to be “a great student and critic of handwriting” (p. 32), and Utterson hands over the letter (of interest because it is “ ‘a murderer’s autograph’ ”) to him for analysis. Utterson’s clerk is in the vanguard of the new science. Police technology had only recently begun to develop the practices of document examination, by which handwriting was identified and forgery detected. The clerk’s interest may also be connected to the practice of graphology, the study of handwriting based on the premise that an individual’s “hand” expresses his or her personality. A dinner invitation meanwhile arrives from Dr. Jekyll, and when the clerk compares it with the letter signed by Hyde mentioned above, he comments on “ ‘a rather singular resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only differently sloped.’ ” Utterson locks the note in his safe: “ ‘What!’ he thought. ‘Henry Jekyll forge for a murderer!’‘ And his blood ran cold in his veins” (p. 33).Utterson continues to misunderstand the relationship between Jekyll and Hyde, of course; the best evidence that the two men are really one is that they share the identical handwriting, a clue to the ultimate working out of the plot that Stevenson hides here in plain view.

Now that Hyde himself has vanished, tales of his past misdeeds surface, but Utterson is moderately comforted by the present state of affairs: ‘The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll” (p. 34) . Jekyll seems relieved of the burden of what Utterson still takes to have been blackmail: ”He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer ; and whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service ; and for more than two months, the doctor was at peace” (p. 34). After two months of business as usual, however, Utterson is repeatedly denied entrance at Jekyll’s, and he finally has recourse for support in their mutual friend Lanyon, estranged from Jekyll for some time. Utterson has not understood the gravity of the falling-out between Jekyll and Lanyon, for Lanyon has said little about it beyond expressing his anger that Jekyll has become ” ‘too fanciful’ “ and spouted ” ’unscientific balderdash’ “ (p. 14), leading the lawyer to put it down to a scientific disagreement between two medical men.

He is shocked to find Lanyon on the verge of death and refusing to speak of Jekyll: “ ‘I beg that you will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead,’ ” Lanyon says (p. 35). Jekyll himself subsequently refuses to have any contact with Utterson, expressing the following wish by letter:

“I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence” (p. 36).

The mystery is compounded when Lanyon dies shortly afterward, leaving for Utterson a letter with a sealed enclosure marked “ ‘not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll.’ ” Utterson has been pushed by this time almost to the breaking point: “A great curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard the prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his dead friend were stringent obligations; and the packet slept in the inmost corner of his private safe” (p. 37). Yet while he does not act on this curiosity, Utterson is hardly the same man as before: “It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it; and it may be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson desired the society of his surviving friend with the same eagerness” (p. 37) . Finally, on a walk following a route similar to the one on which Utterson first heard Enfield’s narrative about Hyde, the cousins come upon Jekyll in the courtyard behind the house where Hyde appeared. As they watch, “the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below” (p. 39).

In the last part of the main narrative Utterson receives a visit from the butler Poole, whose master, Jekyll, has been shut up in his cabinet or private office for the best part of a week. Utterson returns with the butler to Jekyll’s house, where they find the staff gathered in mortal terror. Utterson follows the butler into the laboratory, through the surgical theater, and to the foot of the staircase leading to Jekyll’s cabinet. The voice that answers their spoken inquiry sounds nothing like the doctor‘s, and the butler is convinced that his master has been murdered. The inhabitant of the cabinet, whoever he may be, has been calling out all week for a supply of a mysterious drug that ’is wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for,’ ” in the butler’s words to Utterson. ” ’For God’s sake, find me some of the old,’ ” Jekyll has written in the note requesting the equivalent of his previous supply, as opposed to the “ ‘impure’ ” sample he has lately received (pp. 43-44). Utterson has a rational explanation for what Poole thinks he’s seen, a masked creature “ ‘digging among the crates’ ” in the operating theater in the vain hope of discovering a supply of the drug: Jekyll must have been seized (the lawyer suggests) “with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer” (pp. 44-45), probably syphilis or some other sexually transmitted disease. But the butler knows what he saw: a “ ‘masked thing like a monkey,’ ” “ ‘much of the same bigness’ ” as Mr. Hyde (p. 46). The language used to describe Hyde consistently makes him out to belong to a different species than the human beings in the story, tapping into an unattractive contemporary discourse of difference and degeneracy that is highly raciali zed. (Stevenson’s 1885 story ”Olalla,” not included in this collection, offers another interesting exploration of the idea of degeneracy and casts light on aspects of his depiction of Hyde.) What can the two men do but force their way into the cabinet? The individual they believe to be Hyde calls out for mercy, but they hack their way in with an axe.

What they find is a sight at once ordinary and uncanny. Amid a quiet domestic scene, the fire glowing on the hearth and the kettle whistling—it seems an inadvertently comical detail that the villainous Hyde should drink such an ordinary beverage as tea—they find the body of Hyde, dressed in the much-too-large clothes of Dr. Jekyll and dead by self administered cyanide. When they search for the body of Jekyll, however, the two men have no luck: “Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive.” All they find are the signs of a chemical experiment and one or two other disturbing artifacts: “There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies” (p. 50) . They also find yet another envelope for Utterson: a will, written in terms similar to the last, though “in place of the name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer, with indescribable amazement, read the name of Gabriel John Utterson” (p. 50) . It is accompanied by a note from Jekyll dated that day, which gives the two men some hope that the doctor may still be alive, and a third enclosure, a substantial packet of papers that Utterson is instructed to read after he opens Lanyon’s sealed narrative. In the final scene of the story’s third-person narration, Utterson tells the butler that he will go home and read the papers, then return at midnight, at which point they will notify the police. Yet the reader never sees Utterson again: The story’s remaining pages are entirely occupied by the first-person narratives of Lanyon and Jekyll, and there is no positive evidence that Utterson ever goes to the police at all. What, after all, could he tell them?

Structurally speaking, the two personal narratives with which the story concludes resemble the inset stories of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a justified Sinner (1824), the latter an important Scottish novel that has a great deal in common with the story of Jekyll and Hyde. Stevenson was fascinated with the literature of the double, which includes (in addition to Hogg’s novel) Robert Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer” (1799), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Double” (1846) and Crime and Punishment (1866) . Stevenson read Crime and Punishment in 1884 and 1885 in French translation, referring to it in a letter as “the greatest book I have read easily in ten years”: “Henry James could not finish it: all I can say is, it nearly finished me. It was like having an illness” (Selected Letters, p. 310). Subsequent literary doubles, all probably influenced by Jekyll and Hyde, appear in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1910), and Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1909).

Lanyon’s narrative, given first of the two, is akin to an affidavit and follows the form of written or verbal testimony, complete with dates and documents. It begins with the night when Lanyon receives from Jekyll a registered letter containing a most peculiar request: to break into his private cabinet, with the assistance of a locksmith, and retrieve a locked drawer and its contents, then to admit at midnight the man Jekyll will send to retrieve it. Lanyon follows his friend’s instructions. Though he fears that Jekyll has become insane, there is nothing terrifying in the drawer, just some wrapped powders, clearly “of Jekyll’s private manufacture” and containing “a simple crystalline salt of a white colour”; a phial “half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to ... contain phosphorus and some volatile ether”; and a “version book,” a sketchy record of scientific experiments with a list of dates (pp. 55-56). Increasingly sure that Jekyll must be suffering from “cerebral disease,” Lanyon loads an old revolver in case he needs to defend himself, then dismisses his servants for the night. At midnight, Lanyon finds outside his door a “small man crouching against the pillars of the portico” and avoiding the notice of an approaching policeman (p. 56) . Once they are inside the consulting room—chosen by Lanyon as the site of their conversation because it will let him protect himself psychologically against these extraordinary circumstances with “as fair an imitation of [his] ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of [his] preoccupations, and the horror [he] had of [his] visitor, would suffer [him] to muster” (p. 58)—Lanyon is able to see the visitor clearly:

He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred (P. 57).

The clothes the visitor wears are “enormously too large for him,” and Lanyon sees “something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature.”

The visitor takes the contents of the drawer and mixes a compound in a glass he then sets on the table, but before consuming it he issues to Lanyon a challenge that recalls the serpent’s temptation of Eve in the garden or Satan’s of Jesus in the wilderness:

“Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan” (p. 59).

Lanyon can’t resist the temptation to knowledge, and his visitor holds him to professional secrecy: “ ‘what follows is under the seal of our profession,’ ” he insists. That word “our” is already a giveaway as to the identity of the visitor, who must be another doctor, and as the visitor drinks the potion, Lanyon witnesses Hyde’s monstrous transformation back into Henry Jekyll, “pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death” (p. 60) . Lanyon does not choose to pass on to Utterson the account Jekyll provides of the whole affair. His soul is “sickened” by what he has seen, and the letter ends here.

The key to the mystery is provided by “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”—the chapter title evokes both a doctor’s case and a legal case—and Stevenson’s decision to let the narrative speak for itself proves extremely effective. It opens with these words:

I was born in the year 18- to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame (p. 61).

Jekyll is thus the victim of society’s restrictive moral codes. He emphasizes that none of his faults was inherently immoral or wicked (the defensive implication is that he enjoyed “normal” sex outside of marriage), but that his desire to appear virtuous led him to suppress this so-called vice, committing him to the “profound duplicity of life” that will find its logical outcome in the splitting of Jekyll into two separate physical and moral bodies: “It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature” (p. 61) .

Stevenson had long been interested in the phenomenon of the double, coauthoring (with W. E. Henley) a play called Deacon Brodie (1880) and subtitled The Double Life. Set in late-eighteenth-century Edinburgh, the play recounts the exposure and execution of a real-life historical figure who was deacon of the joiners’ guild by day and a notorious house-breaker by night. Stevenson had been fascinated by this character since childhood, when his nurse Alison Cunningham (known as “Cummy”) told him stories about Brodie, who supposedly made the bookcase and chest of drawers in the child’s bedroom. Deacon Brodie—as the use of his professional title suggests—is oppressed by his respectable station in life; he covers his nocturnal absences with the alibi of serious headaches to justify his locking himself into a darkened room, from which he escapes by a secret passage. Outside, Brodie drinks, has sex, gambles, and steals, all activities incompatible with his daytime identity. Brodie utters this heartfelt plea in the play’s central scene (act 1, scene 9): “Shall a man not have half a life of his own?—not eight hours out of twenty-four?”

Jekyll not only chooses his terms more carefully than Brodie, he also offers a far more complex theorization of his own situation. “Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite,” Jekyll says; “both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering” (pp. 61-62). Here Stevenson explodes the conventional assumption that hypocrisy involves a mask of false virtue covering up the real sinner behind it. Both sides of Jekyll are “in dead earnest,” even as the pressure to conceal sexual impulses corrodes the integrity of the self: Jekyll has already split himself—or perhaps been split by the destructive conventional imperative to appear virtuous—into two separate selves.

In response to this situation Jekyll makes the discovery “that man is not truly one, but truly two” (p. 62). Is this insight endorsed by Stevenson, or does Jekyll display a pathological understanding of his own relation to society? Both may be true, as the sentence that follows suggests a grandiose, even monstrous but nonetheless persuasive vision of the fragmentation of personality in the modern world. Jekyll speculates that his discovery that man is two will be followed by far more extraordinary developments: “Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (p. 62). Jekyll’s conviction of “the thorough and primitive duality of man” leads him to a new understanding of the relationship between his own two selves. “I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both,” he writes. “I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements” (p. 62). If only the elements “could be housed in separate identities,” then “the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil” (p. 62).

This is a Calvinistic fantasy, and a deluded one at that, based on the false premise that evil is extraneous rather than a quality woven in with the other strands of the self. The passages that follow fudge the physical details of the transformation, but as Jekyll informs the reader, “[I] managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul” (p. 63). It is a revolutionary discovery in more senses than one, and the language of toppling or dethroning powers clearly suggests the Oedipal appeal of an act of transformation by which the son may destroy his despised father. Daring at last to drink the potion, Jekyll experiences an agonizing transformation followed by a kind of delight:

I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution [i.e., dissolution or dissolving] of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine (p. 64) .

Without a mirror in the cabinet to observe the physical aspects of this transformation—a situation later remedied by the addition of the cheval-glass, a full-length mirror that enables Jekyll to take in the full effects of his metamorphosis—Jekyll ventures out to his bedroom and catches his first sight of Edward Hyde. Hyde is “smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll” because the “evil side” of Jekyll’s nature is “less robust and less developed” than the good: Jekyll’s has been “nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control” (pp. 64-65). He is attracted to the image of Hyde, despite its “imprint of deformity and decay”: “In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine” (p. 65). Everyone else experiences revulsion at the sight of Hyde, and Jekyll speculatively assigns this to the fact that while the rest of the world mingles good and evil, “Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

In retrospect, Jekyll argues that the drug itself is not inherently evil, but that it rather reflects the spirit of the experiment : He could have come forth an angel rather than a devil, under different stars. This projection, however, emerged all devil, without the angel to balance it out; moreover, of his two characters, “the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair.” In his self-diagnosis, Jekyll reports that the discovery of how to release an evil second self came at an all-too-opportune time, the crisis of late middle age: “I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome.” He continues, “It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery” (p. 66).

In preparation for the arrival of his new son, so to speak, Jekyll sets up the house in Soho and paves the way for Hyde’s acceptance, even as Jekyll’s own lawful heir. There is something perverse about this delegation of vice, as Jekyll himself comments: “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures” (p. 66) . Yet just as a hired assassin might go well beyond the mandate of his employer, so pleasures merely “undignified” as transacted by Jekyll turn in the hands of Hyde “toward the monstrous.” Hyde’s physical separation from Jekyll, however, allows the doctor to rationalize away his own responsibility for Hyde’s actions, preventing him from feeling the pangs of anything like conscience about Hyde’s misdeeds (and he writes about both selves here in the third person): “It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered” (p. 67) . Yet the balance between Jekyll and his other self is inherently unstable. Perhaps the most uncanny moment in the story comes when Jekyll describes waking one morning at home, after a night out for one of his “adventures,” with the strange sense that despite the familiarity of his surroundings, he must be in Hyde’s room in Soho. Still half asleep, his eyes fall upon his own hand:

Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde (p. 68).

Jekyll henceforth abjures the drug, realizing that the “part of me [Hyde] which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished”; “I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine” (p. 69).

The initial difficulty was in changing from Jekyll to Hyde, but gradually it has become harder and harder to cast off Hyde and return to his public life. Jekyll now realizes “that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse” (p. 70) . This prompts a moment of choice: Which person will he become?

My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cav ern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference (P. 70).

The language here invokes an Oedipal struggle between son and father, one that critics have linked to Stevenson’s own struggles against his father and all he represented. Jekyll chooses to remain the respected doctor, but doesn’t have the strength to keep to his resolution, a reservation foreshadowed by his decision not to give up the house in Soho or the clothes of Hyde. Through these months of single identity Jekyll “began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last,” he continues, “in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.” Jekyll explicitly compares this to an alcoholic unable to leave off the thing that will kill him: “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” (p. 71). When Hyde comes, of course, he comes with a vengeance: After two months’ respite, the potion transforms Jekyll into the monster who kills Sir Danvers Carew. The return to Jekyll’s body prompts remorse and self-revelation. “I saw my life as a whole,” Jekyll says, and “Hyde was thenceforth impossible” (p. 72).

Resolving to redeem the past by relieving the suffering of others, Jekyll knows nonetheless that the beast inside him is not satisfied:

I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation (p. 73).

This presumably sexual indulgence initiates the inadvertent transformation into Hyde. Sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park, Jekyll is overcome with nausea and comes to himself in the person of Hyde. His difficulty now is to retrieve the drug that will help him to his original self. Remembering “that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand” (p. 74) , Jekyll resolves to write to Lanyon. Yet though he obtains the drug (at the expense of Lanyon’s friendship), the remedy is only partial. The change now comes on him again: “from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll” (p. 76).

The two selves are bound together in a terrible pact. Hyde hates Jekyll as a patricidal son hates his father, even as the fear of being hanged for murder prompts him “to commit temporary suicide”: “Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father” (p. 77). Yet here, too, Hyde seems to be doing nothing more than acting out Jekyll’s own fantasies: defacing the pious books that Jekyll doesn’t dare to reject, destroying the portrait of a father for whom Jekyll himself surely has painfully mixed feelings. This precarious state of affairs is brought to a halt by the failure of the supply of the salt needed for the transformation. “I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure,” Jekyll writes, “and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught” (p. 78): an ironic twist, given the centrality of a mistaken idea of purity to Jekyll’s initial fall from grace.

The other stories in this volume address themes similar to those of jekyll and Hyde across a wide range of times and places. In “A Lodging for the Night” (1877), Stevenson depicts a senseless murder and the failure to profit from it—either literally or morally-in fifteenth-century France. The protago nist of the story is the poet Francis Villon, also treated in Stevenson’s essay “François Villon, Student, Poet, and House-breaker” (in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 1882), a disreputable and impoverished student in fifteenth-century Paris who led a life both criminal and literary. Stevenson seems to identify strongly with Villon, and the story shows some ambivalence toward Villon’s failure to be persuaded by his noble host to reconsider his definitions of terms like honor, theft, good, and evil.

“The Suicide Club” (1878) will remind many readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the first of which, A Study in Scarlet (1887), was published almost a decade later than Stevenson’s story. They share not just a common milieu but an interest in exploring the anomie of urban modernity. Sherlock Holmes relies on cocaine to stimulate his jaded intellect and the detection of crime to remedy his terminal boredom, while the Ruritanian Prince Florizel and his sidekick join the Suicide Club out of a similar lack of conviction as to the interest and value of ordinary life. The prince is named after a character in Shakespeare’s comedy The Winter’s Tale, but his nationality is that of an imaginary central European kingdom beloved in the popular fiction of the day and most famously associated with Anthony Hope’s novel The Prisoner of Zenda, published years after Stevenson’s story in 1894.

“Thrawn Janet” (1881) is one of Stevenson’s best-known stories, written in a Scots dialect that looks impenetrable at first glance but quickly comes clear to the reader. Scots was the language spoken in Lowland Scotland following the Norman Conquest; it bears a close relation to English, of which it is now usually considered a dialect. The reader who has difficulty following the details of the story may consult Mairi Robinson, ed., The Concise Scots Dictionary (Aberdeen University Press, 1985) or Douglas Kynoch’s more recent Scottish (Doric)-English, English-Scottish (Doric) Concise Dictionary (Hippocrene Books, 1998). The Stevenson legend says that the writer’s childhood nurse Cummy first told him this story of an encounter with the devil, and that his language mimics her vernacular ; the story’s supernatural elements are a familiar part of Scottish fiction and folklore.

“The Body Snatcher” (1884) looks back to an Edinburgh in which Burke and Hare have not yet been exposed and charged with murdering vagrants to sell their corpses to surgeons for dissection. Like ”A Lodging for the Night,” “The Body-Snatcher” is interested in questions about choice and individual morality. It also includes a supernatural twist. Finally, “Markheim” (1885) most explicitly foreshadows the themes of Jekyll and Hyde. Given the choice to turn away from the path of evil, Markheim (who has murdered a pawnbroker on Christmas Day) comes to an unexpected decision, under the influence of a character who has been variously identified by critics as a devil, an angel, or a projection of Markheim’s own inner self. Together with Jekyll and Hyde, these stories show Stevenson’s power and range as a writer of short fiction in English.

jenny Davidson is an assistant professor of eighteenth-century literature and culture in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her novel Heredity was published by Soft Skull Press in 2003, and her book Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2004- She has also published articles on Jonathan Swift’s servant problem (Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture) and on the pros and cons of politeness according to William Godwin, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft (Studies in Romanticism) ; articles on Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth are forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Eighteenth-Century Women.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Melanie Micir for help with the foot notes, Emily Wilson for lending her expertise in classical languages, and Nico Muhly for conversation about Jack the Ripper. Thanks, too, to George Stade and to Jeffrey Broesche at Fine Creative Media. I owe my initial knowledge of Stevenson to my Scottish grandfather, Thomas Davidson, who sent me multiple copies of Kidnapped and Treasure Island as Christmas presents and encouraged me to read widely in nineteenth-century Scottish literature; this edition is dedicated to his memory, with love and gratitude.

The 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.”a In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of downgoing 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 friendship 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 weekdays. The inhabitants were all doing well, it seemed, and all emulously hoping to do better still, and laying out the surplus of their grains 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 storeys high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower storey 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.b I gave a view halloa, 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;c 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 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—fright—ened 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,d 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 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. Black mail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the 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 happento 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,e 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. And yet it’s not so sure; for the buildings are so packed together about the 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. It was a man of the name of Hyde.”

“Hm,” 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 down-right 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., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc.,f 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 greatcoat, and set forth in the direction of Cavendish Square,g that citadel of medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding patients. “If anyone 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 respectors 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.”h

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),i 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 protégé 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 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.

The steps drew swiftly nearer, and swelled out suddenly louder as they turned the end of the street. The lawyer, looking forth from the entry, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with. He was small and very plainly dressed, and the look of him, even at that distance, went somehow strongly against the watcher’s inclination. But he made straight for the door, crossing the roadway to save time; and as he came, he drew a key from his pocket like one approaching home.

Mr. Utterson stepped out and touched him on the shoulder as he passed. “Mr. Hyde, I think?”

Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of the breath. But his fear was only momentary; and though he did not look the lawyer in the face, he answered coolly enough: “That is my name. What do you want?”

“I see you are going in,” returned the lawyer. “I am an old friend of Dr. Jekyll‘s—Mr. Utterson of Gaunt Street—you must have heard of my name; and meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might admit me.”

“You will not find Dr. Jekyll; he is from home,” replied Mr. Hyde, blowing in the key. And then suddenly, but still without looking up, “How did you know me?” he asked.

“On your side,” said Mr. Utterson, “will you do me a favour?”

“With pleasure,” replied the other. “What shall it be?”

“Will you let me see your face?” asked the lawyer.

Mr. Hyde appeared to hesitate, and then, as if upon some sudden reflection, fronted about with an air of defiance; and the pair stared at each other pretty fixedly for a few seconds. “Now I shall know you again,” said Mr. Utterson. “It may be useful.”

“Yes,” returned Mr. Hyde, “it is as well we have met; and a propos, you should have my address.” And he gave a number of a street in Soho.j

“Good God!” thought Mr. Utterson, “can he, too, have been thinking of the will?” But he kept his feelings to himself and only grunted in acknowledgment of the address.

“And now,” said the other, “how did you know me?”

“By description,” was the reply.

“Whose description?”

“We have common friends,” said Mr. Utterson.

“Common friends?” echoed Mr. Hyde, a little hoarsely. “Who are they?”

“ekyll, for instance,” said the lawyer.

“He never told you,” cried Mr. Hyde, with a flush of anger. “I did not think you would have lied.”

“Come,” said Mr. Utterson, “that is not fitting language.”

The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh; and the next moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and disappeared into the house.

The lawyer stood awhile when Mr. Hyde had left him, the picture of disquietude. Then he began slowly to mount the street, pausing every step or two and putting his hand to his brow like a man in mental perplexity. The problem he was thus debating as he walked, was one of a class that is rarely solved. Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.¹ “There must be something else,” said the perplexed gentleman. “There is something more, if I could find a name for it. God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say? or can it be the old story of Dr. Fell?k or is it the mere radiance of a foul soul that thus transpires through, and transfigures, its clay continent? The last, I think; for, O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

Round the corner from the by-street, there was a square of ancient, handsome houses, now for the most part decayed from their high estate and let in flats and chambers to all sorts and conditions of men; map-engravers, architects, shady lawyers and the agents of obscure enterprises. One house, however, second from the corner, was still occupied entire; and at the door of this, which wore a great air of wealth and comfort, though it was now plunged in darkness except for the fanlight, Mr. Utterson stopped and knocked. A well-dressed, elderly servant opened the door.

“Is Dr. Jekyll at home, Poole?” asked the lawyer.

“I will see, Mr. Utterson,” said Poole, admitting the visitor, as he spoke, into a large, low-roofed, comfortable hall, paved with flags, warmed (after the fashion of a country house) by a bright, open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of oak. “Will you wait here by the fire, sir? or shall I give you a light in the dining-room?”

“Here, thank you,” said the lawyer, and he drew near and leaned on the tall fender. This hall, in which he was now left alone, was a pet fancy of his friend the doctor’s; and Utterson himself was wont to speak of it as the pleasantest room in London. But tonight there was a shudder in his blood; the face of Hyde sat heavy on his memory; he felt (what was rare with him) a nausea and distaste of life; and in the gloom of his spirits, he seemed to read a menace in the flickering of the firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy starting of the shadow on the roof. He was ashamed of his relief, when Poole presently returned to announce that Dr. Jekyll was gone out.

“I saw Mr. Hyde go in by the old dissecting-room door, Poole,” he said. “Is that right, when Dr. Jekyll is from home?”

“Quite right, Mr. Utterson, sir,” replied the servant. “Mr. Hyde has a key.”

“Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man, Poole,” resumed the other musingly.

“Yes, sir, he does indeed,” said Poole. “We have all orders to obey him.”

“I do not think I ever met Mr. Hyde?” asked Utterson.

“O, dear no, sir. He never dines here,” replied the butler. “Indeed we see very little of him on this side of the house; he mostly comes and goes by the laboratory.”

“Well, good-night, Poole.”

“Good-night, Mr. Utterson.”

And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. “Poor Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo,l years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.” And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some Jack-in-the-Box of an old iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into a sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided. And then by a return on his former subject, he conceived a spark of hope. “This Master Hyde, if he were studied,” thought he, “must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Jekyll’s worst would be like sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing like a thief to Harry’s bedside; poor Harry, what a wakening! And the danger of it; for if this Hyde suspects the existence of the will, he may grow impatient to inherit. Ay, I must put my shoulders to the wheel—if Jekyll will but let me,” he added, “if Jekyll will only let me.” For once more he saw before his mind’s eye, as clear as transparency, the strange clauses of the will.

DR. JEKYLL WAS QUITE AT EASE

A fortnight later, by excellent good fortune, the doctor gave one of his pleasant dinners to some five or six old cronies, all intelligent, reputable men and all judges of good wine; and Mr. Utterson so contrived that he remained behind after the others had departed. This was no new arrangement, but a thing that had befallen many scores of times. Where Utterson was liked, he was liked well. Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit awhile in his unobtrusive company, practising for solitude, sobering their minds in the man’s rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety. To this rule, Dr. Jekyll was no exception; and as he now sat on the opposite side of the fire—a large, well-made, smooth-faced man of fifty, with something of a slyish cast perhaps, but every mark of capacity and kindness—you could see by his looks that he cherished for Mr. Utterson a sincere and warm affection.

“I have been wanting to speak to you, Jekyll,” began the latter. “You know that will of yours?”

A close observer might have gathered that the topic was distasteful; but the doctor carried it off gaily. “My poor Utterson,” said he, “you are unfortunate in such a client. I never saw a man so distressed as you were by my will; unless it were that hide-bound pedant, Lanyon, at what he called my scientific heresies. O, I know he’s a good fellow—you needn’t frown—an excellent fellow, and I always mean to see more of him; but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon.”

“You know I never approved of it,” pursued Utterson, ruthlessly disregarding the fresh topic.

“My will? Yes, certainly, I know that,” said the doctor, a trifle sharply. “You have told me so.”

“Well, I tell you so again,” continued the lawyer. “I have been learning something of young Hyde.”

The large handsome face of Dr. Jekyll grew pale to the very lips, and there came a blackness about his eyes. “I do not care to hear more,” said he. “This is a matter I thought we had agreed to drop.”

“What I heard was abominable,” said Utterson.

“It can make no change. You do not understand my position,” returned the doctor, with a certain incoherency of manner. “I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange—a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.”

“ekyll,” said Utterson, “u know me: I am a man to be trusted. Make a clean breast of this in confidence; and I make no doubt I can get you out of it.”

“My good Utterson,” said the doctor, “this is very good of you, this is downright good of you, and I cannot find words to thank you in. I believe you fully; I would trust you before any man alive, ay, before myself, if I could make the choice; but indeed it isn’t what you fancy; it is not as bad as that; and just to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde. I give you my hand upon that; and I thank you again and again; and I will just add one little word, Utterson, that I’m sure you’ll take in good part: this is a private matter, and I beg of you to let it sleep.”

Utterson reflected a little, looking in the fire.

“I have no doubt you are perfectly right,” he said at last, getting to his feet.

“Well, but since we have touched upon this business, and for the last time I hope,” continued the doctor, “there is one point I should like you to understand. I have really a very great interest in poor Hyde. I know you have seen him; he told me so; and I fear he was rude. But I do sincerely take a great, a very great interest in that young man; and if I am taken away, Utterson, I wish you to promise me that you will bear with him and get his rights for him. I think you would, if you knew all; and it would be a weight off my mind if you would promise.”

“I can’t pretend that I shall ever like him,” said the lawyer.

“I don’t ask that,” pleaded Jekyll, laying his hand upon the other’s arm; “I only ask for justice; I only ask you to help him for my sake, when I am no longer here.”

Utterson heaved an irrepressible sigh. “Well,” said he, “I promise.”

THE CAREW MURDER CASE

Nearly a year later, in the month of October, 18—, London was startled by a crime of singular ferocity and rendered all the more notable by the high position of the victim. The details were few and startling. A maid servant living alone in a house not far from the river, had gone up stairs to bed about eleven. Although a fog rolled over the city in the small hours, the early part of the night was cloudless, and the lane, which the maid’s window overlooked, was brilliantly lit by the full moon. It seems she was romantically given, for she sat down upon her box, which stood immediately under the window, and fell into a dream of musing. Never (she used to say, with streaming tears, when she narrated that experience), never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world. And as she so sat she became aware of an aged beautiful gentleman with white hair, drawing near along the lane; and advancing to meet him, another and very small gentleman, to whom at first she paid less attention. When they had come within speech (which was just under the maid’s eyes) the older man bowed and accosted the other with a very pretty manner of politeness. It did not seem as if the subject of his address were of great importance; indeed, from his pointing, it sometimes appeared as if he were only inquiring his way; but the moon shone on his face as he spoke, and the girl was pleased to watch it, it seemed to breathe such an innocent and old-world kindness of disposition, yet with something high too, as of a well-founded self-content. Presently her eye wandered to the other, and she was surprised to recognise in him a certain Mr. Hyde, who had once visited her master and for whom she had conceived a dislike. He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word, and seemed to listen with an ill-contained impatience. And then all of a sudden he broke out in a great flame of anger, stamping with his foot, brandishing the cane, and carrying on (as the maid described it) like a madman. The old gentleman took a step back, with the air of one very much surprised and a trifle hurt; and at that Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway. At the horror of these sights and sounds, the maid fainted.

It was two o‘clock when she came to herself and called for the police. The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter—the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and gold watch were found upon the victim: but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped envelope, which he had been probably carrying to the post, and which bore the name and address of Mr. Utterson.

This was brought to the lawyer the next morning, before he was out of bed; and he had no sooner seen it, and been told the circumstances, than he shot out a solemn lip. “I shall say nothing till I have seen the body,” said he; “this may be very serious. Have the kindness to wait while I dress.” And with the same grave countenance he hurried through his breakfast and drove to the police station, whither the body had been carried. As soon as he came into the cell, he nodded.

“Yes,” said he, “I recognise him. I am sorry to say that this is Sir Danvers Carew.”

“Good God, sir,” exclaimed the officer, “is it possible?” And the next moment his eye lighted up with professional ambition. “This will make a deal of noise,” he said. “And perhaps you can help us to the man.” And he briefly narrated what the maid had seen, and showed the broken stick.

Mr. Utterson had already quailed at the name of Hyde; but when the stick was laid before him, he could doubt no longer; broken and battered as it was, he recognized it for one that he had himself presented many years before to Henry Jekyll.

“Is this Mr. Hyde a person of small stature?” he inquired.

“Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking, is what the maid calls him,” said the officer.

Mr. Utterson reflected; and then, raising his head, “If you will come with me in my cab,” he said, “I think I can take you to his house.”

It was by this time about nine in the morning, and the first fog of the season.² A great chocolate-coloured pall lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr. Utterson beheld a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.

As the cab drew up before the address indicated, the fog lifted a little and showed him a dingy street, a gin palace, a low French eating house, a shop for the retail of penny numbers and twopenny salads, many ragged children huddled in the doorways, and many women of many different nationalities passing out, key in hand, to have a morning glass; and the next moment the fog settled down again upon that part, as brown as umber, and cut him off from his blackguardly surroundings. This was the home of Henry Jekyll’s favourite; of a man who was heir to a quarter of a million sterling.

An ivory-faced and silvery-haired old woman opened the door. She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy: but her manners were excellent. Yes, she said, this was Mr. Hyde‘s, but he was not at home; he had been in that night very late, but he had gone away again in less than an hour; there was nothing strange in that; his habits were very irregular, and he was often absent; for instance, it was nearly two months since she had seen him till yesterday.

“Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms,” said the lawyer; and when the woman began to declare it was impossible, “I had better tell you who this person is,” he added. “This is Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard.”m

A flash of odious joy appeared upon the woman’s face. “Ah!” said she, “he is in trouble! What has he done?”

Mr. Utterson and the inspector exchanged glances. “He don’t seem a very popular character,” observed the latter. “And now, my good woman, just let me and this gentleman have a look about us.”

In the whole extent of the house, which but for the old woman remained otherwise empty, Mr. Hyde had only used a couple of rooms; but these were furnished with luxury and good taste. A closet was filled with wine; the plate was of silver, the napery elegant; a good picture hung upon the walls, a gift (as Utterson supposed) from Henry Jekyll, who was much of a connoisseur; and the carpets were of many plies and agreeable in colour. At this moment, however, the rooms bore every mark of having been recently and hurriedly ransacked; clothes lay about the floor, with their pockets inside out; lock-fast drawers stood open; and on the hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt end of a green cheque book, which had resisted the action of the fire; the other half of the stick was found behind the door; and as this clinched his suspicions, the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank, where several thousand pounds were found to be lying to the murderer’s credit, completed his gratification.

“You may depend upon it, sir,” he told Mr. Utterson: “I have him in my hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left the stick or, above all, burned the cheque book. Why, money’s life to the man. We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the handbills.”

This last, however, was not so easy of accomplishment; for Mr. Hyde had numbered few familiars—even the master of the servant maid had only seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as common observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders.

INCIDENT OF THE LETTER

It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way to Dr. Jekyll’s door, where he was at once admitted by Poole, and carried down by the kitchen offices and across a yard which had once been a garden, to the building which was indifferently known as the laboratory or dissecting rooms. The doctor had bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes being rather chemical than anatomical, had changed the destination of the block at the bottom of the garden. It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in that part of his friend’s quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw, and the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further end, a flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize; and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into the doctor’s cabinet. It was a large room fitted round with glass presses, furnished, among other things, with a cheval-glassn and a business table, and looking out upon the court by three dusty windows barred with iron. The fire burned in the grate; a lamp was set lighted on the chimney shelf, for even in the houses the fog began to lie thickly; and there, close up to the warmth, sat Dr. Jekyll, looking deathly sick. He did not rise to meet his visitor, but held out a cold hand and bade him welcome in a changed voice.

“And now,” said Mr. Utterson, as soon as Poole had left them, “you have heard the news?”

The doctor shuddered. “They were crying it in the square,” he said. “I heard them in my dining-room.”

“One word,” said the lawyer. “Carew was my client, but so are you, and I want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad enough to hide this fellow?”

“Utterson, I swear to God,” cried the doctor, “I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of.”

The lawyer listened gloomily; he did not like his friend’s feverish manner. “You seem pretty sure of him,” said he; “and for your sake, I hope you may be right. If it came to a trial, your name might appear.”

“I am quite sure of him,” replied Jekyll; “I have grounds for certainty that I cannot share with anyone. But there is one thing on which you may advise me. I have—I have received a letter; and I am at a loss whether I should show it to the police. I should like to leave it in your hands, Utterson; you would judge wisely, I am sure; I have so great a trust in you.”

“You fear, I suppose, that it might lead to his detection?” asked the lawyer.

“No,” said the other. “I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character, which this hateful business has rather exposed.”

Utterson ruminated awhile; he was surprised at his friend’s selfishness, and yet relieved by it. “Well,” said he, at last, “let me see the letter.”

The letter was written in an odd, upright hand and signed “Edward Hyde”: and it signified, briefly enough, that the writer’s benefactor, Dr. Jekyll, whom he had long so unworthily repaid for a thousand generosities, need labour under no alarm for his safety, as he had means of escape on which he placed a sure dependence. The lawyer liked this letter well enough; it put a better colour on the intimacy than he had looked for; and he blamed himself for some of his past suspicions.

“Have you the envelope?” he asked.

“I burned it,” replied Jekyll, “before I thought what I was about. But it bore no postmark. The note was handed in.”

“Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?” asked Utterson.

“I wish you to judge for me entirely,” was the reply. “I have lost confidence in myself.”

“Well, I shall consider,” returned the lawyer. “And now one word more: it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that disappearance?”

The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness; he shut his mouth tight and nodded.

“I knew it,” said Utterson. “He meant to murder you. You had a fine escape.”

“I have had what is far more to the purpose,” returned the doctor solemnly: “I have had a lesson—O God, Utterson, what a lesson I have had!” And he covered his face for a moment with his hands.

On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or two with Poole. “By the bye,” said he, “there was a letter handed in to-day: what was the messenger like?” But Poole was positive nothing had come except by post; “and only circulars by that,” he added.

This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed. Plainly the letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly, indeed, it had been written in the cabinet; and if that were so, it must be differently judged, and handled with the more caution. The newsboys, as he went, were crying themselves hoarse along the footways: “Special edition. Shocking murder of an M.P.”o That was the funeral oration of one friend and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest the good name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal. It was, at least, a ticklish decision that he had to make; and self-reliant as he was by habit, he began to cherish a longing for advice. It was not to be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might be fished for.

Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr. Guest, his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London. Insensibly the lawyer melted. There was no man from whom he kept fewer secrets than Mr. Guest; and he was not always sure that he kept as many as he meant. Guest had often been on business to the doctor’s; he knew Poole; he could scarce have failed to hear of Mr. Hyde’s familiarity about the house; he might draw conclusions: was it not as well, then, that he should see a letter which put that mystery to rights? and above all since Guest, being a great student and critic of handwriting, would consider the step natural and obliging? The clerk, besides, was a man of counsel; he could scarce read so strange a document without dropping a remark; and by that remark Mr. Utterson might shape his future course.

“This is a sad business about Sir Danvers,” he said.

“Yes, sir, indeed. It has elicited a great deal of public feeling,” returned Guest. “The man, of course, was mad.”

“I should like to hear your views on that,” replied Utterson. “I have a document here in his handwriting; it is between ourselves, for I scarce know what to do about it; it is an ugly business at the best. But there it is; quite in your way: a murderer’s autograph.”

Guest’s eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and studied it with passion. “No sir,” he said: “not mad; but it is an odd hand.”

“And by all accounts a very odd writer,” added the lawyer.

Just then the servant entered with a note.

“Is that from Dr. Jekyll, sir?” inquired the clerk. “I thought I knew the writing. Anything private, Mr. Utterson?”

“Only an invitation to dinner. Why? Do you want to see it?”

“One moment. I thank you, sir;” and the clerk laid the two sheets of paper alongside and sedulously compared their contents. “Thank you, sir,” he said at last, returning both; “it’s a very interesting autograph.”

There was a pause, during which Mr. Utterson struggled with himself. “Why did you compare them, Guest?” he inquired suddenly.

“Well, sir,” returned the clerk, “there’s a rather singular resemblance; the two hands are in many points identical: only differently sloped.”

“Rather quaint,” said Utterson.

“It is, as you say, rather quaint,” returned Guest.

“I wouldn’t speak of this note, you know,” said the master.

“No, sir,” said the clerk. “I understand.”

But no sooner was Mr. Utterson alone that night, than he locked the note into his safe, where it reposed from that time forward. “What! he thought. “enry Jekyll forge for a murderer!” And his blood ran cold in his veins.

REMARKABLE INCIDENT OF DR. LANYON

Time ran on; thousands of pounds were offered in reward, for the death of Sir Danvers was resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of the man’s cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts, not a whisper. From the time he had left the house in Soho on the morning of the murder, he was simply blotted out; and gradually, as time drew on, Mr. Utterson began to recover from the hotness of his alarm, and to grow more at quiet with himself. The death of Sir Danvers was, to his way of thinking, more than paid for by the disappearance of Mr. Hyde. Now that that evil influence had been withdrawn, a new life began for Dr. Jekyll. He came out of his seclusion, renewed relations with his friends, became once more their familiar guest and entertainer; and whilst he had always been known for charities, he was now no less distinguished for religion. He was busy, he was much in the open air, he did good; his face seemed to open and brighten, as if with an inward consciousness of service; and for more than two months, the doctor was at peace.

On the 8th of January Utterson had dined at the doctor’s with a small party; Lanyon had been there; and the face of the host had looked from one to the other as in the old days when the trio were inseparable friends. On the 12th, and again on the 14th, the door was shut against the lawyer. “The doctor was confined to the house,” Poole said, “and saw no one.” On the 15th, he tried again, and was again refused; and having now been used for the last two months to see his friend almost daily, he found this return of solitude to weigh upon his spirits. The fifth night he had in Guest to dine with him; and the sixth he betook himself to Dr. Lanyon’s.

There at least he was not denied admittance; but when he came in, he was shocked at the change which had taken place in the doctor’s appearance. He had his death-warrant written legibly upon his face. The rosy man had grown pale; his flesh had fallen away; he was visibly balder and older; and yet it was not so much these tokens of a swift physical decay that arrested the lawyer’s notice, as a look in the eye and quality of manner that seemed to testify to some deep-seated terror of the mind. It was unlikely that the doctor should fear death; and yet that was what Utterson was tempted to suspect. “Yes,” he thought; “he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear.” And yet when Utterson remarked on his ill-looks, it was with an air of great firmness that Lanyon declared himself a doomed man.

“I have had a shock,” he said, “and I shall never recover. It is a question of weeks. Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away.”

“Jekyll is ill, too,” observed Utterson. “Have you seen him?”

But Lanyon’s face changed, and he held up a trembling hand. “I wish to see or hear no more of Dr. Jekyll,” he said in a loud, unsteady voice. “I am quite done with that person; and I beg that you will spare me any allusion to one whom I regard as dead.”

“Tut-tut,” said Mr. Utterson; and then after a considerable pause, “Can’t I do anything?” he inquired. “We are three very old friends, Lanyon; we shall not live to make others.”

“Nothing can be done,” returned Lanyon; “ask himself.”

“He will not see me,” said the lawyer.

“I am not surprised at that,” was the reply. “Some day, Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you. And in the meantime, if you can sit and talk with me of other things, for God’s sake, stay and do so; but if you cannot keep clear of this accursed topic, then in God’s name, go, for I cannot bear it.”

As soon as he got home, Utterson sat down and wrote to Jekyll, complaining of his exclusion from the house, and asking the cause of this unhappy break with Lanyon; and the next day brought him a long answer, often very pathetically worded, and sometimes darkly mysterious in drift. The quarrel with Lanyon was incurable. “I do not blame our old friend,” Jekyll wrote, “but I share his view that we must never meet. I mean from henceforth to lead a life of extreme seclusion; you must not be surprised, nor must you doubt my friendship, if my door is often shut even to you. You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning; and you can do but one thing, Utterson, to lighten this destiny, and that is to respect my silence.” Utterson was amazed; the dark influence of Hyde had been withdrawn, the doctor had returned to his old tasks and amities; a week ago, the prospect had smiled with every promise of a cheerful and an honoured age; and now in a moment, friendship, and peace of mind, and the whole tenor of his life were wrecked. So great and unprepared a change pointed to madness; but in view of Lanyon’s manner and words, there must lie for it some deeper ground.

A week afterwards Dr. Lanyon took to his bed, and in something less than a fortnight he was dead. The night after the funeral, at which he had been sadly affected, Utterson locked the door of his business room, and sitting there by the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set before him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend. “PRIVATE: for the hands of G.J. Utterson ALONE, and in case of his predecease to be destroyed unread,” so it was emphatically superscribed; and the lawyer dreaded to behold the contents. “I have buried one friend to-day,” he thought: “what if this should cost me another?” And then he condemned the fear as a disloyalty, and broke the seal. Within there was another enclosure, likewise sealed, and marked upon the cover as “not to be opened till the death or disappearance of Dr. Henry Jekyll.” Utterson could not trust his eyes. Yes, it was disappearance; here again, as in the mad will which he had long ago restored to its author, here again were the idea of a disappearance and the name of Henry Jekyll bracketted. But in the will, that idea had sprung from the sinister suggestion of the man Hyde; it was set there with a purpose all too plain and horrible. Written by the hand of Lanyon, what should it mean? A great curiosity came on the trustee, to disregard the prohibition and dive at once to the bottom of these mysteries; but professional honour and faith to his dead friend were stringent obligations; and the packet slept in the inmost corner of his private safe.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it; and it may be doubted if, from that day forth, Utterson desired the society of his surviving friend with the same eagerness. He thought of him kindly; but his thoughts were disquieted and fearful. He went to call indeed; but he was perhaps relieved to be denied admittance; perhaps, in his heart, he preferred to speak with Poole upon the doorstep and surrounded by the air and sounds of the open city, rather than to be admitted into that house of voluntary bondage, and to sit and speak with its inscrutable recluse. Poole had, indeed, no very pleasant news to communicate. The doctor, it appeared, now more than ever confined himself to the cabinet over the laboratory, where he would sometimes even sleep; he was out of spirits, he had grown very silent, he did not read; it seemed as if he had something on his mind. Utterson became so used to the unvarying character of these reports, that he fell off little by little in the frequency of his visits.

INCIDENT AT THE WINDOW

It chanced on Sunday, when Mr. Utterson was on his usual walk with Mr. Enfield, that their way lay once again through the by-street; and that when they came in front of the door, both stopped to gaze on it.

“Well,” said Enfield, “that story’s at an end at least. We shall never see more of Mr. Hyde.”

“I hope not,” said Utterson. “Did I ever tell you that I once saw him, and shared your feeling of repulsion?”

“It was impossible to do the one without the other,” returned Enfield. “And by the way, what an ass you must have thought me, not to know that this was a back way to Dr. Jekyll‘s! It was partly your own fault that I found it out, even when I did.”

“So you found it out, did you?” said Utterson. “But if that be so, we may step into the court and take a look at the windows. To tell you the truth, I am uneasy about poor Jekyll; and even outside, I feel as if the presence of a friend might do him good.”

The court was very cool and a little damp, and full of premature twilight, although the sky, high up overhead, was still bright with sunset. The middle one of the three windows was half-way open; and sitting close beside it, taking the air with an infinite sadness of mien, like some disconsolate prisoner, Utterson saw Dr. Jekyll.

“What! Jekyll!” he cried. “I trust you are better.”

“I am very low, Utterson,” replied the doctor drearily, “very low. It will not last long, thank God.”

“You stay too much indoors,” said the lawyer. “You should be out, whipping up the circulation like Mr. Enfield and me. (This is my cousin—Mr. Enfield—Dr. Jekyll.) Come now; get your hat and take a quick turn with us.”

“You are very good,” sighed the other. “I should like to very much; but no, no, no, it is quite impossible; I dare not. But indeed, Utterson, I am very glad to see you; this is really a great pleasure; I would ask you and Mr. Enfield up, but the place is really not fit.”

“Why, then,” said the lawyer, good-naturedly, “the best thing we can do is to stay down here and speak with you from where we are.”

“That is just what I was about to venture to propose,” returned the doctor with a smile. But the words were hardly uttered, before the smile was struck out of his face and succeeded by an expression of such abject terror and despair, as froze the very blood of the two gentlemen below. They saw it but for a glimpse for the window was instantly thrust down; but that glimpse had been sufficient, and they turned and left the court without a word. In silence, too, they traversed the by-street; and it was not until they had come into a neighbouring thoroughfare, where even upon a Sunday there were still some stirrings of life, that Mr. Utterson at last turned and looked at his companion. They were both pale; and there was an answering horror in their eyes.

“God forgive us, God forgive us,” said Mr. Utterson.

But Mr. Enfield only nodded his head very seriously, and walked on once more in silence.

THE LAST NIGHT

Mr. Utterson was sitting by his fireside one evening after dinner, when he was surprised to receive a visit from Poole.

“Bless me, Poole, what brings you here?” he cried; and then taking a second look at him, “What ails you?” he added; “is the doctor ill?”

“Mr. Utterson,” said the man, “there is something wrong.”

“Take a seat, and here is a glass of wine for you,” said the lawyer. “Now, take your time, and tell me plainly what you want.”

“You know the doctor’s ways, sir,” replied Poole, “and how he shuts himself up. Well, he’s shut up again in the cabinet; and I don’t like it, sir—I wish I may die if I like it. Mr. Utterson, sir, I’m afraid.”

“Now, my good man,” said the lawyer, “be explicit. What are you afraid of?”

“I’ve been afraid for about a week,” returned Poole, doggedly disregarding the question, “and I can bear it no more.”

The man’s appearance amply bore out his words; his manner was altered for the worse; and except for the moment when he had first announced his terror, he had not once looked the lawyer in the face. Even now, he sat with the glass of wine untasted on his knee, and his eyes directed to a corner of the floor. “I can bear it no more,” he repeated.

“Come,” said the lawyer, “I see you have some good reason, Poole; I see there is something seriously amiss. Try to tell me what it is.”

“I think there’s been foul play,” said Poole, hoarsely.

“Foul play!” cried the lawyer, a good deal frightened and rather inclined to be irritated in consequence. “What foul play! What does the man mean?”

“I daren’t say, sir,” was the answer; “but will you come along with me and see for yourself?”

Mr. Utterson’s only answer was to rise and get his hat and greatcoat; but he observed with wonder the greatness of the relief that appeared upon the butler’s face, and perhaps with no less, that the wine was still untasted when he set it down to follow.

It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of London so deserted. He could have wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious of so sharp a wish to see and touch his fellow-creatures; for struggle as he might, there was borne in upon his mind a crushing anticipation of calamity. The square, when they got there, was full of wind and dust, and the thin trees in the garden were lashing themselves along the railing. Poole, who had kept all the way a pace or two ahead, now pulled up in the middle of the pavement, and in spite of the biting weather, took off his hat and mopped his brow with a red pocket-handkerchief. But for all the hurry of his coming, these were not the dews of exertion that he wiped away, but the moisture of some strangling anguish; for his face was white and his voice, when he spoke, harsh and broken.

“Well, sir,” he said, “here we are, and God grant there be nothing wrong.”

“Amen, Poole,” said the lawyer.

Thereupon the servant knocked in a very guarded manner; the door was opened on the chain; and a voice asked from within, “Is that you, Poole?”

“It’s all right,” said Poole. “Open the door.”

The hall, when they entered it, was brightly lighted up; the fire was built high; and about the hearth the whole of the servants, men and women, stood huddled together like a flock of sheep. At the sight of Mr. Utterson, the housemaid broke into hysterical whimpering; and the cook, crying out “Bless God! it’s Mr. Utterson,” ran forward as if to take him in her arms.

“What, what? Are you all here?” said the lawyer peevishly. “Very irregular, very unseemly; your master would be far from pleased.”

“They’re all afraid,” said Poole.

Blank silence followed, no one protesting; only the maid lifted her voice and now wept loudly.

“Hold your tongue!” Poole said to her, with a ferocity of accent that testified to his own jangled nerves; and indeed, when the girl had so suddenly raised the note of her lamentation, they had all started and turned towards the inner door with faces of dreadful expectation. “And now,” continued the butler, addressing the knife-boy, “reach me a candle, and we’ll get this through hands at once.” And then he begged Mr. Utterson to follow him, and led the way to the back garden.

“Now, sir,” said he, “you come as gently as you can. I want you to hear, and I don’t want you to be heard. And see here, sir, if by any chance he was to ask you in, don’t go.”

Mr. Utterson’s nerves, at this unlooked-for termination, gave a jerk that nearly threw him from his balance; but he recollected his courage and followed the butler into the laboratory building through the surgical theatre, with its lumber of crates and bottles, to the foot of the stair. Here Poole motioned him to stand on one side and listen; while he himself, setting down the candle and making a great and obvious call on his resolution, mounted the steps and knocked with a somewhat uncertain hand on the red baize of the cabinet door.

“Mr. Utterson, sir, asking to see you,” he called; and even as he did so, once more violently signed to the lawyer to give ear.

A voice answered from within: “Tell him I cannot see anyone,” it said complainingly.

“Thank you, sir,” said Poole, with a note of something like triumph in his voice; and taking up his candle, he led Mr. Utterson back across the yard and into the great kitchen, where the fire was out and the beetles were leaping on the floor.

“Sir,” he said, looking Mr. Utterson in the eyes, “was that my master’s voice?”

“It seems much changed,” replied the lawyer, very pale, but giving look for look.

“Changed? Well, yes, I think so,” said the butler. “Have I been twenty years in this man’s house, to be deceived about his voice? No, sir; master’s made away with; he was made away with eight days ago, when we heard him cry out upon the name of God; and who’s in there instead of him, and why it stays there, is a thing that cries to Heaven, Mr. Utterson!”

“This is a very strange tale, Poole; this is rather a wild tale, my man,” said Mr. Utterson, biting his finger. “Suppose it were as you suppose, supposing Dr. Jekyll to have been—well, murdered, what could induce the murderer to stay? That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend itself to reason.”

“Well, Mr. Utterson, you are a hard man to satisfy, but I’ll do it yet,” said Poole. “All this last week (you must know) him, or it, whatever it is that lives in that cabinet, has been crying night and day for some sort of medicine and cannot get it to his mind. It was sometimes his way—the master‘s, that is—to write his orders on a sheet of paper and throw it on the stair. We’ve had nothing else this week back; nothing but papers, and a closed door, and the very meals left there to be smuggled in when nobody was looking. Well, sir, every day, ay, and twice and thrice in the same day, there have been orders and complaints, and I have been sent flying to all the wholesale chemists in town. Every time I brought the stuff back, there would be another paper telling me to return it, because it was not pure, and another order to a different firm. This drug is wanted bitter bad, sir, whatever for.”

“Have you any of these papers?” asked Mr. Utterson.

Poole felt in his pocket and handed out a crumpled note, which the lawyer, bending nearer to the candle, carefully examined. Its contents ran thus: “Dr. Jekyll presents his compliments to Messrs. Maw. He assures them that their last sample is impure and quite useless for his present purpose. In the year 18—, Dr. J. purchased a somewhat large quantity from Messrs. M. He now begs them to search with most sedulous care, and should any of the same quality be left, to forward it to him at once. Expense is no consideration. The importance of this to Dr. J. can hardly be exaggerated.” So far the letter had run composedly enough, but here with a sudden splutter of the pen, the writer’s emotion had broken loose. “For God’s sake,” he added, “find me some of the old.”

“This is a strange note,” said Mr. Utterson; and then sharply, “How do you come to have it open?”

“The man at Maw’s was main angry, sir, and he threw it back to me like so much dirt,” returned Poole.

“This is unquestionably the doctor’s hand, do you know?” resumed the lawyer.

“I thought it looked like it,” said the servant rather sulkily; and then, with another voice, “But what matters hand of write?” he said. “I’ve seen him!”

“Seen him?” repeated Mr. Utterson. “Well?”

“That’s it!” said Poole. “It was this way. I came suddenly into the theatre from the garden. It seems he had slipped out to look for this drug or whatever it is; for the cabinet door was open, and there he was at the far end of the room digging among the crates. He looked up when I came in, gave a kind of cry, and whipped upstairs into the cabinet. It was but for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face? If it was my master, why did he cry out like a rat, and run from me? I have served him long enough. And then...” The man paused and passed his hand over his face.

“These are all very strange circumstances,” said Mr. Utterson, “but I think I begin to see daylight. Your master, Poole, is plainly seized with one of those maladies that both torture and deform the sufferer; hence, for aught I know, the alteration of his voice; hence the mask and the avoidance of his friends; hence his eagerness to find this drug, by means of which the poor soul retains some hope of ultimate recovery—God grant that he be not deceived! There is my explanation; it is sad enough, Poole, ay, and appalling to consider; but it is plain and natural, hangs well together, and delivers us from all exorbitant alarms.”

“Sir,” said the butler, turning to a sort of mottled pallor, “that thing was not my master, and there’s the truth. My master” —here he looked round him and began to whisper—“is a tall, fine build of a man, and this was more of a dwarf.” Utterson attempted to protest. “O, sir,” cried Poole, “do you think I do not know my master after twenty years? Do you think I do not know where his head comes to in the cabinet door, where I saw him every morning of my life? No, sir, that thing in the mask was never Dr. Jekyll—God knows what it was, but it was never Dr. Jekyll; and it is the belief of my heart that there was murder done.”

“Poole,” replied the lawyer, “if you say that, it will become my duty to make certain. Much as I desire to spare your master’s feelings, much as I am puzzled by this note which seems to prove him to be still alive, I shall consider it my duty to break in that door.”

“Ah, Mr. Utterson, that’s talking!” cried the butler.

“And now comes the second question,” resumed Utterson: “Who is going to do it?”

“Why, you and me, sir,” was the undaunted reply.

“That’s very well said,” returned the lawyer; “and whatever comes of it, I shall make it my business to see you are no loser.”

“There is an axe in the theatre,” continued Poole; “and you might take the kitchen poker for yourself.”

The lawyer took that rude but weighty instrument into his hand, and balanced it. “Do you know, Poole,” he said, looking up, “that you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?”

“You may say so, sir, indeed,” returned the butler.

“It is well, then, that we should be frank,” said the other. “We both think more than we have said; let us make a clean breast. This masked figure that you saw, did you recognise it?”

“Well, sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so doubled up, that I could hardly swear to that,” was the answer. “But if you mean, was it Mr. Hyde?—why, yes, I think it was! You see, it was much of the same bigness; and it had the same quick, light way with it; and then who else could have got in by the laboratory door? You have not forgot, sir, that at the time of the murder he had still the key with him? But that’s not all. I don’t know, Mr. Utterson, if you ever met this Mr. Hyde?”

“Yes,” said the lawyer, “I once spoke with him.”

“Then you must know as well as the rest of us that there was something queer about that gentleman—something that gave a man a turn—I don’t know rightly how to say it, sir, beyond this: that you felt in your marrow kind of cold and thin.”

“I own I felt something of what you describe,” said Mr. Utterson.

“Quite so, sir,” returned Poole. “Well, when that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals and whipped into the cabinet, it went down my spine like ice. O, I know it’s not evidence, Mr. Utterson; I’m book-learned enough for that; but a man has his feelings, and I give you my bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!”

“Ay, ay,” said the lawyer. “My fears incline to the same point. Evil, I fear, founded—evil was sure to come—of that connection. Ay truly, I believe you; I believe poor Harry is killed; and I believe his murderer (for what purpose, God alone can tell) is still lurking in his victim’s room. Well, let our name be vengeance. Call Bradshaw.”

The footman came at the summons, very white and nervous.

“Put yourself together, Bradshaw,” said the lawyer. “This suspense, I know, is telling upon all of you; but it is now our intention to make an end of it. Poole, here, and I are going to force our way into the cabinet. If all is well, my shoulders are broad enough to bear the blame. Meanwhile, lest anything should really be amiss, or any malefactor seek to escape by the back, you and the boy must go round the comer with a pair of good sticks and take your post at the laboratory door. We give you ten minutes, to get to your stations.”

As Bradshaw left, the lawyer looked at his watch. “And now, Poole, let us get to ours,” he said; and taking the poker under his arm, led the way into the yard. The scud had banked over the moon, and it was now quite dark. The wind, which only broke in puffs and draughts into that deep well of building, tossed the light of the candle to and fro about their steps, until they came into the shelter of the theatre, where they sat down silently to wait. London hummed solemnly all around; but nearer at hand, the stillness was only broken by the sounds of a footfall moving to and fro along the cabinet floor.

“So it will walk all day, sir,” whispered Poole; “ay, and the better part of the night. Only when a new sample comes from the chemist, there’s a bit of a break. Ah, it’s an ill conscience that’s such an enemy to rest! Ah, sir, there’s blood foully shed in every step of it! But hark again, a little closer—put your heart in your ears, Mr. Utterson, and tell me, is that the doctor’s foot?”

The steps fell lightly and oddly, with a certain swing, for all they went so slowly; it was different indeed from the heavy creaking tread of Henry Jekyll. Utterson sighed. “Is there never anything else?” he asked.

Poole nodded. “Once,” he said. “Once I heard it weeping!”

“Weeping? how that?” said the lawyer, conscious of a sudden chill of horror.

“Weeping like a woman or a lost soul,” said the butler. “I came away with that upon my heart, that I could have wept too.”

But now the ten minutes drew to an end. Poole disinterred the axe from under a stack of packing straw; the candle was set upon the nearest table to light them to the attack; and they drew near with bated breath to where that patient foot was still going up and down, up and down, in the quiet of the night. “Jekyll,” cried Utterson, with a loud voice, “I demand to see you.” He paused a moment, but there came no reply. “I give you fair warning, our suspicions are aroused, and I must and shall see you,” he resumed; “if not by fair means, then by foul—if not of your consent, then by brute force!”

“Utterson,” said the voice, “for God’s sake, have mercy!”

“Ah, that’s not Jekyll’s voice—it’s Hyde‘s!” cried Utterson. “Down with the door, Poole!”

Poole swung the axe over his shoulder; the blow shook the building, and the red baize door leaped against the lock and hinges. A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from the cabinet. Up went the axe again, and again the panels crashed and the frame bounded; four times the blow fell; but the wood was tough and the fittings were of excellent workmanship; and it was not until the fifth, that the lock burst and the wreck of the door fell inwards on the carpet.

The besiegers, appalled by their own riot and the stillness that had succeeded, stood back a little and peered in. There lay the cabinet before their eyes in the quiet lamplight, a good fire glowing and chattering on the hearth, the kettle singing its thin strain, a drawer or two open, papers neatly set forth on the business table, and nearer the fire, the things laid out for tea; the quietest room, you would have said, and, but for the glazed presses full of chemicals, the most commonplace that night in London.

Right in the midst there lay the body of a man sorely contorted and still twitching. They drew near on tiptoe, turned it on its back and beheld the face of Edward Hyde. He was dressed in clothes far too large for him, clothes of the doctor’s bigness; the cords of his face still moved with a semblance of life, but life was quite gone: and by the crushed phial in the hand and the strong smell of kernels that hung upon the air, Utterson knew that he was looking on the body of a self destroyer.

“We have come too late,” he said sternly, “whether to save or punish. Hyde is gone to his account; and it only remains for us to find the body of your master.”

The far greater proportion of the building was occupied by the theatre, which filled almost the whole ground storey and was lighted from above, and by the cabinet, which formed an upper storey at one end and looked upon the court. A corridor joined the theatre to the door on the by-street; and with this the cabinet communicated separately by a second flight of stairs. There were besides a few dark closets and a spacious cellar. All these they now thoroughly examined. Each closet needed but a glance, for all were empty, and all, by the dust that fell from their doors, had stood long unopened. The cellar, indeed, was filled with crazy lumber, mostly dating from the times of the surgeon who was Jekyll’s predecessor; but even as they opened the door they were advertised of the uselessness of further search, by the fall of a perfect mat of cobweb which had for years sealed up the entrance. Nowhere was there any trace of Henry Jekyll, dead or alive.

Poole stamped on the flags of the corridor. “He must be buried here,” he said, hearkening to the sound.

“Or he may have fled,” said Utterson, and he turned to examine the door in the by-street. It was locked; and lying near by on the flags, they found the key, already stained with rust.

“This does not look like use,” observed the lawyer.

“Use!” echoed Poole. “Do you not see, sir, it is broken? much as if a man had stamped on it.”

“Ay,” continued Utterson, “and the fractures, too, are rusty.” The two men looked at each other with a scare. “This is beyond me, Poole,” said the lawyer. “Let us go back to the cabinet.”

They mounted the stair in silence, and still with an occasional awestruck glance at the dead body, proceeded more thoroughly to examine the contents of the cabinet. At one table, there were traces of chemical work, various measured heaps of some white salt being laid on glass saucers, as though for an experiment in which the unhappy man had been prevented.

“That is the same drug that I was always bringing him,” said Poole; and even as he spoke, the kettle with a startling noise boiled over.

This brought them to the fireside, where the easychair was drawn cosily up, and the tea things stood ready to the sitter’s elbow, the very sugar in the cup. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand, with startling blasphemies.

Next, in the course of their review of the chamber, the searchers came to the cheval-glass, into whose depths they looked with an involuntary horror. But it was so turned as to show them nothing but the rosy glow playing on the roof, the fire sparkling in a hundred repetitions along the glazed front of the presses, and their own pale and fearful countenances stooping to look in.

“This glass has seen some strange things, sir,” whispered Poole.

“And surely none stranger than itself,” echoed the lawyer in the same tones. “For what did Jekyll”—he caught himself up at the word with a start, and then conquering the weakness—“ what could Jekyll want with it?” he said.

“You may say that!” said Poole.

Next they turned to the business table. On the desk, among the neat array of papers, a large envelope was uppermost, and bore, in the doctor’s hand, the name of Mr. Utterson. The lawyer unsealed it, and several enclosures fell to the floor. The first was a will, drawn in the same eccentric terms as the one which he had returned six months before, to serve as a testament in case of death and as a deed of gift in case of disappearance; but in place of the name of Edward Hyde, the lawyer, with indescribable amazement, read the name of Gabriel John Utterson. He looked at Poole, and then back at the paper, and last of all at the dead malefactor stretched upon the carpet.

“My head goes round,” he said. “He has been all these days in possession; he had no cause to like me; he must have raged to see himself displaced; and he has not destroyed this document.”

He caught up the next paper; it was a brief note in the doctor’s hand and dated at the top. “O Poole!” the lawyer cried, “he was alive and here this day. He cannot have been disposed of in so short a space; he must be still alive, he must have fled! And then, why fled? and how? and in that case, can we venture to declare this suicide? O, we must be careful. I foresee that we may yet involve your master in some dire catastrophe.”

“Why don’t you read it, sir?” asked Poole.

“Because I fear,” replied the lawyer solemnly. God grant I have no cause for it!” And with that he brought the paper to his eyes and read as follows:

“My dear Utterson,—When this shall fall into your hands, I shall have disappeared, under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee, but my instinct and all the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early. Go then, and first read the narrative which Lanyon warned me he was to place in your hands; and if you care to hear more, turn to the confession of

“Your unworthy and unhappy friend,

“HENRY JEKYLL.”

“There was a third enclosure?” asked Utterson.

“Here, sir,” said Poole, and gave into his hands a considerable packet sealed in several places.

The lawyer put it in his pocket. “I would say nothing of this paper. If your master has fled or is dead, we may at least save his credit. It is now ten; I must go home and read these documents in quiet; but I shall be back before midnight, when we shall send for the police.”

They went out, locking the door of the theatre behind them; and Utterson, once more leaving the servants gathered about the fire in the hall, trudged back to his office to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained.

DR. LANYON’S NARRATIVE

On the ninth of January, now four days ago, I received by the evening delivery a registered envelope, addressed in the hand of my colleague and old school companion, Henry Jekyll. I was a good deal surprised by this; for we were by no means in the habit of correspondence; I had seen the man, dined with him, indeed, the night before; and I could imagine nothing in our intercourse that should justify formality of registration. The contents increased my wonder; for this is how the letter ran:

“10th December, 18—.

“Dear Lanyon,—You are one of my oldest friends; and although we may have differed at times on scientific questions, I cannot remember, at least on my side, any break in our affection. There was never a day when, if you had said to me, ‘Jekyll, my life, my honour, my reason, depend upon you,’ I would not have sacrificed my left hand to help you. Lanyon, my life, my honour, my reason, are all at your mercy; if you fail me to-night, I am lost. You might suppose, after this preface, that I am going to ask you for something dishonourable to grant. Judge for yourself.

“I want you to postpone all other engagements for to night—ay, even if you were summoned to the bedside of an emperor; to take a cab, unless your carriage should be actually at the door; and with this letter in your hand for consultation, to drive straight to my house. Poole, my butler, has his orders; you will find him waiting your arrival with a locksmith. The door of my cabinet is then to be forced: and you are to go in alone; to open the glazed press (letter E) on the left hand, breaking the lock if it be shut; and to draw out, with all its contents as they stand, the fourth drawer from the top or (which is the same thing) the third from the bottom. In my extreme distress of mind, I have a morbid fear of misdirecting you; but even if I am in error, you may know the right drawer by its contents: some powders, a phial and a paper book. This drawer I beg of you to carry back with you to Cavendish Square exactly as it stands.

“That is the first part of the service: now for the second. You should be back, if you set out at once on the receipt of this, long before midnight; but I will leave you that amount of margin, not only in the fear of one of those obstacles that can neither be prevented nor foreseen, but because an hour when your servants are in bed is to be preferred for what will then remain to do. At midnight, then, I have to ask you to be alone in your consulting room, to admit with your own hand into the house a man who will present himself in my name, and to place in his hands the drawer that you will have brought with you from my cabinet. Then you will have played your part and earned my gratitude completely. Five minutes afterwards, if you insist upon an explanation, you will have understood that these arrangements are of capital importance; and that by the neglect of one of them, fantastic as they must appear, you might have charged your conscience with my death or the shipwreck of my reason.

“Confident as I am that you will not trifle with this appeal, my heart sinks and my hand trembles at the bare thought of such a possibility. Think of me at this hour, in a strange place, labouring under a blackness of distress that no fancy can exaggerate, and yet well aware that, if you will but punctually serve me, my troubles will roll away like a story that is told. Serve me, my dear Lanyon, and save

“Your friend,
” H. J.

“P.S.—I had already sealed this up when a fresh terror struck upon my soul. It is possible that the post-office may fail me, and this letter not come into your hands until to-morrow morning. In that case, dear Lanyon, do my errand when it shall be most convenient for you in the course of the day; and once more expect my messenger at midnight. It may then already be too late; and if that night passes without event, you will know that you have seen the last of Henry Jekyll.”

Upon the reading of this letter, I made sure my colleague was insane; but till that was proved beyond the possibility of doubt, I felt bound to do as he requested. The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance; and an appeal so worded could not be set aside without a grave responsibility. I rose accordingly from table, got into a hansom,p and drove straight to Jekyll’s house. The butler was awaiting my arrival; he had received by the same post as mine a registered letter of instruction, and had sent at once for a locksmith and a carpenter. The tradesmen came while we were yet speaking; and we moved in a body to old Dr. Denman’s surgical theatre, from which (as you are doubtless aware) Jekyll’s private cabinet is most conveniently entered. The door was very strong, the lock excellent; the carpenter avowed he would have great trouble and have to do much damage, if force were to be used; and the locksmith was near despair. But this last was a handy fellow, and after two hours’ work, the door stood open. The press marked E was unlocked; and I took out the drawer, had it filled up with straw and tied in a sheet, and returned with it to Cavendish Square.

Here I proceeded to examine its contents. The powders were neatly enough made up, but not with the nicety of the dispensing chemist; so that it was plain they were of Jekyll’s private manufacture: and when I opened one of the wrappers I found what seemed to me a simple crystalline salt of a white colour. The phial, to which I next turned my attention, might have been about half full of a blood-red liquor, which was highly pungent to the sense of smell and seemed to me to contain phosphorus and some volatile ether. At the other ingredients I could make no guess. The book was an ordinary version book and contained little but a series of dates. These covered a period of many years, but I observed that the entries ceased nearly a year ago and quite abruptly. Here and there a brief remark was appended to a date, usually no more than a single word: “double” occurring perhaps six times in a total of several hundred entries; and once very early in the list and followed by several marks of exclamation, “total failure!!!” All this, though it whetted my curiosity, told me little that was definite. Here were a phial of some salt, and the record of a series of experiments that had led (like too many of Jekyll’s investigations) to no end of practical usefulness. How could the presence of these articles in my house affect either the honour, the sanity, or the life of my flighty colleague? If his messenger could go to one place, why could he not go to another? And even granting some impediment, why was this gentleman to be received by me in secret? The more I reflected the more convinced I grew that I was dealing with a case of cerebral disease; and though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver, that I might be found in some posture of self-defence.

Twelve o‘clock had scarce rung out over London, ere the knocker sounded very gently on the door. I went myself at the summons, and found a small man crouching against the pillars of the portico.

“Are you come from Dr. Jekyll?” I asked.

He told me “yes” by a constrained gesture; and when I had bidden him enter, he did not obey me without a searching backward glance into the darkness of the square. There was a policeman not far off, advancing with his bull’s eyeq open; and at the sight, I thought my visitor started and made greater haste.

These particulars struck me, I confess, disagreeably; and as I followed him into the bright light of the consulting room, I kept my hand ready on my weapon. Here, at last, I had a chance of clearly seeing him. I had never set eyes on him before, so much was certain. He was small, as I have said; I was struck besides with the shocking expression of his face, with his remarkable combination of great muscular activity and great apparent debility of constitution, and—last but not least—with the odd, subjective disturbance caused by his neighbourhood. This bore some resemblance to incipient rigour, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse. At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.

This person (who had thus, from the first moment of his entrance, struck in me what I can only describe as a disgustful curiosity) was dressed in a fashion that would have made an ordinary person laughable; his clothes, that is to say, although they were of rich and sober fabric, were enormously too large for him in every measurement—the trousers hanging on his legs and rolled up to keep them from the ground, the waist of the coat below his haunches, and the collar sprawling wide upon his shoulders. Strange to relate, this ludicrous accoutre ment was far from moving me to laughter. Rather, as there was something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature that now faced me—something seizing, surprising and revolting—this fresh disparity seemed but to fit in with and to reinforce it; so that to my interest in the man’s nature and character, there was added a curiosity as to his origin, his life, his fortune and status in the world.

These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds. My visitor was, indeed, on fire with sombre excitement.

“Have you got it?” he cried. “Have you got it?” And so lively was his impatience that he even laid his hand upon my arm and sought to shake me.

I put him back, conscious at his touch of a certain icy pang along my blood. “Come, sir,” said I. “You forget that I have not yet the pleasure of your acquaintance. Be seated, if you please.” And I showed him an example, and sat down myself in my customary seat and with as fair an imitation of my ordinary manner to a patient, as the lateness of the hour, the nature of my preoccupations, and the horror I had of my visitor, would suffer me to muster.

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanyon,” he replied civilly enough. “What you say is very well founded; and my impatience has shown its heels to my politeness. I come here at the instance of your colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, on a piece of business of some moment; and I understood ...” He paused and put his hand to his throat, and I could see, in spite of his collected manner, that he was wrestling against the approaches of the hysteria—“I understood, a drawer ...”

But here I took pity on my visitor’s suspense, and some perhaps on my own growing curiosity.

“There it is, sir,” said I, pointing to the drawer, where it lay on the floor behind a table and still covered with the sheet.

He sprang to it, and then paused, and laid his hand upon his heart: I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and reason.

“Compose yourself,” said I.

He turned a dreadful smile to me, and as if with the decision of despair, plucked away the sheet. At sight of the contents, he uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I sat petrified. And the next moment, in a voice that was already fairly well under control, “Have you a graduated glass?”r he asked.

I rose from my place with something of an effort and gave him what he asked.

He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.

“And now,” said he, “to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.”

“Sir,” said I, affecting a coolness that I was far from truly possessing, “you speak enigmas, and you will perhaps not wonder that I hear you with no very strong impression of belief. But I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end.”

“It is well,” replied my visitor. “Lanyon, you remember your vows: what follows is under the seal of our profession. And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine,³ you who have derided your superiors—behold!”

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change—he seemed to swell—his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter—and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

“O God!” I screamed, and “O God!” again and again; for there before my eyes—pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death—there stood Henry Jekyll!

What he told me in the next hour, I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night; and I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die incredulous. As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence, I cannot, even in memory, dwell on it without a start of horror. I will say but one thing, Utterson, and that (if you can bring your mind to credit it) will be more than enough. The creature who crept into my house that night was, on Jekyll’s own confession, known by the name of Hyde and hunted for in every corner of the land as the murderer of Carew.

Hastie Lanyon

HENRY JEKYLL’S FULL STATEMENT OF THE CASE

I was born in the year 18—to a large fortune, endowed besides with excellent parts, inclined by nature to industry, fond of the respect of the wise and good among my fellowmen, and thus, as might have been supposed, with every guarantee of an honourable and distinguished future. And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature. In this case, I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental, reacted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?

I was so far in my reflections when, as I have said, a side light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table. I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired. Certain agents I found to have the power to shake and pluck back that fleshly vestment, even as a wind might toss the curtains of a pavilion. For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were incomplete. Enough then, that I not only recognised my natural body from the mere aura and effulgence of certain of the powers that made up my spirit, but managed to compound a drug by which these powers should be dethroned from their supremacy, and a second form and countenance substituted, none the less natural to me because they were the expression, and bore the stamp of lower elements in my soul.

I hesitated long before I put this theory to the test of practice. I knew well that I risked death; for any drug that so potently controlled and shook the very fortress of identity, might, by the least scruple of an overdose or at the least in-opportunity in the moment of exhibition, utterly blot out that immaterial tabernacle which I looked to it to change. But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm. I had long since prepared my tincture; I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt which I knew, from my experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature.

There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands beside me as I write, was brought there later on and for the very purpose of these transformations. The night, however, was far gone into the morning—the morning, black as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception of the day—the inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous hours of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

I must here speak by theory alone, saying not that which I know, but that which I suppose to be most probable. The evil side of my nature, to which I had now transferred the stamping efficacy, was less robust and less developed than the good which I had just deposed. Again, in the course of my life, which had been, after all, nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control, it had been much less exercised and much less exhausted. And hence, as I think, it came about that Edward Hyde was so much smaller, slighter and younger than Henry Jekyll. Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.

That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prison-house of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.s At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.

Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion; it seemed to me at the time to be hu mourous ; and I made my preparations with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho, to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a housekeeper a creature whom I knew well to be silent and unscrupulous. On the other side, I announced to my servants that a Mr. Hyde (whom I described) was to have full liberty and power about my house in the square; and to parry mishaps, I even called and made myself a familiar object, in my second character. I next drew up that will to which you so much objected; so that if anything befell me in the person of Dr. Jekyll, I could enter on that of Edward Hyde without pecuniary loss. And thus fortified, as I supposed, on every side, I began to profit by the strange immunities of my position.

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lend ings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.

The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.

Into the details of the infamy at which I thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed it) I have no design of entering; I mean but to point out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastisement approached. I met with one accident which, as it brought on no consequence, I shall no more than mention. An act of cruelty to a child aroused against me the anger of a passer-by, whom I recognised the other day in the person of your kinsman; the doctor and the child’s family joined him; there were moments when I feared for my life; and at last, in order to pacify their too just resentment, Edward Hyde had to bring them to the door, and pay them in a cheque drawn in the name of Henry Jekyll. But this danger was easily eliminated from the future, by opening an account at another bank in the name of Edward Hyde himself; and when, by sloping my own hand backward, I had supplied my double with a signature, I thought I sat beyond the reach of fate.

Some two months before the murder of Sir Danvers, I had been out for one of my adventures, had returned at a late hour, and woke the next day in bed with somewhat odd sensations. It was in vain I looked about me; in vain I saw the decent furniture and tall proportions of my room in the square; in vain that I recognised the pattern of the bed curtains and the design of the mahogany frame; something still kept insisting that I was not where I was, that I had not wakened where I seemed to be, but in the little room in Soho where I was accustomed to sleep in the body of Edward Hyde. I smiled to myself, and, in my psychological way, began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

I must have stared upon it for near half a minute, sunk as I was in the mere stupidity of wonder, before terror woke up in my breast as sudden and startling as the crash of cymbals; and bounding from my bed, I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed into something exquisitely thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself; and then, with another bound of terror—how was it to be remedied? It was well on in the morning; the servants were up; all my drugs were in the cabinet—a long journey down two pairs of stairs, through the back passage, across the open court and through the anatomical theatre, from where I was then standing horror-struck. It might indeed be possible to cover my face; but of what use was that, when I was unable to conceal the alteration in my stature? And then with an overpowering sweetness of relief, it came back upon my mind that the servants were already used to the coming and going of my second self. I had soon dressed, as well as I was able, in clothes of my own size: had soon passed through the house, where Bradshaw stared and drew back at seeing Mr. Hyde at such an hour and in such a strange array; and ten minutes later, Dr. Jekyll had returned to his own shape and was sitting down, with a darkened brow, to make a feint of breakfasting.

Small indeed was my appetite. This inexplicable incident, this reversal of my previous experience, seemed, like the Babylonian finger on the wall,t to be spelling out the letters of my judgment; and I began to reflect more seriously than ever before on the issues and possibilities of my double existence. That part of me which I had the power of projecting, had lately been much exercised and nourished; it had seemed to me of late as though the body of Edward Hyde had grown in stature, as though (when I wore that form) I were conscious of a more generous tide of blood; and I began to spy a danger that, if this were much prolonged, the balance of my nature might be permanently overthrown, the power of voluntary change be forfeited, and the character of Edward Hyde become irrevocably mine. The power of the drug had not been always equally displayed. Once, very early in my career, it had totally failed me; since then I had been obliged on more than one occasion to double, and once, with infinite risk of death, to treble the amount; and these rare uncertainties had cast hitherto the sole shadow on my contentment. Now, however, and in the light of that morning’s accident, I was led to remark that whereas, in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side. All things therefore seemed to point to this; that I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.

Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them. Jekyll (who was composite) now with the most sensitive apprehensions, now with a greedy gusto, projected and shared in the pleasures and adventures of Hyde; but Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll, or but remembered him as the mountain bandit remembers the cavern in which he conceals himself from pursuit. Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

Yes, I preferred the elderly and discontented doctor, surrounded by friends and cherishing honest hopes; and bade a resolute farewell to the liberty, the comparative youth, the light step, leaping impulses and secret pleasures, that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde, which still lay ready in my cabinet. For two months, however, I was true to my determination; for two months, I led a life of such 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 last, 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 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 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 O, how I rejoiced to think of 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.

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how earnestly, in the last months of the last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for license. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; the bare idea of that would startle me to frenzy: no, it was in my own person that I was once more tempted to trifle with my conscience; and it was as an ordinary secret sinner that I at last fell before the assaults of temptation.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to my evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. And yet I was not alarmed; the fall seemed natural, like a return to the old days before I had made my discovery. It was a fine, clear, January day, wet under foot where the frost had melted, but cloudless overhead; and the Regent’s Park was full of winter chirrupings and sweet with spring odours. I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours ; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And at the very moment of that vainglorious thought, a qualm came over me, a horrid nausea and the most deadly shuddering. These passed away, and left me faint; and then as in its turn faintness subsided, I began to be aware of a change in the temper of my thoughts, a greater boldness, a contempt of danger, a solution of the bonds of obligation. I looked down; my clothes hung formlessly on my shrunken limbs; the hand that lay on my knee was corded and hairy. I was once more Edward Hyde. A moment before I had been safe of all men’s respect, wealthy, beloved—the cloth laying for me in the dining-room at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows.

My reason wavered, but it did not fail me utterly. I have more than once observed that, in my second character, my faculties seemed sharpened to a point and my spirits more tensely elastic; thus it came about that, where Jekyll perhaps might have succumbed, Hyde rose to the importance of the moment. My drugs were in one of the presses of my cabinet; how was I to reach them? That was the problem that (crushing my temples in my hands) I set myself to solve. The laboratory door I had closed. If I sought to enter by the house, my own servants would consign me to the gallows. I saw I must employ another hand, and thought of Lanyon. How was he to be reached? how persuaded? Supposing that I escaped capture in the streets, how was I to make my way into his presence? and how should I, an unknown and displeasing visitor, prevail on the famous physician to rifle the study of his colleague, Dr. Jekyll? Then I remembered that of my original character, one part remained to me: I could write my own hand; and once I had conceived that kindling spark, the way that I must follow became lighted up from end to end.

Thereupon, I arranged my clothes as best I could, and summoning a passing hansom, drove to an hotel in Portland Street, the name of which I chanced to remember. At my appearance (which was indeed comical enough, however tragic a fate these garments covered) the driver could not conceal his mirth. I gnashed my teeth upon him with a gust of devilish fury; and the smile withered from his face—happily for him—yet more happily for myself, for in another instant I had certainly dragged him from his perch. At the inn, as I entered, I looked about me with so black a countenance as made the attendants tremble; not a look did they exchange in my presence; but obsequiously took my orders, led me to a private room, and brought me wherewithal to write. Hyde in danger of his life was a creature new to me; shaken with inordinate anger, strung to the pitch of murder, lusting to inflict pain. Yet the creature was astute; mastered his fury with a great effort of the will; composed his two important letters, one to Lanyon and one to Poole; and that he might receive actual evidence of their being posted, sent them out with directions that they should be registered. Thenceforward, he sat all day over the fire in the private room, gnawing his nails; there he dined, sitting alone with his fears, the waiter visibly quailing before his eye; and thence, when the night was fully come, he set forth in the comer of a closed cab, and was driven to and fro about the streets of the city. He, I say—I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human; nothing lived in him but fear and hatred. And when at last, thinking the driver had begun to grow suspicious, he discharged the cab and ventured on foot, attired in his misfitting clothes, an object marked out for observation, into the midst of the nocturnal passengers, these two base passions raged within him like a tempest. He walked fast, hunted by his fears, chattering to himself, skulking through the less frequented thoroughfares, counting the minutes that still divided him from midnight. Once a woman spoke to him, offering, I think, a box of lights. He smote her in the face, and she fled.

When I came to myself at Lanyon‘s, the horror of my old friend perhaps affected me somewhat: I do not know; it was at least but a drop in the sea to the abhorrence with which I looked back upon these hours. A change had come over me. It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me. I received Lanyon’s condemnation partly in a dream; it was partly in a dream that I came home to my own house and got into bed. I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break. I awoke in the morning shaken, weakened, but refreshed. I still hated and feared the thought of the brute that slept within me, and I had not of course forgotten the appalling dangers of the day before; but I was once more at home, in my own house and close to my drugs; and gratitude for my escape shone so strong in my soul that it almost rivalled the brightness of hope.

I was stepping leisurely across the court after breakfast, drinking the chill of the air with pleasure, when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It took on this occasion a double dose to recall me to myself; and alas! six hours after, as I sat looking sadly in the fire, the pangs returned, and the drug had to be re-administered. In short, from that day forth it seemed only by a great effort as of gymnastics, and only under the immediate stimulation of the drug, that I was able to wear the countenance of Jekyll. At all hours of the day and night, I would be taken with the premonitory shudder; above all, if I slept, or even dozed for a moment in my chair, it was always as Hyde that I awakened. Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self. But when I slept, or when the virtue of the medicine wore off, I would leap almost without transition (for the pangs of transformation grew daily less marked) into the possession of a fancy brimming with images of terror, a soul boiling with causeless hatreds, and a body that seemed not strong enough to contain the raging energies of life. The powers of Hyde seemed to have grown with the sickliness of Jekyll. And certainly the hate that now divided them was equal on each side. With Jekyll, it was a thing of vital instinct. He had now seen the full deformity of that creature that shared with him some of the phenomena of consciousness, and was co-heir with him to death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life. The hatred of Hyde for Jekyll was of a different order. His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded. Hence the ape-like tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father; and indeed, had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin. But his love of life is wonderful; I go further: I, who sicken and freeze at the mere thought of him, when I recall the abjection and passion of this attachment, and when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him.

It is useless, and the time awfully fails me, to prolong this description; no one has ever suffered such torments, let that suffice; and yet even to these, habit brought—no, not alleviation—but a certain callousness of soul, a certain acquiescence of despair; and my punishment might have gone on for years, but for the last calamity which has now fallen, and which has finally severed me from my own face and nature. My provision of the salt, which had never been renewed since the date of the first experiment, began to run low. I sent out for a fresh supply and mixed the draught; the ebullition followed, and the first change of colour, not the second; I drank it and it was without efficiency. You will learn from Poole how I have had London ransacked; it was in vain; and I am now persuaded that my first supply was impure, and that it was that unknown impurity which lent efficacy to the draught.

About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powders. This, then, is the last time, short of a miracle, that Henry Jekyll can think his own thoughts or see his own face (now how sadly altered!) in the glass. Nor must I delay too long to bring my writing to an end; for if my narrative has hitherto escaped destruction, it has been by a combination of great prudence and great good luck. Should the throes of change take me in the act of writing it, Hyde will tear it in pieces; but if some time shall have elapsed after I have laid it by, his wonderful selfishness and circumscription to the moment will probably save it once again from the action of his ape-like spite. And indeed the doom that is closing on us both has already changed and crushed him. Half an hour from now, when I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fearstruck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

A Lodging for the Night

A STORY OF FRANCIS VILLON

It was late in November, 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and grimaces with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was Villon’s age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about the precincts of the church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All the graves were decently covered; tall white house-tops stood around in grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, benightcapped like their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighbourhood but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its oscillations. The clock was hard on ten when the patrol went by with halberds and a lantern, beating their hands; and they saw nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall, which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a stream of warm vapour from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow melted on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the door. But within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis Villon the poet, and some of the thievish crew with whom he consorted, were keeping the night alive and passing round the bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and in a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker’s; it was covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half with the shadow of his portly frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call the “Ballade of Roast Fish,” and Tabary spluttering admiration at his shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean, with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly, earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk’s other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a game of chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as he swept in his gains.

“Doubles or quits?” said Thevenin.

Montigny nodded grimly.

“Some may Prefer to dine in state,” wrote Villon, “Or bread and cheese on silver plate. Or, or—help me out, Guido!”

Tabary giggled.

“Or parsley on a golden dish,” scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet‘s, much detested by the Picardy monk.

“Can’t you hear it rattle in the gibbet?” said Villon. “They are all dancing the devil’s jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you’ll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree!—I say, Dom Nicolas, it’ll be cold to-night on the St. Denis Road?” he asked.

Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his Adam’s apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood hard by the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the raw. As for Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he had never heard anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides and crowed. Villon fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned his mirth into an attack of coughing.

“Oh, stop that row,” said Villon, “and think of rhymes to ‘fish.’ ”

“Doubles or quits,” said Montigny doggedly.

“With all my heart,” quoth Thevenin.

“Is there any more in that bottle?” asked the monk.

“Open another,” said Villon. “How do you ever hope to fill that big hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how do you expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can be spared to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think yourself another Elias—and they’ll send the coach for you?”u

“Hominibus impossibile,”v replied the monk as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

“Laugh at my jokes, if you like,” he said.

“It was very good,” objected Tabary.

Villon made a face at him. “Think of rhymes to ‘fish,’ ” he said. “What have you to do with Latin? You’ll wish you knew none of it at the great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus—the devil with the hump-back and red-hot finger-nails. Talking of the devil,” he added in a whisper, “look at Montigny!”

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard under the gruesome burthen.

“He looks as if he could knife him,” whispered Tabary, with round eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands to the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not any excess of moral sensibility.

“Come now,” said Villon—“about this ballade. How does it run so far?” And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart. The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry, before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and Thevenin Pensete’s spirit had returned to Him who made it.

Every one sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and ugly leer.

“My God!” said Tabary; and he began to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder. Then he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing bitterly, as though he would shake himself to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

“Let’s see what he has about him,” he remarked, and he picked the dead man’s pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money into four equal portions on the table. “There’s for you,” he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself and topple sideways off the chair.

“We’re all in for it,” cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. “It’s a hanging job for every man jack of us that’s here—not to speak of those who aren’t.” He made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a shuffle with his feet as if to restore the circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money, and retired to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.

“You fellows had better be moving,” he said, as he wiped the blade on his victim’s doublet.

“I think we had,” returned Villon, with a gulp. “Damn his fat head!” he broke out. “It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What right has a man to have red hair when he is dead?” And he fell all of a heap again upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming in.

“Cry baby,” said the monk.

“I always said he was a woman,” added Montigny, with a sneer. “Sit up, can’t you?” he went on, giving another shake to the murdered body. “Tread out that fire, Nick!”

But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon’s purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been making a ballade not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook himself, jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and extinguish the embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddlesome patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to escape from the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin, and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should discover the loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to issue forth into the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleeping city was absolutely still; a company of white hoods, a field full of little alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase of the night’s existence, for one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald head and garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind swooped round a comer and threw up the snow, which was beginning to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as though carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was merely crossing his line of march he judged it wiser to get out of eyeshot as speedily as he could. He was not in the humour to be challenged, and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow. Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it was half ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into the shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a woman, and she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point. She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little enough; but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man’s life. Henry V. of England, dying at Vin cennesjust after he had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great man’s doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites—it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps towards the house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow: nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon him; and although the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable as was success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no answer. He knocked again and again, taking heart with every stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from within. A barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, and emitted a gush of yellow light.

“Hold up your face to the wicket,” said the chaplain from within.

“It’s only me,” whimpered Villon.

“Oh, it’s only you, is it?” returned the chaplain; and he cursed him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour, and bade him be off to hell, where he came from.

“My hands are blue to the wrist,” pleaded Villon; “my feet are dead and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold lies at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once, father, and before God, I will never ask again!”

“You should have come earlier,” said the ecclesiastic coolly. “Young men require a lesson now and then.” He shut the wicket and retired deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

“Wormy old fox!” he cried. “If I had my hand under your twist, I would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit.”

A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And then the humour of the situation struck him, and he laughed and looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking over his discomfiture.

What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination, and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! and with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one else‘s, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should find his body.

He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a plight. He had lampooned them in verses; he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see.

On the way, two little accidents happened to him which coloured his musings in a very different manner. For, first, he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards, although it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had confused his trail; for he was still possessed with the idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and collaring him next morning before he was awake. The other matter affected him quite differently. He passed a street corner, where, not so long before, a woman and her child had been devoured by wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; and a lone man in these deserted streets would run the chance of something worse than a mere scare. He stopped and looked upon the place with an unpleasant interest—it was a centre where several lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them all, one after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling between him and the river. He remembered his mother telling him the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow; nay, he would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he arrived at his destination—his last hope for the night.

The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and yet after a few taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor had he to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been unprepared for something of the sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but for all that, he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency,w and began coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had been so rudely used, and reflected with his finger to his nose. He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if it might be easily broken into, and thither he betook himself promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea of a room still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of supper, where he might pass the rest of the black hours and whence he should issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He even considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and as he was calling the roll of his favourite dainties, roast fish presented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amusement and horror.

“I shall never finish that ballade,” he thought to himself; and then, with another shudder at the recollection, “Oh, damn his fat head!” he repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.

The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a curtained window.

“The devil!” he thought. “People awake! Some student or some saint, confound the crew! Can’t they get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their neighbours? What’s the good of curfew, and poor devils of bell-ringers jumping at a rope’s end in bell-towers? What’s the use of day, if people sit up all night? The gripes to them!” He grinned as he saw where his logic was leading him. “Every man to his business, after all,” added he, “and if they’re awake, by the Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for once, and cheat the devil.”

He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand. On both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly and with some dread of attracting notice; but now when he had just discarded the thought of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed through the house with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though it were quite empty; but these had scarcely died away before a measured tread drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular and spare, but a little bent, confronted Villon. The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose blunt at the bottom, but refining upward to where it joined a pair of strong and honest eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with delicate markings, and the whole face based upon a thick white beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flickering hand-lamp, it looked perhaps nobler than it had a right to do; but it was a fine face, honourable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and righteous.

“You knock late, sir,” said the old man in resonant, courteous tones.

Villon cringed and brought up many servile words of apology; at a crisis of this sort the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man of genius hid his head with confusion.

“You are cold,” repeated the old man, “and hungry? Well, step in.” And he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.

“Some great seigneur,” thought Villon, as his host, setting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once more into their places.

“You will pardon me if I go in front,” he said, when this was done; and he preceded the poet up-stairs into a large apartment, warmed with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It was very bare of furniture: only some gold plate on a sideboard; some folios; and a stand of armour between the windows. Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, representing the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and in another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a running stream. Over the chimney was a shield of arms.

“Will you seat yourself,” said the old man, “and forgive me if I leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat I must forage for you myself.”

No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on which he had just seated himself, and began examining the room, with the stealth and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his hand, opened all the folios, and investigated the arms upon the shield, and the stuff with which the seats were lined. He raised the window curtains, and saw that the windows were set with rich stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, of martial import. Then he stood in the middle of the room, drew a long breath, and retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked round and round him, turning on his heels, as if to impress every feature of the apartment on his memory.

“Seven pieces of plate,” he said. “If there had been ten, I would have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me all the saints!”

And just then, hearing the old man’s tread returning along the corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan.

His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine in the other. He set down the plate upon the table, motioning Villon to draw in his chair, and going to the sideboard, brought back two goblets which he filled.

“I drink your better fortune,” he said, gravely touching Villon’s cup with his own.

“To our better acquaintance,” said the poet, growing bold. A mere man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth for great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous gusto, while the old man, leaning backward, watched him with steady, curious eyes.

“You have blood on your shoulder, my man,” he said.

Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the house. He cursed Montigny in his heart.

“It was none of my shedding,” he stammered.

“I had not supposed so,” returned his host quietly. “A brawl?”

“Well, something of that sort,” Villon admitted with a quaver.

“Perhaps a fellow murdered?”

“Oh, no, not murdered,” said the poet, more and more confused. “It was all fair play—murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God strike me dead!” he added fervently.

“One rogue the fewer, I dare say,” observed the master of the house.

“You may dare to say that,” agreed Villon, infinitely relieved. “As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned up his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say you’ve seen dead men in your time, my lord?” he added, glancing at the armour.

“Many,” said the old man. “I have followed the wars, as you imagine.”

Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up again.

“Were any of them bald?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, and with hair as white as mine.”

“I don’t think I should mind the white so much,” said Villon. “His was red.” And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine. “I’m a little put out when I think of it,” he went on. “I knew him—damn him! And then the cold gives a man fancies—or the fancies give a man cold, I don’t know which.”

“Have you any money?” asked the old man.

“I have one white,” returned the poet, laughing. “I got it out of a dead jade’s stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Caesar, poor wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and poor rogues like me.”

“I,” said the old man, “am Enguerrand de la Feuillée, seigneur de Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be? ”

Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. “I am called Francis Villon,” he said, “a poor Master of Arts of this university. I know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chan sons, ballades, lais, virelais, and roundels, and I am very fond of wine. I was born in a garret, and I shall not improbably die upon the gallows. I may add, my lord, that from this night forward I am your lordship’s very obsequious servant to command.”

“No servant of mine,” said the knight; “my guest for this evening, and no more.”

“A very grateful guest,” said Villon politely, and he drank in dumb show to his entertainer.

“You are shrewd,” began the old man, tapping his forehead, “very shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a small piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a kind of theft?”

“It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord.”

“The wars are the field of honour,” returned the old man proudly. “There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy saints and angels.”

“Put it,” said Villon, “that I were really a thief, should I not play my life also, and against heavier odds?”

“For gain but not for honour.”

“Gain?” repeated Villon with a shrug. “Gain! The poor fellow wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign. Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to the others. The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country; ay, I have seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was because they could not scrape together enough crowns to satisfy the men-at-arms. ”

“These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must endure with constancy. It is true that some captains drive overhard; there are spirits in every rank not easily moved by pity; and indeed many follow arms who are no better than brigands.”

“You see,” said the poet, “you cannot separate the soldier from the brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with circumspect manners? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without so much as disturbing people’s sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but sups none the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I am only Tom, Dick, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and hanging’s too good for me—with all my heart; but just ask the farmer which of us he prefers, just find out which of us he lies awake to curse on cold nights.”

“Look at us two,” said his lordship. “I am old, strong, and honoured. If I were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would be proud to shelter me. Poor people would go out and pass the night in the streets with their children, if I merely hinted that I wished to be alone. And I find you up, wandering homeless, and picking farthings off dead women by the wayside! I fear no man and nothing; I have seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word. I wait God’s summons contentedly in my own house, or, if it please the king to call me out again, upon the field of battle. You look for the gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or honour. Is there no difference between these two?”

“As far as to the moon,” Villon acquiesced. “But if I had been born lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis, would the difference have been any the less? Should not I have been warming my knees at this charcoal pan, and would not you have been groping for farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the soldier, and you the thief?”

“A thief?” cried the old man. “I a thief! If you understood your words, you would repent them.”

Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable impudence. “If your lordship had done me the honour to follow my argument!” he said.

“I do you too much honour in submitting to your presence,” said the knight. “Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old and honourable men, or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a sharper fashion.” And he rose and paced the lower end of the apartment, struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon surreptitiously refilled his cup, and settled himself more comfortably in the chair, crossing his knees and leaning his head upon one hand and the elbow against the back of the chair. He was now replete and warm; and he was in nowise frightened for his host, having gauged him as justly as was possible between two such different characters. The night was far spent, and in a very comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of a safe departure on the morrow.

“Tell me one thing,” said the old man, pausing in his walk. “Are you really a thief?”

“I claim the sacred rights of hospitality,” returned the poet. “My lord, I am.”

“You are very young,” the knight continued.

“I should never have been so old,” replied Villon, showing his fingers, “if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They have been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers.”

“You may still repent and change.”

“I repent daily,” said the poet. “There are few people more given to repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody change my circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were only that he may continue to repent.”

“The change must begin in the heart,” returned the old man solemnly.

“My dear lord,” answered Villon, “do you really fancy that I steal for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or of danger. My teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I must drink, I must mix in society of some sort. What the devil! Man is not a solitary animal—Cui Deus fœminam tradit.x Make me king’s pantler—make me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the Patatrac; and then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you leave me the poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why, of course, I remain the same.”

“The grace of God is all-powerful.”

“I should be a heretic to question it,” said Francis. “It has made you lord of Brisetout and bailly of the Patatrac; it has given me nothing but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my hands. May I help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By God’s grace, you have a very superior vintage. ”

The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind his back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever the cause, he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to drive him forth again into the street.

“There is something more than I can understand in this,” he said at length. “Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has led you very far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit before God’s truth, and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true honour, like darkness at morning. Listen to me once more. I learned long ago that a gentleman should live chivalrously and lovingly to God, and the king, and his lady; and though I have seen many strange things done, I have still striven to command my ways upon that rule. It is not only written in all noble histories, but in every man’s heart, if he will take care to read. You speak of food and wine, and I know very well that hunger is a difficult trial to endure; but you do not speak of other wants; you say nothing of honour, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy, of love without reproach. It may be that I am not very wise—and yet I think I am—but you seem to me like one who has lost his way and made a great error in life. You are attending to the little wants, and you have totally forgotten the great and only real ones, like a man who should be doctoring toothache on the Judgment Day. For such things as honour and love and faith are not only nobler than food and drink, but indeed I think we desire them more, and suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to you as I think you will most easily understand me. Are you not, while careful to fill your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart, which spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually wretched?”

Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonising. “You think I have no sense of honour!” he cried. “I’m poor enough, God knows! It’s hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in your hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Anyway I’m a thief—make the most of that—but I’m not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I’ve an honour of my own, as good as yours, though I don’t prate about it all day long, as if it was a God’s miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it’s wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone in the house? Look at your gold plate! You’re strong, if you like, but you’re old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want but a jerk of the elbow and here would have been you with the cold steel in your bowels, and there would have been me, linking in the streets, with an armful of golden cups! Did you suppose I hadn’t wit enough to see that? And I scorned the action. There are your damned goblets, as safe as in a church; there are you, with your heart ticking as good as new; and here am I, ready to go out again as poor as I came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth! And you think I have no sense of honour—God strike me dead!”

The old man stretched out his right arm. “I will tell you what you are,” he said. “You are a rogue, my man, an impudent and black-hearted rogue and vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh! believe me, I feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk at my table. But now I am sick at your presence; the day has come, and the night-bird should be off to his roost. Will you go before, or after?”

“Which you please,” returned the poet, rising. “I believe you to be strictly honourable.” He thoughtfully emptied his cup. “I wish I could add you were intelligent,” he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles. “Age! age! the brains stiff and rheumatic.”

The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect. Villon followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.

“God pity you,” said the lord of Brisetout at the door.

“Good-bye, papa,” returned Villon with a yawn. “Many thanks for the cold mutton.”

The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking over the white roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon stood and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.

“A very dull old gentleman,” he thought. “I wonder what his goblets may be worth.”

The Suicide Club

STORY OF THE YOUNG MAN WITH THE CREAM TARTS

During his residence in London, the accomplished Prince Florizel of Bohemiay gained the affection of all classes by the seduction of his manner and by a well-considered generosity. He was a remarkable man even by what was known of him; and that was but a small part of what he actually did. Although of a placid temper in ordinary circumstances, and accustomed to take the world with as much philosophy as any ploughman, the Prince of Bohemia was not without a taste for ways of life more adventurous and eccentric than that to which he was destined by his birth. Now and then, when he fell into a low humour, when there was no laughable play to witness in any of the London theatres, and when the season of the year was unsuitable to those field sports in which he excelled all competitors, he would summon his confidant and Master of the Horse, Colonel Geraldine, and bid him prepare himself against an evening ramble. The Master of the Horse was a young officer of a brave and even temerarious disposition. He greeted the news with delight, and hastened to make ready. Long practice and a varied acquaintance of life had given him a singular facility in disguise; he could adapt not only his face and bearing, but his voice and almost his thoughts, to those of any rank, character, or nation; and in this way he diverted attention from the Prince, and sometimesgained admission for the pair into strange societies. The civil authorities were never taken into the secret of these adventures; the imperturbable courage of the one and the ready invention and chivalrous devotion of the other had brought them through a score of dangerous passes; and they grew in confidence as time went on.

One evening in March they were driven by a sharp fall of sleet into an Oyster Bar in the immediate neighborhood of Leicester Square.z Colonel Geraldine was dressed and painted to represent a person connected with the Press in reduced circumstances; while the Prince had, as usual, travestied his appearance by the addition of false whiskers and a pair of large adhesive eyebrows. These lent him a shaggy and weather-beaten air, which, for one of his urbanity, formed the most impenetrable disguise. Thus equipped, the commander and his satellite sipped their brandy and soda in security.

The bar was full of guests, both male and female; but though more than one of these offered to fall into talk with our adventurers, none of them promised to grow interesting upon a nearer acquaintance. There was nothing present but the lees of London and the commonplace of disrespectability; and the Prince had already fallen to yawning, and was beginning to grow weary of the whole excursion, when the swing doors were pushed violently open, and a young man, followed by a couple of commissionaires, entered the bar. Each of the commissionaires carried a large dish of cream tarts under a cover, which they at once removed; and the young man made the round of the company, and pressed these confections upon everyone’s acceptance with an exaggerated courtesy. Sometimes his offer was laughingly accepted; sometimes it was firmly, or even harshly, rejected. In these latter cases the newcomer always ate the tart himself, with some more or less hu“Sir,” mourous commentary.

At last he accosted Prince Florizel.

said he, with a profound obeisance, proffering the tart at the same time between his thumb and forefinger, “will you so far honour an entire stranger? I can answer for the quality of the pastry, having eaten two dozen and three of them myself since five o‘clock.”

“I am in the habit,” replied the Prince, “of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.”

“The spirit, sir,” returned the young man, with another bow, “is one of mockery.”

“Mockery?” repeated Florizel. “And whom do you propose to mock?”

“I am not here to expound my philosophy,” replied the other, “but to distribute these cream tarts. If I mention that I heartily include myself in the ridicule of the transaction, I hope you will consider honour satisfied and condescend. If not, you will constrain me to eat my twenty-eighth, and I own to being weary of the exercise.”

“You touch me,” said the Prince, “and I have all the will in the world to rescue you from this dilemma, but upon one condition. If my friend and I eat your cakes—for which we have neither of us any natural inclination—we shall expect you to join us at supper by way of recompense.”

The young man seemed to reflect.

“I have still several dozen upon hand,” he said at last; “and that will make it necessary for me to visit several more bars before my great affair is concluded. This will take some time; and if you are hungry—”

The Prince interrupted him with a polite gesture.

“My friend and I will accompany you,” he said: “for we have already a deep interest in your very agreeable mode of passing an evening. And now that the preliminaries of peace are settled, allow me to sign the treaty for both.”

And the Prince swallowed the tart with the best grace imaginable.

“It is delicious,” said he.

“I perceive you are a connoisseur,” replied the young man.

Colonel Geraldine likewise did honour to the pastry; and every one in that bar having now either accepted or refused his delicacies, the young man with the cream tarts led the way to another and similar establishment. The two commissionaires, who seemed to have grown accustomed to their absurd employment, followed immediately after; and the Prince and the Colonel brought up the rear, arm in arm, and smiling to each other as they went. In this order the company visited two other taverns, where scenes were enacted of a like nature to that already described—some refusing, some accepting, the favours of this vagabond hospitality, and the young man himself eating each rejected tart.

On leaving the third saloon the young man counted his store. There were but nine remaining, three in one tray and six in the other.

“Gentlemen,” said he, addressing himself to his two new followers, “I am unwilling to delay your supper. I am positively sure you must be hungry. I feel that I owe you a special consideration. And on this great day for me, when I am closing a career of folly by my most conspicuously silly action, I wish to behave handsomely to all who give me countenance. Gentlemen, you shall wait no longer. Although my constitution is shattered by previous excesses, at the risk of my life I liquidate the suspensory condition.”

With these words he crushed the nine remaining tarts into his mouth, and swallowed them at a single movement each. Then, turning to the commissionaires, he gave them a couple of sovereigns.

“I have to thank you,” said he, “for your extraordinary patience.”

And he dismissed them with a bow apiece. For some seconds he stood looking at the purse from which he had just paid his assistants, then, with a laugh, he tossed it into the middle of the street, and signified his readiness for supper.

In a small French restaurant in Soho, which had enjoyed an exaggerated reputation for some little while, but had already begun to be forgotten, and in a private room up two pairs of stairs, the three companions made a very elegant supper, and drank three or four bottles of champagne, talking the while upon indifferent subjects. The young man was fluent and gay, but he laughed louder than was natural in a person of polite breeding; his hands trembled violently, and his voice took sudden and surprising inflections, which seemed to be independent of his will. The dessert had been cleared away, and all three had lighted their cigars, when the Prince addressed him in these words:—

“You will, I am sure, pardon my curiosity. What I have seen of you has greatly pleased but even more puzzled me. And though I should be loath to seem indiscreet, I must tell you that my friend and I are persons very well worthy to be entrusted with a secret. We have many of our own, which we are continually revealing to improper ears. And if, as I suppose, your story is a silly one, you need have no delicacy with us, who are two of the silliest men in England. My name is Godall, Theophilus Godall; my friend is Major Alfred Hammersmith—or at least, such is the name by which he chooses to be known. We pass our lives entirely in the search for extravagant adventures; and there is no extravagance with which we are not capable of sympathy.”

“I like you, Mr. Godall,” returned the young man; “you inspire me with a natural confidence; and I have not the slightest objection to your friend, the Major; whom I take to be a nobleman in masquerade. At least, I am sure he is no soldier.”

The Colonel smiled at this compliment to the perfection of his art; and the young man went on in a more animated manner.

“There is every reason why I should not tell you my story. Perhaps that is just the reason why I am going to do so. At least, you seem so well prepared to hear a tale of silliness that I cannot find it in my heart to disappoint you. My name, in spite of your example, I shall keep to myself. My age is not essential to the narrative. I am descended from my ancestors by ordinary generation, and from them I inherited the very eligible human tenement which I still occupy and a fortune of three hundred pounds a year. I suppose they also handed on to me a hare-brain humour, which it has been my chief delight to indulge. I received a good education. I can play the violin nearly well enough to earn money in the orchestra of a penny gaff, but not quite. The same remark applies to the flute and the French horn. I learned enough of whist to lose about a hundred a year at that scientific game. My acquaintance with French was sufficient to enable me to squander money in Paris with almost the same facility as in London. In short, I am a person full of manly accomplishments. I have had every sort of adventure, including a duel about nothing. Only two months ago I met a young lady exactly suited to my taste in mind and body; I found my heart melt; I saw that I had come upon my fate at last, and was in the way to fall in love. But when I came to reckon up what remained to me of my capital, I found it amounted to something less than four hundred pounds! I ask you fairly—can a man who respects himself fall in love on four hundred pounds? I concluded, certainly not; left the presence of my charmer, and slightly accelerating my usual rate of expenditure, came this morning to my last eighty pounds. This I divided into two equal parts; forty I reserved for a particular purpose; the remaining forty I was to dissipate before the night. I have passed a very entertaining day, and played many farces besides that of the cream tarts which procured me the advantage of your acquaintance; for I was determined, as I told you, to bring a foolish career to a still more foolish conclusion; and when you saw me throw my purse into the street, the forty pounds were at an end. Now you know me as well as I know myself: a fool, but consistent in his folly; and, as I will ask you to believe, neither a whimperer nor a coward.”

From the whole tone of the young man’s statement it was plain that he harboured very bitter and contemptuous thoughts about himself. His auditors were led to imagine that his love affair was nearer his heart than he admitted, and that he had a design on his own life. The farce of the cream tarts began to have very much the air of a tragedy in disguise.

“Why, is this not odd,” broke out Geraldine, giving a look to Prince Florizel, “that we three fellows should have met by the merest accident in so large a wilderness as London, and should be so nearly in the same condition?”

“How?” cried the young man. “Are you, too, ruined? Is this supper a folly like my cream tarts? Has the devil brought three of his own together for a last carouse?”

“The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gen demanly thing,” returned Prince Florizel; “and I am so much touched by this coincidence, that, although we are not entirely in the same case, I am going to put an end to the disparity. Let your heroic treatment of the last cream tarts be my example.”

So saying, the Prince drew out his purse and took from it a small bundle of bank-notes.

“You see, I was a week or so behind you, but I mean to catch you up and come neck and neck into the winning-post,” he continued. “This,” laying one of the notes upon the table, “will suffice for the bill. As for the rest—”

He tossed them into the fire, and they went up the chimney in a single blaze.

The young man tried to catch his arm, but as the table was between them his interference came too late.

“Unhappy man,” he cried, “you should not have burned them all! You should have kept forty pounds.”

“Forty pounds!” repeated the Prince. “Why, in Heaven’s name, forty pounds?”

“Why not eighty?” cried the Colonel; “for to my certain knowledge there must have been a hundred in the bundle.”

“It was only forty pounds he needed,” said the young man gloomily. “But without them there is no admission. The rule is strict. Forty pounds for each. Accursed life, where a man cannot even die without money!”

The Prince and the Colonel exchanged glances.

“Explain yourself,” said the latter. “I have still a pocket-book tolerably well lined, and I need not say how readily I would share my wealth with Godall. But I must know to what end: you must certainly tell us what you mean.”

The young man seemed to awaken; he looked uneasily from one to the other, and his face flushed deeply.

“You are not fooling me?” he asked. “You are indeed ruined men like me?”

“Indeed, I am for my part,” replied the Colonel.

“And for mine,” said the Prince, “I have given you proof. Who but a ruined man would throw his notes into the fire? The action speaks for itself.”

“A ruined man—yes,” returned the other suspiciously, “or else a millionaire.”

“Enough, sir,” said the Prince; “I have said so, and I am not accustomed to have my word remain in doubt.”

“Ruined?” said the young man. “Are you ruined, like me? Are you, after a life of indulgence, come to such a pass that you can only indulge yourself in one thing more? Are you”—he kept lowering his voice as he went on—“are you going to give yourselves that last indulgence! Are you going to avoid the consequences of your folly by the one infallible and easy path? Are you going to give the slip to the sheriffs officers of conscience by the one open door?”

Suddenly he broke off and attempted to laugh.

“Here is your health!” he cried, emptying his glass, “and good night to you, my merry ruined men.”

Colonel Geraldine caught him by the arm as he was about to rise.

“You lack confidence in us,” he said, “and you are wrong. To all your questions I make answer in the affirmative. But I am not so timid, and can speak the Queen’s English plainly. We too, like yourself, have had enough of life, and are determined to die. Sooner or later, alone or together, we meant to seek out death and beard him where he lies ready. Since we have met you, and your case is more pressing, let it be to night—and at once—and, if you will, all three together. Such a penniless trio,” he cried, “should go arm in arm into the halls of Pluto, and give each other some countenance among the shades!”

Geraldine had hit exactly on the manners and intonations that became the part he was playing. The Prince himself was disturbed, and looked over at his confidant with a shade of doubt. As for the young man, the flush came back darkly into his cheek, and his eyes threw out a spark of light.

“You are the men for me!” he cried, with an almost terrible gayety. “Shake hands upon the bargain!” (his hand was cold and wet.) “You little know in what a company you will begin the march! You little know in what a happy moment for yourselves you partook of my cream tarts! I am only a unit, but I am a unit in an army. I know Death’s private door. I am one of his familiars, and can show you into eternity without ceremony and yet without scandal.”

They called upon him eagerly to explain his meaning.

“Can you muster eighty pounds between you?” he demanded.

Geraldine ostentatiously consulted his pocket-book, and replied in the affirmative.

“Fortunate beings!” cried the young man. “Forty pounds is the entry money of the Suicide Club.”

“The Suicide Club,” said the Prince, “why, what the devil is that?”

“Listen,” said the young man; “this is the age of conveniences, and I have to tell you of the last perfection of the sort. We have affairs in different places; and hence railways were invented. Railways separated us infallibly from our friends; and so telegraphs were made that we might communicate speedily at great distances. Even in hotels we have lifts to spare us a climb of some hundred steps. Now, we know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon as long as the part amuses us. There was one more convenience lacking to modern comfort; a decent, easy way to quit that stage; the back stairs to liberty; or, as I said this moment, Death’s private door. This, my two fellow-rebels, is supplied by the Suicide Club. Do not suppose that you and I are alone, or even exceptional, in the highly reasonable desire that we profess. A large number of our fellow-men, who have grown heartily sick of the performance in which they are expected to join daily and all their lives long, are only kept from flight by one or two considerations. Some have families who would be shocked, or even blamed, if the matter became public; others have a weakness at heart and recoil from the circumstances of death. That is, to some extent, my own experience. I cannot put a pistol to my head and draw the trigger; for something stronger than myself withholds the act; and although I loathe life, I have not strength enough in my body to take hold of death and be done with it. For such as I, and for all who desire to be out of the coilaa without posthumous scandal, the Suicide Club has been inaugurated. How this has been managed, what is its history, or what may be its ramifications in other lands, I am myself uninformed; and what I know of its constitution, I am not at liberty to communicate to you. To this extent, however, I am at your service. If you are truly tired of life, I will introduce you to-night to a meeting; and if not to-night, at least some time within the week, you will be easily relieved of your existences. It is now (consulting his watch) eleven; by half-past, at latest, we must leave this place; so that you have half an hour before you to consider my proposal. It is more serious than a cream tart,” he added, with a smile; “and I suspect more palatable.”

“More serious, certainly,” returned Colonel Geraldine; “and as it is so much more so, will you allow me five minutes’ speech in private with my friend, Mr. Godall?”

“It is only fair,” answered the young man. “If you will permit, I will retire.”

“You will be very obliging,” said the Colonel.

As soon as the two were alone—“What,” said Prince Florizel, “is the use of this confabulation, Geraldine? I see you are flurried, whereas my mind is very tranquilly made up. I will see the end of this.”

“Your Highness,” said the Colonel turning pale; “let me ask you to consider the importance of your life, not only to your friends, but to the public interest. ‘If not to-night,’ said this madman; but supposing that to-night some irreparable disaster were to overtake your Highness’s person, what, let me ask you, what would be my despair, and what the concern and disaster of a great nation?”

“I will see the end of this,” repeated the Prince in his most deliberate tones; “and have the kindness, Colonel Geraldine, to remember and respect your word of honour as a gentleman. Under no circumstances, recollect, nor without my special authority, are you to betray the incognito under which I choose to go abroad. These were my commands, which I now reiterate. And now,” he added, “let me ask you to call for the bill.”

Colonel Geraldine bowed in submission; but he had a very white face as he summoned the young man of the cream tarts, and issued his directions to the waiter. The Prince preserved his undisturbed demeanor, and described a Palais Royal farce to the young suicide with great humour and gusto. He avoided the Colonel’s appealing looks without ostentation, and selected another cheroot with more than usual care. Indeed, he was now the only man of the party who kept any command over his nerves.

The bill was discharged, the Prince giving the whole change of the note to the astonished waiter; and the three drove off in a four wheeler. They were not long upon the way before the cab stopped at the entrance to a rather dark court. Here all descended.

After Geraldine had paid the fare, the young man turned, and addressed Prince Florizel as follows:

“It is still time, Mr. Godall, to make good your escape into thralldom. And for you too, Major Hammersmith. Reflect well before you take another step; and if your hearts say no—here are the crossroads.”

“Lead on, sir,” said the Prince. “I am not the man to go back from a thing once said.”

“Your coolness does me good,” replied their guide. “I have never seen anyone so unmoved at this conjuncture; and yet you are not the first whom I have escorted to this door. More than one of my friends has preceded me, where I knew I must shortly follow. But this is of no interest to you. Wait me here for only a few moments; I shall return as soon as I have arranged the preliminaries of your introduction.”

And with that the young man, waving his hand to his companions, turned into the court, entered a doorway and disappeared.

“Of all our follies,” said Colonel Geraldine in a low voice, “this is the wildest and most dangerous.”

“I perfectly believe so,” returned the Prince. “We have still,” pursued the Colonel, “a moment to ourselves. Let me beseech your Highness to profit by the opportunity and retire. The consequences of this step are so dark, and may be so grave, that I feel myself justified in pushing a little farther than usual the liberty which your Highness is so condescending as to allow me in private.”

“Am I to understand that Colonel Geraldine is afraid?” asked his Highness, taking his cheroot from his lips, and looking keenly into the other’s face.

“My fear is certainly not personal,” replied the other proudly; “of that your Highness may rest well assured.”

“I had supposed as much,” returned the Prince, with undisturbed good humour; “but I was unwilling to remind you of the difference in our stations. No more—no more,” he added, seeing Geraldine about to apologize, “you stand excused.”

And he smoked placidly, leaning against a railing, until the young man returned.

“Well,” he asked, “has our reception been arranged?”

“Follow me,” was the reply. “The President will see you in the cabinet. And let me warn you to be frank in your answers. I have stood your guarantee; but the club requires a searching inquiry before admission; for the indiscretion of a single member would lead to the dispersion of the whole society forever.”

The Prince and Geraldine put their heads together for a moment. “Bear me out in this,” said the one; and “bear me out in that,” said the other; and by boldly taking up the characters of men with whom both were acquainted, they had come to an agreement in a twinkling, and were ready to follow their guide into the President’s cabinet.

There were no formidable obstacles to pass. The outer door stood open; the door of the cabinet was ajar; and there, in a small but very high apartment, the young man left them once more.

“He will be here immediately,” he said with a nod, as he disappeared.

Voices were audible in the cabinet through the folding doors which formed one end; and now and then the noise of a champagne cork, followed by a burst of laughter, intervened among the sounds of conversation. A single tall window looked out upon the river and the embankment; and by the disposition of the lights they judged themselves not far from Charing Cross station.ab The furniture was scanty, and the coverings worn to the thread; and there was nothing movable except a hand-bell in the centre of a round table, and the hats and coats of a considerable party hung round the wall on pegs.

“What sort of a den is this?” said Geraldine.

“That is what I have come to see,” replied the Prince. “If they keep live devils on the premises, the thing may grow amusing.”

Just then the folding door was opened no more than necessary for the passage of a human body; and there entered at the same moment a louder buzz of talk, and the redoubtable President of the Suicide Club. The President was a man of fifty or upwards; large and rambling in his gait, with shaggy side-whiskers, a bald top to his head, and a veiled gray eye, which now and then emitted a twinkle. His mouth, which embraced a large cigar, he kept continually screwing round and round and from side to side, as he looked sagaciously and coldly at the strangers. He was dressed in light tweeds, with his neck very open, in a striped shirt collar; and carried a minute book under one arm.

“Good evening,” said he, after he had closed the door behind him. “I am told you wish to speak with me.”

“We have a desire, sir, to join the Suicide Club,” replied the Colonel.

The President rolled his cigar about in his mouth.

“What is that?” he said abruptly.

“Pardon me,” returned the Colonel, “but I believe you are the person best qualified to give us information on that point.”

“I?” cried the President. “A Suicide Club? Come, come! this is a frolic for All Fools’ Day. I can make allowances for gentlemen who get merry in their liquor; but let there be an end to this.”

“Call your Club what you will,” said the Colonel, “you have some company behind these doors, and we insist on joining it.”

“Sir,” returned the President, curtly, “you have made a mistake. This is a private house, and you must leave it instantly.”

The Prince had remained quietly in his seat throughout this little colloquy; but now, when the Colonel looked over to him, as much as to say, “Take your answer and come away, for God’s sake!” he drew his cheroot from his mouth, and spoke—

“I have come here,” said he, “upon the invitation of a friend of yours. He has doubtless informed you of my intention in thus intruding on your party. Let me remind you that a person in my circumstances has exceedingly little to bind him, and is not at all likely to tolerate much rudeness. I am a very quiet man, as a usual thing; but, my dear sir, you are either going to oblige me in the little matter of which you are aware, or you shall very bitterly repent that you ever admitted me to your ante-chamber.”

The President laughed aloud.

“That is the way to speak,” said he. “You are a man who is a man. You know the way to my heart, and can do what you like with me. Will you,” he continued, addressing Geraldine, “will you step aside for a few minutes? I shall finish first with your companion, and some of the club’s formalities require to be fulfilled in private.”

With these words he opened the door of a small closet, into which he shut the Colonel.

“I believe in you,” he said to Florizel, as soon as they were alone; “but are you sure of your friend?”

“Not so sure as I am of myself, though he has more cogent reasons,” answered Florizel, “but sure enough to bring him here without alarm. He has had enough to cure the most tenacious man of life. He was cashiered the other day for cheating at cards.”ac

“A good reason, I daresay,” replied the President; “at least, we have another in the same case, and I feel sure of him. Have you also been in the Service, may I ask?”

“I have,” was the reply; “but I was too lazy, I left it early.”

“What is your reason for being tired of life?” pursued the President.

“The same, as near as I can make out,” answered the Prince; “unadulterated laziness.”

The President started. “D_____n it,” said he, “you must have something better than that.”

“I have no more money,” added Florizel. “That is also a vexation, without doubt. It brings my sense of idleness to an acute point.”

The President rolled his cigar round in his mouth for some seconds, directing his gaze straight into the eyes of this unusual neophyte; but the Prince supported his scrutiny with unabashed good temper.

“If I had not a deal of experience,” said the President at last, “I should turn you off. But I know the world; and this much any way, that the most frivolous excuses for a suicide are often the toughest to stand by. And when I downright like a man, as I do you, sir, I would rather strain the regulation than deny him.”

The Prince and the Colonel, one after the other, were subjected to a long and particular interrogatory: the Prince alone; but Geraldine in the presence of the Prince, so that the President might observe the countenance of the one while the other was being warmly cross-examined. The result was satisfactory; and the President, after having booked a few details of each case, produced a form of oath to be accepted. Nothing could be conceived more passive than the obedience promised, or more stringent than the terms by which the juror bound himself. The man who forfeited a pledge so awful could scarcely have a rag of honour or any of the consolations of religion left to him. Florizel signed the document, but not without a shudder; the Colonel followed his example with an air of great depression. Then the President received the entry money; and without more ado, introduced the two friends into the smoking-room of the Suicide Club.

The smoking-room of the Suicide Club was the same height as the cabinet into which it opened, but much larger, and papered from top to bottom with an imitation of oak wainscot. A large and cheerful fire and a number of gas-jets illuminated the company. The Prince and his follower made the number up to eighteen. Most of the party were smoking, and drinking champagne; a feverish hilarity reigned, with sudden and rather ghastly pauses.

“Is this a full meeting?” asked the Prince.

“Middling,” said the President. “By the way,” he added, “if you have any money, it is usual to offer some champagne. It keeps up a good spirit, and is one of my own little perquisites.”

“Hammersmith,” said Florizel, “I may leave the champagne to you.”

And with that he turned away and began to go round among the guests. Accustomed to play the host in the highest circles, he charmed and dominated all whom he approached; there was something at once winning and authoritative in his address; and his extraordinary coolness gave him yet another distinction in this half maniacal society. As he went from one to another he kept both his eyes and ears open, and soon began to gain a general idea of the people among whom he found himself. As in all other places of resort, one type predominated: people in the prime of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility in their appearance, but with little promise of strength or the quality that makes success. Few were much above thirty, and not a few were still in their teens. They stood, leaning on tables and shifting on their feet; sometimes they smoked extraordinarily fast, and sometimes they let their cigars go out; some talked well, but the conversation of others was plainly the result of nervous tension, and was equally without wit or purport. As each new bottle of champagne was opened, there was a manifest improvement in gaiety. Only two were seated—one in a chair in the recess of the window, with his head hanging and his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets, pale, visibly moist with perspiration, saying never a word, a very wreck of soul and body; the other sat on the divan close by the chimney, and attracted notice by a trenchant dissimilarity from all the rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but he looked fully ten years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen a man more naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and ruinous excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, was partly paralyzed, and wore spectacles of such unusual power, that his eyes appeared through the glasses greatly magnified and distorted in shape. Except the Prince and the President, he was the only person in the room who preserved the composure of ordinary life.

There was little decency among the members of the club. Some boasted of the disgraceful actions, the consequences of which had reduced them to seek refuge in death; and the others listened without disapproval. There was a tacit understanding against moral judgments; and whoever passed the club doors enjoyed already some of the immunities of the tomb. They drank to each other’s memories, and to those of notable suicides in the past. They compared and developed their different views of death—some declaring that it was no more than blackness and cessation; others full of a hope that that very night they should be scaling the stars and commerc ing with the mighty dead.

“To the eternal memory of Baron Trenck,ad the type of suicides!” cried one. “He went out of a small cell into a smaller, that he might come forth again to freedom.”

“For my part,” said a second, “I wish no more than a bandage for my eyes and cotton for my ears. Only they have no cotton thick enough in this world.”

A third was for reading the mysteries of life in a future state; and a fourth professed that he would never have joined the club, if he had not been induced to believe in Mr. Darwin.

“I could not bear,” said this remarkable suicide, “to be descended from an ape.”ae

Altogether, the Prince was disappointed by the bearing and conversation of the members.

“It does not seem to me,” he thought, “a matter for so much disturbance. If a man has made up his mind to kill himself, let him do it, in God’s name, like a gentleman. This flutter and big talk is out of place.”

In the meanwhile Colonel Geraldine was a prey to the blackest apprehensions; the club and its rules were still a mystery, and he looked round the room for some one who should be able to set his mind at rest. In this survey his eye lighted on the paralytic person with the strong spectacles; and seeing him so exceedingly tranquil, he besought the President, who was going in and out of the room under a pressure of business, to present him to the gentleman on the divan.

The functionary explained the needlessness of all such formalities within the club, but nevertheless presented Mr. Hammersmith to Mr. Malthus.af

Mr. Malthus looked at the Colonel curiously, and then requested him to take a seat upon his right.

“You are a newcomer,” he said, “and wish information? You have come to the proper source. It is two years since I first visited this charming club.”

The Colonel breathed again. If Mr. Malthus had frequented the place for two years there could be little danger for the Prince in a single evening. But Geraldine was none the less astonished, and began to suspect a mystification.

“What!” cried he, “two years! I thought—but indeed I see I have been made the subject of a pleasantry.”

“By no means,” replied Mr. Malthus mildly. “My case is peculiar. I am not, properly speaking, a suicide at all; but, as it were, an honourary member. I rarely visit the club twice in two months. My infirmity and the kindness of the President have procured me these little immunities, for which besides I pay at an advanced rate. Even as it is my luck has been extraordinary.”

“I am afraid,” said the Colonel, “that I must ask you to be more explicit. You must remember that I am still most imperfectly acquainted with the rules of the club.”

“An ordinary member who comes here in search of death like yourself,” replied the paralytic, “returns every evening until fortune favours him. He can, even if he is penniless, get board and lodging from the President: very fair, I believe, and clean, although, of course, not luxurious; that could hardly be, considering the exiguity (if I may so express myself) of the subscription. And then the President’s company is a delicacy in itself.”

“Indeed!” cried Geraldine, “he had not greatly prepossessed me.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Malthus, “you do not know the man: the drollest fellow! What stories! What cynicism! He knows life to admiration and, between ourselves, is probably the most corrupt rogue in Christendom.”

“And he also,” asked the Colonel, “is a permanency—like yourself, if I may say so without offence?”

“Indeed, he is a permanency in a very different sense from me,” replied Mr. Malthus. “I have been graciously spared, but I must go at last. Now he never plays. He shuffles and deals for the club, and makes the necessary arrangements. That man, my dear Mr. Hammersmith, is the very soul of ingenuity. For three years he has pursued in London his useful and, I think I may add, his artistic calling; and not so much as a whisper of suspicion has been once aroused. I believe him myself to be inspired. You doubtless remember the celebrated case, six months ago, of the gentleman who was accidentally poisoned in a chemist’s shop? That was one of the least rich, one of the least racy, of his notions; but then, how simple! and how safe!”

“You astound me,” said the Colonel. “Was that unfortunate gentleman one of the_____” He was about to say “victims”; but bethinking himself in time, he substituted—“members of the club?”

In the same flash of thought, it occurred to him that Mr. Malthus himself had not at all spoken in the tone of one who is in love with death; and he added hurriedly:

“But I perceive I am still in the dark. You speak of shuffling and dealing; pray for what end? And since you seem rather unwilling to die than otherwise, I must own that I cannot conceive what brings you here at all.”

“You say truly that you are in the dark,” replied Mr. Malthus with more animation. “Why, my dear sir, this club is the temple of intoxication. If my enfeebled health could support the excitement more often, you may depend upon it I should be more often here. It requires all the sense of duty engendered by a long habit of ill-health and careful regimen, to keep me from excess in this, which is, I may say, my last dissipation. I have tried them all, sir,” he went on, laying his hand on Geraldine’s arm, “all without exception, and I declare to you, upon my honour, there is not one of them that has not been grossly and untruthfully overrated. People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intense joys of living. Envy me—envy me, sir,” he added with a chuckle, “I am a coward!”

Geraldine could scarcely repress a movement of repulsion for this deplorable wretch; but he commanded himself with an effort, and continued his inquiries.

“How, sir,” he asked, “is the excitement so artfully prolonged? and where is there any element of uncertainty?”

“I must tell you how the victim for every evening is selected,” returned Mr. Malthus; “and not only the victim, but another member, who is to be the instrument in the club’s hands, and death’s high priest of that occasion.”

“Good God!” said the Colonel, “do they then kill each other?”

“The trouble of suicide is removed in that way,” returned Malthus with a nod.

“Merciful Heavens!” ejaculated the Colonel, “and may you—may I—may the—my friend, I mean—may any of us be pitched upon this evening as the slayer of another man’s body and immortal spirit? Can such things be possible among men born of women? Oh! infamy of infamies!”

He was about to rise in his horror, when he caught the Prince’s eye. It was fixed upon him from across the room with a frowning and angry stare. And in a moment Geraldine recovered his composure.

“After all,” he added, “why not? And since you say the game is interesting, vogue la galère—I follow the club!”

Mr. Malthus had keenly enjoyed the Colonel’s amazement and disgust. He had the vanity of wickedness; and it pleased him to see another man give way to a generous movement, while he felt himself, in his entire corruption, superior to such emotions.

“You now, after your first moment of surprise,” said he, “are in a position to appreciate the delights of our society. You can see how it combines the excitement of a gaming-table, a duel, and a Roman amphitheatre. The Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand how vapid are all amusements to a man who has acquired a taste for this one. The game we play,” he continued, “is one of extreme simplicity. A full pack—but I perceive you are about to see the thing in progress. Will you lend me the help of your arm? I am unfortunately paralyzed.”

Indeed, just as Mr. Malthus was beginning his description, another pair of folding-doors was thrown open, and the whole club began to pass, not without some hurry, into the adjoining room. It was similar in every respect to the one from which it was entered, but somewhat differently furnished. The centre was occupied by a long green table, at which the President sat shuffling a pack of cards with great particularity. Even with the stick and the Colonel’s arm, Mr. Malthus walked with so much difficulty that everyone was seated before this pair and the Prince, who had waited for them, entered the apartment; and, in consequence, the three took seats close together at the lower end of the board.

“It is a pack of fifty-two,” whispered Mr. Malthus. “Watch for the ace of spades, which is the sign of death, and the ace of clubs, which designates the official of the night. Happy, happy young men!” he added. “You have good eyes, and can follow the game. Alas! I cannot tell an ace from a deuce across the table.”

And he proceeded to equip himself with a second pair of spectacles.

“I must at least watch the faces,” he explained.

The Colonel rapidly informed his friend of all that he had learned from the honourary member, and of the horrible alternative that lay before them. The Prince was conscious of a deadly chill and a contraction about his heart; he swallowed with difficulty, and looked from side to side like a man in a maze.

“One bold stroke,” whispered the Colonel, “and we may still escape.”

But the suggestion recalled the Prince’s spirits.

“Silence!” said he. “Let me see that you can play like a gentleman for any stake, however serious.”

And he looked about him, once more to all appearance at his ease, although his heart beat thickly, and he was conscious of an unpleasant heat in his bosom. The members were all very quiet and intent; everyone was pale, but none so pale as Mr. Malthus. His eyes protruded; his head kept nodding involuntarily upon his spine; his hands found their way, one after the other, to his mouth, where they made clutches at his tremulous and ashen lips. It was plain that the honourary member enjoyed his membership on very startling terms.

“Attention, gentlemen!” said the President.

And he began slowly dealing the cards about the table in the reverse direction, pausing until each man had shown his card. Nearly everyone hesitated; and sometimes you would see a player’s fingers stumble more than once before he could turn over the momentous slip of pasteboard. As the Prince’s turn drew nearer, he was conscious of a growing and almost suffocating excitement; but he had somewhat of the gambler’s nature, and recognized almost with astonishment that there was a degree of pleasure in his sensations. The nine of clubs fell to his lot; the three of spades was dealt to Geraldine; and the queen of hearts to Mr. Malthus, who was unable to suppress a sob of relief. The young man of the cream tarts almost immediately afterwards turned over the ace of clubs, and remained frozen with horror, the card still resting on his finger; he had not come there to kill, but to be killed; and the Prince, in his generous sympathy with his position, almost forgot the peril that still hung over himself and his friend.

The deal was coming round again, and still Death’s card had not come out. The players held their respiration, and only breathed by gasps. The Prince received another club; Geraldine had a diamond; but when Mr. Malthus turned up his card a horrible noise, like that of something breaking, issued from his mouth; and he rose from his seat and sat down again, with no sign of his paralysis. It was the ace of spades. The honourary member had trifled once too often with his terrors.

Conversation broke out again almost at once. The players relaxed their rigid attitudes, and began to rise from the table and stroll back by twos and threes into the smoking-room. The President stretched his arms and yawned, like a man who had finished his day’s work. But Mr. Malthus sat in his place, with his head in his hands, and his hands upon the table, drunk and motionless—a thing stricken down.

The Prince and Geraldine made their escape at once. In the cold night air their horror of what they had witnessed was redoubled.

“Alas!” cried the Prince, “to be bound by an oath in such a matter! to allow this wholesale trade in murder to be continued with profit and impunity! If I but dared to forfeit my pledge!”

“That is impossible for your Highness,” replied the Colonel, “whose honour is the honour of Bohemia. But I dare, and may with propriety, forfeit mine.”

“Geraldine,” said the Prince, “if your honour suffers in any of the adventures into which you follow me, not only will I never pardon you, but—what I believe will much more sensibly affect you—I should never forgive myself.”

“I receive your Highness’s commands,” replied the Colonel. “Shall we go from this accursed spot?”

“Yes,” said the Prince. “Call a cab in Heaven’s name, and let me try to forget in slumber the memory of this night’s disgrace.”

But it was notable that he carefully read the name of the court before he left it.

The next morning, as soon as the Prince was stirring, Colonel Geraldine brought him a daily newspaper, with the following paragraph marked:—

“MELANCHOLY ACCIDENT.—This morning, about two o‘clock, Mr. Bartholomew Malthus, of 16 Chepstow Place, Westbourne Grove, on his way home from a party at a friend’s house, fell over the upper parapet in Trafalgar Square, fracturing his skull and breaking a leg and an arm. Death was instantaneous. Mr. Malthus, accompanied by a friend, was engaged in looking for a cab at the time of the unfortunate occurrence. As Mr. Malthus was paralytic, it is thought that his fall may have been occasioned by another seizure. The unhappy gentleman was well known in the most respectable circles, and his loss will be widely and deeply deplored.”

“If ever a soul went straight to Hell,” said Geraldine solemnly, “it was that paralytic man’s.”

The Prince buried his face in his hands, and remained silent.

“I am almost rejoiced,” continued the Colonel, “to know that he is dead. But for our young man of the cream tarts I confess my heart bleeds.”

“Geraldine,” said the Prince, raising his face, “that unhappy lad was last night as innocent as you and I; and this morning the guilt of blood is on his soul. When I think of the President, my heart grows sick within me. I do not know how it shall be done, but I shall have that scoundrel at my mercy as there is a God in Heaven. What an experience, what a lesson, was that game of cards!”

“One,” said the Colonel, “never to be repeated.”

The Prince remained so long without replying, that Geraldine grew alarmed.

“You cannot mean to return,” he said. “You have suffered too much and seen too much horror already. The duties of your high position forbid the repetition of the hazard.”

“There is much in what you say,” replied Prince Florizel, “and I am not altogether pleased with my own determination. Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man? I never felt my weakness more acutely than now, Geraldine, but it is stronger than I. Can I cease to interest myself in the fortunes of the unhappy young man who supped with us some hours ago? Can I leave the President to follow his nefarious career unwatched? Can I begin an adventure so entrancing, and not follow it to an end? No, Geraldine; you ask of the Prince more than the man is able to perform. To night, once more, we take our places at the table of the Suicide Club.”

Colonel Geraldine fell upon his knees.

“Will your Highness take my life?” he cried. “It is his—his freely; but do not, Oh, do not! let him ask me to countenance so terrible a risk.”

“Colonel Geraldine,” replied the Prince, with some haughtiness of manner, “your life is absolutely your own. I only looked for obedience; and when that is unwillingly rendered, I shall look for that no longer. I add one word: your importunity in this affair has been sufficient.”

The Master of the Horse regained his feet at once. “Your Highness,” he said, “may I be excused in my attendance this afternoon? I dare not, as an honourable man, venture a second time into that fatal house until I have perfectly ordered my affairs. Your Highness shall meet, I promise him, with no more opposition from the most devoted and grateful of his servants.”

“My dear Geraldine,” returned Prince Florizel, “I always regret when you oblige me to remember my rank. Dispose of your day as you think fit, but be here before eleven in the same disguise.”

The club, on this second evening, was not so fully attended; and when Geraldine and the Prince arrived, there were not above half a dozen persons in the smoking-room. His Highness took the President aside and congratulated him warmly on the demise of Mr. Malthus.

“I like,” he said, “to meet with capacity, and certainly find much of it in you. Your profession is of a very delicate nature, but I see you are well qualified to conduct it with success and secrecy”.

The President was somewhat affected by these compliments from one of his Highness’s superior bearing. He acknowledged them almost with humility.

“Poor Malthy! he added, ”I shall hardly know the club without him. The most of my patrons are boys, sir, and poetical boys, who are not much company for me. Not but what Malthy had some poetry, too; but it was of a kind that I could understand.”

“I can readily imagine you should find yourself in sympathy with Mr. Malthus,” returned the Prince. “He struck me as a man of a very original disposition.”

The young man of the cream tarts was in the room, but painfully depressed and silent. His late companions sought in vain to lead him into conversation.

“How bitterly I wish,” he cried, “that I had never brought you to this infamous abode! Begone, while you are clean-handed. If you could have heard the old man scream as he fell, and the noise of his bones upon the pavement! Wish me, if you have any kindness to so fallen a being—wish the ace of spades for me to-night!”

A few more members dropped in as the evening went on, but the club did not muster more than the devil’s dozen when they took their places at the table. The Prince was again conscious of a certain joy in his alarms; but he was astonished to see Geraldine so much more self-possessed than on the night before.

“It is extraordinary,” thought the Prince, “that a will, made or unmade, should so greatly influence a young man’s spirit.”

“Attention, gentlemen!” said the President, and he began to deal.

Three times the cards went all round the table, and neither of the marked cards had yet fallen from his hand. The excitement as he began the fourth distribution was overwhelming. There were just cards enough to go once more entirely round. The Prince, who sat second from the dealer’s left, would receive, in the reverse mode of dealing practiced at the club, the second last card. The third player turned up a black ace—it was the ace of clubs. The next received a diamond, the next a heart, and so on; but the ace of spades was still undelivered. At last Geraldine, who sat upon the Prince’s left, turned his card; it was an ace, but the ace of hearts.

When Prince Florizel saw his fate upon the table in front of him, his heart stood still. He was a brave man, but the sweat poured off his face. There were exactly fifty chances out of a hundred that he was doomed. He reversed the card; it was the ace of spades. A loud roaring filled his brain, and the table swam before his eyes. He heard the player on his right break into a fit of laughter that sounded between mirth and disappointment; he saw the company rapidly dispersing, but his mind was full of other thoughts. He recognized how foolish, how criminal, had been his conduct. In perfect health, in the prime of his years, the heir to a throne, he had gambled away his future and that of a brave and loyal country. “God,” he cried, “God forgive me!” And with that, the confusion of his senses passed away, and he regained his self-possession in a moment.

To his surprise Geraldine had disappeared. There was no one in the card-room but his destined butcher consulting with the President, and the young man of the cream tarts, who slipped up to the Prince and whispered in his ear:

“I would give a million, if I had it, for your luck.”

His Highness could not help reflecting, as the young man departed, that he would have sold his opportunity for a much more moderate sum.

The whispered conference now came to an end. The holder of the ace of clubs left the room with a look of intelligence, and the President, approaching the unfortunate Prince, proffered him his hand.

“I am pleased to have met you, sir,” said he, “and pleased to have been in a position to do you this trifling service. At least, you cannot complain of delay. On the second evening—what a stroke of luck!”

The Prince endeavored in vain to articulate something in response, but his mouth was dry and his tongue seemed paralyzed.

“You feel a little sickish?” asked the President, with some show of solicitude. “Most gentlemen do. Will you take a little brandy?”

The Prince signified in the affirmative, and the other immediately filled some of the spirit into a tumbler.

“Poor old Malthy!” ejaculated the President, as the Prince drained the glass. “He drank near upon a pint, and little enough good it seemed to do him!”

“I am more amenable to treatment,” said the Prince, a good deal revived. “I am my own man again at once, as you perceive. And so, let me ask you, what are my directions?”

“You will proceed along the Strand in the direction of the City, and on the left-hand pavement, until you meet the gentleman who has just left the room. He will continue your instructions, and him you will have the kindness to obey; the authority of the club is vested in his person for the night. And now,” added the President, “I wish you a pleasant walk.”

Florizel acknowledged the salutation rather awkwardly, and took his leave. He passed through the smoking-room, where the bulk of the players were still consuming champagne, some of which he had himself ordered and paid for; and he was surprised to find himself cursing them in his heart. He put on his hat and great coat in the cabinet, and selected his umbrella from a comer. The familiarity of these acts, and the thought that he was about them for the last time, betrayed him into a fit of laughter which sounded unpleasantly in his own ears. He conceived a reluctance to leave the cabinet, and turned instead to the window. The sight of the lamps and the darkness recalled him to himself.

“Come, come, I must be a man,” he thought, “and tear myself away.”

At the corner of Box Court three men fell upon Prince Florizel and he was unceremoniously thrust into a carriage, which at once drove rapidly away. There was already an occupant.

“Will your Highness pardon my zeal?” said a well-known voice.

The Prince threw himself upon the Colonel’s neck in a passion of relief.

“How can I ever thank you?” he cried. “And how was this effected?”

Although he had been willing to march upon his doom, he was overjoyed to yield to friendly violence, and return once more to life and hope.

“You can thank me effectually enough,” replied the Colonel, “by avoiding all such dangers in the future. And as for your second question, all has been managed by the simplest means. I arranged this afternoon with a celebrated detective. Secrecy has been promised and paid for. Your own servants have been principally engaged in the affair. The house in Box Court has been surrounded since nightfall, and this, which is one of your own carriages, has been awaiting you for nearly an hour.”

“And the miserable creature who was to have slain me—what of him?” inquired the Prince.

“He was pinioned as he left the club,” replied the Colonel, “and now awaits your sentence at the Palace, where he will soon be joined by his accomplices.”

“Geraldine,” said the Prince, “you have saved me against my explicit orders, and you have done well. I owe you not only my life, but a lesson; and I should be unworthy of my rank if I did not show myself grateful to my teacher. Let it be yours to choose the manner.”

There was a pause, during which the carriage continued to speed through the streets, and the two men were each buried in his own reflections. The silence was broken by Colonel Geraldine.

“Your Highness,” said he, “has by this time a considerable body of prisoners. There is at least one criminal among the number to whom justice should be dealt. Our oath forbids us all recourse to law; and discretion would forbid it equally if the oath were loosened. May I inquire your Highness’s intention?”

“It is decided,” answered Florizel; “the President must fall in duel. It only remains to choose his adversary.”

“Your Highness has permitted me to name my own recompense,” said the Colonel. “Will he permit me to ask the appointment of my brother? It is an honourable post, but I dare assure your Highness that the lad will acquit himself with credit.”

“You ask me an ungracious favour,” said the Prince, “but I must refuse you nothing.”

The Colonel kissed his hand with the greatest affection; and at that moment the carriage rolled under the archway of the Prince’s splendid residence.

An hour after, Florizel in his official robes, and covered with all the orders of Bohemia, received the members of the Suicide Club.

“Foolish and wicked men,” said he, “as many of you as have been driven into this strait by the lack of fortune shall receive employment and remuneration from my officers. Those who suffer under a sense of guilt must have recourse to a higher and more generous Potentate than I. I feel pity for all of you, deeper than you can imagine; to-morrow you shall tell me your stories; and as you answer more frankly, I shall be the more able to remedy your misfortunes. As for you,” he added, turning to the President, “I should only offend a person of your parts by any offer of assistance; but I have instead a piece of diversion to propose to you. Here,” laying his hand on the shoulder of Colonel Geraldine’s young brother, “is an officer of mine who desires to make a little tour upon the Continent; and I ask you, as a favour, to accompany him on this excursion. Do you,” he went on, changing his tone, “do you shoot well with the pistol? Because you may have need of that accomplishment. When two men go traveling together, it is best to be prepared for all. Let me add that, if by any chance you should lose young Mr. Geraldine upon the way, I shall always have another member of my household to place at your disposal; and I am known, Mr. President, to have long eyesight, and as long an arm.”

With these words, said with much sternness, the Prince concluded his address. Next morning the members of the club were suitably provided for by his munificence, and the President set forth upon his travels, under the supervision of Mr. Geraldine, and a pair of faithful and adroit lackeys, well trained in the Prince’s household. Not content with this, discreet agents were put in possession of the house of Box Court, and all letters of visitors for the Suicide Club or its officials were to be examined by Prince Florizel in person.

Here (says my Arabian author)ag ends the STORY OF THE YOUNG MAN WITH THE CREAM TARTS, who is now a comfortable householder in Wigmore Street, Cavendish Square. The number, for obvious reasons, I suppress. Those who care to pursue the adventures of Prince Florizel and the President of the Suicide Club, may read the STORY OF THE PHYSICIAN AND THE SARATOGA TRUNK.

STORY OF THE PHYSICIAN AND THE SARATOGA TRUNK

Mr. Silas Q. Scuddamore was a young American of a simple and harmless disposition, which was the more to his credit as he came from New England—a quarter of the New World not precisely famous for those qualities. Although he was exceedingly rich, he kept a note of all his expenses in a little paper pocket-book; and he had chosen to study the attractions of Paris from the seventh story of what is called a furnished hotel, in the Latin Quarter. There was a great deal of habit in his penuriousness; and his virtue, which was very remarkable among his associates, was principally founded upon diffidence and youth.

The next room to his was inhabited by a lady, very attractive in her air and very elegant in toilette, whom, on his first arrival, he had taken for a Countess. In course of time he had learned that she was known by the name of Madame Zéphyrine, and that whatever station she occupied in life it was not that of a person of title. Madame Zéphyrine, probably in the hope of enchanting the young American, used to flaunt by him on the stairs with a civil inclination, a word of course, and a knock-down look out of her black eyes, and disappear in a rustle of silk, and with the revelation of an admirable foot and ankle. But these advances, so far from encouraging Mr. Scuddamore, plunged him into the depths of depression and bashfulness. She had come to him several times for a light, or to apologize for the imaginary depredations of her poodle, but his mouth was closed in the presence of so superior a being, his French promptly left him, and he could only stare and stammer until she was gone. The slenderness of their intercourse did not prevent him from throwing out insinuations of a very glorious order when he was safely alone with a few males.

The room on the other side of the American‘s—for there were three rooms on a floor in the hotel—was tenanted by an old English physician of rather doubtful reputation. Dr. Noel, for that was his name, had been forced to leave London, where he enjoyed a large and increasing practice; and it was hinted that the police had been the instigators of this change of scene. At least he, who had made something of a figure in earlier life, now dwelt in the Latin Quarter in great simplicity and solitude, and devoted much of his time to study. Mr. Scuddamore had made his acquaintance, and the pair would now and then dine together frugally in a restaurant across the street.

Silas Q. Scuddamore had many little vices of the more respectable order, and was not restrained by delicacy from indulging them in many rather doubtful ways. Chief among his foibles stood curiosity. He was a born gossip; and life, and especially those parts of it in which he had no experience, interested him to the degree of passion. He was a pert, invincible questioner, pushing his inquiries with equal pertinacity and indiscretion; he had been observed, when he took a letter to the post, to weigh it in his hand, to turn it over and over, and to study the address with care; and when he found a flaw in the partition between his room and Madame Zéphyrine‘s, instead of filling it up, he enlarged and improved the opening, and made use of it as a spy-hole on his neighbor’s affairs.

One day, in the end of March, his curiosity grew as it was indulged and he enlarged the hole a little further, so that he might command another corner of the room. That evening, when he went as usual to inspect Madame Zéphyrine’s movements, he was astonished to find the aperture obscured in an odd manner on the other side, and still more abashed when the obstacle was suddenly withdrawn and a titter of laughter reached his ears. Some of the plaster had evidently betrayed the secret of his spy-hole, and his neighbor had been returning the compliment in kind. Mr. Scuddamore was moved to a very acute feeling of annoyance; he condemned Madame Zéphyrine unmercifully; he even blamed himself; but when he found, next day, that she had taken no means to baulk him of his favourite pastime, he continued to profit by her carelessness, and gratify his idle curiosity.

That next day Madame Zéphyrine received a long visit from a tall, loosely-built man of fifty or upwards, whom Silas had not hitherto seen. His tweed suit and colored shirt, no less than his shaggy side-whiskers, identified him as a Britisher, and his dull gray eye affected Silas with a sense of cold. He kept screwing his mouth from side to side and round and round during the whole colloquy, which was carried on in whispers. More than once it seemed to the young New Englander as if their gestures indicated his own apartment; but the only thing definite he could gather by the most scrupulous attention was this remark made by the Englishman in a somewhat higher key, as if in answer to some reluctance or opposition.

“I have studied his taste to a nicety, and I tell you again and again you are the only woman of the sort that I can lay my hands on.”

In answer to this, Madame Zéphyrine sighed, and appeared by a gesture to resign herself, like one yielding to unqualified authority.

That afternoon the observatory was finally blinded, a wardrobe having been drawn in front of it upon the other side, and while Silas was still lamenting over this misfortune, which he attributed to the Britisher’s malign suggestion, the con cierge brought him up a letter in a female handwriting. It was conceived in French of no very rigorous orthography, bore no signature, and in the most encouraging terms invited the young American to be present in a certain part of the Bullier Ball at eleven o‘clock that night. Curiosity and timidity fought a long battle in his heart; sometimes he was all virtue, sometimes all fire and daring; and the result of it was that, long before ten, Mr. Silas Q. Scuddamore presented himself in unimpeachable attire at the door of the Bullier Ball Rooms, and paid his entry money with a sense of reckless deviltry that was not without its charm.

It was Carnival time, and the Ball was very full and noisy. The lights and the crowd at first rather abashed our young adventurer, and then, mounting to his brain with a sort of intoxication, put him in possession of more than his own share of manhood. He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier. While he was thus parading, he became aware of Madame Zéphyrine and her Britisher in conference behind a pillar. The cat-like spirit of eaves-dropping overcame him at once. He stole nearer and nearer on the couple from behind, until he was within earshot.

“That is the man,” the Britisher was saying; “there—with the long blond hair—speaking to a girl in green.”

Silas identified a very handsome young fellow of small stature, who was plainly the object of this designation.

“It is well,” said Madame Zéphyrine. “I shall do my utmost. But, remember, the best of us may fail in such a matter.”

“Tut!” returned her companion; “I answer for the result. Have I not chosen you from thirty? Go; but be wary of the Prince. I cannot think what cursed accident has brought him here to-night. As if there were not a dozen balls in Paris better worth his notice than this riot of students and counter-jumpers! See him where he sits, more like a reigning Emperor at home than a Prince upon his holidays!”

Silas was again lucky. He observed a person of rather a full build, strikingly handsome, and of a very stately and courteous demeanor, seated at table with another handsome young man, several years his junior, who addressed him with conspicuous deference. The name of Prince struck gratefully on Silas’s republican hearing, and the aspect of the person to whom that name was applied exercised its usual charm upon his mind. He left Madame Zéphyrine and her Englishman to take care of each other, and threading his way through the assembly, approached the table which the Prince and his confidant had honoured with their choice.

“I tell you, Geraldine,” the former was saying, “the action is madness. Yourself (I am glad to remember it) chose your brother for this perilous service, and you are bound in duty to have a guard upon his conduct. He has consented to delay so many days in Paris; that was already an imprudence, considering the character of the man he has to deal with; but now, when he is within eight and forty hours of his departure, when he is within two or three days of the decisive trial, I ask you, is this a place for him to spend his time? He should be in a gallery at practice; he should be sleeping long hours and taking moderate exercise on foot; he should be on a rigorous diet, without white wines or brandy. Does the dog imagine we are all playing comedy? The thing is deadly earnest, Geraldine.”

“I know the lad too well to interfere,” replied Colonel Geraldine, “and well enough not to be alarmed. He is more cautious than you fancy, and of an indomitable spirit. If it had been a woman I should not say so much, but I trust the President to him and the two valets without an instant’s apprehension.”

“I am gratified to hear you say so,” replied the Prince; “but my mind is not at rest. These servants are well-trained spies, and already has not this miscreant succeeded three times in eluding their observation and spending several hours on end in private, and most likely dangerous, affairs? An amateur might have lost him by accident, but if Rudolph and Jérome were thrown off the scent, it must have been done on purpose, and by a man who had a cogent reason and exceptional resources.”

“I believe the question is now one between my brother and myself,” replied Geraldine, with a shade of offense in his tone.

“I permit it to be so, Colonel Geraldine,” returned Prince Florizel. “Perhaps, for that very reason, you should be all the more ready to accept my counsels. But enough. That girl in yellow dances well.”

And the talk veered into the ordinary topics of a Paris ballroom in the Carnival.

Silas remembered where he was, and that the hour was already near at hand when he ought to be upon the scene of his assignation. The more he reflected the less he liked the prospect, and as at that moment an eddy in the crowd began to draw him in the direction of the door, he suffered it to carry him away without resistance. The eddy stranded him in a corner under the gallery, where his car was immediately struck with the voice of Madame Zéphyrine. She was speaking in French with the young man of the blond locks who had been pointed out by the strange Britisher not half an hour before.

“I have a character at stake,” she said, “or I would put no other condition than my heart recommends. But you have only to say so much to the porter, and he will let you go by without a word.”

“But why this talk of debt?” objected her companion.

“Heavens!” said she, “do you think I do not understand my own hotel?”

And she went by, clinging affectionately to her companion’s arm.

This put Silas in mind of his billet.

“Ten minutes hence,” thought he, “and I may be walking with as beautiful a woman as that, and even better dressed—perhaps a real lady, possibly a woman of title.”

And then he remembered the spelling, and was a little downcast.

“But it may have been written by her maid,” he imagined.

The clock was only a few minutes from the hour, and this immediate proximity set his heart beating at a curious and rather disagreeable speed. He reflected with relief that he was in no way bound to put in an appearance. Virtue and cowardice were together, and he made once more for the door, but this time of his own accord, and battling against the stream of people which was now moving in a contrary direction. Perhaps this prolonged resistance wearied him, or perhaps he was in that frame of mind when merely to continue in the same determination for a certain number of minutes produces a reaction and a different purpose. Certainly, at least, he wheeled about for a third time, and did not stop until he had found a place of concealment within a few yards of the appointed place.

Here he went through an agony of spirit, in which he several times prayed to God for help, for Silas had been devoutly educated. He had now not the least inclination for the meeting; nothing kept him from flight but a silly fear lest he should be thought unmanly; but this was so powerful that it kept head against all other motives; and although it could not decide him to advance, prevented him from definitely running away. At last the clock indicated ten minutes past the hour. Young Scuddamore’s spirit began to rise; he peered round the corner and saw no one at the place of meeting; doubtless his unknown correspondent had wearied and gone away. He became as bold as he had formerly been timid. It seemed to him that if he came at all to the appointment, however late, he was clear from the charge of cowardice. Nay, now he began to suspect a hoax, and actually complimented himself on his shrewdness in having suspected and out-manœuvred his mys tifiers. So very idle a thing is a boy’s mind!

Armed with these reflections, he advanced boldly from his corner; but he had not taken above a couple of steps before a hand was laid upon his arm. He turned and beheld a lady cast in a very large mould and with somewhat stately features, but bearing no mark of severity in her looks.

“I see that you are a very self-confident lady-killer,” said she; “for you make yourself expected. But I was determined to meet you. When a woman has once so far forgotten herself as to make the first advance, she has long ago left behind her all considerations of petty pride.”

Silas was overwhelmed by the size and attractions of his correspondent and the suddenness with which she had fallen upon him. But she soon set him at his ease. She was very towardly and lenient in her behaviour; she led him on to make pleasantries, and then applauded him to the echo; and in a very short time, between blandishments and a liberal exhibition of warm brandy, she had not only induced him to fancy himself in love, but to declare his passion with the greatest vehemence.

“Alas!” she said; “I do not know whether I ought not to deplore this moment, great as is the pleasure you give me by your words. Hitherto I was alone to suffer; now, poor boy, there will be two. I am not my own mistress. I dare not ask you to visit me at my own house, for I am watched by jealous eyes. Let me see,” she added; “I am older than you, although so much weaker; and while I trust in your courage and determination, I must employ my own knowledge of the world for our mutual benefit. Where do you live?”

He told her that he lodged in a furnished hotel, and named the street and number.

She seemed to reflect for some minutes, with an effort of mind.

“I see,” she said at last. “You will be faithful and obedient, will you not?”

Silas assured her eagerly of his fidelity.

“To-morrow night, then,” she continued, with an encouraging smile, “you must remain at home all the evening; and if any friends should visit you, dismiss them at once on any pretext that most readily presents itself. Your door is probably shut by ten?” she asked.

“By eleven,” answered Silas.

“At a quarter past eleven,” pursued the lady, “leave the house. Merely cry for the door to be opened, and be sure you fall into no talk with the porter, as that might ruin everything. Go straight to the corner where the Luxembourg Gardens join the Boulevard; there you will find me waiting you. I trust you to follow my advice from point to point: and remember, if you fail me in only one particular, you will bring the sharpest trouble on a woman whose only fault is to have seen and loved you.”

“I cannot see the use of all these instructions,” said Silas.

“I believe you are already beginning to treat me as a master,” she cried, tapping him with her fan upon the arm. “Patience, patience! that should come in time. A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying. Do as I ask you, for Heaven’s sake, or I will answer for nothing. Indeed, now I think of it,” she added, with the manner of one who had just seen further into a difficulty, “I find a better plan of keeping importunate visitors away. Tell the porter to admit no one for you, except a person who may come that night to claim a debt; and speak with some feeling, as though you feared the interview, so that he may take your words in earnest.”

“I think you may trust me to protect myself against intruders,” he said, not without a little pique.

“That is how I should prefer the thing arranged,” she answered, coldly. “I know you men; you think nothing of a woman’s reputation.”

Silas blushed and somewhat hung his head; for the scheme he had in view had involved a little vain-glorying before his acquaintances.

“Above all,” she added, “do not speak to the porter as you come out.”

“And why?” said he. “Of all your instructions, that seems to me the least important.”

“You at first doubted the wisdom of some of the others, which you now see to be very necessary,” she replied. “Believe me, this also has its uses; in time you will see them; and what am I to think of your affection, if you refuse me such trifles at our first interview?”

Silas confounded himself in explanations and apologies; in the middle of these she looked up at the clock and clapped her hands together with a suppressed scream.

“Heavens!” she cried, “is it so late? I have not an instant to lose. Alas, we poor women, what slaves we are! What have I not risked for you already?”

And after repeating her directions, which she artfully combined with caresses and the most abandoned looks, she bade him farewell and disappeared among the crowd.

The whole of the next day Silas was filled with a sense of great importance; he was now sure she was a countess; and when evening came he minutely obeyed her orders and was at the comer of the Luxembourg Gardens by the hour appointed. No one was there. He waited nearly half an hour, looking in the face of everyone who passed or loitered near the spot; he even visited the neighboring corners of the Boulevard and made a complete circuit of the garden railings; but there was no beautiful countess to throw herself into his arms. At last, and most reluctantly, he began to retrace his steps towards his hotel. On the way he remembered the words he had heard pass between Madame Zéphyrine and the blond young man, and they gave him an indefinite uneasiness.

“It appears,” he reflected, “that everyone has to tell lies to our porter.”

He rang the bell, the door opened before him, and the porter in his bed-clothes came to offer him a light.

“Has he gone?” inquired the porter.

“He? Whom do you mean?” asked Silas, somewhat sharply, for he was irritated by his disappointment.

“I did not notice him go out,” continued the porter, “but I trust you paid him. We do not care, in this house, to have lodgers who cannot meet their liabilities.”

“What the devil do you mean?” demanded Silas, rudely. “I cannot understand a word of this farrago.”

“The short, blond young man who came for his debt,” returned the other. “Him it is I mean. Who else should it be, when I had your orders to admit no one else?”

“Why, good God, of course he never came,” retorted Silas.

“I believe what I believe,” retorted the porter, putting his tongue into his cheek with a most roguish air.

“You are an insolent scoundrel,” cried Silas, and, feeling that he had made a ridiculous exhibition of asperity, and at the same time bewildered by a dozen alarms, he turned and began to run up stairs.

“Do you not want a light then?” cried the porter.

But Silas only hurried the faster, and did not pause until he had reached the seventh landing and stood in front of his own door. There he waited a moment to recover his breath, assailed by the worst forebodings and almost dreading to enter the room.

When at last he did so he was relieved to find it dark, and to all appearance, untenanted. He drew a long breath. Here he was, home again in safety, and this should be his last folly as certainly as it had been his first. The matches stood on a little table by the bed, and he began to grope his way in that direction. As he moved, his apprehensions grew upon him once more, and he was pleased, when his foot encountered an obstacle, to find it nothing more alarming than a chair. At last he touched curtains. From the position of the window, which was faintly visible, he knew he must be at the foot of the bed, and had only to feel his way along it in order to reach the table in question.

He lowered his hand, but what he touched was not simply a counterpane—it was a counterpane with something underneath it like the outline of a human leg. Silas withdrew his arm and stood a moment petrified.

“What, what,” he thought, “can this betoken?”

He listened intently, but there was no sound of breathing. Once more, with a great effort, he reached out the end of his finger to the spot he had already touched; but this time he leaped back half a yard, and stood shivering and fixed with terror. There was something in his bed. What it was he knew not, but there was something there.

It was some seconds before he could move. Then, guided by an instinct, he fell straight upon the matches, and keeping his back toward the bed, lighted a candle. As soon as the flame had kindled, he turned slowly round and looked for what he feared to see. Sure enough, there was the worst of his imaginations realized. The coverlid was drawn carefully up over the pillow, but it moulded the outline of a human body lying motionless; and when he dashed forward and flung aside the sheets, he beheld the blond young man whom he had seen in the Bullier Ball the night before, his eyes open and without speculation, his face swollen and blackened, and a thin stream of blood trickling from his nostrils.

Silas uttered a long, tremulous wail, dropped the candle, and fell on his knees beside the bed.

Silas was awakened from the stupor into which his terrible discovery had plunged him, by a prolonged but discreet tapping at the door. It took him some seconds to remember his position; and when he hastened to prevent anyone from entering it was already too late. Dr. Noel, in a tall nightcap, carrying a lamp which lighted up his long white countenance, sidling in his gait, and peering and cocking his head like some sort of bird, pushed the door slowly open, and advanced into the middle of the room.

“I thought I heard a cry,” began the Doctor, “and fearing you might be unwell, I did not hesitate to offer this intrusion.”

Silas, with a flushed face and a fearful beating heart, kept between the Doctor and the bed; but he found no voice to answer.

“You are in the dark,” pursued the Doctor; “and yet you have not even begun to prepare for rest. You will not easily persuade me against my own eyesight; and your face declares most eloquently that you require either a friend or a physician—which is it to be? Let me feel your pulse, for that is often a just reporter of the heart.”

He advanced to Silas, who still retreated before him backwards, and sought to take him by the wrist; but the strain on the young American’s nerves had become too great for endurance. He avoided the Doctor with a febrile movement, and, throwing himself upon the floor, burst into a flood of weeping.

As soon as Dr. Noel perceived the dead man in the bed his face darkened; and hurrying back to the door which he had left ajar, he hastily closed and double-locked it.

“Up!” he cried, addressing Silas in strident tones. “This is no time for weeping. What have you done? How came this body in your room. Speak freely to one who may be helpful. Do you imagine I would ruin you? Do you think this piece of dead flesh on your pillow can alter in any degree the sympathy with which you have inspired me? Credulous youth, the horror with which blind and unjust law regards an action never attaches to the doer in the eyes of those who love him; and if I saw the friend of my heart return to me out of seas of blood he would be in no way changed in my affection. Raise yourself,” he said; “good and ill are a chimera; there is naught in life except destiny, and however you may be circumstanced there is one at your side who will help you to the last.”

Thus encouraged, Silas gathered himself together, and in a broken voice, and helped out by the Doctor’s interrogation, contrived at last to put him in possession of the facts. But the conversation between the Prince and Geraldine he altogether omitted, as he had understood little of its purport, and had no idea that it was in any way related to his own misadventure.

“Alas!” cried Dr. Noel, “I am much abused, or you have fallen innocently into the most dangerous hands in Europe. Poor boy, what a pit has been dug for your simplicity! into what a deadly peril have your unwary feet been conducted! This man,” he said, “this Englishman, whom you twice saw, and whom I suspect to be the soul of the contrivance, can you describe him? Was he young or old? tall or short?”

But Silas, who, for all his curiosity, had not a seeing eye in his head, was able to supply nothing but meagre generalities, which it was impossible to recognize.

“I would have it a piece of education in all schools!” cried the Doctor angrily. “Where is the use of eyesight and articulate speech if a man cannot observe and recollect the features of his enemy? I, who know all the gangs of Europe, might have identified him, and gained new weapons for your defence. Cultivate this art in future, my poor boy; you may find it of momentous service.”

“The future!” repeated Silas. “What future is there left for me except the gallows?”

“Youth is but a cowardly season,” returned the Doctor; “and a man’s own troubles look blacker than they are. I am old, and yet I never despair.”

“Can I tell such a story to the police?” demanded Silas.

“Assuredly not,” replied the Doctor. “From what I see already of the machination in which you have been involved, your case is desperate upon that side; and for the narrow eye of the authorities you are infallibly the guilty person. And remember that we only know a portion of the plot; and the same infamous contrivers have doubtless arranged many other circumstances which would be elicited by a police inquiry, and help to fix the guilt more certainly upon your innocence.”

“I am then lost, indeed!” cried Silas.

“I have not said so,” answered Dr. Noel, “for I am a cautious man.”

“But look at this!” objected Silas, pointing to the body. “Here is this object in my bed: not to be explained, not to be disposed of, not to be regarded without horror.”

“Horror?” replied the Doctor. “No. When this sort of clock has run down, it is no more to me than an ingenious piece of mechanism, to be investigated with the bistery.ah When blood is once cold and stagnant, it is no longer human blood; when flesh is once dead, it is no longer that flesh which we desire in our lovers and respect in our friends. The grace, the attraction, the terror, have all gone from it with the animating spirit. Accustom yourself to look upon it with composure; for if my scheme is practicable you will have to live in constant proximity to that which now so greatly horrifies you.”

“Your scheme?” cried Silas. “What is that? Tell me speedily, Doctor; for I have scarcely courage enough to continue to exist.”

Without replying, Dr. Noel turned towards the bed, and proceeded to examine the corpse.

“Quite dead,” he murmured. “Yes, as I had supposed, the pockets empty. Yes, and the name cut off the shirt. Their work has been done thoroughly and well. Fortunately he is of small stature.”

Silas followed these words with an extreme anxiety. At last the Doctor, his autopsy completed, took a chair and addressed the young American with a smile.

“Since I came into your room,” said he, “although my ears and my tongue have been so busy, I have not suffered my eyes to remain idle. I noted a little while ago that you have there, in the corner, one of those monstrous constructions which your fellow-countrymen carry with them into all quarters of the globe—in a word, a Saratoga trunk.ai Until this moment I have never been able to conceive the utility of these erections; but then I began to have a glimmer. Whether it was for convenience in the slave trade, or to obviate the results of too ready an employment of the bowie-knife, I cannot bring myself to decide. But one thing I see plainly—the object of such a box is to contain a human body.”

“Surely,” cried Silas, “surely this is not a time for jesting.”

“Although I may express myself with some degree of pleasantry,” replied the Doctor, “the purport of my words is entirely serious. And the first thing we have to do, my young friend, is to empty your coffer of all it contains.”

Silas, obeying the authority of Doctor Noel, put himself at his disposition. The Saratoga trunk was soon gutted of its contents, which made a considerable litter on the floor; and then—Silas taking the heels and the Doctor supporting the shoulders—the body of the murdered man was carried from the bed, and, after some difficulty, doubled up and inserted whole into the empty box. With an effort on the part of both, the lid was forced down upon this unusual baggage, and the trunk was locked and corded by the Doctor’s own hand, while Silas disposed of what had been taken out between the closet and a chest of drawers.

“Now,” said the Doctor, “the first step has been taken on the way to your deliverance. To-morrow, or rather today, it must be your task to allay the suspicions of your porter, paying him all that you owe; while you may trust me to make the arrangements necessary to a safe conclusion. Meantime, follow me to my room, where I shall give you a safe and powerful opiate; for, whatever you do you must have rest.”

The next day was the longest in Silas’s memory; it seemed as if it would never be done. He denied himself to his friends, and sat in a corner with his eyes fixed upon the Saratoga trunk in dismal contemplation. His own former indiscretions were now returned upon him in kind; for the observatory had been once more opened, and he was conscious of an almost continual study from Madame Zéphyrine’s apartment. So distressing did this become, that he was at last obliged to block up the spy-hole from his own side; and when he was thus secured from observation he spent a considerable portion of his time in contrite tears and prayer.

Late in the evening Dr. Noel entered the room carrying in his hand a pair of sealed envelopes without address, one somewhat bulky, and the other so slim as to seem without enclosure.

“Silas,” he said, seating himself at the table, “the time has now come for me to explain my plan for your salvation. To morrow morning, at an early hour, Prince Florizel of Bohemia returns to London, after having diverted himself for a few days with the Parisian Carnival. It was my fortune, a good while ago, to do Colonel Geraldine, his Master of the Horse, one of those services so common in my profession, which are never forgotten upon either side. I have no need to explain to you the nature of the obligation under which he was laid; suffice it to say that I knew him ready to serve me in any practicable manner. Now, it was necessary for you to gain London with your trunk unopened. To this the Custom House seemed to oppose a fatal difficulty; but I bethought me that the baggage of so considerable a person as the Prince is, as a matter of courtesy, passed without examination by the officers of Custom. I applied to Colonel Geraldine, and succeeded in obtaining a favourable answer. To-morrow, if you go before six to the hotel where the Prince lodges, your baggage will be passed over as a part of his, and you yourself will make the journey as a member of his suite.”

“It seems to me, as you speak, that I have already seen both the Prince and Colonel Geraldine; I even overheard some of their conversation the other evening at the Bullier Ball.”

“It is probable enough; for the Prince loves to mix with all societies,” replied the Doctor. “Once arrived in London,” he pursued, “your task is nearly ended. In this more bulky envelope I have given you a letter which I dare not address; but in the other you will find the designation of the house to which you must carry it along with your box, which will there be taken from you and not trouble you any more.”

“Alas!” said Silas, “I have every wish to believe you; but how is it possible? You open up to me a bright prospect, but, I ask you, is my mind capable of receiving so unlikely a solution? Be more generous, and let me farther understand your meaning.”

The Doctor seemed painfully impressed.

“Boy,” he answered, “you do not know how hard a thing you ask of me. But be it so. I am now inured to humiliation; and it would be strange if I refused you this, after having granted you so much. Know, then, that although I now make so quiet an appearance—frugal, solitary, addicted to study—when I was younger, my name was once a rallying-cry among the most astute and dangerous spirits of London; and while I was outwardly an object for respect and consideration, my true power resided in the most secret, terrible, and criminal relations. It is to one of the persons who then obeyed me that I now address myself to deliver you from your burden. They were men of many different nations and dexterities, all bound together by a formidable oath, and working to the same purposes; the trade of the association was in murder; and I who speak to you, innocent as I appear, was the chieftain of this redoubtable crew.”

“What?” cried Silas. “A murderer? And one with whom murder was a trade? Can I take your hand? Ought I to so much as accept your services? Dark and criminal old man, would you make an accomplice of my youth and my distress?”

The Doctor bitterly laughed.

“You are difficult to please, Mr. Scuddamore,” said he; “but I now offer you your choice of company between the murdered man and the murderer. If your conscience is too nice to accept my aid, say so, and I will immediately leave you. Thenceforward you can deal with your trunk and its belongings as best suits your upright conscience.”

“I own myself wrong,” replied Silas. “I should have remembered how generously you offered to shield me, even before I had convinced you of my innocence, and I continue to listen to your counsels with gratitude.”

“That is well,” returned the Doctor; “and I perceive you are beginning to learn some of the lessons of experience.”

“At the same time,” resumed the New Englander, “as you confess yourself accustomed to this tragical business, and the people to whom you recommend me are your own former associates and friends, could you not yourself undertake the transport of the box, and rid me at once of its detested presence?”

“Upon my word,” replied the Doctor, “I admire you cordially. If you do not think I have already meddled sufficiently in your concerns, believe me, from my heart I think the contrary. Take or leave my services as I offer them; and trouble me with no more words of gratitude, for I value your consideration even more lightly than I do your intellect. A time will come, if you should be spared to see a number of years in health and mind, when you will think differently of all this, and blush for your to-night’s behaviour.”

So saying, the Doctor arose from his chair, repeated his directions briefly and clearly, and departed from the room without permitting Silas any time to answer.

The next morning Silas presented himself at the hotel, where he was politely received by Colonel Geraldine, and relieved, from that moment, of all immediate alarm about his trunk and its grisly contents. The journey passed over without much incident, although the young man was horrified to overhear the sailors and railway porters complaining among themselves about the unusual weight of the Prince’s baggage. Silas traveled in a carriage with the valets, for Prince Florizel chose to be alone with his Master of the Horse. On board the steamer, however, Silas attracted his Highness’s attention by the melancholy of his air and attitude as he stood gazing at the pile of baggage; for he was still full of disquietude about the future.

“There is a young man,” observed the Prince, “who must have some cause for sorrow.”

“That,” replied Geraldine, “is the American for whom I obtained permission to travel with your suite.”

“You remind me that I have been remiss in courtesy,” said Prince Florizel, and advancing to Silas, he addressed him with the most exquisite condescension in these words:

“I was charmed, young sir, to be able to gratify the desire you made known to me through Colonel Geraldine. Remember, if you please, that I shall be glad at any future time to lay you under a more serious obligation.”

And then he put some questions as to the political condition of America, which Silas answered with sense and propriety.

“You are still a young man,” said the Prince; “but I observe you to be very serious for your years. Perhaps you allow your attention to be too much occupied with grave studies. But, perhaps, on the other hand, I am myself indiscreet and touch upon a painful subject.”

“I have certainly cause to be the most miserable of men,” said Silas; “never has a more innocent person been more dismally abused.”

“I will not ask you for your confidence,” returned Prince Florizel. “But do not forget that Colonel Geraldine’s recommendation is an unfailing passport; and that I am not only willing, but possibly more able than many others, to do you a service.”

Silas was delighted with the amiability of this great personage; but his mind soon returned upon its gloomy preoccupations; for not even the favour of a Prince to a republican can discharge a brooding spirit of its cares.

The train arrived at Charing Cross, where the officers of the Revenue respected the baggage of Prince Florizel in the usual manner. The most elegant equipages were in waiting; and Silas was driven, along with the rest, to the Prince’s residence. There Colonel Geraldine sought him out, and expressed himself pleased to have been of any service to a friend of the physician‘s, for whom he professed a great consideration.

“I hope,” he added, “that you will find none of your porcelain injured. Special orders were given along the line to deal tenderly with the Prince’s effects.”

And then, directing the servants to place one of the carriages at the young gentleman’s disposal, and at once to charge the Saratoga trunk upon the dickey, the Colonel shook hands and excused himself on account of his occupations in the princely household.

Silas now broke the seal of the envelope containing the address, and directed the stately footman to drive him to Box Court, opening off the Strand. It seemed as if the place were not at all unknown to the man, for he looked startled and begged a repetition of the order. It was with a heart full of alarms, that Silas mounted into the luxurious vehicle, and was driven to his destination. The entrance to Box Court was too narrow for the passage of a coach; it was a mere footway between railings, with a post at either end. On one of these posts was seated a man, who at once jumped down and exchanged a friendly sign with the driver, while the footman opened the door and inquired of Silas whether he should take down the Saratoga trunk, and to what number it should be carried.

“If you please,” said Silas. “To number three.”

The footman and the man who had been sitting on the post, even with the aid of Silas himself, had hard work to carry in the trunk; and before it was deposited at the door of the house in question, the young American was horrified to find a score of loiterers looking on. But he knocked with as good a countenance as he could muster up, and presented the other envelope to him who opened.

“He is not at home,” said he, “but if you will leave your letter and return to-morrow early, I shall be able to inform you whether and when he can receive your visit. Would you like to leave your box?” he added.

“Dearly,” cried Silas; and the next moment he repented his precipitation, and declared, with equal emphasis, that he would rather carry the box along with him to the hotel.

The crowd jeered at his indecision and followed him to the carriage with insulting remarks; and Silas, covered with shame and terror, implored the servants to conduct him to some quiet and comfortable house of entertainment in the immediate neighbourhood.

The Prince’s equipage deposited Silas at the Craven Hotel in Craven Street, and immediately drove away, leaving him alone with the servants of the inn. The only vacant room, it appeared, was a little den up four pairs of stairs, and looking towards the back. To this hermitage, with infinite trouble and complaint, a pair of stout porters carried the Saratoga trunk. It is needless to mention that Silas kept closely at their heels throughout the ascent, and had his heart in his mouth at every corner. A single false step, he reflected, and the box might go over the banisters and land its fatal contents, plainly discovered, on the pavement of the hall.

Arrived in the room, he sat down on the edge of his bed to recover from the agony that he had just endured; but he had hardly taken his position when he was recalled to a sense of his peril by the action of the boots, who had knelt beside the trunk, and was proceeding officiously to undo its elaborate fastenings.

“Let it be!” cried Silas. “I shall want nothing from it while I stay here.”

“You might have let it lie in the hall then,” growled the man; “a thing as big and heavy as a church. What you have inside, I cannot fancy. If it is all money, you are a richer man than me.”

“Money?” repeated Silas, in a sudden perturbation. “What did you mean by money? I have no money, and you are speaking like a fool.”

“All right, Captain,” retorted the boots with a wink. “here’s nobody will touch your lordship’s money. I’m as safe as the bank,” he added; ”but as the box is heavy, I shouldn’t mind drinking something to your lordship’s health.“

Silas pressed two Napoleons upon his acceptance, apologizing, at the same time, for being obliged to trouble him with foreign money, and pleading his recent arrival for excuse. And the man, grumbling with even greater fervor, and looking contemptuously from the money in his hand to the Saratoga trunk and back again from the one to the other, at last consented to withdraw.

For nearly two days the dead body had been packed into Silas’s box; and as soon as he was alone the unfortunate New Englander nosed all the cracks and openings with the most passionate attention. But the weather was cool, and the trunk still managed to contain his shocking secret.

He took a chair beside it, and buried his face in his hands, and his mind in the most profound reflection. If he were not speedily relieved, no question but he must be speedily discovered. Alone in a strange city, without friends or accomplices, if the Doctor’s introduction failed him, he was indubitably a lost New Englander. He reflected pathetically over his ambitious designs for the future; he should not now become the hero and spokesman of his native place of Bangor, Maine; he should not, as he had fondly anticipated, move on from office to office, from honour to honour; he might as well divest himself at once of all hope of being acclaimed President of the United States, and leaving behind him a statue, in the worst possible style of art, to adorn the Capitol at Washington. Here he was, chained to a dead Englishman doubled up inside a Saratoga trunk; whom he must get rid of, or perish from the rolls of national glory!

I should be afraid to chronicle the language employed by this young man to the Doctor, to the murdered man, to Madame Zéphyrine, to the boots of the hotel, to the Prince’s servants, and, in a word, to all who had been ever so remotely connected with his horrible misfortune.

He slunk down to dinner about seven at night; but the yellow coffee-room appalled him, the eyes of the other diners seemed to rest on his with suspicion, and his mind remained upstairs with the Saratoga trunk. When the waiter came to offer him cheese, his nerves were already so much on edge that he leaped half-way out of his chair and upset the remainder of a pint of ale upon the table-cloth.

The fellow offered to show him the smoking-room when he had done; and although he would have much preferred to return at once to his perilous treasure, he had not the courage to refuse, and was shown downstairs, to the black, gas-lit cellar, which formed, and possibly still forms, the divan of the Craven Hotel.

Two very sad betting men were playing billiards, attended by a moist, consumptive marker; and for the moment Silas imagined that these were the only occupants of the apartment. But at the next glance his eye fell upon a person smoking in the farthest corner, with lowered eyes and a most respectable and modest aspect. He knew at once that he had seen the face before; and in spite of the entire change of clothes, recognized the man whom he had found seated on a post at the entrance to Box Court, and who had helped him to carry the trunk to and from the carriage. The New Englander simply turned and ran, nor did he pause until he had locked and bolted himself into his bedroom.

There, all night long, a prey to the most terrible imaginations, he watched beside the fatal boxful of dead flesh. The suggestion of the boots that his trunk was full of gold inspired him with all manner of new terrors, if he so much as dared to close an eye; and the presence in the smoking-room, and under an obvious disguise, of the loiterer from Box Court convinced him that he was once more the centre of obscure machination.

Midnight had sounded some time, when, impelled by uneasy suspicions, Silas opened his bedroom door and peered into the passage. It was dimly illuminated by a single jet of gas; and some distance off he perceived a man sleeping on the floor in the costume of an hotel under-servant. Silas drew near the man on tip-toe. He lay partly on his back, partly on his side, and his right forearm concealed his face from recognition. Suddenly, while the American was still bending over him, the sleeper removed his arm and opened his eyes, and Silas found himself once more face to face with the loiterer of Box Court.

“Good night, sir,” said the man, pleasantly.

But Silas was too profoundly moved to find an answer, and regained his room in silence.

Towards morning, worn out by apprehension, he fell asleep on his chair, with his head forward on the trunk. In spite of so constrained an attitude and such a grisly pillow, his slumber was sound and prolonged, and he was only awakened at a late hour and by a sharp tapping at the door.

He hurried to open, and found the boots without.

“You are the gentleman who called yesterday at Box Court?” he asked.

Silas, with a quaver, admitted that he had done so.

“Then this note is for you,” added the servant, proffering a sealed envelope.

Silas tore it open, and found inside the words: “Twelve o‘clock.”

He was punctual to the hour; the trunk was carried before him by several stout servants; and he was himself ushered into a room, where a man sat warming himself before the fire with his back towards the door. The sound of so many persons entering and leaving, and the scraping of the trunk as it was deposited upon the bare boards, were alike unable to attract the notice of the occupant; and Silas stood waiting, in an agony of fear, until he should deign to recognize his presence.

Perhaps five minutes had elapsed before the man turned leisurely about, and disclosed the features of Prince Florizel of Bohemia.

“So, sir,” he said with great severity, “this is the manner in which you abuse my politeness. You join yourself to persons of condition, I perceive, for no other purpose than to escape the consequences of your crimes; and I can readily understand your embarrassment when I addressed myself to you yesterday.”

“Indeed,” cried Silas, “I am innocent of everything except misfortune.”

And in a hurried voice, and with the greatest ingenuousness, he recounted to the Prince the whole history of his calamity.

“I see I have been mistaken,” said his Highness, when he had heard him to an end. “You are no other than a victim, and since I am not to punish you, you may be sure I shall do my utmost to help. And now,” he continued, “to business. Open your box at once, and let me see what it contains.”

Silas changed color.

“I almost fear to look upon it,” he exclaimed.

“Nay,” replied the Prince, “have you not looked at it already? This is a form of sentimentality to be resisted. The sight of a sick man, whom we can still help, should appeal more directly to the feelings than that of a dead man who is equally beyond help or harm, love or hatred. Nerve yourself, Mr. Scuddamore,” and then, seeing that Silas still hesitated, “I do not desire to give another name to my request,” he added.

The young American awoke as if out of a dream, and with a shiver of repugnance addressed himself to loose the straps and open the lock of the Saratoga trunk. The Prince stood by, watching with a composed countenance and his hands behind his back. The body was quite stiff, and it cost Silas a great effort, both moral and physical, to dislodge it from its position, and discover the face.

Prince Florizel started back with an exclamation of painful surprise.

“Alas!” he cried, “you little know, Mr. Scuddamore, what a cruel gift you have brought me. This is a young man of my own suite, the brother of my trusted friend; and it was upon matters of my own service that he has thus perished at the hands of violent and treacherous men. Poor Geraldine,” he went on, as if to himself, “in what words am I to tell you of your brother’s fate? How can I excuse myself in your eyes, or in the eyes of God, for the presumptuous schemes that led him to this bloody and unnatural death? Ah, Florizel! Florizel! when will you learn the discretion that suits mortal life, and be no longer dazzled with the image of power at your disposal ? Power!” he cried; “who is more powerless? I look upon this young man whom I have sacrificed, Mr. Scuddamore, and feel how small a thing it is to be a Prince.”

Silas was moved at the sight of his emotion. He tried to murmur some consolatory words, and burst into tears. The Prince, touched by his obvious intention, came up to him and took him by the hand.

“Command yourself,” said he. “We have both much to learn and we shall both be better men for to-day’s meeting.”

Silas thanked him in silence with an affectionate look.

“Write me the address of Doctor Noel on this piece of paper,” continued the Prince, leading him towards the table; “and let me recommend you, when you are again in Paris, to avoid the society of that dangerous man. He has acted in this matter on a generous inspiration; that I must believe; had he been privy to young Geraldine’s death he would never have despatched the body to the care of the actual criminal.”

“The actual criminal!” repeated Silas in astonishment.

“Even so,” returned the Prince. “This letter, which the disposition of Almighty Providence has so strangely delivered into my hands, was addressed to no less a person than the criminal himself, the infamous President of the Suicide Club. Seek to pry no further in these perilous affairs, but content yourself with your own miraculous escape, and leave this house at once. I have pressing affairs, and must arrange at once about this poor clay, which was so lately a gallant and handsome youth.”

Silas took a grateful and submissive leave of Prince Florizel, but he lingered in Box Court until he saw him depart in a splendid carriage on a visit to Colonel Henderson of the police. Republican as he was, the young American took off his hat with almost a sentiment of devotion to the retreating carriage. And the same night he started by rail on his return to Paris.

Here (observes my Arabian Author) is the end of the STORY OF THE PHYSICIAN AND THE SARATOGA TRUNK. Omitting some reflections on the power of Providence, highly pertinent in the original, but little suited to our occidental taste, I shall only add that Mr. Scuddamore has already begun to mount the ladder of political fame, and by last advices was the Sheriff of his native town.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE HANSOM CAB

Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich had greatly distinguished himself in one of the lesser Indian hill wars.aj He it was who took the chieftain prisoner with his own hand; his gallantry was universally applauded; and when he came home, prostrated by an ugly sabre cut and a protracted jungle fever, society was prepared to welcome the Lieutenant as a celebrity of minor luster. But his was a character remarkable for unaffected modesty; adventure was dear to his heart, but he cared little for adulation; and he waited at foreign watering-places and in Algiers until the fame of his exploits had run through its nine days’ vitality and begun to be forgotten. He arrived in London at last, in the early season, with as little observation as he could desire; and as he was an orphan and had none but distant relatives who lived in the provinces, it was almost as a foreigner that he installed himself in the capital of the country for which he had shed his blood.

On the day following his arrival he dined alone at a military club. He shook hands with a few old comrades, and received their congratulations; but as one and all had some engagement for the evening, he found himself left entirely to his own resources. He was in dress, for he had entertained the notion of visiting a theater. But the great city was new to him; he had gone from a provincial school to a military college, and thence direct to the Eastern Empire; and he promised himself a variety of delights in this world for exploration. Swinging his cane, he took his way westward. It was a mild evening, already dark, and now and then threatening rain. The succession of faces in the lamplight stirred the Lieutenant’s imagination; and it seemed to him as if he could walk for ever in that stimulating city atmosphere and surrounded by the mystery of four million private lives. He glanced at the houses, and marvelled what was passing behind those warmly-lighted windows; he looked into face after face, and saw them each intent upon some unknown interest, criminal or kindly.

“They talk of war,” he thought, “but this is the great battlefield of mankind.”

And then he began to wonder that he should walk so long in this complicated scene, and not chance upon so much as the shadow of an adventure for himself.

“All in good time,” he reflected. “I am still a stranger, and perhaps wear a strange air. But I must be drawn into the eddy before long.”

The night was already well advanced, when a plump of cold rain fell suddenly out of the darkness. Brackenbury paused under some trees, and as he did so he caught sight of a hansom cabman making him a sign that he was disengaged. The circumstance fell in so happily to the occasion that he at once raised his cane in answer, and had soon ensconced himself in the London gondola.

“Where to, sir?” asked the driver.

“Where you please,” said Brackenbury.

And immediately, at a pace of surprising swiftness, the hansom drove off through the rain into a maze of villas. One villa was so like another, each with its front garden, and there was so little to distinguish the deserted lamp-lit streets and crescents through which the flying hansom took its way, that Brackenbury soon lost all idea of direction. He would have been contented to believe that the cabman was amusing himself by driving him round and round and in and out about a small quarter, but there was something businesslike in the speed which convinced him of the contrary. The man had an object in view, he was hastening towards a definite end and Brackenbury was at once astonished at the fellow’s skill in picking a way through such a labyrinth, and a little concerned to imagine what was the occasion of his hurry. He had heard tales of strangers falling ill in London. Did the driver belong to some bloody and treacherous association? and was he himself being whirled to a murderous death?

The thought had scarcely presented itself, when the cab swung sharply round a corner and pulled up before the garden gate of a villa in a long and wide road. The house was brilliantly lighted up. Another hansom had just driven away, and Brackenbury could see a gentleman being admitted at the front door and received by several liveried servants. He was surprised that the cabman should have stopped so immediately in front of a house where a reception was being held; but he did not doubt it was the result of accident, and sat placidly smoking where he was, until he heard the trap thrown open over his head.

“Here we are, sir,” said the driver.

“Here!” repeated Brackenbury. “Where?”

“You told me to take you where I pleased, sir,” returned the man with a chuckle, “and here we are.”

It struck Brackenbury that the voice was wonderfully smooth and courteous for a man in so inferior a position; he remembered the speed at which he had been driven; and now it occurred to him that the hansom was more luxuriously appointed than the common run of public conveyances.

“I must ask you to explain,” said he. “Do you mean to turn me out into the rain? My good man, I suspect the choice is mine.”

“The choice is certainly yours,” replied the driver, “but when I tell you all, I believe I know how a gentleman of your figure will decide. There is a gentlemen’s party in this house. I do not know whether the master be a stranger to London and without acquaintances of his own; or whether he is a man of odd notions. But certainly I was hired to kidnap single gentlemen in evening dress, as many as I pleased, but military officers by preference. You have simply to go in and say that Mr. Morris invited you.”

“Are you Mr. Morris?” inquired the Lieutenant.

“Oh, no,” replied the cabman. “Mr. Morris is the person of the house.”

“It is not a common way of collecting guests,” said Brackenbury; “but an eccentric man might very well indulge the whim without any intention to offend. And suppose that I refuse Mr. Morris’s invitation,” he went on, “what then?”

“My orders are to drive you back where I took you from,” replied the man, “and set out to look for others up to midnight. Those who have no fancy for such an adventure, Mr. Morris said, were not the guests for him.”

These words decided the Lieutenant on the spot.

“After all,” he reflected, as he descended from the hansom, “I have not had long to wait for my adventure.”

He had hardly found footing on the side-walk, and was still feeling in his pocket for the fare, when the cab swung about and drove off by the way it came at the former break-neck velocity. Brackenbury shouted after the man, who paid no heed, and continued to drive away; but the sound of his voice was overheard in the house, the door was again thrown open, emitting a flood of light upon the garden, and a servant ran down to meet him holding an umbrella.

“The cabman has been paid,” observed the servant in a very civil tone; and he proceeded to escort Brackenbury along the path and up the steps. In the hall several other attendants relieved him of his hat, cane, and paletot,ak gave him a ticket with a number in return, and politely hurried him up a stair adorned with tropical flowers, to the door of an apartment on the first story. Here a grave butler inquired his name, and announcing “Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich,” ushered him into the drawing-room of the house.

A young man, slender and singularly handsome, came forwardand greeted him with an air at once courtly and affectionate. Hundreds of candles, of the finest wax, lit up a room perfumed, like the staircase, with a profusion of rare and beautiful flowering shrubs. A side-table was loaded with tempting viands. Several servants went to and fro with fruits and goblets of champagne. The company was perhaps sixteen in number, all men, few beyond the prime of life, and with hardly an exception, of a dashing and capable exterior.

They were divided into two groups, one about a roulette board, and the other surrounding a table at which one of their number held a bank of baccarat.

“I see,” thought Brackenbury, “I am in a private gambling saloon, and the cabman was a tout.”

His eye had embraced the details, and his mind formed the conclusion, while his host was still holding him by the hand; and to him his looks returned from this rapid survey. At a second view Mr. Morris surprised him still more than on the first. The easy elegance of his manners, the distinction, amiability, and courage that appeared upon his features, fitted very ill with the Lieutenant’s preconceptions on the subject of the proprietor of a hell;al and the tone of his conversation seemed to mark him out for a man of position and merit. Brackenbury found he had an instinctive liking for his entertainer and though he chid himself for the weakness he was unable to resist a sort of friendly attraction for Mr. Morris’s person and character.

“I have heard of you, Lieutenant Rich,” said Mr. Morris, lowering his tone; “and believe me I am gratified to make your acquaintance. Your looks accord with the reputation that has preceded you from India. And if you will forget for a while the irregularity of your presentation in my house, I shall feel it not only an honour, but genuine pleasure besides. A man who makes a mouthful of barbarian cavaliers,” he added with a laugh, “should not be appalled by a breach of etiquette, however serious.”

And he led him towards the sideboard and pressed him to partake of some refreshments.

“Upon my word,” the Lieutenant reflected, “this is one of the pleasantest fellows and, I do not doubt, one of the most agreeable societies in London.”

He partook of some champagne, which he found excellent; and observing that many of the company were already smoking, he lit one of his own Manilas, and strolled up to the roulette board, where he sometimes made a stake and sometimes looked on smilingly on the fortune of others. It was while he was thus idling that he became aware of a sharp scrutiny to which the whole of the guests were subjected. Mr. Morris went here and there, ostensibly busied on hospitable concerns; but he had ever a shrewd glance at disposal; not a man of the party escaped his sudden, searching looks; he took stock of the bearing of heavy losers, he valued the amount of the stakes, he paused behind couples who were deep in conversation; and, in a word, there was hardly a characteristic of anyone present but he seemed to catch and make a note of it. Brackenbury began to wonder if this were indeed a gambling hell: it had so much the air of a private inquisition. He followed Mr. Morris in all his movements; and although the man had a ready smile, he seemed to perceive, as it were under a mask, a haggard, careworn, and preoccupied spirit. The fellows around him laughed and made their game; but Brackenbury had lost interest in the guests.

“This Morris,” thought he, “is no idler in the room. Some deep purpose inspires him; let it be mine to fathom it.”

Now and then Mr. Morris would call one of his visitors aside; and after a brief colloquy in an ante-room, he would return alone, and the visitors in question reappeared no more. After a certain number of repetitions, this performance excited Brackenbury’s curiosity to a high degree. He determined to be at the bottom of this minor mystery at once; and strolling into the ante-room, found a deep window recess concealed by curtains of the fashionable green. Here he hurriedly ensconced himself; nor had he to wait long before the sound of steps and voices drew near him from the principal apartment. Peering through the division, he saw Mr. Morris escorting a fat and ruddy personage, with somewhat the look of a commercial traveler, whom Brackenbury had already remarked for his coarse laugh and under-bred behaviour at the table. The pair halted immediately before the window, so that Brackenbury lost not a word of the following discourse:—

“I beg you a thousand pardons!” began Mr. Morris, with the most conciliatory manner; “and, if I appear rude, I am sure you will readily forgive me. In a place so great as London accidents must continually happen; and the best that we can hope is to remedy them with as small delay as possible. I will not deny that I fear you have made a mistake and honoured my poor house by inadvertence; for, to speak openly, I cannot at all remember your appearance. Let me put the question without unnecessary circumlocution—between gentlemen of honour a word will suffice—Under whose roof do you suppose yourself to be?”

“That of Mr. Morris,” replied the other, with a prodigious display of confusion, which had been visibly growing upon him throughout the last few words.

“Mr. John or Mr. James Morris?” inquired the host.

“I really cannot tell you,” returned the unfortunate guest. “I am not personally acquainted with the gentleman, any more than I am with yourself.”

“I see,” said Mr. Morris. “There is another person of the same name farther down the street; and I have no doubt the policeman will be able to supply you with his number. Believe me, I felicitate myself on the misunderstanding which has procured me the pleasure of your company for so long; and let me express a hope that we may meet again upon a more regular footing. Meantime, I would not for the world detain you longer from your friends. John,” he added, raising his voice, “will you see that the gentleman finds his great-coat?”

And with the most agreeable air Mr. Morris escorted his visitor as far as the ante-room door, where he left him under conduct of the butler. As he passed the window, on his return to the drawing-room, Brackenbury could hear him utter a profound sigh, as though his mind was loaded with great anxiety, and his nerves already fatigued with the task on which he was engaged.

For perhaps an hour the hansoms kept arriving with such frequency, that Mr. Morris had to receive a new guest for every old one that he sent away, and the company preserved its number undiminished. But towards the end of that time the arrivals grew few and far between, and at length ceased entirely, while the process of elimination was continued with unimpaired activity. The drawing-room began to look empty: the baccarat was discontinued for lack of a banker; more than one person said good-night of his own accord, and was suffered to depart without expostulation: and in the meanwhile Mr. Morris redoubled in agreeable attentions to those who stayed behind. He went from group to group and from person to person with looks of the readiest sympathy and the most pertinent and pleasing talk; he was not so much like a host as like a hostess, and there was a feminine coquetry and condescension in his manner which charmed the hearts of all.

As the guests grew thinner, Lieutenant Rich strolled for a moment out of the drawing-room into the hall in quest of fresher air. But he had no sooner passed the threshold of the ante-chamber than he was brought to a dead halt by a discovery of the most surprising nature. The flowering shrubs had disappeared from the staircase; three large furniture wagons stood before the garden gate; the servants were busy dismantling the house upon all sides; and some of them had already donned their great-coats and were preparing to depart. It was like the end of a country ball, where everything has been supplied by contract. Brackenbury had indeed some matter for reflection. First, the guests, who were no real guests after all, had been dismissed; and now the servants, who could hardly be genuine servants, were actively dispersing.

“Was the whole establishment a sham?” he asked himself. “The mushroom of a single night which should disappear before morning?”

Watching a favourable opportunity, Brackenbury dashed upstairs to the higher regions of the house. It was as he had expected. He ran from room to room, and saw not a stick of furniture nor so much as a picture on the walls. Although the house had been painted and papered, it was not only uninhabited at present, but plainly had never been inhabited at all. The young officer remembered with astonishment its specious, settled, and hospitable air on his arrival. It was only at a prodigious cost that the imposture could have been carried out upon so great a scale.

Who, then, was Mr. Morris? What was his intention in thus playing the householder for a single night in the remote west of London? And why did he collect his visitors at hazard from the streets?

Brackenbury remembered that he had already delayed too long, and hastened to join the company. Many had left during his absence; and counting the Lieutenant and his host, there were not more than five persons in the drawing-room-recently so thronged. Mr. Morris greeted him, as he reentered the apartment, with a smile, and immediately rose to his feet.

“It is now time, gentlemen,” said he, “to explain my purpose in decoying you from your amusements. I trust you did not find the evening hang very dully on your hands; but my object, I will confess it, was not to entertain your leisure, but to help myself in an unfortunate necessity. You are all gentlemen,” he continued, “your appearance does you that much justice, and I ask for no better security. Hence, I speak it without concealment, I ask you to render me a dangerous and delicate service; dangerous because you may run the hazard of your lives, and delicate because I must ask an absolute discretion upon all that you shall see or hear. From an utter stranger the request is almost comically extravagant; I am well aware of this; and I would add at once, if there be anyone present who has heard enough, if there be one among the party who recoils from a dangerous confidence and a piece of Quixotic devotion to he knows not whom—here is my hand ready, and I shall wish him good-night and Godspeed, with all the sincerity in the world.”

A very tall, black man, with a heavy stoop, immediately responded to this appeal.

“I commend your frankness, sir,” said he; “and, for my part, I go. I make no reflections; but I cannot deny that you fill me with suspicious thoughts. I go myself, as I say; and perhaps you will think I have no right to add words to my example.”

“On the contrary,” replied Mr. Morris, “I am obliged to you for all you say. It would be impossible to exaggerate the gravity of my proposal.”

“Well, gentlemen, what do you say?” said the tall man, addressing the others. “We have had our evening’s frolic; shall we go homeward peaceably in a body? You will think well of my suggestion in the morning, when you see the sun again in innocence and safety.”

The speaker pronounced the last words with an intonation which added to their force; and his face wore a singular expression, full of gravity and significance. Another of the company rose hastily, and, with some appearance of alarm, prepared to take his leave. There were only two who held their ground, Brackenbury and an old red-nosed cavalry Major; but these two preserved a nonchalant demeanor, and, beyond a look of intelligence which they rapidly exchanged, appeared entirely foreign to the discussion that had just been terminated.

Mr. Morris conducted the deserters as far as the door, which he closed upon their heels; then he turned round disclosing a countenance of mingled relief and animation, and addressed the two officers as follows:

“I have chosen my men like Joshua in the Bible,”am said Mr. Morris, “and I now believe I have the pick of London. Your appearance pleased my hansom cabmen; then it delighted me; I watched your behaviour in a strange company, and under the most unusual circumstances: I have studied how you played and how you bore your losses; lastly, I have put you to the test of a staggering announcement, and you received it like an invitation to dinner. It is not for nothing,” he cried, ”that I have been for years the companion and the pupil of the bravest and wisest potentate in Europe.”

“At the affair of Bunderchang,” observed the Major, “I asked for twelve volunteers, and every trooper in the ranks replied to my appeal. But a gaming party is not the same thing as a regiment under fire. You may be pleased, I suppose, to have found two, and two who will not fail you at a push. As for the pair who ran away, I count them among the most pitiful hounds I ever met with. Lieutenant Rich,” he added, addressing Brackenbury, “I have heard much of you of late; and I cannot doubt but you have also heard of me. I am Major O‘Rooke.”

And the veteran tendered his hand, which was red and tremulous, to the young Lieutenant.

“Who has not?” answered Brackenbury.

“When this little matter is settled,” said Mr. Morris, “you will think I have sufficiently rewarded you; for I could offer neither a more valuable service than to make him acquainted with the other.”

“And now,” said Major O‘Rooke, “is it a duel?” “A duel after a fashion,” replied Mr. Morris, “a duel with unknown and dangerous enemies, and, as I gravely fear, a duel to the death. I must ask you,” he continued, “to call me Morris no longer; call me, if you please, Hammersmith; my real name, as well as that of another person to whom I hope to present you before long, you will gratify me by not asking and not seeking to discover for yourselves. Three days ago the person of whom I speak disappeared suddenly from home; and, until this morning, I received no hint of his situation. You will fancy my alarm when I tell you that he is engaged upon a work of private justice. Bound by an unhappy oath, too lightly sworn, he finds it necessary, without the help of law, to rid the earth of an insidious and bloody villain. Already two of our friends, and one of them my own born brother, have perished in the enterprise. He himself, or I am much deceived, is taken in the same fatal toils. But at least he still lives and still hopes, as this billet sufficiently proves.”

And the speaker, no other than Colonel Geraldine, proffered a letter, thus conceived:—

“Major Hammersmith,—On Wednesday, at 3 A.M., you will be admitted by the small door to the gardens of Rochester House, Regent’s Park, by a man who is entirely in my interest. I must request you not to fail me by a second. Pray bring my case of swords, and, if you can find them, one or two gentlemen of conduct and discretion to whom my person is unknown. My name must not be used in this affair.

“T. GODALL.”

“From his wisdom alone, if he had no other title,” pursued Golonel Geraldine, when the others had each satisfied his curiosity, “my friend is a man whose directions should implicitly be followed. I need not tell you, therefore, that I have not so much as visited the neighborhood of Rochester House; and that I am still as wholly in the dark as either of yourselves as to the nature of my friend’s dilemma. I betook myself, as soon as I had received this order, to a furnishing contractor, and, in a few hours, the house in which we now are had assumed its late air of festival. My scheme was at least original; and I am far from regretting an action which has procured me the services of Major O‘Rooke and Lieutenant Brackenbury Rich. But the servants in the street will have a strange awakening. The house which this evening was full of lights and visitors they will find uninhabited and for sale to-morrow morning. Thus even the most serious concerns,” added the Colonel, “have a merry side.”

“And let us add a merry ending,” said Brackenbury.

The Colonel consulted his watch.

“It is now hard on two,” he said. “We have an hour before us, and a swift cab is at the door. Tell me if I may count upon your help.”

“During a long life,” replied Major O‘Rooke, “I never took back my hand from anything, nor so much as hedged a bet.”

Brackenbury signified his readiness in the most becoming terms; and after they had drunk a glass or two of wine, the Colonel gave each of them a loaded revolver, and the three mounted into the cab and drove off for the address in question.

Rochester House was a magnificent residence on the banks of the canal. The large extent of the garden isolated it in an unusual degree from the annoyances of neighbourhood. It seemed the parc aux cefsan of some great nobleman or millionaire. As far as could be seen from the street, there was not a glimmer of light in any of the numerous windows of the mansion; and the place had a look of neglect, as though the master had been long from home.

The cab was discharged, and the three gentlemen were not long in discovering the small door, which was a sort of postern in a lane between two garden walls. It still wanted ten or fifteen minutes of the appointed time, the rain fell heavily, and the adventurers sheltered themselves below some pendent ivy, and spoke in low tones of the approaching trial.

Suddenly Geraldine raised his finger to command silence, and all three bent their hearing to the utmost. Through the continuous noise of the rain, the steps and voices of two men became audible from the other side of the wall; and, as they drew nearer, Brackenbury, whose sense of hearing was remarkably acute, could even distinguish some fragments of their talk.

“Is the grave dug?” asked one.

“It is,” replied the other; “behind the laurel hedge. When the job is done, we can cover it with a pile of stakes.”

The first speaker laughed, and the sound of his merriment was shocking to the listeners on the other side.

“In an hour from now,” he said.

And by the sound of the steps it was obvious that the pair had separated, and were proceeding in contrary directions.

Almost immediately after the postern door was cautiously opened, a white face was protruded into the lane, and a hand was seen beckoning to the watchers. In dead silence the three passed the door, which was immediately locked behind them, and followed their guide through several garden alleys to the kitchen entrance of the house. A single candle burned in the great paved kitchen, which was destitute of the customary furniture; and as the party proceeded to ascend from thence by a flight of winding stairs, a prodigious noise of rats testified still more plainly to the dilapidation of the house.

Their conductor preceded them, carrying the candle. He was a lean man, much bent, but still agile; and he turned from time to time and admonished silence and caution by his gestures. Colonel Geraldine followed on his heels, the case of swords under one arm, and a pistol ready in the other. Brackenbury’s heart beat thickly. He perceived that they were still in time; but he judged from the alacrity of the old man that the hour of action must be near at hand; the circumstances of this adventure were so obscure and menacing, the place seemed so well chosen for the darkest acts, that an older man than Brackenbury might have been pardoned a measure of emotion as he closed the procession up the winding stair.

At the top the guide threw open a door and ushered the three officers before him into a small apartment, lighted by a smoky lamp and the glow of a modest fire. At the chimney corner sat a man in the early prime of life, and of a stout but courtly and commanding appearance. His attitude and expression were those of the most unmoved composure; he was smoking a cheroot with much enjoyment and deliberation, and on a table by his elbow stood a long glass of some effervescing beverage which diffused an agreeable odor through the room.

“Welcome,” said he, extending his hand to Colonel Geraldine. “I knew I might count on your exactitude.”

“On my devotion,” replied the Colonel, with a bow.

“Present me to your friends,” continued the first; and, when that ceremony had been performed, “I wish, gentlemen,” he added, with the most exquisite affability, “that I could offer you a more cheerful programme; it is ungracious to inaugurate an acquaintance upon serious affairs; but the compulsion of events is stronger than the obligations of good-fellowship. I hope and believe you will be able to forgive me this unpleasant evening; and for men of your stamp it will be enough to know that you are conferring a considerable favour.”

“Your Highness,” said the Major, “must pardon my bluntness. I am unable to hide what I know. For some time back I have suspected Major Hammersmith, but Mr. Godall is unmistakable. To seek two men in London unacquainted with Prince Florizel of Bohemia was to ask too much at Fortune’s hands.”

“Prince Florizel!” cried Brackenbury in amazement.

And he gazed with the deepest interest on the features of the celebrated personage before him.

“I shall not lament the loss of my incognito,” remarked the Prince, “for it enables me to thank you with the more authority. You would have done as much for Mr. Godall, I feel sure, as for the Prince of Bohemia; but the latter can perhaps do more for you. The gain is mine,” he added, with a courteous gesture.

And the next moment he was conversing with the two officers about the Indian army and the native troops, a subject on which, as on all others, he had a remarkable fund of information and the soundest views.

There was something so striking in this man’s attitude at a moment of deadly peril that Brackenbury was overcome with respectful admiration; nor was he less sensible to the charm of his conversation or the surprising amenity of his address. Every gesture, every intonation, was not only noble in itself, but seemed to ennoble the fortunate mortal for whom it was intended; and Brackenbury confessed to himself with enthusiasm that this was a sovereign for whom a brave man might thankfully lay down his life.

Many minutes had thus passed, when the person who had introduced them into the house, and who had sat ever since in a corner, and with his watch in his hand, arose and whispered a word into the Prince’s ear.

“It is well, Dr. Noel,” replied Florizel, aloud; and then addressing the others, “You will excuse me, gentlemen,” he added, “if I have to leave you in the dark. The moment now approaches.”

Dr. Noel extinguished the lamp. A faint, gray light, premonitory to the dawn, illuminated the window, but was not sufficient to illuminate the room; and when the Prince rose to his feet, it was impossible to distinguish his features or to make a guess at the nature of the emotion which obviously affected him as he spoke. He moved towards the door, and placed himself at one side of it in an attitude of the wariest attention.

“You will have the kindness,” he said, “to maintain the strictest silence, and to conceal yourselves in the densest of the shadow.”

The three officers and the physician hastened to obey, and for nearly ten minutes the only sound in Rochester House was occasioned by the excursions of the rats behind the woodwork. At the end of that period, a loud creak of a hinge broke in with surprising distinctness on the silence; and shortly after, the watchers could distinguish a slow and cautious tread approaching up the kitchen stair. At every second step the intruder seemed to pause and lend an ear, and during these intervals, which seemed of an incalculable duration, a profound disquiet possessed the spirit of the listeners. Dr. Noel, accustomed as he was to dangerous emotions, suffered an almost pitiful physical prostration; his breath whistled in his lungs, his teeth grated one upon another, and his joints cracked aloud as he nervously shifted his position.

At last a hand was laid upon the door, and the bolt shot back with a slight report. There followed another pause, during which Brackenbury could see the Prince draw himself together noiselessly as if for some unusual exertion. Then the door opened, letting in a little more of the light of the morning; and the figure of a man appeared upon the threshold and stood motionless. He was tall, and carried a knife in his hand. Even in the twilight they could see his upper teeth bare and glistening, for his mouth was open like that of a hound about to leap. The man had evidently been over the head in water but a minute or two before; and even while he stood there the drops kept falling from his wet clothes and pattered on the floor.

The next moment he crossed the threshold. There was a leap, a stifled cry, an instantaneous struggle; and before Colonel Geraldine could spring to his aid, the Prince held the man, disarmed and helpless, by the shoulders.

“Dr. Noel,” he said, “you will be so good as to relight the lamp.”

And relinquishing the charge of his prisoner to Geraldine and Brackenbury, he crossed the room and set his back against the chimney-piece. As soon as the lamp had kindled, the party beheld an unaccustomed sternness on the Prince’s features. It was no longer Florizel, the careless gentleman; it was the Prince of Bohemia, justly incensed and full of deadly purpose, who now raised his head and addressed the captive President of the Suicide Club.

“President,” he said, “you have laid your last snare, and your own feet are taken in it. The day is beginning; it is your last morning. You have just swum the Regent’s Canal; it is your last bath in this world. Your old accomplice, Dr. Noel, so far from betraying me, has delivered you into my hands for judgment. And the grave you had dug for me this afternoon shall serve, in God’s almighty providence, to hide your own just doom from the curiosity of mankind. Kneel and pray, sir, if you have a mind that way; for your time is short, and God is weary of your iniquities.”

The President made no answer either by word or sign; but continued to hang his head and gaze sullenly on the floor, as though he were conscious of the Prince’s prolonged and unsparing regard.

“Gentlemen,” continued Florizel, resuming the ordinary tone of his conversation, “this is a fellow who has long eluded me, but whom, thanks to Dr. Noel, I now have tightly by the heels. To tell the story of his misdeeds would occupy more time than we can now afford; but if the canal had contained nothing but the blood of his victims, I believe the wretch would have been no drier than you see him. Even in an affair of this sort I desire to preserve the forms of honour. But I make you the judges, gentlemen—this is more an execution than a duel; and to give the rogue his choice of weapons would be to push too far a point of etiquette. I cannot afford to lose my life in such a business,” he continued, unlocking the case of swords, “and as a pistol-bullet travels so often on the wings of chance, and skill and courage may fall by the most trembling marksman, I have decided, and I feel sure you will approve my determination, to put this question to the touch of swords.”

When Brackenbury and Major O‘Rooke, to whom these remarks were particularly addressed, had each intimated his approval, “Quick, sir,” added Prince Florizel to the President, “choose a blade and do not keep me waiting; I have an impatience to be done with you for ever.”

For the first time since he was captured and disarmed the President raised his head, and it was plain that he began instantly to pluck up courage.

“Is it to be stand up?” he asked eagerly, “and between you and me?”

“I mean so far to honour you,” replied the Prince.

“Oh, come,” cried the President. “With a fair field, who knows how things may happen? I must add that I consider it handsome behaviour on your Highness’s part; and if the worst comes to the worst I shall die by one of the most gallant gentlemen in Europe.

And the President, liberated by those who had detained him, stepped up to the table and began, with minute attention, to select a sword. He was highly elated, and seemed to feel no doubt that he should issue victorious from the contest. The spectators grew alarmed in the face of so entire a confidence, and adjured Prince Florizel to reconsider his intention.

“It is but a farce,” he answered; “and I think I can promise you, gentlemen, that it will not be long a-playing.”

“Your Highness will be careful not to overreach,” said Colonel Geraldine.

“Geraldine,” returned the Prince, “did you ever know me fail in a debt of honour? I owe you this man’s death, and you shall have it.”

The President at last satisfied himself with one of the rapiers, and signified his readiness by a gesture that was not devoid of a rude nobility. The nearness of peril, and the sense of courage, even to this obnoxious villain, lent an air of manhood and a certain grace.

The Prince helped himself at random to a sword.

“Colonel Geraldine and Doctor Noel,” he said, “will have the goodness to await me in this room. I wish no personal friend of mine to be involved in this transaction. Major O‘Rooke, you are a man of some years and a settled reputation—let me recommend the President to your good graces. Lieutenant Rich will be so good as to lend me his attentions: a young man cannot have too much experience in such affairs.”

“Your Highness,” replied Brackenbury, “it is an honour I shall prize extremely.”

“It is well,” returned Prince Florizel; “I shall hope to stand your friend in more important circumstances.”

And so saying he led the way out of the apartment and down the kitchen stairs.

The two men who were thus left alone threw open the window and leaned out, straining every sense to catch an indication of the tragical events that were about to follow. The rain was now over; day had almost come, and the birds were piping in the shrubbery and on the forest trees of the garden. The Prince and his companions were visible for a moment as they followed an alley between two flowering thickets; but at the first corner a clump of foliage intervened, and they were again concealed from view. This was all that the Colonel and the physician had an opportunity to see, and the garden was so vast, and the place of combat evidently so remote from the house that not even the noise of sword-play reached their ears.

“He has taken him towards the grave,” said Dr. Noel, with a shudder.

“God,” cried the Colonel, “God defend the right!”

And they awaited the event in silence, the Doctor shaking with fear, the Colonel in an agony of sweat. Many minutes must have elapsed, the day was sensibly broader, and the birds were singing more heartily in the garden before a sound of returning footsteps recalled their glances towards the door. It was the Prince and the two Indian officers who entered. God had defended the right.

“I am ashamed of my emotion,” said Prince Florizel; “I feel it a weakness unworthy of my station, but the continued existence of that hound of hell had begun to play upon me like a disease, and his death has more refreshed me than a night of slumber. Look, Geraldine,” he continued, throwing his sword upon the floor, “there is the blood of the man who killed your brother. It should be a welcome sight. And yet,” he added, “see how strangely we men are made! my revenge is not yet five minutes old, and already I am beginning to ask myself if even revenge be attainable on this precarious stage of life. The ill he did, who can undo it? The career in which he amassed a huge fortune (for the house itself in which he stayed belonged to him)—that career is now a part of the destiny of mankind forever; and I might weary myself making thrusts in carte until the crack of judgment, and Geraldine’s brother would be none the less dead, and a thousand other innocent persons would be none the less dishonoured and debauched! The existence of a man is so small a thing to take, so mighty a thing to employ! Alas!” he cried, “is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?”

“God’s justice has been done,” replied the Doctor. “So much I behold. The lesson, your Highness, has been a cruel one for me; and I await my own turn with deadly apprehension.”

“What was I saying?” cried the Prince. “I have punished, and here is the man beside us who can help me to undo. Ah, Dr. Noel! you and I have before us many a day of hard and honourable toil; and perhaps, before we have done, you may have more than redeemed your early errors.”

“And in the meantime,” said the Doctor, “let me go and bury my oldest friend.”

(And this, observes the erudite Arabian, is the fortunate conclusion of the tale. The Prince, it is superfluous to mention, forgot none of those who served him in this great exploit; and to this day his authority and influence help them forward in their public career, while his condescending friendship adds a charm to their private life. To collect, continues the author, all the strange events in which this Prince has played the part of Providence were to fill the habitable globe with books. But the stories which relate to the fortunes of THE RAJAH’S DIAMOND are of too entertaining a description, says he, to be omitted. Following prudently in the footsteps of this Oriental, we shall now begin the series to which he refers with the STORY OF THE BANDBOX.)

Thrawn Janet

THRAWN JANET

The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule.ao A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon on 1 st Peter, v. and 8th, “The devil as a roaring lion,” on the Sunday after every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated.ap The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hill-tops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis’s ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the highroad and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was towards the kirktown of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The house was two storeys high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark, sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to “follow my leader” across that legendary spot.

This atmosphere of terror, surrounding, as it did, a man of God of spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and subject of inquiry among the few strangers who were led by chance or business into that unknown, outlying country. But many even of the people of the parish were ignorant of the strange events which had marked the first year of Mr. Soulis’s ministrations; and among those who were better informed, some were naturally reticent, and others shy of that particular topic. Now and again, only, one of the older folk would warn into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the minister’s strange looks and solitary life.

Fifty years syne, when Mr. Soulis cam’ first into Ba‘weary, he was still a young man—a callant, the folk said—fu’ o’ book learnin’ and grand at the exposition, but, as was natural in sae young a man, wi’ nae leevin’ experience in religion. The younger sort were greatly taken wi’ his gifts and his gab; but auld, concerned, serious men and women were moved even to prayer for the young man, whom they took to be a self-deceiver, and the parish that was like to be sae ill-supplied. It was before the days o’ the moderates—weary fa’ them; but ill things are like guid—they baith come bit by bit, a pickle at a time; and there were folk even then that said the Lord had left the college professors to their ain devices, an’ the lads that went to study wi’ them wad hae done mair and better sittin’ in a peat-bog, like their forbears of the persecution, wi’ a Bible under their oxter and a speerit o’ prayer in their heart. There was nae doubt, onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been ower lang at the college. He was careful and troubled for mony things besides the ae thing needful. He had a feck o’ books wi’ him—mair than had ever been seen before in a’ that presbytery; and a sair wark the carrier had wi’ them, for they were a’ like to have smoored in the Deil’s Hag between this and Kilmackerlie. They were books o’ divinity, to be sure, or so they ca’d them; but the serious were o’ opinion there was little service for sae mony, when the hail o’ God’s Word would gang in the neuk of a plaid. Then he wad sit half the day and half the nicht forbye, which was scant decent—writin’, nae less; and first, they were feared he wad read his sermons; and syne it proved he was writin’ a book himsel’ which was surely no fittin’ for ane of his years and sma’ experience.

Onyway it behoved him to get an auld, decent wife to keep the manse for him an’ see to his bit denners; and he was recommended to an auld limmer—Janet M‘Clour, they ca‘ed her—and sae far left to himsel’ as to be ower persuaded. There was mony advised him to the contrar, for Janet was mair than suspeckit by the best folk in Ba’weary. Lang or that, she had had a wean to a dragoon; she hadnae come forrit for maybe thretty year; and bairns had seen her mumblin’ to hersel’ up on Key’s Loan in the gloamin’whilk was an unco time an’ place for a God-fearin’ woman. Howsoever, it was the laird himsel’ that had first tauld the minister o’ Janet; and in thae days he wad have gane a far gate to pleesure the laird. When folk tauld him that Janet was sib to the deil, it was a’ superstition by his way of it; an’ when they cast up the Bible to him an’ the witch of Endor, he wad threep it doun their thrapples that thir days were a’ gane by, and the deil was mercifully restrained.

Weel, when it got about the clachan that Janet M‘Clour was to be servant at the manse, the folk were fair mad wi’ her an’ him thegether; and some o’ the guidwives had nae better to dae than get round her door cheeks and chairge her wi’ a’ that was ken’t again her, frae the sodger’s bairn to John Tam son’s twa kye. She was nae great speaker; folk usually let her gang her ain gate, an’ she let them gang theirs, wi’ neither Fair-guid-een nor Fair-guid-day; but when she buckled to, she had a tongue to deave the miller. Up she got, an’ there wasnae an auld story in Ba’weary but she gart somebody lowp for it that day; they couldnae say ae thing but she could say twa to it; till, at the hinder end, the guidwives up and claught haud of her, and clawed the coats aff her back, and pu’d her doun the clachan to the water o’ Dule, to see if she were a witch or no, soum or droun.aq The carline skirled till ye could hear her at the Hangin’ Shaw, and she focht like ten; there was mony a guidwife bure the mark of her neist day an’ mony a lang day after; and just in the hettest o’ the collieshangie, wha suld come up (for his sins) but the new minister.

“Women,” said he (and he had a grand voice), “I charge you in the Lord’s name to let her go.”

Janet ran to him—she was fair wud wi’ terror—an’ clang to him, an’ prayed him, for Christ’s sake, save her frae the cummers; an’ they, for their pairt, tauld him a’ that was ken‘t, and maybe mair.

“Woman,” says he to Janet, “is this true?”

“As the Lord sees me,” says she, “as the Lord made me, no a word o’t. Forbye the bairn,” says she, “I ’ve been a decent woman a’ my days.”

“Will you,” says Mr. Soulis, “in the name of God, and before me, His unworthy minister, renounce the devil and his works?”

Weel, it wad appear that when he askit that, she gave a girn that fairly frichtit them that saw her, an’ they could hear her teeth play dirl thegither in her chafts; but there was naething for it but the ae way or the ither; an’ Janet lifted up her hand and renounced the deil before them a’.

“And now,” says Mr. Soulis to the guidwives, “home with ye, one and all, and pray to God for His forgiveness.”

And he gied Janet his arm, though she had little on her but a sark, and took her up the clachan to her ain door like a leddy of the land; an’ her scrieghin’ and laughin’ as was a scandal to be heard.

There were mony grave folk lang ower their prayers that nicht; but when the morn cam’ there was sic a fear fell upon a’ Ba‘weary that the bairns hid theirsels, and even the men folk stood and keekit frae their doors. For there was Janet comin’ doun the clachan—her or her likeness, nane could tell—wi’ her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit, and a girn on her face like an unstreakit corp. By an’ by they got used wi’ it, and even speered at her to ken what was wrang; but frae that day forth she couldnae speak like a Christian woman, but slavered and played click wi’ her teeth like a pair o’ shears; and frae that day forth the name o’ God cam’ never on her lips. Whiles she wad try to say it, but it michtnae be. Them that kenned best said least; but they never gied that Thing the name o’ Janet M’Clour; for the auld Janet, by their way o‘t, was in muckle hell that day. But the minister was neither to haud or to bind; he preached about naething but the folk’s cruelty that had gi’en her a stroke of the palsy; he skelpt the bairns that meddled her; and he had her up to the manse that same nicht, and dwalled there a’ his lane wi’ her under the Hangin’ Shaw.

Weel, time gaed by: and the idler sort commenced to think mair lichtly o’ that black business. The minister was weel thocht o‘; he was aye late at the writing, folk wad see his can’le doon by the Dule water after twal’ at e‘en; and he seemed pleased wi’ himsel’ and upsitten as at first, though a’ body could see that he was dwining. As for Janet she cam’ an’ she gaed; if she didnae speak muckle afore, it was reason she should speak less then; she meddled naebody; but she was an eldritch thing to see, an’ nane wad hae mistrysted wi’ her for Ba’weary glebe.

About the end o’ July there cam’ a spell o’ weather, the like o’t never was in that country-side; it was lown an’ het an’ heartless; the herds couldnae win up the Black Hill, the bairns were ower weariet to play; an’ yet it was gousty too, wi’ claps o’ het wund that rummled in the glens, and bits o’ shouers that slockened naething. We aye thocht it but to thun‘er on the morn; but the morn cam’, an’ the morn’s morning, and it was aye the same uncanny weather, sair on folks and bestial. Of a’ that were the waur, nane suffered like Mr. Soulis; he could neither sleep nor eat, he tauld his elders; an’ when he wasnae writin’ at his weary book, he wad be stravaguin’ ower a’ the country-side like a man possessed, when a’ body else was blythe to keep caller ben the house.

Abune Hangin’ Shaw, in the bield o’ the Black Hill, there’s a bit enclosed grund wi’ an iron yett; and it seems, in the auld days, that was the kirkyaird o’ Ba‘weary, and consecrated by the Papists before the blessed licht shone upon the kingdom. It was a great howff, o’ Mr. Soulis’s onyway; there he would sit an’ consider his sermons; and inded it ’s a bieldy bit. Weel, as he cam’ ower the wast end o’ the Black Hill, ae day, he saw first twa, an’ syne fower, an’ syne seeven corbie craws fleein’ round an’ round abune the auld kirkyaird. They flew laigh and heavy, an’ squawked to ither as they gaed; and it was clear to Mr. Soulis that something had put them frae their ordinar. He wasnae easy fleyed, an’ gaed straucht up to the wa’s; and what suld he find there but a man, or the appearance of a man, sittin’ in the inside upon a grave. He was of a great stature, an’ black as hell,ar and his e’en were singular to see. Mr. Soulis had heard tell o’ black men, mony’s the time; but there was something unco about this black man that daunted him. Het as he was, he took a kind o’ cauld grue in the marrow o’ his banes; but up he spak for a’ that; an’ says he: “My friend, are you a stranger in this place?” The black man answered never a word; he got upon his feet, an’ begude to hirsle to the wa’ on the far side; but he aye lookit at the minister; an’ the minister stood an’ lookit back; till a’ in a meenute the black man was ower the wa’ an’ rinnin’ for the bield o’ the trees. Mr. Soulis, he hardly kenned why, ran after him; but he was sair forjaskit wi’ his walk an’ the het, unhale some weather; and rin as he likit, he got nae mair than a glisk o’ the black man amang the birks, till he won doun to the foot o’ the hillside, an’ there he saw him ance mair, gaun, hap, step, an’ lowp, ower Dule water to the manse.

Mr. Soulis wasnae weel pleased that this fearsome gangrel suld mak’ sae free wi’ Ba‘weary manse; an’ he ran the harder, an’ wet shoon, ower the burn, an’ up the walk; but the deil a black man was there to see. He stepped out upon the road, but there was naebody there; he gaed a’ ower the gairden, but na, nae black man. At the hinder end, and a bit feared as was but natural, he lifted the hasp and into the manse; and there was Janet M’Clour before his een, wi’ her thrawn craig, and nane sae pleased to see him. And he aye minded sinsyne, when first he set his een upon her, he had the same cauld and deidly grue.

“Janet,” says he, “have you seen a black man?”

“A black man!” quo’ she. “Save us a‘! Ye’re no wise, minister. There ’s nae black man in a’ Ba’weary.”

But she didnae speak plain, ye maun understand; but yam yammered, like a powny wi’ the bit in its moo.

“Weel,” says he, “Janet, if there was nae black man, I have spoken with the Accuser of the Brethren.”

An’ he sat doun like ane wi’ a fever, an’ his teeth chittered in his heid.

“Hoots,” says she, “think shame to yoursel‘, minister”; an’ gied him a drap brandy that she keept aye by her.

Syne Mr. Soulis gaed into his study amang a’ his books. It ’s a lang, laigh, mirk chalmer, perishin’ cauld in winter, an’ no very dry even in the top o’ the simmer, for the manse stands near the burn. Sae doun he sat, and thocht of a’ that had come an’ gane since he was in Ba‘weary, an’ his hame, an’ the days when he was a bairn an’ ran daffin’ on the braes; and that black man aye ran in his heid like the owercome of a sang. Aye the mair he thocht, the mair he thocht o’ the black man. He tried the prayer, an’ the words wouldnae come to him; an’ he tried, they say, to write at his book, but he couldnae mak’ nae mair o’ that. There was whiles he thocht the black man was at his oxter, an’ the swat stood upon him cauld as well-water; and there was other whiles, when he cam’ to himsel’ like a christened bairn and minded naething.

The upshot was that he gaed to the window an’ stood glow rin’ at Dule water. The trees are unco thick, an’ the water lies deep an’ black under the manse; and there was Janet washin’ the cla‘es wi’ her coats kilted. She had her back to the minister, an’ he, for his pairt, hardly kenned what he was lookin’ at. Syne she turned round, an’ shawed her face; Mr. Soulis had the same cauld grue as twice that day afore, an’ it was borne in upon him what folk said, that Janet was deid lang syne, an’ this was a bogle in her clay-cauld flesh. He drew back a pickle and he scanned her narrowly. She was tramp-trampin’ in the cla’es, croonin’ to hersel’; and eh! Gude guide us, but it was a fearsome face. Whiles she sang louder, but there was nae man born o’ woman that could tell the words o’ her sang; an’ whiles she lookit side-lang doun, but there was naething there for her to look at. There gaed a scunner through the flesh upon his banes; and that was Heeven’s advertisement. But Mr. Soulis just blamed himsel’, he said, to think sae ill of a puir, auld afflicted wife that hadnae a freend forbye himsel’; an’ he put up a bit prayer for him an’ her, an’ drank a little caller water—for his heart rose again the meat—an’ gaed up to his naked bed in the gloaming.

That was a nicht that has never been forgotten in Ba‘weary, the nicht o’ the seeventeenth of August, seventeen hun’er’ an’ twal’. It had been het afore, as I hae said, but that nicht it was hetter than ever. The sun gaed doun amang unco-lookin’ clouds; it fell as mirk as the pit; no a star, no a breath o’ wund; ye couldnae see your han’ afore your face, and even the auld folk cuist the covers frae their beds and lay pechin’ for their breath. Wi’ a’ that he had upon his mind, it was gey and unlikely Mr. Soulis wad get muckle sleep. He lay an’ he tummled; the gude, caller bed that he got into brunt his very banes; whiles he slept, and whiles he waukened; whiles he heard the time o’ nicht, and whiles a tyke yowlin’ up the muir, as if somebody was deid; whiles he thocht he heard bogles claverin’ in his lug, an’ whiles he saw spunkies in the room. He behoved, he judged, to be sick; an’ sick he was—little he jaloosed the sickness.

At the hinder end, he got a clearness in his mind, sat up in his sark on the bed-side, and fell thinkin’ ance mair o’ the black man an’ Janet. He couldnae weel tell how—maybe it was the cauld to his feet—but it cam’ in upon him wi’ a spate that there was some connection between thir twa, an’ that either or baith o’ them were bogles. And just at that moment, in Janet’s room, which was neist to his, there cam’ a stramp o’ feet as if men were wars‘lin’, an’ then a loud bang; an’ then a wund gaed reishling round the fower quarters of the house; an’ then a’ was ance mair as seelent as the grave.

Mr. Soulis was feared for neither man nor deevil. He got his tinder-box, an’ lit a can‘le, an’ made three steps o’t ower to Janet’s door. It was on the hasp, an’ he pushed it open, an’ keeked bauldly in. It was a big room, as big as the minister’s ain, an’ plenished wi’ grand, auld, solid gear, for he had naething else. There was a fower-posted bed wi’ auld tapestry; and a braw cabinet of aik, that was fu’ o’ the minister’s divinity books, an’ put there to be out o’ the gate; an’ a wheen duds o’ Janet’s lying here and there about the floor. But nae Janet could Mr. Soulis see; nor ony sign of a contention. In he gaed (an’ there’s few that wad ha’e followed him) an’ lookit a’ round, an’ listened. But there was naething to be heard, neither inside the manse nor in a’ Ba‘weary parish, an’ naething to be seen but the muckle shadows turnin’ round the can’le. An’ then, a’ at ance, the minister’s heart played dunt an’ stood stock-still; an’ a cauld wund blew amang the hairs o’ his heid. Whaten a weary sicht was that for the puir man’s een! For there was Janet hangin’ frae a nail beside the auld aik cabinet: her heid aye lay on her shouther, her een were steeked, the tongue projeckit frae her mouth, and her heels were twa feet clear abune the floor.

“God forgive us all!” thocht Mr. Soulis, “poor Janet ’s dead.”

He cam’ a step nearer to the corp; an’ then his heart fair whammled in his inside. For by what cantrip it wad ill-beseem a man to judge, she was hingin’ frae a single nail an’ by a single wursted thread for darnin’ hose.

It’s a awfu’ thing to be your lane at nicht wi’ siccan prodigies o’ darkness; but Mr. Soulis was strong in the Lord. He turned an’ gaed his ways oot o’ that room, and lockit the door ahint him; and step by step, doun the stairs, as heavy as leed; and set doun the can‘le on the table at the stairfoot. He couldnae pray, he couldnae think, he was dreepin’ wi’ caul’ swat, an’ naething could he hear but the dunt-dunt-duntin’ o’ his ain heart. He micht maybe have stood there an hour, or maybe twa, he minded sae little; when a’ o’ a sudden, he heard a laigh, uncanny steer up-stairs; a foot gaed to an’ fro in the chalmer whaur the corp was hingin’; syne the door was opened, though he minded weel that he had lockit it; an’ syne there was a step upon the landin,’ an’ it seemed to him as if the corp was lookin’ ower the rail and doun upon him whaur he stood.

He took up the can‘le again (for he couldnae want the licht), and as saftly as ever he could, gaed straucht out o’ the manse an’ to the far end o’ the causeway. It was aye pit-mirk; the flame o’ the can’le, when he set it on the grund, brunt steedy and clear as in a room; naething moved, but the Dule water seepin’ and sabbin’ doun the glen, an’ yon unhaly footstep that cam’ ploddin’ doun the stairs inside the manse. He kenned the foot ower weel, for it was Janet’s; and at ilka step that cam’ a wee thing nearer, the cauld got deeper in his vitals. He commended his soul to Him that made an’ keepit him; “and O Lord,” said he, “give me strength this night to war against the powers of evil.”

By this time the foot was comin’ through the passage for the door; he could hear a hand skirt alang the wa‘, as if the fearsome thing was feelin’ for its way. The saughs tossed an’ maned thegither, a long sigh cam’ ower the hills, the flame o’ the can’le was blawn aboot; an’ there stood the corp of Thrawn Janet, wi’ her grogram goun an’ her black mutch, wi’ the heid aye upon the shouther, an’ the girn still upon the face o‘t—leevin’, ye wad hae said—deid, as Mr. Soulis weel kenned—upon the threshold o’ the manse.

It ’s a strange thing that the saul of man should be that thirled into his perishable body; but the minister saw that, an’ his heart didnae break.

She didnae stand there lang; she began to move again an’ cam’ slowly towards Mr. Soulis whaur he stood under the saughs. A’ the life o’ his body, a’ the strength o’ his speerit, were glowerin’ frae his een. It seemed she was gaun to speak, but wanted words, an’ made a sign wi’ the left hand. There cam’ a clap o’ wund, like a cat’s fuff; oot gaed the can‘le, the saughs skrieghed like folk; an’ Mr. Soulis kenned that, live or die, this was the end o’t.

“Witch, beldame, devil! he cried, ”I charge you, by the power of God, begone—if you be dead, to the grave—if you be damned, to hell.”

An’ at that moment the Lord’s ain hand out o’ the Heevens struck the Horror whaur it stood; the auld, deid, desecrated corp o’ the witch-wife, sae lang keepit frae the grave and hir sled round by deils, lowed up like a brunstane spunk and fell in ashes to the grund; the thunder followed, peal on dirling peal, the rairing rain upon the back o’ that; and Mr. Soulis lowped through the garden hedge, and ran, wi’ skelloch upon skelloch, for the clachan.

That same mornin‘, John Christie saw the Black Man pass the Muckle Cairn as it was chappin’ six; before eicht, he gaed by the change-house at Knockdow; an’ no lang after, Sandy M’Lellan saw him gaun linkin’ doun the braes frae Kilmackerlie. There’s little doubt but it was him that dwalled sae lang in Janet’s body; but he was awa’ at last; and sinsyne the deil has never fashed us in Ba‘weary.

But it was a sair dispensation for the minister; lang, lang he lay ravin’ in his bed; and frae that hour to this, he was the man ye ken the day.

The Body-Snatcher

THE BODY-SNA TCHER

Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham—the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular arm-chair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous, disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would now and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the table. He drank rum—five glasses regularly every evening; and for the greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass in his right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We called him the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a fracture or reduce a dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars, we had no knowledge of his character and antecedents.

One dark winter night—it had struck nine some time before the landlord joined us—there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament; and the great man’s still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all proportionately moved by the occurrence.

“He’s come,” said the landlord, after he had filled and lighted his pipe.

“He?” said I. “Who?—not the doctor?”

“Himself,” replied our host.

“What is his name?”

“Dr. Macfarlane,” said the landlord.

Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to awaken, and repeated the name “Macfarlane” twice, quietly enough the first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.

“Yes,” said the landlord, “that’s his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane.”

Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear, loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am afraid I have not been paying much attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane ?” And then, when he had heard the landlord out, “It cannot be, it cannot be,” he added; “and yet I would like well to see him face to face.”

“Do you know him, Doctor?” asked the undertaker, with a gasp.

“God forbid!” was the reply. “And yet the name is a strange one; it were too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?”

“Well,” said the host, “he’s not a young man, to be sure, and his hair is white; but he looks younger than you.”

“He is older, though; years older. But,” with a slap upon the table, “it’s the rum you see in my face—rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would you not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if he’d stood in my shoes,as but the brains”—with a rattling fillip on his bald head—“the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no deductions.”

“If you know this doctor,” I ventured to remark, after a somewhat awful pause, “I should gather that you do not share the landlord’s good opinion.”

Fettes paid no regard to me.

“Yes,” he said, with sudden decision, “I must see him face to face.”

There was another pause, and then a door was closed rather sharply on the first floor, and a step was heard upon the stair.

“That’s the doctor,” cried the landlord. “Look sharp, and you can catch him.”

It was but two steps from the small parlour to the door of the old George Inn; the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there was room for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the last round of the descent; but this little space was every evening brilliantly lit up, not only by the light upon the stair and the great signal-lamp below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the barroom window. The George thus brightly advertised itself to passers-by in the cold street. Fettes walked steadily to the spot, and we, who were hanging behind, beheld the two men meet, as one of them had phrased it, face to face. Dr. Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set off his pale and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a great gold watchchain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious material. He wore a broad-folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot—bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in his old camlet cloak—confront him at the bottom of the stairs.

“Macfarlane!” he said somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend.

The great doctor pulled up short on the fourth step, as though the familiarity of the address surprised and somewhat shocked his dignity.

“Toddy Macfarlane!” repeated Fettes.

The London man almost staggered. He stared for the swiftest of seconds at the man before him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then in a startled whisper, “Fettes!” he said, “you! ”

“Ay,” said the other, “me! Did you think I was dead too? We are not so easy shut of our acquaintance.”

“Hush, hush!” exclaimed the doctor. “Hush, hush! this meeting is so unexpected—I can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at first; but I am overjoyed—overjoyed to have this opportunity. For the present it must be how-d’ ye-do and good-by in one, for my fly is waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall—let me see—yes—you shall give me your address, and you can count on early news of me. We must do something for you, Fettes. I fear you are out at elbows; but we must see to that for auld lang syne, as once we sang at suppers.”

“Money!” cried Fettes; “money from you! The money that I had from you is lying where I cast it in the rain.”

Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and confidence, but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into his first confusion.

A horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable countenance. “My dear fellow,” he said, “be it as you please; my last thought is to offend you. I would intrude on none. I will leave you my address, however—”

“I do not wish it—I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,” interrupted the other. “I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I wished to know if, after all, there were a God; I know now that there is none. Begone!”

He still stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway; and the great London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to step to one side. It was plain that he hesitated before the thought of this humiliation. White as he was, there was a dangerous glitter in his spectacles; but while he still paused uncertain, he became aware that the driver of his fly was peering in from the street at this unusual scene and caught a glimpse at the same time of our little body from the parlour, huddled by the corner of the bar. The presence of so many witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on the wainscot, and made a dart like a serpent, striking for the door. But his tribulation was not yet entirely at an end, for even as he was passing Fettes clutched him by the arm and these words came in a whisper, and yet painfully distinct, “Have you seen it again?”

The great rich London doctor cried out aloud with a sharp, throttling cry; he dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief. Before it had occurred to one of us to make a movement the fly was already rattling toward the station. The scene was over like a dream, but the dream had left proofs and traces of its passage. Next day the servant found the fine gold spectacles broken on the threshold, and that very night we were all standing breathless by the barroom window, and Fettes at our side, sober, pale and resolute in look.

“God protect us, Mr. Fettes!” said the landlord, coming first into possession of his customary senses. “What in the universe is all this? These are strange things you have been saying.”

Fettes turned toward us; he looked us each in succession in the face. “See if you can hold your tongues,” said he. “That man Macfarlane is not safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too late.”

And then, without so much as finishing his third glass, far less waiting for the other two, he bade us good-by and went forth, under the lamp of the hotel, into the black night.

We three turned to our places in the parlour, with the big red fire and four clear candles; and as we recapitulated what had passed the first chill of our surprise soon changed into a glow of curiosity. We sat late; it was the latest session I have known in the old George. Each man, before we parted, had his theory that he was bound to prove; and none of us had any nearer business in this world than to track out the past of our condemned companion, and surprise the secret that he shared with the great London doctor. It is no great boast, but I believe I was a better hand at worming out a story than either of my fellows at the George; and perhaps there is now no other man alive who could narrate to you the following foul and unnatural events.

In his young days Fettes studied medicine in the schools of Edinburgh. He had talent of a kind, the talent that picks up swiftly what it hears and readily retails it for its own. He worked little at home; but he was civil, attentive, and intelligent in the presence of his masters. They soon picked him out as a lad who listened closely and remembered well; nay, strange as it seemed to me when I first heard it, he was in those days well favoured, and pleased by his exterior. There was, at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here designate by the letter K.⁴ His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burkeat called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K—was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. Mr. K—was a bon vivantau as well as an accomplished teacher; he liked a sly illusion no less than a careful preparation. In both capacities Fettes enjoyed and deserved his notice, and by the second year of his attendance he held the half-regular position of second demonstrator or sub-assistant in his class.

In this capacity, the charge of the theatre and lecture-room devolved in particular upon his shoulders. He had to answer for the cleanliness of the premises and the conduct of the other students, and it was a part of his duty to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects. It was with a view to this last—at that time very delicate—affair that he was lodged by Mr. K——in the same wynd,av and at last in the same building, with the dissecting-rooms. Here, after a night of turbulent pleasures, his hand still tottering, his sight still misty and confused, he would be called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber, to repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours of the day.

Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions. Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted, besides, a measure of consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after day rendered unimpeachable eye-service to his employer, Mr. K——. For his day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring, blackguardly enjoyment; and when that balance had been struck, the organ that he called his conscience declared itself content.

The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomists kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K——to ask no questions in his dealings with the trade. “They bring the body, and we pay the price,” he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration—“quid pro quo.” And, again, and somewhat profanely, “Ask no questions,” he would tell his assistants, “for conscience sake.” There was no understanding that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an offence against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he dealt. Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the hang-dog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime.

One November morning this policy of silence was put sharply to the test. He had been awake all night with a racking toothache—pacing his room like a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed—and had fallen at last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows on a night of pain, when he was awakened by the third or fourth angry repetition of the concerted signal. There was a thin, bright moonshine; it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. Fettes, sick with sleep, lighted them upstairs. He heard their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as they stripped the sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with his shoulder propped against the wall; he had to shake himself to find the men their money. As he did so his eyes lighted on the dead face. He started; he took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.

“God Almighty!” he cried. “That is Jane Galbraith!”

The men answered nothing, but they shuffled nearer the door.

“I know her, I tell you,” he continued. “She was alive and hearty yesterday. It’s impossible she can be dead; it’s impossible you should have got this body fairly.”

“Sure, sir, you’re mistaken entirely,” said one of the men.

But the other looked Fettes darkly in the eyes, and demanded the money on the spot.

It was impossible to misconceive the threat or to exaggerate the danger. The lad’s heart failed him. He stammered some excuses, counted out the sum, and saw his hateful visitors depart. No sooner were they gone than he hastened to confirm his doubts. By a dozen unquestionable marks he identified the girl he had jested with the day before. He saw, with horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence. A panic seized him, and he took refuge in his room. There he reflected at length over the discovery that he had made; considered soberly the bearing of Mr. K——’s instructions and the danger to himself of interference in so serious a business, and at last, in sore perplexity, determined to wait for the advice of his immediate superior, the class assistant.

This was a young doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all the reckless students, clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous to the last degree. He had travelled and studied abroad. His manners were agreeable and a little forward. He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity, and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed, their relative positions called for some community of life; and when subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in Macfarlane’s gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return before dawn with their booty to the door of the dissecting-room.

On that particular morning Macfarlane arrived somewhat earlier than his wont. Fettes heard him, and met him on the stairs, told him his story, and showed him the cause of his alarm. Macfarlane examined the marks on her body.

“Yes,” he said with a nod, “it looks fishy.”

“Well, what should I do?” asked Fettes.

“Do?” repeated the other. “Do you want to do anything? Least said soonest mended, I should say.”

“Some one else might recognise her,” objected Fettes. “She was as well known as the Castle Rock.”

“We’ll hope not,” said Macfarlane, “and if anybody does—well, you didn‘t, don’t you see, and there’s an end. The fact is, this has been going on too long. Stir up the mud, and you’ll get K——into the most unholy trouble; you’ll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you come to that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or what the devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian witness-box. For me, you know there’s one thing certain—that, practically speaking, all our subjects have been murdered.”

“Macfarlane!” cried Fettes.

“Come now!” sneered the other. “As if you hadn’t suspected it yourself!”

“Suspecting is one thing——”

“And proof another. Yes, I know; and I’m as sorry as you are this should have come here,” tapping the body with his cane. “The next best thing for me is not to recognise it; and,” he added coolly, “I don’t. You may, if you please. I don’t dictate, but I think a man of the world would do as I do; and I may add, I fancy that is what K——would look for at our hands. The question is, Why did he choose us two for his assistants? And I answer, because he didn’t want old wives.”

This was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes. He agreed to imitate Macfarlane. The body of the unfortunate girl was duly dissected, and no one remarked or appeared to recognise her.

One afternoon, when his day’s work was over, Fettes dropped into a popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, and stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

“I’m a pretty bad fellow myself,” the stranger remarked, “but Macfarlane is the boy—Toddy Macfarlane I call him. Toddy, order your friend another glass.” Or it might be, “oddy, you jump up and shut the door.” ”Toddy hates me,” he said again. ”Oh, yes, Toddy, you do!”

“Don’t you call me that confounded name,” growled Macfarlane.

“Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do that all over my body,” remarked the stranger.

“We medicals have a better way than that,” said Fettes. “When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.”

Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his mind.

The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger’s name, invited Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the tavern was thrown in commotion, and when all was done commanded Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he posted from place to place in quest of his last night’s companions. He could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.

At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal. Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly packages with which he was so well acquainted.

“What?” he cried. “Have you been out alone? How did you manage?”

But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to hesitate; and then, “You had better look at the face,” said he, in tones of some constraint. “You had better,” he repeated, as Fettes only stared at him in wonder.

“But where, and how, and when did you come by it?” cried the other.

“Look at the face,” was the only answer.

Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of death and naked on that coarse layer of sack-cloth, the man whom he had left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern, awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the conscience. It was a cras tibiaw which re-echoed in his soul, that two whom he had known should have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet these were only secondary thoughts. His first concern regarded Wolfe. Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to look his comrade in the face. He durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words nor voice at his command.

It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly behind and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other’s shoulder.

“Richardson,” said he, “may have the head.”

Now Richardson was a student who had long been anxious for that portion of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer resumed: “Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, you see, must tally.”

Fettes found a voice, the ghost of his own: “Pay you!” he cried. “Pay you for that?”

“Why, yes, of course you must. By all means and on every possible account, you must,” returned the other. “I dare not give it for nothing, you dare not take it for nothing; it would compromise us both. This is another case like Jane Galbraith’s. The more things are wrong the more we must act as if all were right. Where does old K——keep his money?”

“There,” answered Fettes hoarsely, pointing to a cupboard in the comer.

“Give me the key, then,” said the other, calmly, holding out his hand.

There was an instant’s hesitation, and the die was cast. Macfarlane could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an immense relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the cupboard, brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one compartment, and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to the occasion.

“Now, look here,” he said, “there is the payment made—first proof of your good faith: first step to your security. You have now to clinch it by a second. Enter the payment in your book, and then you for your part may defy the devil.”

The next few seconds were for Fettes an agony of thought; but in balancing his terrors it was the most immediate that triumphed. Any future difficulty seemed almost welcome if he could avoid a present quarrel with Macfarlane. He set down the candle which he had been carrying all this time, and with a steady hand entered the date, the nature, and the amount of the transaction.

“And now,” said Macfarlane, “it’s only fair that you should pocket the lucre. I’ve had my share already. By the bye, when a man of the world falls into a bit of luck, has a few shillings extra in his pocket—I’m ashamed to speak of it, but there’s a rule of conduct in the case. No treating, no purchase of expensive class-books, no squaring of old debts; borrow, don’t lend.”

“Macfarlane,” began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely, “I have put my neck in a halter to oblige you.”ax

“To oblige me?” cried Wolfe. “Oh, come! You did, as near as I can see the matter, what you downright had to do in self-defence. Suppose I got into trouble, where would you be? This second little matter flows clearly from the first. Mr. Gray is the continuation of Miss Galbraith. You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning; that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.”

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

“My God!” he cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be made a class assistant—in the name of reason, where’s the harm in that? Service wanted the position; Service might have got it. Would he have been where I am now?”

“My dear fellow,” said Macfarlane, “what a boy you are! What harm has come to you? What harm can come to you if you hold your tongue? Why, man, do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us—the lions and the lambs. If you’re a lamb, you’ll come to lie upon these tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a horse like me, like K—, like all the world with any wit or courage. You’re staggered at the first. But look at K——! My dear fellow, you’re clever, you have pluck. I like you, and K——likes you. You were born to lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my honour and my experience of life, three days from now you’ll laugh at all these scarecrows like a high school boy at a farce.”

And with that Macfarlane took his departure and drove off up the wynd in his gig to get under cover before daylight. Fettes was thus left alone with his regrets. He saw the miserable peril in which he stood involved. He saw, with inexpressible dismay, that there was no limit to his weakness, and that, from concession to concession, he had fallen from the arbiter of Macfarlane’s destiny to his paid and helpless accomplice. He would have given the world to have been a little braver at the time, but it did not occur to him that he might still be brave. The secret of Jane Galbraith and the cursed entry in the daybook closed his mouth.

Hours passed; the class began to arrive; the members of the unhappy Gray were dealt out to one and to another, and received without remark. Richardson was made happy with the head; and before the hour of freedom rang Fettes trembled with exultation to perceive how far they had already gone toward safety.

For two days he continued to watch, with increasing joy, the dreadful process of disguise.

On the third day Macfarlane made his appearance. He had been ill, he said; but he made up for lost time by the energy with which he directed the students. To Richardson in particular he extended the most valuable assistance and advice, and that student, encouraged by the praise of the demonstrator, burned high with ambitious hopes, and saw the medal already in his grasp.

Before the week was out Macfarlane’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Fettes had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his mind that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride. Of his accomplice he saw but little. They met, of course, in the business of the class; they received their orders together from Mr. K——. At times they had a word or two in private, and Macfarlane was from first to last particularly kind and jovial. But it was plain that he avoided any reference to their common secret; and even when Fettes whispered to him that he had cast in his lot with the lions and foresworn the lambs, he only signed to him smilingly to hold his peace.

At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer union. Mr. K——was again short of subjects; pupils were eager, and it was a part of this teacher’s pretensions to be always well supplied. At the same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of Glencorse. Time has little changed the place in question. It stood then, as now, upon a cross road, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural church. The Resurrection Manay—to use a byname of the period—was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs, the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys.

Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that faraway city that she had always honoured with her Sunday’s best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.

Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission—a cold, dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening. They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher’s Tryst, to have a toast before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of ale. When they reached their journey’s end the gig was housed, the horse was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold, incongruous work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of the meal. With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane handed a little pile of gold to his companion.

“A compliment,” he said. “Between friends these little d—d accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights.”

Fettes pocketed the money, and applauded the sentiment to the echo. “You are a philosopher,” he cried. “I was an ass till I knew you. You and K——between you, by the Lord Harry! but you’ll make a man of me.”

“Of course, we shall,” applauded Macfarlane. “A man? I tell you, it required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big, brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look of the d—d thing; but not you—you kept your head. I watched you.”

“Well, and why not?” Fettes thus vaunted himself. “It was no affair of mine. There was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on the other I could count on your gratitude, don’t you see?” And he slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.

Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant words. He may have regretted that he had taught his young companion so successfully, but he had no time to interfere, for the other noisily continued in this boastful strain:

“The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don’t want to hang—that’s practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities—they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them. Here’s to the memory of Gray!”

It was by this time growing somewhat late. The gig, according to order, was brought round to the door with both lamps brightly shining, and the young men had to pay their bill and take the road. They announced that they were bound for Pee bles, and drove in that direction till they were clear of the last houses of the town; then, extinguishing the lamps, returned upon their course, and followed a by-road toward Glencorse. There was no sound but that of their own passage, and the incessant, strident pouring of the rain. It was pitch dark; here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through that resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the sunken woods that traverse the neighbourhood of the burying-ground the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and reillu mine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping trees, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours.

They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade; and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid. At the same moment Macfarlane, having hurt his hand upon a stone, flung it carelessly above his head. The grave, in which they now stood almost to the shoulders, was close to the edge of the plateau of the graveyard; and the gig lamp had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours, against a tree, and on the immediate verge of the steep bank descending to the stream. Chance had taken a sure aim with the stone. Then came a clang of broken glass; night fell upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing announced the bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had dislodged in its descent, rattled behind it into the profundities of the glen; and then silence, like night, resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing to its utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now marching to the wind, now steadily falling over miles of open country.

They were so nearly at an end of their abhorred task that they judged it wisest to complete it in the dark. The coffin was exhumed and broken open; the body inserted in the dripping sack and carried between them to the gig; one mounted to keep it in its place, and the other, taking the horse by the mouth, groped along by wall and bush until they reached the wider road by the Fisher’s Tryst. Here was a faint, diffused radiancy, which they hailed like daylight; by that they pushed the horse to a good pace and began to rattle along merrily in the direction of the town.

They had both been wetted to the skin during their operations, and now, as the gig jumped among the deep ruts, the thing that stood propped between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured jest about the farmer’s wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon their shoulders, and now the drenching sackcloth would flap icily about their faces. A creeping chill began to possess the soul of Fettes. He peered at the bundle, and it seemed somehow larger than at first. All over the countryside, and from every degree of distance, the farm dogs accompanied their passage with tragic ululations; and it grew and grew upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling.

“For God’s sake,” said he, making a great effort to arrive at speech, “for God’s sake, let’s have a light!”

Seemingly Macfarlane was affected in the same direction; for, though he made no reply, he stopped the horse, passed the reins to his companion, got down, and proceeded to kindle the remaining lamp. They had by that time got no farther than the cross-road down to Auchenclinny. The rain still poured as though the deluge were returning, and it was no easy matter to make a light in such a world of wet and darkness. When at last the flickering blue flame had been transferred to the wick and began to expand and clarify, and shed a wide circle of misty brightness round the gig, it became possible for the two young men to see each other and the thing they had along with them. The rain had moulded the rough sacking to the outlines of the body underneath; the head was distinct from the trunk, the shoulders plainly modelled; something at once spectral and human riveted their eyes upon the ghastly comrade of their drive.

For some time Macfarlane stood motionless, holding up the lamp. A nameless dread was swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body, and tightened the white skin upon the face of Fettes; a fear that was meaningless, a horror of what could not be, kept mounting to his brain. Another beat of the watch, and he had spoken. But his comrade forestalled him.

“That is not a woman,” said Macfarlane, in a hushed voice.

“It was a woman when we put her in,” whispered Fettes.

“Hold that lamp,” said the other. “I must see her face.”

And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the sack and drew down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear upon the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams of both of these young men. A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own side into the roadway; the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse, terrified by this unusual commotion, bounded and went off toward Edinburgh at a gallop, bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig, the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.

Markheim

MARKHEIM

“Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas Day,” he resumed, “when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you today very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, “You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tiptoe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

“This time,” said he, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand today is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence. “Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he went on, “this hand-glass-fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.”

The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the hand that now received the glass.

“A glass,” he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?”

“And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask me why not?” he said. “Why, look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do you like to see it? No! nor I—nor any man.”

The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard-favoured,” said he.

“I ask you,” said Markheim, “for a Christmas present, and you give me this—this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies—this hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?”

The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

“What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

“Not charitable?” returned the other gloomily. “Not charitable ; not pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

“I will tell you what it is,” began the dealer, with some sharpness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. “But I see this is a love match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady’s health.”

“Ah!” cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that.”

“I,” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time today for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

“Where is the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure—no, not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff’s edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it—a cliff a mile high—high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other: why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows, we might become friends?”

“I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop!”

“True, true,” said Markheim. “Enough fooling. To business. Show me something else.”

The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat; he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different emotions were depicted together on his face—terror, horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

“This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer: and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow, as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must lie till it was found. Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. “Time was that when the brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice—one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz—the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumour of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, “out for the day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a stir of delicate footing—he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again beheld the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground storey was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking and departed.

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence—his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that, the keys.

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression: but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair-day in a fishers’ village: a grey day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad-singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried overhead in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes.az The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums. A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his mind to realise the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horol ogist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor.

With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the keys and advanced towards the open door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his muscles, and drew back the door.

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop, he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he would possess his soul! And then again, and hearkening with ever fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about God Himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing-cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbours. Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing-case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned.

“Did you call me?” he asked pleasantly, and with that he entered the room and closed the door behind him.

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

“I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”

“You know me?” cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favourite of mine,” he said; “and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”

“What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”

“What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I propose to render you.”

“It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!”

“I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”

“Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid ; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself.”

“To me?” inquired the visitant.

“To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were intelligent. I thought—since you exist—you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity—the unwilling sinner?”

“All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply, “but it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?”

“For what price?” asked Markheim.

“I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. “No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil.”

“I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.

“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.

“I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”

“And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”

“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offer to forward your escape.”

“I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But today, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.”

“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?”

“Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”

“This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor quietly.

“Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.

“That also you will lose,” said the other.

The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyr doms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”

But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world,” said he, “through many changes of fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you.”

“It is true,” Markheim said huskily, “I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings.”

“I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”

“In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. “No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”

“Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down.”

Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show you the money?”

“And grace?” cried Markheim.

“Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?”

“It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at least for what I am.”

At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour.

“The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let here in, with an assured but rather serious countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night, if needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up! he cried; ”up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and act!”

Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even as they brightened, faded and dis limned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the farther side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour.

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

“You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your master.”

Endnotes

1 (p. 18) loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him: Utterson’s disgust for Hyde’s physical deformity taps into a flourishing contemporary discourse about evolution, disease, and degeneracy. The new science of evolution had dissolved boundaries between men and monkeys, and later nineteenth-century biologists and criminologists such as Cesare Lombroso began to argue that it was not social but biological differences that distinguished criminals from respectable citizens.

2 (p. 26) first fog of the season: London’s notoriously heavy fogs were caused by pollution due to smoke and sulfur dioxide from coal fires. The gaslit street lamps introduced early in the nineteenth century did little to combat the effects of fog.

3 (p. 59) “transcendental medicine”: In framing their disagreement, Jekyll invokes against Lanyon’s modern scientific arguments an older tradition that goes back to the alchemist Paracelsus and beyond, in which the human body is understood not as a mechanical entity but as a coalescence of spiritual and occult forces.

4 (p. 206) I shall here designate by the letter K: In Edinburgh in 1827 and 1828, two Irish-born men, William Burke and William Hare, killed at least fifteen people and sold the corpses of their victims to a surgeon named Robert Knox, who used the bodies for dissection in his school of anatomy. When the murderers’ crimes were discovered, Hare turned king’s evidence and testified against Burke, who was tried, found guilty, executed, and then publicly dissected. Burke claimed to his death that Knox knew nothing about the crimes, but popular sentiment implicated him in the murders.

Inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories

Immediately upon the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886, people wanted to see it. A stage adaptation opened on May 9, 1887, in Boston, starring the preeminent theater actor Richard Mansfield. The role was a career-defining one for Mansfield, and the public’s enjoyment of the play became deeply associated with the performance of the male lead.

With the mushrooming popularity of film in the early twentieth century, more than a dozen adaptations of Stevenson’s classic were quickly produced. But it wasn’t until 1920, with Paramount’s spectacular movie depiction of Dr. , jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by John Stuart Robertson, that the dominance of an actor of Mansfield’s caliber was captured on film. With the celebrated John Barrymore cast in the duplicitous lead, Robertson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is considered the definitive silent version of Stevenson’s thriller. Atmospheric and creepy, Robertson’s film is laden with careful detail; one distinctive feature is the look of Mr. Hyde—long, sinewy fingers and an elongated, pointed head—reminiscent of the vampire in the classic Nosferatu. But Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is ultimately a vehicle for Barrymore’s talents. The props and special effects pale in comparison with Barrymore’s “flawless performance,” as the New York Times described it; specifically, by distorting and disfiguring his face by expression alone, Barrymore achieves the effect of transforming his very nature from respectable to despicable. Indeed, his onscreen metamorphosis has served as the inspiration for many a subsequent movie transformation, whether a man changing into a werewolf or Dracula’s teeth growing long and feral at the prospect of new blood. Resplendent with visual detail and Barrymore’s tour de-force acting, Robertson’s Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a landmark of the silent-film era.

The first sound adaptation of Stevenson’s classic—and arguably the most successful—is Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In it Mamoulian (The Mark of Zorro) makes the claim that man’s evil side stems wholly from lust. Fredric March plays Jekyll and Hyde, and his portrayal is inspired by a dark sexuality, much of which was later censored (and then restored). The film’s brilliance lies in the ability of Mamoulian and March to generate sympathy for Jekyll while tackling potentially scandalous content. A master of technique and style, Mamoulian conveys the twin psychologies of Jekyll and Hyde through montage, dissolves, the relatively new technology of sound dynamics, and, perhaps most crucially, a large number of subjective, point-of-view shots draping the edges of the frame in fog and shadow.

The film opens with Jekyll holding a piano recital before an esteemed audience. The constant point-of-view shots during Jekyll’s performance establish in viewers of the film an immediate affinity with and compassion for Jekyll, laying the groundwork for the audience’s heartbreak at his later transformation. With the change into Mr. Hyde, March’s features turn simian and monstrously toothy. The actor makes the two selves play out on his face throughout the film in a way that powerfully conveys Jekyll’s anxiety and pathetic disintegration and Hyde’s grotesque animalism and perversity.

March’s portrayal of Hyde arrived onscreen the same year as Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, but Hyde was the scar iest monster of all, his jilted sociopathy hitting much closer to home than the situations of the other two protagonists. His performance (some moviegoers believed his part was played by two actors) won him an Oscar for Best Actor. The Academy also nominated the film for Best Cinematography and Best Screenplay.

In 1941 director Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind) oversaw a production of Jekyll and Hyde that declares there is no evil in the world, only insanity—good gone horribly mad. Fleming’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde stars Spencer Tracy as the Samaritan scientist dedicated to proving this theory; Tracy is supported by Ingrid Bergman as the loose barmaid and Lana Turner as his virtuous fiancée. Fleming punctuates Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde with a disturbing and sexually suggestive dream sequence, which provides some of the film’s finest moments. But overall this movie seems polite rather than provocative, especially when compared to Mamoulian’s 1931 version.

Widely spoofed, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story has enjoyed many cinematic parodies—notable among them Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride (1925), starring Stan Laurel; the inevitable Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953); Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor (1963); and the gender-bending Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (1995).

Valerie Martin’s 1990 novel Mary Reilly, the story of Jekyll and Hyde told from the point of view of an Irish chamber-maid, was made into a 1996 film directed by Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons). A foggy gloominess pervades the picture, providing a slow, oozing pace and lending to the principal players—Julia Roberts as Mary Reilly and John Malkovich as Jekyll/Hyde—a color-drained, ghostly pallor. As the story unfolds we learn that Reilly was abused by her father yet refuses to hate him for it. This complex emotional response on the part of his maid draws Jekyll to her, as his own personality becomes increasingly complex and potentially unlovable. This unique version of the story confuses the good-versus-evil dichotomy of previous adaptations. By positioning Reilly-who falls in love with both Jekyll and Hyde—as the storyteller, the qualities and flaws of the pure and lofty Jekyll and of the animalistic Hyde come to the surface. Indeed, in Mary Reilly the figures of Jekyll and Hyde complete each other, and together constitute the recipe for human nature.

Jekyll and Hyde are not the only Stevenson characters to be transported into film. “The Body-Snatcher” was made into a “golden age” monsterfest, The Body Snatcher, in 1945, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. And “The Suicide Club” has inspired several adaptations, including one produced by horror-film legend Roger Corman in 2000.

Comments Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of persibectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

COMMENTS

HENRY JAMES

Is “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions? It has the stamp of a really imaginative production, that we may take it in different ways, but I suppose it would be called the most serious of the author’s tales. It deals with the relation of the baser parts of man to his nobler—of the capacity for evil that exists in the most generous natures, and it expresses these things in a fable which is a wonderfully happy invention. The subject is endlessly interesting, and rich in all sorts of provocation, and Mr. Stevenson is to be congratulated on having touched the core of it. I may do him injustice, but it is, however, here, not the profundity of the idea which strikes me so much as the art of the presentation—the extremely successful form. There is a genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad, but what there is above all is a singular ability in holding the interest. I confess that that, to my sense, is the most edifying thing in the short, rapid, concentrated story, which is really a masterpiece of concision.

—from Century Illustrated (April 1888)

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW

The [book by Stevenson] which has most of a dream’s vivid pictorial quality is undoubtedly The Strange Case ofDr.jekyll and Mr. Hyde. What piece of prose is less likely to be forgotten? To begin with, the central idea, strange as it is, at once comes home to everybody. The double personality, which the very habit of a dream-land existence must have forced in upon Mr. Stevenson, corresponds with facts of which we are all obscurely conscious. It heightens immensely the interest of a book thus to carry an allegory on the very face of it, provided that the allegory does not interfere with the illusion, but speaks the moral with the poignancy of life itself. Further, this is the only case where Mr. Stevenson, working by himself, has used a mystery; and most skillfully it is used in the opening chapters to stimulate curiosity.

—December 1894

THE NATION

‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ despite the unifying effect of its strong and serious art, bears unmistakable testimony to what we have vaguely called the uncertainty of this middle period. The book is at once an apologue, a wonder-story, and a genuine romantic fiction of a high type. Fables are out of fashion, and we should prefer, therefore, to call ‘Dr. Jekyll’ a psychological fiction; but this would be mere juggling with names. ‘Markheim’ is openly an apologue, and ‘Dr. Jekyll’ carries as patent and intentional a moral as ‘Markheim.’ The curiously comparative might even construct a form of proportion with the nineteenth century and ‘Dr. Jekyll’ on one side and on the other the eighteenth century and ‘The Vision of Mirzah.’ The plot itself combines extravaganza with serious romance. In those parts in which the work is genuine and impressive, ‘Dr. Jekyll’ marks a high state of Stevenson’s romantic power. The weak point, at once detected by the critics, is a mere bit of fantastic detail, worked into the inmost structure of the fiction. We refer to the chemical hocus-pocus-a desperate expedient, not quite consistently carried out.... The trick of “transcendental medicine” was perhaps the only trick that would do the business, but it was a poor trick. Jekyll changing into Hyde in his sleep, he knows not how, is terrific; Jekyll taking the draught is not even impressive. One wishes that the means of the transformation had been left unexplained. But this was not Stevenson’s way. He is habitually complaisant to the reader who “wants to know.”

—January 9, 1896

BRADFORD TORREY

Stevenson could afford to be generous; he had always good things enough and to spare. His was a mind incessantly active. He was always covering paper. If only disease would leave him strength enough to hold the pen, he could be trusted to keep it going. Ideas thronged upon him; books by the dozen, one may almost say, stood waiting for him to make them. The more wonder that, with all this excess of fertility, he could yet rewrite and rewrite, and then write again, still on the search for perfection. Surely the artist was strong in him.

—from the Atlantic Monthly (June 1902)

QUESTIONS

1. The Nation criticizes Stevenson for his use of “chemical hocus-pocus” in explaining Dr. Jekyll’s transformation. How better could he have resolved his tale? Would the story have been stronger if Mr. Hyde never changed back?

2. . “Man is not truly one, but truly two,” says Dr. Jekyll. Is he right? Do you feel in yourself a Hyde struggling to get out?

3. How would you define the part of the self that Hyde represents ? All that we yearn for but deny ourselves? Whatever is taboo or forbidden? Lust?

4. . What would you say is the source of the Hyde component in one’s personality: Original sin? An evolutionary urge that is no longer adaptive? Puritanical repression? Corrupting social images, as from television and movies?

5. What do you make of Hyde’s appearance? (He is small and subtly deformed.) Do you think he should have been depicted as tall and hypermuscular, or obese and debauched, or pale and cadaverous? Why? (Or why not?) Is there a specific meaning in, or reason for, Hyde’s appearance?

6. Should we blame Jekyll for Hyde’s behavior? What do you think of the fact that it becomes harder and harder to reverse the transformation—from Hyde back to Jekyll?

For Further Reading

BIOGRAPHIES AND LETTERS

Bell, Ian. Robert Louis Stevenson: Dreams of Exile. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1992.

Calder, Jenni. RLS: A Life Study. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980.

Callow, Philip. Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.

Dury, Richard, ed. The Robert Louis Stevenson Web Site. http://wwwesterni.unibg.it/siti_esterni/rls/rls.htm. A useful site devoted to the author’s life and works.

McLynn, Frank. Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography. London: Hutchinson, 1993.

Mehew, Ernest, ed. Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1997.

“Stevenson, Robert Louis.” Encyclopcedia Britannica. 2003. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/eb/ article?eu = 71476.

CRITICAL STUDIES

Calder, Jenni, ed. Stevenson and Victorian Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981.

Chesterton, G. K. Robert Louis Stevenson. 1927. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928.

Daiches, David. Robert Louis Stevenson and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Geduld, Harry M., ed. The Definitive Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Companion. New York: Garland, 1983.

Kiely, Robert. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Knight, Alanna, comp. The Robert Louis Stevenson Treasury. London : Shepheard-Walwyn, 1985.

Maixner, Paul, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.

Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Finde-siècle. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.

Terry, R. C. Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996.

Veeder, William, and Gordon Hirsch, eds. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: After One Hundred Years. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

CULTURAL AND LITERARY CONTEXTS

Bell, Ian, ed. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Complete Short Stories. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Mainstream 1993 (Centenary edition); New York: Henry Holt, 1994.

Danahay, Martin, ed. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999.

Marshall, Tim. Murdering to Dissect: Grave-Robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature. Manchester, England, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Richardson, Ruth. Death, Dissection, and the Destitute. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

OTHER WORKS CITED IN THE INTRODUCTION

Cornwell, Patricia. Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002.

Rumbelow, Donald. The Complete Jack the Ripper. London: W. H. Allen, 1975.

Wilstach, Paul. Richard Mansfield, the Man and the Actor. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908.

a

Reference to the Bible, Genesis 4:9, and Cain’s famous question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (New King James Version; henceforth, NKJV) .

b

An institution, practice, or notion to which persons blindly devote themselves, or are ruthlessly sacrificed (Oxford English Dictionary; henceforth, OED) .

c

Slang for a surgeon or physician.

d

A leading London bank, acting for many members of the British and foreign royalty and located in the Strand.

e

Imaginary street where people in difficulties are supposed to reside (OED).

f

Jekyll is a Doctor of Medicine, a Doctor of Civil Law, a Doctor of Laws, and a Fellow of the Royal Society; the list emphasizes the excellence of his credentials.

g

Square in London’s West End and the heart of the doctors’ quarter.

h

According to Greek legend, Damon and Pythias were close friends. Pythias, condemned to death by the tyrant Dionysius, obtains leave to put his affairs in order on the condition that Damon be executed in his place should he not return. A delay ensues, resulting in Damon’s being led to execution, but Pythias arrives in time to save him. Impressed by the strength of their friendship, Dionysius spares them both.

i

Act of drawing deeds, leases, or other writings for transferring the title to property.

j

London’s shabby red-light district; also home to many immigrants.

k

Reference to a verse attributed to seventeenth-century satirist Tom Brown: “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,/The reason why I cannot tell;/But this I know, and know full well,/I do not like thee, Dr. Fell”; the verse is a parody of a well-known epigram by the Roman poet Martial (c. A.D. 40-104).

l

Punishment comes limping—that is, slowly but surely; a quotation from Horace, Odes, book 3, ode 2.

m

Headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in London, located in Stevenson’s day at No. 4. Whitehall, Westminster.

n

Full-length mirror swung on a frame.

o

Member of Parliament (House of Commons).

p

Light, two-wheeled, covered one-horse carriage with the driver’s seat behind and above the passenger compartment, such as a cabriolet (hence the abbreviation “cab”).

q

Lantern containing a hemispherical lens of glass that resembles a bull’s eye.

r

Glass vessel marked with precise volume measurements.

s

Reference to the Bible, Acts 16:26, when the apostle Paul prayed in prison at Philippi: “Suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were loosed” (NKJV).

t

Reference to the ominous appearance at Belshazzar’s feast of the fingers of a human hand that “appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace”; see the Bible, Daniel 5:5 (NKJV) . The image is also the subject of well-known paintings by Rembrandt (1635), John Martin (1820), and others.

u

Reference to the Bible, 2 Kings 2:11, where Elias, or Elijah, was carried directly to heaven by “a chariot of fire” led by “horses of fire” (NKJV).

v

Impossible for men (Latin).

w

Consumptive; like Villon, Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from serious weakness of the lungs.

x

To whom God gives woman (Latin).

y

Name of the prince in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

z

Seedy Soho eating establishment; in nineteenth-century London, oysters were a distinctly lower-class food.

aa

Reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 3, scene 1) and Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” speech, specifically the phrase “shuffled off this mortal coil” to describe death.

ab

One of the great Victorian railway stations, built in 1863 and located near Trafalgar Square and the Strand.

ac

Thrown out of his regiment for breaking the gentleman’s code of honor.

ad

Baron Franz von der Trenck (1711-1747) committed suicide by taking poison while in prison.

ae

Reference to Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), which led to a spate of popular caricatures on man’s supposed descent from monkeys.

af

Possible reference to Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), whose deeply pessimistic Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) argued that populations always expand faster than the food supplies necessary to support them.

ag

This story was first published in The London Magazine in 1878 as part of a series called “Latter-Day Arabian Nights” and subsequently included in a book of collected works titled New Arabian Nights (London: Chatto and Win dus, 1882).

ah

Explored with medical instruments, emphasizing the mechanical rather than spiritual properties of human beings.

ai

Large trunk, often with a rounded top, used for travel.

aj

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British army fought many wars in India, both to suppress Indian revolts against British rule and to extend the British sphere of influence in central Asia.

ak

Overcoat, topcoat, or cloak.

al

Gaming-house.

am

Reference to the Bible, Joshua 4:2: “Take for yourselves twelve men from the people, one man from every tribe” (NKJV).

an

Literally, a deer park; also, the mansion on the grounds of the palace at Versailles where King Louis XV seduced young women.

ao

South of Kirkcaldy, in Fife, Scotland.

ap

Perhaps a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet (act 3, scene 4)—specifically, Hamlet’s description of the elderly Polonius as “a foolish prating knave.”

aq

Reference to the superstitious belief that a witch could not die by drowning.

ar

Scottish folklore often depicts the devil as a “black man.”

as

The speaker stresses that even the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), known for his denunciations of organized religion, might have “recanted” his atheism in such circumstances.

at

Burke was one of a pair of notorious Edinburgh murderers who killed their victims for profit and sold them to surgeon Robert Knox for dissection; see endnote 4.

au

Sociable and cultivated person who enjoys food and drink.

av

Narrow street or passage turning off from a main thoroughfare; a narrow cross-street, lane, or alley (OED).

aw

Reference to a Latin phrase often found in epitaphs, Hodie mihi, cras tibi, which means “It is my turn today, yours tomorrow.”

ax

Reference to the halter used to hang criminals sentenced to death.

ay

Name for a type of grave robber who supplied surgeons with cadavers for dissection.

az

References to notorious nineteenth-century murderers.