The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde

Search for Ms. Hyde

That evening Mrs. Utterson came home to her bachelor house in somber spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was her custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on her reading desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when she would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, she took up a candle and went into her business room. There she opened her safe once more, 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. As far as her memory served her, this was the first time she had examined the document. The will was holograph, for Mrs. Utterson though she 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 Katherine Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S., etc., all her possessions were to pass into the hands of her friend and benefactor Elizabeth Hyde, but that in case of Dr. Jekyll's disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months, the said Elizabeth Hyde should step into the said Katherine 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 her 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 her ignorance of Ms. Hyde that had swelled her indignation; now, by a sudden turn, it was her knowledge. It was already bad enough when the name was but a name of which she 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 her eye, there leaped up the sudden, definite presentment of a fiend.

"I thought it was madness," she said, as she replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, "and now I begin to fear it is disgrace."

With that she blew out her candle, put on a greatcoat, and set forth in the direction of Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine, where her friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had her house and received her crowding patients. "If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon," she had thought.

The solemn butler knew and welcomed her; she was subjected to no stage of delay, but ushered direct from the door to the dining-room where Dr. Lanyon sat alone over her wine. This was a hearty, healthy, dapper, red-faced woman, with a shock of hair prematurely white, and a boisterous and decided manner. At sight of Mrs. Utterson, she sprang up from her chair and welcomed her with both hands. The geniality, as was the way of the lady, 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, women who thoroughly enjoyed each other's company.

After a little rambling talk, the lawyer led up to the subject which so disagreeably preoccupied her mind.

"I suppose, Lanyon, said he, you and I must be the two oldest friends that Katherine Jekyll has?"

"I wish the friends were younger," chuckled Dr. Lanyon. "But I suppose we are. And what of that? I see little of her 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 Katherine Jekyll became too fanciful for me. She began to go wrong, wrong in mind; and though of course I continue to take an interest in her for old sake's sake, as they say, I see, and I have seen devilish little of the lady. Such unscientific balderdash," added the doctor, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged Damon and Pythias."

This little spirit of temper was somewhat of a relief to Mrs. Utterson. "They have only differed on some point of science," she thought; and being a lady of no scientific passions (except in the matter of conveyancing), she even added: "It is nothing worse than that!" She gave her friend a few seconds to recover her composure, and then approached the question she had come to put. "Did you ever come across a protege of her–one Hyde?" she asked.