“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?” 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, 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 arms 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.