Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Search for Mr. Hyde

That Sunday evening Mr. Utterson came home in a dark mood, and instead of reading by the fire until midnight as usual, he took a candle to his business room and opened his safe.From it he took an envelope marked “Dr. Jekyll’s Will” and read the document again with a troubled frown.The will said that if Henry Jekyll died, everything he owned should go to his “friend and benefactor Edward Hyde”, and that if Jekyll disappeared for more than three months, Hyde should take his place at once.

The lawyer had always disliked this document, but until now Hyde had been only a name; after Enfield’s story, the name had become a monster.“I thought it was madness,” he said as he locked the paper away, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.”He went straight to Cavendish Square to see Dr. Lanyon, a cheerful, red-faced doctor who had been his friend and Jekyll’s since their school days.

But Lanyon said he saw little of Jekyll now: more than ten years ago Jekyll had become “too fanciful” for him, full of unscientific nonsense.And he had never heard of anyone called Hyde.That night Utterson could not sleep; he kept seeing a figure without a face walking swiftly through the lamplit city and trampling a child, and he longed to see the real Mr. Hyde just once.

From then on he watched the strange door in the side street morning, noon and night, thinking, “If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.”At last, on a cold, clear night, a small, plainly dressed man came quickly down the street with a key in his hand, and Utterson stepped out and touched his shoulder: “Mr. Hyde, I think?”Hyde shrank back with a hiss, then coolly asked what he wanted, and when Utterson asked to see his face, he turned and stared at him in defiance, and even gave him his address in Soho.

But when Utterson said that Jekyll had described him, Hyde cried angrily, “He never told you! I did not think you would have lied,” and with a savage laugh he vanished through the door.Utterson could not explain the disgust and fear he felt; Hyde was pale and dwarfish, with an ugly smile and a whispering voice, yet there was something more, something hardly human.“O my poor old Harry Jekyll,” he thought, “if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

Round the corner stood Jekyll’s fine old house, and Poole, the butler, told him that the doctor was out, that Mr. Hyde had a key to the old laboratory door, and that the servants had orders to obey him.Walking home with a heavy heart, Utterson decided that Jekyll must be paying for some sin of his wild youth, and he feared that Hyde, if he knew about the will, might grow impatient to inherit.