Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Last Night

One evening in March, Poole arrived at Mr. Utterson’s house, pale and shaking, and said, “Mr. Utterson, there is something wrong.”The doctor had shut himself up in the cabinet again, and for a week Poole had been afraid; now he could bear it no more, and he thought there had been foul play.Utterson took his hat and coat at once, and they went out into a wild, cold night, with a pale moon and a wind that had swept the streets empty.

In Jekyll’s hall all the servants stood huddled around the fire like frightened sheep, and the housemaid began to cry when she saw the lawyer.Poole took a candle and led Utterson through the laboratory to the foot of the stairs, warning him, “If by any chance he was to ask you in, don’t go.”Then he knocked on the red door and called out that Mr. Utterson wished to see the doctor, and a voice inside answered, “Tell him I cannot see anyone.”

Back in the kitchen, Poole looked Utterson in the eye: “Was that my master’s voice? Have I been twenty years in this man’s house, to be deceived about his voice?”He believed his master had been killed eight days ago, when they heard him cry out the name of God, and that something else was hiding in the cabinet.All week the thing inside had thrown notes onto the stairs, sending Poole to every chemist in London for a certain drug and always sending it back as not pure; one note ended with a desperate cry: “For God’s sake, find me some of the old.”

Worst of all, Poole had once seen the figure digging among the crates: it wore a mask, cried out like a rat and ran upstairs, and it was far smaller than his tall master.Utterson tried to explain it as an illness that changed a man’s face and voice, but Poole said, “That thing was not my master. I give you my bible-word it was Mr. Hyde!”At last Utterson agreed that it was his duty to break down the door, and Poole would bring the axe from the theatre while the lawyer took the kitchen poker.

They sent the footman Bradshaw and the kitchen boy round to guard the laboratory door in the side street, and then sat down in the dark to wait.Above them a light footstep went up and down, up and down the cabinet floor, nothing like Henry Jekyll’s heavy tread.“Is there never anything else?” whispered Utterson, and Poole nodded. “Once I heard it weeping, like a woman or a lost soul.”