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 least, 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
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