Carolyn: ..."Jekyll is more endangered by the confrontation with the child's family (he might be exposed) and he, Jekyll, can only escape by paying kinbote for Hyde's criminal act. Even though RLS was trained to the law and may have known the word kinbote, his readers would not". 

Jansy:

(1) I would interpret this story differently, though. I cannot forget the Erlking theme and your words brought up a "kinbote payment" for a child that had been trampled down or killed by a monstrous seducer.  I don't think it applies to Hazel, inspite of the countrapunctal theme involving her frosty swamp suicide and the television programs the Shades had been watching while waiting up for her, with the branches of a tree rasping against the window. 

In my opinion, VN might have extracted the "kinbote" meaning from the familiar RLS's work ( cryptomnesically or not) to add  it to his novel where it would operate as a kind of extension of  Humbert Humbert's indebtness to Lolita.

 

(2) We might also imagine that, by inverting the perspective, this "kinbote" becomes a statement concerning a small boy's right to extract a payment from his seducer.  I'm not very familiar with what in English is "Jack Frost" but I found there is a Russian folkstory about "King Frost" and a dead child. It has a thematic similarity with Grimm's "Frau Holle" and where a compliant child gets a princely reward while the reluctant one is punished with shame or death by exposure.

 

(3) I found a curious sentence in VN's story " A Russian Beauty" that reminded me of the fate of Pale Fire's waxwing: did he "live on"  because he "hit the target...of a reflected sky"? 

Its last lines are:  "That's all. Of course, there may be some sort of sequel, but it is not known to me. In such cases, instead of getting bogged down in guesswork, I repeat the words of the merry king in my favorite fairy tale: Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark."