Complete Works of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens Novels

2006-09-22T00:25:00.000-07:00

BLEAK HOUSE

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Book the First--Recalled to Life

Book the Second--the Golden Thread

Book the Third--the Track of a Storm

More Coming Soon..........

0114 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 15

2006-09-16T22:51:00.001-07:00

The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh.
Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the
devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could
record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet
there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate,
a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to
maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced
this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar
hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.
Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again,
and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to
be the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles,
the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my
father's house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving
peasants! No; the great magician who majestically works out the
appointed order of the Creator, never reverses his transformations.
"If thou be changed into this shape by the will of God," say the
seers to the enchanted, in the wise Arabian stories, "then remain so!
But, if thou wear this form through mere passing conjuration, then resume
thy former aspect!" Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along.

As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough
up a long crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges
of faces are thrown to this side and to that, and the ploughs go
steadily onward. So used are the regular inhabitants of the houses
to the spectacle, that in many windows there are no people,
and in some the occupation of the hands is not so much as suspended,
while the eyes survey the faces in the tumbrils. Here and there,
the inmate has visitors to see the sight; then he points his finger,
with something of the complacency of a curator or authorised exponent,
to this cart and to this, and seems to tell who sat here yesterday,
and who there the day before.

Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all
things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare; others, with
a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated with
drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so
heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances
as they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Several close their
eyes, and think, or try to get their straying thoughts together.
Only one, and he a miserable creature, of a crazed aspect, is so
shattered and made drunk by horror, that he sings, and tries to
dance. Not one of the whole number appeals by look or gesture, to
the pity of the people.

There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils,
and faces are often turned up to some of them, and they are asked
some question. It would seem to be always the same question, for,
it is always followed by a press of people towards the third cart.
The horsemen abreast of that cart, frequently point out one man in it
with their swords. The leading curiosity is, to know which is he;
he stands at the back of the tumbril with his head bent down,
to converse with a mere girl who sits on the side of the cart,
and holds his hand. He has no curiosity or care for the scene about him,
and always speaks to the girl. Here and there in the long street
of St. Honore, cries are raised against him. If they move him at all,
it is only to a quiet smile, as he shakes his hair a little more
loosely about his face. He cannot easily touch his face, his arms
being bound.

On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tumbrils,
stands the Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of them:
not there. He looks into the second: not there. He already asks
himself, "Has he sacrificed me?" when his face clears, as he looks
into the third.

"Which is Evremonde?" says a man behind him.

"That. At the back there."

"With his hand in the girl's?"

"Yes."

The man cries, "Down, Evremonde! To the Guillotine all aristocrats!
Down, Evremonde!"

"Hush, hush!" the Spy entreats him, timidly.

"And why not, citizen?"

"He is going to pay the forfeit: it will be paid in five minutes more.
Let him be at peace."

But the man continuing to exclaim, "Down, Evremonde!" the face of
Evremonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evremonde then sees
the Spy, and looks attentively at him, and goes his way.

The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed among
the populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution,
and end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that, now crumble in
and close behind the last plough as it passes on, for all are following
to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in chairs, as in a garden
of public diversion, are a number of women, busily knitting. On one
of the fore-most chairs, stands The Vengeance, looking about for her friend.

"Therese!" she cries, in her shrill tones. "Who has seen her?
Therese Defarge!"

"She never missed before," says a knitting-woman of the sisterhood.

"No; nor will she miss now," cries The Vengeance, petulantly. "Therese."

"Louder," the woman recommends.

Ay! Louder, Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely hear
thee. Louder yet, Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, and yet
it will hardly bring her. Send other women up and down to seek her,
lingering somewhere; and yet, although the messengers have done dread
deeds, it is questionable whether of their own wills they will go far
enough to find her!

"Bad Fortune!" cries The Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair,
"and here are the tumbrils! And Evremonde will be despatched in a
wink, and she not here! See her knitting in my hand, and her empty
chair ready for her. I cry with vexation and disappointment!"

As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the tumbrils
begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine
are robed and ready. Crash!--A head is held up, and the knitting-
women who scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when
it could think and speak, count One.

The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third comes up. Crash!
--And the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their Work,
count Two.

The supposed Evremonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out
next after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting
out, but still holds it as he promised. He gently places her with
her back to the crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls,
and she looks into his face and thanks him.

"But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I am
naturally a poor little thing, faint of heart; nor should I have been
able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might
have hope and comfort here to-day. I think you were sent to me by Heaven."

"Or you to me," says Sydney Carton. "Keep your eyes upon me, dear child,
and mind no other object."

"I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing when
I let it go, if they are rapid."

"They will be rapid. Fear not!"

The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak
as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand,
heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so
wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway,
to repair home together, and to rest in her bosom.

"Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last
question? I am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little."

"Tell me what it is."

"I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I
love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in
a farmer's house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she
knows nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how
should I tell her! It is better as it is."

"Yes, yes: better as it is."

"What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still
thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so
much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor,
and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she
may live a long time: she may even live to be old."

"What then, my gentle sister?"

"Do you think:" the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much
endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and
tremble: "that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the
better land where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?"

"It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble
there."

"You comfort me so much! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss you now?
Is the moment come?"

"Yes."

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other.
The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than
a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next
before him--is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord:
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces,
the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd,
so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water,
all flashes away. Twenty-Three.

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the
peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked
sublime and prophetic.

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe--a woman--had
asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be
allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he
had given any utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would
have been these:

"I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the
Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the
destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument,
before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city
and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles
to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years
to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of
which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for
itself and wearing out.

"I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful,
prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more.
I see Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her
father, aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all
men in his healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so
long their friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has,
and passing tranquilly to his reward.

"I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of
their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman,
weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her
husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly
bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in
the other's soul, than I was in the souls of both.

"I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man
winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see
him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the
light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see
him, fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my
name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place--
then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement
--and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done;
it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

0113 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 14

2006-09-16T22:51:00.000-07:00

The Knitting Done

In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their fate
Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Vengeance and
Jacques Three of the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the wine-shop did
Madame Defarge confer with these ministers, but in the shed of the
wood-sawyer, erst a mender of roads. The sawyer himself did not
participate in the conference, but abided at a little distance,
like an outer satellite who was not to speak until required, or to
offer an opinion until invited.

"But our Defarge," said Jacques Three, "is undoubtedly a good
Republican? Eh?"

"There is no better," the voluble Vengeance protested in her shrill
notes, "in France."

"Peace, little Vengeance," said Madame Defarge, laying her hand with
a slight frown on her lieutenant's lips, "hear me speak. My husband,
fellow-citizen, is a good Republican and a bold man; he has deserved
well of the Republic, and possesses its confidence. But my husband
has his weaknesses, and he is so weak as to relent towards this Doctor."

"It is a great pity," croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking his
head, with his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth; "it is not quite
like a good citizen; it is a thing to regret."

"See you," said madame, "I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He may
wear his head or lose it, for any interest I have in him; it is all
one to me. But, the Evremonde people are to be exterminated, and the
wife and child must follow the husband and father."

"She has a fine head for it," croaked Jacques Three. "I have seen
blue eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson
held them up." Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.

Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little.

"The child also," observed Jacques Three, with a meditative enjoyment
of his words, "has golden hair and blue eyes. And we seldom have a
child there. It is a pretty sight!"

"In a word," said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short abstraction,
"I cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only do I feel, since
last night, that I dare not confide to him the details of my projects;
but also I feel that if I delay, there is danger of his giving warning,
and then they might escape."

"That must never be," croaked Jacques Three; "no one must escape.
We have not half enough as it is. We ought to have six score a day."

"In a word," Madame Defarge went on, "my husband has not my reason
for pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not his reason
for regarding this Doctor with any sensibility. I must act for myself,
therefore. Come hither, little citizen."

The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the
submission, of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap.

"Touching those signals, little citizen," said Madame Defarge,
sternly, "that she made to the prisoners; you are ready to bear
witness to them this very day?"

"Ay, ay, why not!" cried the sawyer. "Every day, in all weathers,
from two to four, always signalling, sometimes with the little one,
sometimes without. I know what I know. I have seen with my eyes."

He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in incidental
imitation of some few of the great diversity of signals that he had
never seen.

"Clearly plots," said Jacques Three. "Transparently!"

"There is no doubt of the Jury?" inquired Madame Defarge, letting her
eyes turn to him with a gloomy smile.

"Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my
fellow-Jurymen."

"Now, let me see," said Madame Defarge, pondering again. "Yet once more!
Can I spare this Doctor to my husband? I have no feeling either way.
Can I spare him?"

"He would count as one head," observed Jacques Three, in a low voice.
"We really have not heads enough; it would be a pity, I think."

"He was signalling with her when I saw her," argued Madame Defarge;
"I cannot speak of one without the other; and I must not be silent,
and trust the case wholly to him, this little citizen here.
For, I am not a bad witness."

The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their fervent
protestations that she was the most admirable and marvellous of
witnesses. The little citizen, not to be outdone, declared her to be
a celestial witness.

"He must take his chance," said Madame Defarge. "No, I cannot spare
him! You are engaged at three o'clock; you are going to see the batch
of to-day executed.--You?"

The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly replied
in the affirmative: seizing the occasion to add that he was the most
ardent of Republicans, and that he would be in effect the most
desolate of Republicans, if anything prevented him from enjoying the
pleasure of smoking his afternoon pipe in the contemplation of the
droll national barber. He was so very demonstrative herein, that he
might have been suspected (perhaps was, by the dark eyes that looked
contemptuously at him out of Madame Defarge's head) of having his small
individual fears for his own personal safety, every hour in the day.

"I," said madame, "am equally engaged at the same place. After it is
over-say at eight to-night--come you to me, in Saint Antoine, and we
will give information against these people at my Section."

The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend the
citizeness. The citizeness looking at him, he became embarrassed,
evaded her glance as a small dog would have done, retreated among
his wood, and hid his confusion over the handle of his saw.

Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a little nearer
to the door, and there expounded her further views to them thus:

"She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. She will
be mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of mind to impeach
the justice of the Republic. She will be full of sympathy with its
enemies. I will go to her."

"What an admirable woman; what an adorable woman!" exclaimed
Jacques Three, rapturously. "Ah, my cherished!" cried The Vengeance;
and embraced her.

"Take you my knitting," said Madame Defarge, placing it in her
lieutenant's hands, "and have it ready for me in my usual seat.
Keep me my usual chair. Go you there, straight, for there will
probably be a greater concourse than usual, to-day."

"I willingly obey the orders of my Chief," said The Vengeance with
alacrity, and kissing her cheek. "You will not be late?"

"I shall be there before the commencement."

"And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my soul,"
said The Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already turned
into the street, "before the tumbrils arrive!"

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she heard, and
might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so went through the
mud, and round the corner of the prison wall. The Vengeance and the
Juryman, looking after her as she walked away, were highly appreciative
of her fine figure, and her superb moral endowments.

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a
dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more
to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the
streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and
readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not
only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to
strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities; the
troubled time would have heaved her up, under any circumstances.
But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an
inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a
tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the
virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins
of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her,
that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that
was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies
and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her,
was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself.
If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters
in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself;
nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have
gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change
places with the man who sent here there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly
worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her
dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her
bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened
dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such
a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually
walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown
sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very moment
waiting for the completion of its load, had been planned out last
night, the difficulty of taking Miss Pross in it had much engaged
Mr. Lorry's attention. It was not merely desirable to avoid
overloading the coach, but it was of the highest importance that the
time occupied in examining it and its passengers, should be reduced
to the utmost; since their escape might depend on the saving of only
a few seconds here and there. Finally, he had proposed, after anxious
consideration, that Miss Pross and Jerry, who were at liberty to
leave the city, should leave it at three o'clock in the lightest-
wheeled conveyance known to that period. Unencumbered with luggage,
they would soon overtake the coach, and, passing it and preceding it
on the road, would order its horses in advance, and greatly facilitate
its progress during the precious hours of the night, when delay was
the most to be dreaded.

Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in that
pressing emergency, Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and Jerry had
beheld the coach start, had known who it was that Solomon brought,
had passed some ten minutes in tortures of suspense, and were now
concluding their arrangements to follow the coach, even as Madame
Defarge, taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and
nearer to the else-deserted lodging in which they held their consultation.

"Now what do you think, Mr. Cruncher," said Miss Pross, whose
agitation was so great that she could hardly speak, or stand,
or move, or live: "what do you think of our not starting from this
courtyard? Another carriage having already gone from here to-day,
it might awaken suspicion."

"My opinion, miss," returned Mr. Cruncher, "is as you're right.
Likewise wot I'll stand by you, right or wrong."

"I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creatures,"
said Miss Pross, wildly crying, "that I am incapable of forming any
plan. Are YOU capable of forming any plan, my dear good Mr. Cruncher?"

"Respectin' a future spear o' life, miss," returned Mr. Cruncher,
"I hope so. Respectin' any present use o' this here blessed old head
o' mind, I think not. Would you do me the favour, miss, to take
notice o' two promises and wows wot it is my wishes fur to record in
this here crisis?"

"Oh, for gracious sake!" cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying,
"record them at once, and get them out of the way, like an excellent man."

"First," said Mr. Cruncher, who was all in a tremble, and who spoke
with an ashy and solemn visage, "them poor things well out o' this,
never no more will I do it, never no more!"

"I am quite sure, Mr. Cruncher," returned Miss Pross, "that you never
will do it again, whatever it is, and I beg you not to think it
necessary to mention more particularly what it is."

"No, miss," returned Jerry, "it shall not be named to you. Second:
them poor things well out o' this, and never no more will I interfere
with Mrs. Cruncher's flopping, never no more!"

"Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be," said Miss Pross,
striving to dry her eyes and compose herself, "I have no doubt it
is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under her own
superintendence.--O my poor darlings!"

"I go so far as to say, miss, moreover," proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with
a most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit--"and let my
words be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself--that
wot my opinions respectin' flopping has undergone a change, and that
wot I only hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping
at the present time."

"There, there, there! I hope she is, my dear man," cried the distracted
Miss Pross, "and I hope she finds it answering her expectations."

"Forbid it," proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with additional solemnity,
additional slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold
out, "as anything wot I have ever said or done should be wisited on
my earnest wishes for them poor creeturs now! Forbid it as we shouldn't
all flop (if it was anyways conwenient) to get 'em out o' this here
dismal risk! Forbid it, miss! Wot I say, for-BID it!" This was
Mr. Cruncher's conclusion after a protracted but vain endeavour
to find a better one.

And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came
nearer and nearer.

"If we ever get back to our native land," said Miss Pross, "you may
rely upon my telling Mrs. Cruncher as much as I may be able to remember
and understand of what you have so impressively said; and at all
events you may be sure that I shall bear witness to your being
thoroughly in earnest at this dreadful time. Now, pray let us think!
My esteemed Mr. Cruncher, let us think!"

Still, Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came
nearer and nearer.

"If you were to go before," said Miss Pross, "and stop the vehicle
and horses from coming here, and were to wait somewhere for me;
wouldn't that be best?"

Mr. Cruncher thought it might be best.

"Where could you wait for me?" asked Miss Pross.

Mr. Cruncher was so bewildered that he could think of no locality but
Temple Bar. Alas! Temple Bar was hundreds of miles away, and Madame
Defarge was drawing very near indeed.

"By the cathedral door," said Miss Pross. "Would it be much out of the
way, to take me in, near the great cathedral door between the two towers?"

"No, miss," answered Mr. Cruncher.

"Then, like the best of men," said Miss Pross, "go to the posting-
house straight, and make that change."

"I am doubtful," said Mr. Cruncher, hesitating and shaking his head,
"about leaving of you, you see. We don't know what may happen."

"Heaven knows we don't," returned Miss Pross, "but have no fear for
me. Take me in at the cathedral, at Three o'Clock, or as near it as
you can, and I am sure it will be better than our going from here.
I feel certain of it. There! Bless you, Mr. Cruncher! Think-not of
me, but of the lives that may depend on both of us!"

This exordium, and Miss Pross's two hands in quite agonised entreaty
clasping his, decided Mr. Cruncher. With an encouraging nod or two,
he immediately went out to alter the arrangements, and left her by
herself to follow as she had proposed.

The having originated a precaution which was already in course of
execution, was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of
composing her appearance so that it should attract no special notice
in the streets, was another relief. She looked at her watch, and it
was twenty minutes past two. She had no time to lose, but must get
ready at once.

Afraid, in her extreme perturbation, of the loneliness of the
deserted rooms, and of half-imagined faces peeping from behind every
open door in them, Miss Pross got a basin of cold water and began
laving her eyes, which were swollen and red. Haunted by her feverish
apprehensions, she could not bear to have her sight obscured for a
minute at a time by the dripping water, but constantly paused and
looked round to see that there was no one watching her. In one of
those pauses she recoiled and cried out, for she saw a figure
standing in the room.

The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed to the feet
of Madame Defarge. By strange stern ways, and through much staining
blood, those feet had come to meet that water.

Madame Defarge looked coldly at her, and said, "The wife of Evremonde;
where is she?"

It flashed upon Miss Pross's mind that the doors were all standing
open, and would suggest the flight. Her first act was to shut them.
There were four in the room, and she shut them all. She then placed
herself before the door of the chamber which Lucie had occupied.

Madame Defarge's dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement,
and rested on her when it was finished. Miss Pross had nothing
beautiful about her; years had not tamed the wildness, or softened
the grimness, of her appearance; but, she too was a determined woman
in her different way, and she measured Madame Defarge with her eyes,
every inch.

"You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer," said Miss
Pross, in her breathing. "Nevertheless, you shall not get the better
of me. I am an Englishwoman."

Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of
Miss Pross's own perception that they two were at bay. She saw a
tight, hard, wiry woman before her, as Mr. Lorry had seen in the same
figure a woman with a strong hand, in the years gone by. She knew
full well that Miss Pross was the family's devoted friend; Miss Pross
knew full well that Madame Defarge was the family's malevolent enemy.

"On my way yonder," said Madame Defarge, with a slight movement of
her hand towards the fatal spot, "where they reserve my chair and my
knitting for me, I am come to make my compliments to her in passing.
I wish to see her."

"I know that your intentions are evil," said Miss Pross, "and you may
depend upon it, I'll hold my own against them."

Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the other's words;
both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner,
what the unintelligible words meant.

"It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this
moment," said Madame Defarge. "Good patriots will know what that means.
Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do you hear?"

"If those eyes of yours were bed-winches," returned Miss Pross, "and
I was an English four-poster, they shouldn't loose a splinter of me.
No, you wicked foreign woman; I am your match."

Madame Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic remarks in
detail; but, she so far understood them as to perceive that she was
set at naught.

"Woman imbecile and pig-like!" said Madame Defarge, frowning.
"I take no answer from you. I demand to see her. Either tell her
that I demand to see her, or stand out of the way of the door and let
me go to her!" This, with an angry explanatory wave of her right arm.

"I little thought," said Miss Pross, "that I should ever want to
understand your nonsensical language; but I would give all I have,
except the clothes I wear, to know whether you suspect the truth, or
any part of it."

Neither of them for a single moment released the other's eyes.
Madame Defarge had not moved from the spot where she stood when Miss
Pross first became aware of her; but, she now advanced one step.

"I am a Briton," said Miss Pross, "I am desperate. I don't care an
English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep you here,
the greater hope there is for my Ladybird. I'll not leave a handful
of that dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger on me!"

Thus Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her eyes
between every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole breath.
Thus Miss Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life.

But, her courage was of that emotional nature that it brought the
irrepressible tears into her eyes. This was a courage that Madame
Defarge so little comprehended as to mistake for weakness. "Ha, ha!"
she laughed, "you poor wretch! What are you worth! I address myself
to that Doctor." Then she raised her voice and called out, "Citizen
Doctor! Wife of Evremonde! Child of Evremonde! Any person but this
miserable fool, answer the Citizeness Defarge!"

Perhaps the following silence, perhaps some latent disclosure in the
expression of Miss Pross's face, perhaps a sudden misgiving apart from
either suggestion, whispered to Madame Defarge that they were gone.
Three of the doors she opened swiftly, and looked in.

"Those rooms are all in disorder, there has been hurried packing,
there are odds and ends upon the ground. There is no one in that
room behind you! Let me look."

"Never!" said Miss Pross, who understood the request as perfectly as
Madame Defarge understood the answer.

"If they are not in that room, they are gone, and can be pursued and
brought back," said Madame Defarge to herself.

"As long as you don't know whether they are in that room or not, you
are uncertain what to do," said Miss Pross to herself; "and you shall
not know that, if I can prevent your knowing it; and know that, or
not know that, you shall not leave here while I can hold you."

"I have been in the streets from the first, nothing has stopped me,
I will tear you to pieces, but I will have you from that door," said
Madame Defarge.

"We are alone at the top of a high house in a solitary courtyard,
we are not likely to be heard, and I pray for bodily strength to keep
you here, while every minute you are here is worth a hundred thousand
guineas to my darling," said Miss Pross.

Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of the
moment, seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held her
tight. It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike;
Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much
stronger than hate, clasped her tight, and even lifted her from the
floor in the struggle that they had. The two hands of Madame Defarge
buffeted and tore her face; but, Miss Pross, with her head down, held
her round the waist, and clung to her with more than the hold of a
drowning woman.

Soon, Madame Defarge's hands ceased to strike, and felt at her
encircled waist. "It is under my arm," said Miss Pross, in smothered
tones, "you shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless
Heaven for it. I hold you till one or other of us faints or dies!"

Madame Defarge's hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked up, saw
what it was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and stood
alone--blinded with smoke.

All this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an awful
stillness, it passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious
woman whose body lay lifeless on the ground.

In the first fright and horror of her situation, Miss Pross passed
the body as far from it as she could, and ran down the stairs to call
for fruitless help. Happily, she bethought herself of the
consequences of what she did, in time to check herself and go back.
It was dreadful to go in at the door again; but, she did go in, and
even went near it, to get the bonnet and other things that she must
wear. These she put on, out on the staircase, first shutting and
locking the door and taking away the key. She then sat down on the
stairs a few moments to breathe and to cry, and then got up and
hurried away.

By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly
have gone along the streets without being stopped. By good fortune,
too, she was naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to show
disfigurement like any other woman. She needed both advantages, for
the marks of gripping fingers were deep in her face, and her hair was
torn, and her dress (hastily composed with unsteady hands) was
clutched and dragged a hundred ways.

In crossing the bridge, she dropped the door key in the river.
Arriving at the cathedral some few minutes before her escort, and
waiting there, she thought, what if the key were already taken in a
net, what if it were identified, what if the door were opened and the
remains discovered, what if she were stopped at the gate, sent to
prison, and charged with murder! In the midst of these fluttering
thoughts, the escort appeared, took her in, and took her away.

"Is there any noise in the streets?" she asked him.

"The usual noises," Mr. Cruncher replied; and looked surprised by the
question and by her aspect.

"I don't hear you," said Miss Pross. "What do you say?"

It was in vain for Mr. Cruncher to repeat what he said; Miss Pross
could not hear him. "So I'll nod my head," thought Mr. Cruncher,
amazed, "at all events she'll see that." And she did.

"Is there any noise in the streets now?" asked Miss Pross again,
presently.

Again Mr. Cruncher nodded his head.

"I don't hear it."

"Gone deaf in an hour?" said Mr. Cruncher, ruminating, with his mind
much disturbed; "wot's come to her?"

"I feel," said Miss Pross, "as if there had been a flash and a crash,
and that crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this life."

"Blest if she ain't in a queer condition!" said Mr. Cruncher, more
and more disturbed. "Wot can she have been a takin', to keep her
courage up? Hark! There's the roll of them dreadful carts! You can
hear that, miss?"

"I can hear," said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her,
"nothing. O, my good man, there was first a great crash, and then a
great stillness, and that stillness seems to be fixed and
unchangeable, never to be broken any more as long as my life lasts."

"If she don't hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh
their journey's end," said Mr. Cruncher, glancing over his shoulder,
"it's my opinion that indeed she never will hear anything else in
this world."

And indeed she never did.

0112 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 13

2006-09-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

Fifty-two

In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day
awaited their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year.
Fifty-two were to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to
the boundless everlasting sea. Before their cells were quit of them,
new occupants were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood
spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle with theirs to-morrow
was already set apart.

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy,
whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty,
whose poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases,
engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims
of all degrees; and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable
suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference,
smote equally without distinction.

Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with
no flattering delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal.
In every line of the narrative he had heard, he had heard his condemnation.
He had fully comprehended that no personal influence could possibly save him,
that he was virtually sentenced by the millions, and that units could
avail him nothing.

Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife
fresh before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His hold
on life was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen; by gradual
efforts and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the tighter
there; and when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it
yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in all his
thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that contended
against resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel resigned, then
his wife and child who had to live after him, seemed to protest and
to make it a selfish thing.

But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that
there was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers went
the same road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day, sprang up to
stimulate him. Next followed the thought that much of the future
peace of mind enjoyable by the dear ones, depended on his quiet
fortitude. So, by degrees he calmed into the better state, when he
could raise his thoughts much higher, and draw comfort down.

Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he had
travelled thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase the
means of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such time
as the prison lamps should be extinguished.

He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known
nothing of her father's imprisonment, until he had heard of it from
herself, and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father's and
uncle's responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been read.
He had already explained to her that his concealment from herself of
the name he had relinquished, was the one condition--fully
intelligible now--that her father had attached to their betrothal,
and was the one promise he had still exacted on the morning of their
marriage. He entreated her, for her father's sake, never to seek to
know whether her father had become oblivious of the existence of the
paper, or had had it recalled to him (for the moment, or for good),
by the story of the Tower, on that old Sunday under the dear old
plane-tree in the garden. If he had preserved any definite remembrance
of it, there could be no doubt that he had supposed it destroyed with
the Bastille, when he had found no mention of it among the relics of
prisoners which the populace had discovered there, and which had been
described to all the world. He besought her--though he added that he
knew it was needless--to console her father, by impressing him
through every tender means she could think of, with the truth that he
had done nothing for which he could justly reproach himself, but had
uniformly forgotten himself for their joint sakes. Next to her
preservation of his own last grateful love and blessing, and her
overcoming of her sorrow, to devote herself to their dear child,
he adjured her, as they would meet in Heaven, to comfort her father.

To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he told her
father that he expressly confided his wife and child to his care.
And he told him this, very strongly, with the hope of rousing him
from any despondency or dangerous retrospect towards which he foresaw
he might be tending.

To Mr. Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs.
That done, with many added sentences of grateful friendship and warm
attachment, all was done. He never thought of Carton. His mind was
so full of the others, that he never once thought of him.

He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put out.
When he lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done with this world.

But, it beckoned him back in his sleep, and showed itself in shining
forms. Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho (though it had
nothing in it like the real house), unaccountably released and light
of heart, he was with Lucie again, and she told him it was all a dream,
and he had never gone away. A pause of forgetfulness, and then he
had even suffered, and had come back to her, dead and at peace, and yet
there was no difference in him. Another pause of oblivion, and he
awoke in the sombre morning, unconscious where he was or what had
happened, until it flashed upon his mind, "this is the day of my death!"

Thus, had he come through the hours, to the day when the fifty-two
heads were to fall. And now, while he was composed, and hoped that
he could meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in his
waking thoughts, which was very difficult to master.

He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life.
How high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he
would be stood, how he would be touched, whether the touching hands
would be dyed red, which way his face would be turned, whether he
would be the first, or might be the last: these and many similar
questions, in nowise directed by his will, obtruded themselves over
and over again, countless times. Neither were they connected with
fear: he was conscious of no fear. Rather, they originated in a
strange besetting desire to know what to do when the time came;
a desire gigantically disproportionate to the few swift moments to
which it referred; a wondering that was more like the wondering of
some other spirit within his, than his own.

The hours went on as he walked to and fro, and the clocks struck the
numbers he would never hear again. Nine gone for ever, ten gone for
ever, eleven gone for ever, twelve coming on to pass away. After a
hard contest with that eccentric action of thought which had last
perplexed him, he had got the better of it. He walked up and down,
softly repeating their names to himself. The worst of the strife was
over. He could walk up and down, free from distracting fancies,
praying for himself and for them.

Twelve gone for ever.

He had been apprised that the final hour was Three, and he knew he
would be summoned some time earlier, inasmuch as the tumbrils jolted
heavily and slowly through the streets. Therefore, he resolved to keep
Two before his mind, as the hour, and so to strengthen himself in the
interval that he might be able, after that time, to strengthen others.

Walking regularly to and fro with his arms folded on his breast,
a very different man from the prisoner, who had walked to and fro at
La Force, he heard One struck away from him, without surprise.
The hour had measured like most other hours. Devoutly thankful to
Heaven for his recovered self-possession, he thought, "There is but
another now," and turned to walk again.

Footsteps in the stone passage outside the door. He stopped.

The key was put in the lock, and turned. Before the door was opened,
or as it opened, a man said in a low voice, in English: "He has never
seen me here; I have kept out of his way. Go you in alone; I wait near.
Lose no time!"

The door was quickly opened and closed, and there stood before him
face to face, quiet, intent upon him, with the light of a smile on
his features, and a cautionary finger on his lip, Sydney Carton.

There was something so bright and remarkable in his look, that, for
the first moment, the prisoner misdoubted him to be an apparition of
his own imagining. But, he spoke, and it was his voice; he took the
prisoner's hand, and it was his real grasp.

"Of all the people upon earth, you least expected to see me?" he said.

"I could not believe it to be you. I can scarcely believe it now.
You are not"--the apprehension came suddenly into his mind--"a prisoner?"

"No. I am accidentally possessed of a power over one of the keepers
here, and in virtue of it I stand before you. I come from her--
your wife, dear Darnay."

The prisoner wrung his hand.

"I bring you a request from her."

"What is it?"

"A most earnest, pressing, and emphatic entreaty, addressed to you in
the most pathetic tones of the voice so dear to you, that you well remember."

The prisoner turned his face partly aside.

"You have no time to ask me why I bring it, or what it means; I have
no time to tell you. You must comply with it--take off those boots
you wear, and draw on these of mine."

There was a chair against the wall of the cell, behind the
prisoner. Carton, pressing forward, had already, with the speed of
lightning, got him down into it, and stood over him, barefoot.

"Draw on these boots of mine. Put your hands to them;
put your will to them. Quick!"

"Carton, there is no escaping from this place; it never can be done.
You will only die with me. It is madness."

"It would be madness if I asked you to escape; but do I? When I ask
you to pass out at that door, tell me it is madness and remain here.
Change that cravat for this of mine, that coat for this of mine.
While you do it, let me take this ribbon from your hair, and shake
out your hair like this of mine!"

With wonderful quickness, and with a strength both of will and action,
that appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes upon him.
The prisoner was like a young child in his hands.

"Carton! Dear Carton! It is madness. It cannot be accomplished,
it never can be done, it has been attempted, and has always failed.
I implore you not to add your death to the bitterness of mine."

"Do I ask you, my dear Darnay, to pass the door? When I ask that,
refuse. There are pen and ink and paper on this table. Is your hand
steady enough to write?"

"It was when you came in."

"Steady it again, and write what I shall dictate. Quick, friend, quick!"

Pressing his hand to his bewildered head, Darnay sat down at the table.
Carton, with his right hand in his breast, stood close beside him.

"Write exactly as I speak."

"To whom do I address it?"

"To no one." Carton still had his hand in his breast.

"Do I date it?"

"No."

The prisoner looked up, at each question. Carton, standing over him
with his hand in his breast, looked down.

"`If you remember,'" said Carton, dictating, "`the words that passed
between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it.
You do remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them.'"

He was drawing his hand from his breast; the prisoner chancing to
look up in his hurried wonder as he wrote, the hand stopped, closing
upon something.

"Have you written `forget them'?" Carton asked.

"I have. Is that a weapon in your hand?"

"No; I am not armed."

"What is it in your hand?"

"You shall know directly. Write on; there are but a few words more."
He dictated again. "`I am thankful that the time has come, when I
can prove them. That I do so is no subject for regret or grief.'"
As he said these words with his eyes fixed on the writer, his hand
slowly and softly moved down close to the writer's face.

The pen dropped from Darnay's fingers on the table, and he looked
about him vacantly.

"What vapour is that?" he asked.

"Vapour?"

"Something that crossed me?"

"I am conscious of nothing; there can be nothing here. Take up the
pen and finish. Hurry, hurry!"

As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the
prisoner made an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at
Carton with clouded eyes and with an altered manner of breathing,
Carton--his hand again in his breast--looked steadily at him.

"Hurry, hurry!"

The prisoner bent over the paper, once more.

"`If it had been otherwise;'" Carton's hand was again watchfully
and softly stealing down; "`I never should have used the longer
opportunity. If it had been otherwise;'" the hand was at the
prisoner's face; "`I should but have had so much the more to answer
for. If it had been otherwise--'" Carton looked at the pen and saw
it was trailing off into unintelligible signs.

Carton's hand moved back to his breast no more. The prisoner sprang
up with a reproachful look, but Carton's hand was close and firm at
his nostrils, and Carton's left arm caught him round the waist.
For a few seconds he faintly struggled with the man who had come
to lay down his life for him; but, within a minute or so, he was
stretched insensible on the ground.

Quickly, but with hands as true to the purpose as his heart was,
Carton dressed himself in the clothes the prisoner had laid aside,
combed back his hair, and tied it with the ribbon the prisoner had
worn. Then, he softly called, "Enter there! Come in!" and the Spy
presented himself.

"You see?" said Carton, looking up, as he kneeled on one knee beside
the insensible figure, putting the paper in the breast: "is your
hazard very great?"

"Mr. Carton," the Spy answered, with a timid snap of his fingers,
"my hazard is not THAT, in the thick of business here, if you are
true to the whole of your bargain."

"Don't fear me. I will be true to the death."

"You must be, Mr. Carton, if the tale of fifty-two is to be right.
Being made right by you in that dress, I shall have no fear."

"Have no fear! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, and the
rest will soon be far from here, please God! Now, get assistance and
take me to the coach."

"You?" said the Spy nervously.

"Him, man, with whom I have exchanged. You go out at the gate by
which you brought me in?"

"Of course."

"I was weak and faint when you brought me in, and I am fainter now
you take me out. The parting interview has overpowered me. Such a
thing has happened here, often, and too often. Your life is in your
own hands. Quick! Call assistance!"

"You swear not to betray me?" said the trembling Spy, as he paused
for a last moment.

"Man, man!" returned Carton, stamping his foot; "have I sworn by no
solemn vow already, to go through with this, that you waste the
precious moments now? Take him yourself to the courtyard you know of,
place him yourself in the carriage, show him yourself to Mr. Lorry,
tell him yourself to give him no restorative but air, and to remember
my words of last night, and his promise of last night, and drive away!"

The Spy withdrew, and Carton seated himself at the table, resting his
forehead on his hands. The Spy returned immediately, with two men.

"How, then?" said one of them, contemplating the fallen figure. "So
afflicted to find that his friend has drawn a prize in the lottery of
Sainte Guillotine?"

"A good patriot," said the other, "could hardly have been more
afflicted if the Aristocrat had drawn a blank."

They raised the unconscious figure, placed it on a litter they had
brought to the door, and bent to carry it away.

"The time is short, Evremonde," said the Spy, in a warning voice.

"I know it well," answered Carton. "Be careful of my friend, I
entreat you, and leave me."

"Come, then, my children," said Barsad. "Lift him, and come away!"

The door closed, and Carton was left alone. Straining his powers of
listening to the utmost, he listened for any sound that might denote
suspicion or alarm. There was none. Keys turned, doors clashed,
footsteps passed along distant passages: no cry was raised, or hurry
made, that seemed unusual. Breathing more freely in a little while,
he sat down at the table, and listened again until the clock struck Two.

Sounds that he was not afraid of, for he divined their meaning, then
began to be audible. Several doors were opened in succession, and
finally his own. A gaoler, with a list in his hand, looked in,
merely saying, "Follow me, Evremonde!" and he followed into a large
dark room, at a distance. It was a dark winter day, and what with
the shadows within, and what with the shadows without, he could but
dimly discern the others who were brought there to have their arms
bound. Some were standing; some seated. Some were lamenting, and in
restless motion; but, these were few. The great majority were silent
and still, looking fixedly at the ground.

As he stood by the wall in a dim corner, while some of the fifty-two
were brought in after him, one man stopped in passing, to embrace
him, as having a knowledge of him. It thrilled him with a great
dread of discovery; but the man went on. A very few moments after
that, a young woman, with a slight girlish form, a sweet spare face
in which there was no vestige of colour, and large widely opened
patient eyes, rose from the seat where he had observed her sitting,
and came to speak to him.

"Citizen Evremonde," she said, touching him with her cold hand.
"I am a poor little seamstress, who was with you in La Force."

He murmured for answer: "True. I forget what you were accused of?"

"Plots. Though the just Heaven knows that I am innocent of any.
Is it likely? Who would think of plotting with a poor little weak
creature like me?"

The forlorn smile with which she said it, so touched him, that tears
started from his eyes.

"I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evremonde, but I have done nothing.
I am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do so much
good to us poor, will profit by my death; but I do not know how that
can be, Citizen Evremonde. Such a poor weak little creature!"

As the last thing on earth that his heart was to warm and soften to,
it warmed and softened to this pitiable girl.

"I heard you were released, Citizen Evremonde. I hoped it was true?"

"It was. But, I was again taken and condemned."

"If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your
hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me
more courage."

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in
them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn
young fingers, and touched his lips.

"Are you dying for him?" she whispered.

"And his wife and child. Hush! Yes."

"O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?"

"Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last."

The same shadows that are falling on the prison, are falling, in that
same hour of the early afternoon, on the Barrier with the crowd about it,
when a coach going out of Paris drives up to be examined.

"Who goes here? Whom have we within? Papers!"

The papers are handed out, and read.

"Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he?"

This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old
man pointed out.

"Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind?
The Revolution-fever will have been too much for him?"

Greatly too much for him.

"Hah! Many suffer with it. Lucie. His daughter. French. Which is she?"

This is she.

"Apparently it must be. Lucie, the wife of Evremonde; is it not?"

It is.

"Hah! Evremonde has an assignation elsewhere. Lucie, her child.
English. This is she?"

She and no other.

"Kiss me, child of Evremonde. Now, thou hast kissed a good
Republican; something new in thy family; remember it! Sydney Carton.
Advocate. English. Which is he?"

He lies here, in this corner of the carriage. He, too, is pointed out.

"Apparently the English advocate is in a swoon?"

It is hoped he will recover in the fresher air. It is represented
that he is not in strong health, and has separated sadly from a
friend who is under the displeasure of the Republic.

"Is that all? It is not a great deal, that! Many are under the
displeasure of the Republic, and must look out at the little window.
Jarvis Lorry. Banker. English. Which is he?"

"I am he. Necessarily, being the last."

It is Jarvis Lorry who has replied to all the previous questions.
It is Jarvis Lorry who has alighted and stands with his hand on the
coach door, replying to a group of officials. They leisurely walk
round the carriage and leisurely mount the box, to look at what
little luggage it carries on the roof; the country-people hanging
about, press nearer to the coach doors and greedily stare in; a
little child, carried by its mother, has its short arm held out for
it, that it may touch the wife of an aristocrat who has gone to the
Guillotine.

"Behold your papers, Jarvis Lorry, countersigned."

"One can depart, citizen?"

"One can depart. Forward, my postilions! A good journey!"

"I salute you, citizens.--And the first danger passed!"

These are again the words of Jarvis Lorry, as he clasps his hands,
and looks upward. There is terror in the carriage, there is weeping,
there is the heavy breathing of the insensible traveller.

"Are we not going too slowly? Can they not be induced to go faster?"
asks Lucie, clinging to the old man.

"It would seem like flight, my darling. I must not urge them too much;
it would rouse suspicion."

"Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued!"

"The road is clear, my dearest. So far, we are not pursued."

Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous
buildings, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, avenues
of leafless trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft
deep mud is on either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting
mud, to avoid the stones that clatter us and shake us; sometimes, we
stick in ruts and sloughs there. The agony of our impatience is then
so great, that in our wild alarm and hurry we are for getting out and
running--hiding--doing anything but stopping.

Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary
farms, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, cottages in twos and
threes, avenues of leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, and
taken us back by another road? Is not this the same place twice over?
Thank Heaven, no. A village. Look back, look back, and see if we are
pursued! Hush! the posting-house.

Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach stands
in the little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood upon
it of ever moving again; leisurely, the new horses come into visible
existence, one by one; leisurely, the new postilions follow, sucking
and plaiting the lashes of their whips; leisurely, the old postilions
count their money, make wrong additions, and arrive at dissatisfied
results. All the time, our overfraught hearts are beating at a rate
that would far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest horses ever
foaled.

At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are
left behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down the
hill, and on the low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions
exchange speech with animated gesticulation, and the horses are
pulled up, almost on their haunches. We are pursued?

"Ho! Within the carriage there. Speak then!"

"What is it?" asks Mr. Lorry, looking out at window.

"How many did they say?"

"I do not understand you."

"--At the last post. How many to the Guillotine to-day?"

"Fifty-two."

"I said so! A brave number! My fellow-citizen here would have it
forty-two; ten more heads are worth having. The Guillotine goes
handsomely. I love it. Hi forward. Whoop!"

The night comes on dark. He moves more; he is beginning to revive,
and to speak intelligibly; he thinks they are still together; he asks
him, by his name, what he has in his hand. O pity us, kind Heaven,
and help us! Look out, look out, and see if we are pursued.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and
the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit
of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.

0111 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 12

2006-09-16T22:49:00.001-07:00

Darkness

Sydney Carton paused in the street, not quite decided where to go.
"At Tellson's banking-house at nine," he said, with a musing face.
"Shall I do well, in the mean time, to show myself? I think so.
It is best that these people should know there is such a man as I
here; it is a sound precaution, and may be a necessary preparation.
But care, care, care! Let me think it out!"

Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, he took
a turn or two in the already darkening street, and traced the thought
in his mind to its possible consequences. His first impression was
confirmed. "It is best," he said, finally resolved, "that these
people should know there is such a man as I here." And he turned his
face towards Saint Antoine.

Defarge had described himself, that day, as the keeper of a wine-shop
in the Saint Antoine suburb. It was not difficult for one who knew
the city well, to find his house without asking any question. Having
ascertained its situation, Carton came out of those closer streets
again, and dined at a place of refreshment and fell sound asleep
after dinner. For the first time in many years, he had no strong drink.
Since last night he had taken nothing but a little light thin wine,
and last night he had dropped the brandy slowly down on Mr. Lorry's
hearth like a man who had done with it.

It was as late as seven o'clock when he awoke refreshed, and went out
into the streets again. As he passed along towards Saint Antoine, he
stopped at a shop-window where there was a mirror, and slightly
altered the disordered arrangement of his loose cravat, and his coat-
collar, and his wild hair. This done, he went on direct to Defarge's,
and went in.

There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques Three,
of the restless fingers and the croaking voice. This man, whom he
had seen upon the Jury, stood drinking at the little counter, in
conversation with the Defarges, man and wife. The Vengeance assisted
in the conversation, like a regular member of the establishment.

As Carton walked in, took his seat and asked (in very indifferent
French) for a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a careless
glance at him, and then a keener, and then a keener, and then
advanced to him herself, and asked him what it was he had ordered.

He repeated what he had already said.

"English?" asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her dark eyebrows.

After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French word
were slow to express itself to him, he answered, in his former strong
foreign accent. "Yes, madame, yes. I am English!"

Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, as he
took up a Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puzzling out
its meaning, he heard her say, "I swear to you, like Evremonde!"

Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening.

"How?"

"Good evening."

"Oh! Good evening, citizen," filling his glass. "Ah! and good wine.
I drink to the Republic."

Defarge went back to the counter, and said, "Certainly, a little
like." Madame sternly retorted, "I tell you a good deal like."
Jacques Three pacifically remarked, "He is so much in your mind,
see you, madame." The amiable Vengeance added, with a laugh, "Yes,
my faith! And you are looking forward with so much pleasure to seeing
him once more to-morrow!"

Carton followed the lines and words of his paper, with a slow
forefinger, and with a studious and absorbed face. They were all
leaning their arms on the counter close together, speaking low.
After a silence of a few moments, during which they all looked
towards him without disturbing his outward attention from the Jacobin
editor, they resumed their conversation.

"It is true what madame says," observed Jacques Three. "Why stop?
There is great force in that. Why stop?"

"Well, well," reasoned Defarge, "but one must stop somewhere.
After all, the question is still where?"

"At extermination," said madame.

"Magnificent!" croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, highly approved.

"Extermination is good doctrine, my wife," said Defarge, rather
troubled; "in general, I say nothing against it. But this Doctor has
suffered much; you have seen him to-day; you have observed his face
when the paper was read."

"I have observed his face!" repeated madame, contemptuously and
angrily. "Yes. I have observed his face. I have observed his face
to be not the face of a true friend of the Republic. Let him take
care of his face!"

"And you have observed, my wife," said Defarge, in a deprecatory
manner, "the anguish of his daughter, which must be a dreadful
anguish to him!"

"I have observed his daughter," repeated madame; "yes, I have
observed his daughter, more times than one. I have observed her
to-day, and I have observed her other days. I have observed her
in the court, and I have observed her in the street by the prison.
Let me but lift my finger--!" She seemed to raise it (the listener's
eyes were always on his paper), and to let it fall with a rattle on
the ledge before her, as if the axe had dropped.

"The citizeness is superb!" croaked the Juryman.

"She is an Angel!" said The Vengeance, and embraced her.

"As to thee," pursued madame, implacably, addressing her husband,
"if it depended on thee--which, happily, it does not--thou wouldst
rescue this man even now."

"No!" protested Defarge. "Not if to lift this glass would do it!
But I would leave the matter there. I say, stop there."

"See you then, Jacques," said Madame Defarge, wrathfully; "and see
you, too, my little Vengeance; see you both! Listen! For other crimes
as tyrants and oppressors, I have this race a long time on my register,
doomed to destruction and extermination. Ask my husband, is that so."

"It is so," assented Defarge, without being asked.

"In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he
finds this paper of to-day, and he brings it home, and in the middle
of the night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on
this spot, by the light of this lamp. Ask him, is that so."

"It is so," assented Defarge.

"That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and the lamp
is burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters and
between those iron bars, that I have now a secret to communicate.
Ask him, is that so."

"It is so," assented Defarge again.

"I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with these two
hands as I smite it now, and I tell him, `Defarge, I was brought up
among the fishermen of the sea-shore, and that peasant family so
injured by the two Evremonde brothers, as that Bastille paper describes,
is my family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally wounded boy upon
the ground was my sister, that husband was my sister's husband, that
unborn child was their child, that brother was my brother, that
father was my father, those dead are my dead, and that summons to
answer for those things descends to me!' Ask him, is that so."

"It is so," assented Defarge once more.

"Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop," returned madame; "but don't tell me."

Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature
of her wrath--the listener could feel how white she was, without
seeing her--and both highly commended it. Defarge, a weak minority,
interposed a few words for the memory of the compassionate wife of
the Marquis; but only elicited from his own wife a repetition of her
last reply. "Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!"

Customers entered, and the group was broken up. The English customer
paid for what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, and asked,
as a stranger, to be directed towards the National Palace.
Madame Defarge took him to the door, and put her arm on his, in
pointing out the road. The English customer was not without his
reflections then, that it might be a good deed to seize that arm,
lift it, and strike under it sharp and deep.

But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow of the
prison wall. At the appointed hour, he emerged from it to present
himself in Mr. Lorry's room again, where he found the old gentleman
walking to and fro in restless anxiety. He said he had been with
Lucie until just now, and had only left her for a few minutes, to
come and keep his appointment. Her father had not been seen, since
he quitted the banking-house towards four o'clock. She had some
faint hopes that his mediation might save Charles, but they were very
slight. He had been more than five hours gone: where could he be?

Mr. Lorry waited until ten; but, Doctor Manette not returning, and he
being unwilling to leave Lucie any longer, it was arranged that he
should go back to her, and come to the banking-house again at midnight.
In the meanwhile, Carton would wait alone by the fire for the Doctor.

He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve; but Doctor Manette
did not come back. Mr. Lorry returned, and found no tidings of him,
and brought none. Where could he be?

They were discussing this question, and were almost building up some
weak structure of hope on his prolonged absence, when they heard him
on the stairs. The instant he entered the room, it was plain that
all was lost.

Whether he had really been to any one, or whether he had been all
that time traversing the streets, was never known. As he stood
staring at them, they asked him no question, for his face told them
everything.

"I cannot find it," said he, "and I must have it. Where is it?"

His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless look
straying all around, he took his coat off, and let it drop on the floor.

"Where is my bench? I have been looking everywhere for my bench, and
I can't find it. What have they done with my work? Time presses:
I must finish those shoes."

They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.

"Come, come!" said he, in a whimpering miserable way; "let me get to work.
Give me my work."

Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon the ground,
like a distracted child.

"Don't torture a poor forlorn wretch," he implored them, with a dreadful cry;
"but give me my work! What is to become of us, if those shoes are not done
to-night?"

Lost, utterly lost!

It was so clearly beyond hope to reason with him, or try to restore him,
that--as if by agreement--they each put a hand upon his shoulder,
and soothed him to sit down before the fire, with a promise that he
should have his work presently. He sank into the chair, and brooded
over the embers, and shed tears. As if all that had happened since
the garret time were a momentary fancy, or a dream, Mr. Lorry saw him
shrink into the exact figure that Defarge had had in keeping.

Affected, and impressed with terror as they both were, by this
spectacle of ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions.
His lonely daughter, bereft of her final hope and reliance, appealed
to them both too strongly. Again, as if by agreement, they looked at
one another with one meaning in their faces.
Carton was the first to speak:

"The last chance is gone: it was not much. Yes; he had better be
taken to her. But, before you go, will you, for a moment, steadily
attend to me? Don't ask me why I make the stipulations I am going to
make, and exact the promise I am going to exact; I have a reason--
a good one."

"I do not doubt it," answered Mr. Lorry. "Say on."

The figure in the chair between them, was all the time monotonously
rocking itself to and fro, and moaning. They spoke in such a tone as
they would have used if they had been watching by a sick-bed in the night.

Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling his feet.
As he did so, a small case in which the Doctor was accustomed to
carry the lists of his day's duties, fell lightly on the floor.
Carton took it up, and there was a folded paper in it. "We should
look at this!" he said. Mr. Lorry nodded his consent. He opened it,
and exclaimed, "Thank GOD!"

"What is it?" asked Mr. Lorry, eagerly.

"A moment! Let me speak of it in its place. First," he put his hand
in his coat, and took another paper from it, "that is the certificate
which enables me to pass out of this city. Look at it. You see--
Sydney Carton, an Englishman?"

Mr. Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face.

"Keep it for me until to-morrow. I shall see him to-morrow,
you remember, and I had better not take it into the prison."

"Why not?"

"I don't know; I prefer not to do so. Now, take this paper that
Doctor Manette has carried about him. It is a similar certificate,
enabling him and his daughter and her child, at any time, to pass the
barrier and the frontier! You see?"

"Yes!"

"Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against
evil, yesterday. When is it dated? But no matter; don't stay to look;
put it up carefully with mine and your own. Now, observe! I never
doubted until within this hour or two, that he had, or could have
such a paper. It is good, until recalled. But it may be soon recalled,
and, I have reason to think, will be."

"They are not in danger?"

"They are in great danger. They are in danger of denunciation by
Madame Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have overheard words
of that woman's, to-night, which have presented their danger to me in
strong colours. I have lost no time, and since then, I have seen the
spy. He confirms me. He knows that a wood-sawyer, living by the
prison wall, is under the control of the Defarges, and has been
rehearsed by Madame Defarge as to his having seen Her"--he never
mentioned Lucie's name--"making signs and signals to prisoners.
It is easy to foresee that the pretence will be the common one, a
prison plot, and that it will involve her life--and perhaps her
child's--and perhaps her father's--for both have been seen with her
at that place. Don't look so horrified. You will save them all."

"Heaven grant I may, Carton! But how?"

"I am going to tell you how. It will depend on you, and it could
depend on no better man. This new denunciation will certainly not
take place until after to-morrow; probably not until two or three
days afterwards; more probably a week afterwards. You know it is a
capital crime, to mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the
Guillotine. She and her father would unquestionably be guilty of
this crime, and this woman (the inveteracy of whose pursuit cannot
be described) would wait to add that strength to her case, and make
herself doubly sure. You follow me?"

"So attentively, and with so much confidence in what you say, that
for the moment I lose sight," touching the back of the Doctor's
chair, even of this distress."

"You have money, and can buy the means of travelling to the seacoast
as quickly as the journey can be made. Your preparations have been
completed for some days, to return to England. Early to-morrow have
your horses ready, so that they may be in starting trim at two o'clock
in the afternoon."

"It shall be done!"

His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that Mr. Lorry caught the
flame, and was as quick as youth.

"You are a noble heart. Did I say we could depend upon no better man?
Tell her, to-night, what you know of her danger as involving her
child and her father. Dwell upon that, for she would lay her own
fair head beside her husband's cheerfully." He faltered for an instant;
then went on as before. "For the sake of her child and her father,
press upon her the necessity of leaving Paris, with them and you,
at that hour. Tell her that it was her husband's last arrangement.
Tell her that more depends upon it than she dare believe, or hope.
You think that her father, even in this sad state, will submit
himself to her; do you not?"

"I am sure of it."

"I thought so. Quietly and steadily have all these arrangements made
in the courtyard here, even to the taking of your own seat in the
carriage. The moment I come to you, take me in, and drive away."

"I understand that I wait for you under all circumstances?"

"You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know,
and will reserve my place. Wait for nothing but to have my place
occupied, and then for England!"

"Why, then," said Mr. Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm and
steady hand, "it does not all depend on one old man, but I shall have
a young and ardent man at my side."

"By the help of Heaven you shall! Promise me solemnly that nothing
will influence you to alter the course on which we now stand pledged
to one another."

"Nothing, Carton."

"Remember these words to-morrow: change the course, or delay in it--
for any reason--and no life can possibly be saved, and many lives
must inevitably be sacrificed."

"I will remember them. I hope to do my part faithfully."

"And I hope to do mine. Now, good bye!"

Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though he
even put the old man's hand to his lips, he did not part from him
then. He helped him so far to arouse the rocking figure before the
dying embers, as to get a cloak and hat put upon it, and to tempt it
forth to find where the bench and work were hidden that it still
moaningly besought to have. He walked on the other side of it and
protected it to the courtyard of the house where the afflicted
heart--so happy in the memorable time when he had revealed his own
desolate heart to it--outwatched the awful night. He entered the
courtyard and remained there for a few moments alone, looking up at
the light in the window of her room. Before he went away, he
breathed a blessing towards it, and a Farewell.

0110 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 11

2006-09-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

Dusk

The wretched wife of the innocent man thus doomed to die, fell under
the sentence, as if she had been mortally stricken. But, she uttered
no sound; and so strong was the voice within her, representing that
it was she of all the world who must uphold him in his misery and not
augment it, that it quickly raised her, even from that shock.

The Judges having to take part in a public demonstration out of
doors, the Tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement of the
court's emptying itself by many passages had not ceased, when Lucie
stood stretching out her arms towards her husband, with nothing in
her face but love and consolation.

"If I might touch him! If I might embrace him once! O, good citizens,
if you would have so much compassion for us!"

There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had
taken him last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured out to
the show in the streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, "Let her
embrace him then; it is but a moment." It was silently acquiesced in,
and they passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised place,
where he, by leaning over the dock, could fold her in his arms.

"Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love.
We shall meet again, where the weary are at rest!"

They were her husband's words, as he held her to his bosom.

"I can bear it, dear Charles. I am supported from above: don't
suffer for me. A parting blessing for our child."

"I send it to her by you. I kiss her by you. I say farewell to her by you."

"My husband. No! A moment!" He was tearing himself apart from her.
"We shall not be separated long. I feel that this will break my heart
by-and-bye; but I will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her,
God will raise up friends for her, as He did for me."

Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees to
both of them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, crying:

"No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should
kneel to us! We know now, what a struggle you made of old. We know,
now what you underwent when you suspected my descent, and when you
knew it. We know now, the natural antipathy you strove against, and
conquered, for her dear sake. We thank you with all our hearts, and
all our love and duty. Heaven be with you!"

Her father's only answer was to draw his hands through his white hair,
and wring them with a shriek of anguish.

"It could not be otherwise," said the prisoner. "All things have
worked together as they have fallen out. it was the always-vain
endeavour to discharge my poor mother's trust that first brought my
fatal presence near you. Good could never come of such evil,
a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning. Be comforted,
and forgive me. Heaven bless you!"

As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after
him with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer,
and with a radiant look upon her face, in which there was even a
comforting smile. As he went out at the prisoners' door, she turned,
laid her head lovingly on her father's breast, tried to speak to him,
and fell at his feet.

Then, issuing from the obscure corner from which he had never moved,
Sydney Carton came and took her up. Only her father and Mr. Lorry
were with her. His arm trembled as it raised her, and supported her head.
Yet, there was an air about him that was not all of pity--that had a flush
of pride in it.

"Shall I take her to a coach? I shall never feel her weight."

He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in a
coach. Her father and their old friend got into it, and he took his
seat beside the driver.

When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the dark not
many hours before, to picture to himself on which of the rough stones
of the street her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, and carried
her up the staircase to their rooms. There, he laid her down on a
couch, where her child and Miss Pross wept over her.

"Don't recall her to herself," he said, softly, to the latter, "she is
better so. Don't revive her to consciousness, while she only faints."

"Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton!" cried little Lucie, springing up
and throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of grief.
"Now that you have come, I think you will do something to help mamma,
something to save papa! O, look at her, dear Carton! Can you, of all
the people who love her, bear to see her so?"

He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his face.
He put her gently from him, and looked at her unconscious mother.

"Before I go," he said, and paused--"I may kiss her?"

It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her
face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was
nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when
she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, "A life you love."

When he had gone out into the next room, he turned suddenly on
Mr. Lorry and her father, who were following, and said to the latter:

"You had great influence but yesterday, Doctor Manette; let it at
least be tried. These judges, and all the men in power, are very
friendly to you, and very recognisant of your services; are they not?"

"Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me. I had the
strongest assurances that I should save him; and I did." He returned
the answer in great trouble, and very slowly.

"Try them again. The hours between this and to-morrow afternoon are
few and short, but try."

"I intend to try. I will not rest a moment."

"That's well. I have known such energy as yours do great things
before now--though never," he added, with a smile and a sigh together,
"such great things as this. But try! Of little worth as life is when
we misuse it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay
down if it were not."

"I will go," said Doctor Manette, "to the Prosecutor and the President
straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to name.
I will write too, and--But stay! There is a Celebration in the streets,
and no one will be accessible until dark."

"That's true. Well! It is a forlorn hope at the best, and not much
the forlorner for being delayed till dark. I should like to know how
you speed; though, mind! I expect nothing! When are you likely to
have seen these dread powers, Doctor Manette?"

"Immediately after dark, I should hope. Within an hour or two from this."

"It will be dark soon after four. Let us stretch the hour or two.
If I go to Mr. Lorry's at nine, shall I hear what you have done,
either from our friend or from yourself?"

"Yes."

"May you prosper!"

Mr. Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him on the
shoulder as he was going away, caused him to turn.

"I have no hope," said Mr. Lorry, in a low and sorrowful whisper.

"Nor have I."

"If any one of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to spare
him--which is a large supposition; for what is his life, or any man's
to them!--I doubt if they durst spare him after the demonstration in
the court."

"And so do I. I heard the fall of the axe in that sound."

Mr. Lorry leaned his arm upon the door-post, and bowed his face upon it.

"Don't despond," said Carton, very gently; "don't grieve.
I encouraged Doctor Manette in this idea, because I felt that it
might one day be consolatory to her. Otherwise, she might think `his
life was want only thrown away or wasted,' and that might trouble her."

"Yes, yes, yes," returned Mr. Lorry, drying his eyes, "you are
right. But he will perish; there is no real hope."

"Yes. He will perish: there is no real hope," echoed Carton.

And walked with a settled step, down-stairs.

0109 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 10

2006-09-16T22:48:00.001-07:00

The Substance of the Shadow

"I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais,
and afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my
doleful cell in the Bastille, during the last month of the year,
1767. I write it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty.
I design to secrete it in the wall of the chimney, where I have
slowly and laboriously made a place of concealment for it. Some
pitying hand may find it there, when I and my sorrows are dust.

"These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write
with difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney,
mixed with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity.
Hope has quite departed from my breast. I know from terrible
warnings I have noted in myself that my reason will not long remain
unimpaired, but I solemnly declare that I am at this time in the
possession of my right mind--that my memory is exact and
circumstantial--and that I write the truth as I shall answer for
these my last recorded words, whether they be ever read by men or not,
at the Eternal Judgment-seat.

"One cloudy moonlight night, in the third week of December (I think
the twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was walking on a
retired part of the quay by the Seine for the refreshment of the
frosty air, at an hour's distance from my place of residence in the
Street of the School of Medicine, when a carriage came along behind
me, driven very fast. As I stood aside to let that carriage pass,
apprehensive that it might otherwise run me down, a head was put out
at the window, and a voice called to the driver to stop.

"The carriage stopped as soon as the driver could rein in his horses,
and the same voice called to me by my name. I answered. The carriage
was then so far in advance of me that two gentlemen had time to open
the door and alight before I came up with it.

I observed that they were both wrapped in cloaks, and appeared to
conceal themselves. As they stood side by side near the carriage
door, I also observed that they both looked of about my own age, or
rather younger, and that they were greatly alike, in stature, manner,
voice, and (as far as I could see) face too.

"`You are Doctor Manette?' said one.

"I am."

"`Doctor Manette, formerly of Beauvais,' said the other; `the young
physician, originally an expert surgeon, who within the last year or
two has made a rising reputation in Paris?'

"`Gentlemen,' I returned, `I am that Doctor Manette of whom you speak
so graciously.'

"`We have been to your residence,' said the first, `and not being so
fortunate as to find you there, and being informed that you were
probably walking in this direction, we followed, in the hope of
overtaking you. Will you please to enter the carriage?'

"The manner of both was imperious, and they both moved, as these
words were spoken, so as to place me between themselves and the
carriage door. They were armed. I was not.

"`Gentlemen,' said I, `pardon me; but I usually inquire who does me
the honour to seek my assistance, and what is the nature of the case
to which I am summoned.'

"The reply to this was made by him who had spoken second.
'Doctor, your clients are people of condition. As to the nature of
the case, our confidence in your skill assures us that you will
ascertain it for yourself better than we can describe it. Enough.
Will you please to enter the carriage?'

"I could do nothing but comply, and I entered it in silence. They
both entered after me--the last springing in, after putting up the
steps. The carriage turned about, and drove on at its former speed.

"I repeat this conversation exactly as it occurred. I have no doubt
that it is, word for word, the same. I describe everything exactly
as it took place, constraining my mind not to wander from the task.
Where I make the broken marks that follow here, I leave off for the
time, and put my paper in its hiding-place.

* * * *

"The carriage left the streets behind, passed the North Barrier, and
emerged upon the country road. At two-thirds of a league from the
Barrier--I did not estimate the distance at that time, but afterwards
when I traversed it--it struck out of the main avenue, and presently
stopped at a solitary house, We all three alighted, and walked, by a
damp soft footpath in a garden where a neglected fountain had
overflowed, to the door of the house. It was not opened immediately,
in answer to the ringing of the bell, and one of my two conductors
struck the man who opened it, with his heavy riding glove, across the
face.

"There was nothing in this action to attract my particular attention,
for I had seen common people struck more commonly than dogs.
But, the other of the two, being angry likewise, struck the man in
like manner with his arm; the look and bearing of the brothers were
then so exactly alike, that I then first perceived them to be twin
brothers.

"From the time of our alighting at the outer gate (which we found
locked, and which one of the brothers had opened to admit us, and had
relocked), I had heard cries proceeding from an upper chamber. I was
conducted to this chamber straight, the cries growing louder as we
ascended the stairs, and I found a patient in a high fever of the brain,
lying on a bed.

"The patient was a woman of great beauty, and young; assuredly not
much past twenty. Her hair was torn and ragged, and her arms were
bound to her sides with sashes and handkerchiefs. I noticed that
these bonds were all portions of a gentleman's dress. On one of
them, which was a fringed scarf for a dress of ceremony, I saw the
armorial bearings of a Noble, and the letter E.

"I saw this, within the first minute of my contemplation of the
patient; for, in her restless strivings she had turned over on her
face on the edge of the bed, had drawn the end of the scarf into her
mouth, and was in danger of suffocation. My first act was to put out
my hand to relieve her breathing; and in moving the scarf aside, the
embroidery in the corner caught my sight.

"I turned her gently over, placed my hands upon her breast to calm
her and keep her down, and looked into her face. Her eyes were
dilated and wild, and she constantly uttered piercing shrieks, and
repeated the words, `My husband, my father, and my brother!' and
then counted up to twelve, and said, `Hush!' For an instant, and no
more, she would pause to listen, and then the piercing shrieks would
begin again, and she would repeat the cry, `My husband, my father,
and my brother!' and would count up to twelve, and say, `Hush!' There
was no variation in the order, or the manner. There was no cessation,
but the regular moment's pause, in the utterance of these sounds.

"`How long,' I asked, `has this lasted?'

"To distinguish the brothers, I will call them the elder and the
younger; by the elder, I mean him who exercised the most authority.
It was the elder who replied, `Since about this hour last night.'

"`She has a husband, a father, and a brother?'

"`A brother.'

"`I do not address her brother?'

"He answered with great contempt, `No.'

"`She has some recent association with the number twelve?'

"The younger brother impatiently rejoined, `With twelve o'clock?'

"`See, gentlemen,' said I, still keeping my hands upon her breast,
'how useless I am, as you have brought me! If I had known what I was
coming to see, I could have come provided. As it is, time must be
lost. There are no medicines to be obtained in this lonely place.'

"The elder brother looked to the younger, who said haughtily, `There
is a case of medicines here;' and brought it from a closet, and put
it on the table.

* * * *

"I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and put the stoppers to my
lips. If I had wanted to use anything save narcotic medicines that
were poisons in themselves, I would not have administered any of those.

"`Do you doubt them?' asked the younger brother.

"`You see, monsieur, I am going to use them,' I replied, and said no
more.

"I made the patient swallow, with great difficulty, and after many
efforts, the dose that I desired to give. As I intended to repeat it
after a while, and as it was necessary to watch its influence, I then
sat down by the side of the bed. There was a timid and suppressed
woman in attendance (wife of the man down-stairs), who had retreated
into a corner. The house was damp and decayed, indifferently
furnished--evidently, recently occupied and temporarily used.
Some thick old hangings had been nailed up before the windows, to
deaden the sound of the shrieks. They continued to be uttered in
their regular succession, with the cry, `My husband, my father, and
my brother!' the counting up to twelve, and `Hush!' The frenzy was
so violent, that I had not unfastened the bandages restraining the
arms; but, I had looked to them, to see that they were not painful.
The only spark of encouragement in the case, was, that my hand upon
the sufferer's breast had this much soothing influence, that for
minutes at a time it tranquillised the figure. It had no effect upon
the cries; no pendulum could be more regular.

"For the reason that my hand had this effect (I assume), I had sat by
the side of the bed for half an hour, with the two brothers looking
on, before the elder said:

"`There is another patient.'

"I was startled, and asked, `Is it a pressing case?'

"`You had better see,' he carelessly answered; and took up a light.

* * * *

"The other patient lay in a back room across a second staircase,
which was a species of loft over a stable. There was a low plastered
ceiling to a part of it; the rest was open, to the ridge of the tiled
roof, and there were beams across. Hay and straw were stored in that
portion of the place, fagots for firing, and a heap of apples in sand.
I had to pass through that part, to get at the other. My memory is
circumstantial and unshaken. I try it with these details, and I see
them all, in this my cell in the Bastille, near the close of the
tenth year of my captivity, as I saw them all that night.

"On some hay on the ground, with a cushion thrown under his head, lay
a handsome peasant boy--a boy of not more than seventeen at the most.
He lay on his back, with his teeth set, his right hand clenched on
his breast, and his glaring eyes looking straight upward. I could
not see where his wound was, as I kneeled on one knee over him;
but, I could see that he was dying of a wound from a sharp point.

"`I am a doctor, my poor fellow,' said I. `Let me examine it.'

"`I do not want it examined,' he answered; `let it be.'

"It was under his hand, and I soothed him to let me move his hand
away. The wound was a sword-thrust, received from twenty to twenty-
four hours before, but no skill could have saved him if it had been
looked to without delay. He was then dying fast. As I turned my
eyes to the elder brother, I saw him looking down at this handsome
boy whose life was ebbing out, as if he were a wounded bird, or hare,
or rabbit; not at all as if he were a fellow-creature.

"`How has this been done, monsieur?' said I.

"`A crazed young common dog! A serf! Forced my brother to draw upon him,
and has fallen by my brother's sword--like a gentleman.'

"There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in this
answer. The speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was inconvenient
to have that different order of creature dying there, and that it
would have been better if he had died in the usual obscure routine of
his vermin kind. He was quite incapable of any compassionate feeling
about the boy, or about his fate.

"The boy's eyes had slowly moved to him as he had spoken, and they
now slowly moved to me.

"`Doctor, they are very proud, these Nobles; but we common dogs are
proud too, sometimes. They plunder us, outrage us, beat us, kill us;
but we have a little pride left, sometimes. She--have you seen her, Doctor?'

"The shrieks and the cries were audible there, though subdued by the
distance. He referred to them, as if she were lying in our presence.

"I said, `I have seen her.'

"`She is my sister, Doctor. They have had their shameful rights,
these Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years,
but we have had good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my
father say so. She was a good girl. She was betrothed to a good
young man, too: a tenant of his. We were all tenants of his--that man's
who stands there. The other is his brother, the worst of a bad race.'

"It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy gathered bodily
force to speak; but, his spirit spoke with a dreadful emphasis.

"`We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common
dogs are by those superior Beings--taxed by him without mercy, obliged
to work for him without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill,
obliged to feed scores of his tame birds on our wretched crops, and
forbidden for our lives to keep a single tame bird of our own,
pillaged and plundered to that degree that when we chanced to have a
bit of meat, we ate it in fear, with the door barred and the shutters
closed, that his people should not see it and take it from us--I say,
we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father
told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and
that what we should most pray for, was, that our women might be barren
and our miserable race die out!'

"I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth
like a fire. I had supposed that it must be latent in the people
somewhere; but, I had never seen it break out, until I saw it in the
dying boy.

"`Nevertheless, Doctor, my sister married. He was ailing at that
time, poor fellow, and she married her lover, that she might tend and
comfort him in our cottage--our dog-hut, as that man would call it.
She had not been married many weeks, when that man's brother saw her
and admired her, and asked that man to lend her to him--for what are
husbands among us! He was willing enough, but my sister was good and
virtuous, and hated his brother with a hatred as strong as mine.
What did the two then, to persuade her husband to use his influence
with her, to make her willing?'

"The boy's eyes, which had been fixed on mine, slowly turned to the
looker-on, and I saw in the two faces that all he said was true.
The two opposing kinds of pride confronting one another, I can see,
even in this Bastille; the gentleman's, all negligent indifference;
the peasants, all trodden-down sentiment, and passionate revenge.

"`You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to
harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him
and drove him. You know that it is among their Rights to keep us in
their grounds all night, quieting the frogs, in order that their
noble sleep may not be disturbed. They kept him out in the unwholesome
mists at night, and ordered him back into his harness in the day.
But he was not persuaded. No! Taken out of harness one day at noon,
to feed--if he could find food--he sobbed twelve times, once for
every stroke of the bell, and died on her bosom.'

"Nothing human could have held life in the boy but his determination
to tell all his wrong. He forced back the gathering shadows of death,
as he forced his clenched right hand to remain clenched, and to cover
his wound.

"`Then, with that man's permission and even with his aid, his brother
took her away; in spite of what I know she must have told his
brother--and what that is, will not be long unknown to you, Doctor,
if it is now--his brother took her away--for his pleasure and
diversion, for a little while. I saw her pass me on the road.
When I took the tidings home, our father's heart burst; he never
spoke one of the words that filled it. I took my young sister (for
I have another) to a place beyond the reach of this man, and where,
at least, she will never be HIS vassal. Then, I tracked the
brother here, and last night climbed in--a common dog, but sword in
hand.--Where is the loft window? It was somewhere here?'

"The room was darkening to his sight; the world was narrowing around
him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were
trampled over the floor, as if there had been a struggle.

"`She heard me, and ran in. I told her not to come near us till he
was dead. He came in and first tossed me some pieces of money; then
struck at me with a whip. But I, though a common dog, so struck at
him as to make him draw. Let him break into as many pieces as he
will, the sword that he stained with my common blood; he drew to
defend himself--thrust at me with all his skill for his life.'

"My glance had fallen, but a few moments before, on the fragments of
a broken sword, lying among the hay. That weapon was a gentleman's.
In another place, lay an old sword that seemed to have been a soldier's.

"`Now, lift me up, Doctor; lift me up. Where is he?'

"`He is not here,' I said, supporting the boy, and thinking that he
referred to the brother.

"`He! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. Where is
the man who was here? turn my face to him.'

"I did so, raising the boy's head against my knee. But, invested for
the moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself completely:
obliging me to rise too, or I could not have still supported him.

"`Marquis,' said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide,
and his right hand raised, `in the days when all these things are to
be answered for, I summon you and yours, to the last of your bad race,
to answer for them. I mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign
that I do it. In the days when all these things are to be answered
for, I summon your brother, the worst of the bad race, to answer for
them separately. I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that
I do it.'

"Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with his
forefinger drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant with the
finger yet raised, and as it dropped, he dropped with it, and I laid
him down dead.

* * * *

"When I returned to the bedside of the young woman, I found her
raving in precisely the same order of continuity. I knew that this
might last for many hours, and that it would probably end in the
silence of the grave.

"I repeated the medicines I had given her, and I sat at the side of
the bed until the night was far advanced. She never abated the
piercing quality of her shrieks, never stumbled in the distinctness
or the order of her words. They were always `My husband, my father,
and my brother! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
ten, eleven, twelve. Hush!'

"This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first saw her. I
had come and gone twice, and was again sitting by her, when she began
to falter. I did what little could be done to assist that opportunity,
and by-and-bye she sank into a lethargy, and lay like the dead.

"It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a long and
fearful storm. I released her arms, and called the woman to assist
me to compose her figure and the dress she had to. It was then that
I knew her condition to be that of one in whom the first expectations
of being a mother have arisen; and it was then that I lost the little
hope I had had of her.

"`Is she dead?' asked the Marquis, whom I will still describe as the
elder brother, coming booted into the room from his horse.

"`Not dead,' said I; `but like to die.'

"`What strength there is in these common bodies!' he said, looking
down at her with some curiosity.

"`There is prodigious strength,' I answered him, `in sorrow and despair.'

"He first laughed at my words, and then frowned at them. He moved a
chair with his foot near to mine, ordered the woman away, and said in
a subdued voice,

"`Doctor, finding my brother in this difficulty with these hinds,
I recommended that your aid should be invited. Your reputation is
high, and, as a young man with your fortune to make, you are probably
mindful of your interest. The things that you see here, are things
to be seen, and not spoken of.'

"I listened to the patient's breathing, and avoided answering.

"`Do you honour me with your attention, Doctor?'

"`Monsieur,' said I, `in my profession, the communications of
patients are always received in confidence.' I was guarded in my
answer, for I was troubled in my mind with what I had heard and seen.

"Her breathing was so difficult to trace, that I carefully tried the
pulse and the heart. There was life, and no more. Looking round as
I resumed my seat, I found both the brothers intent upon me.

* * * *

"I write with so much difficulty, the cold is so severe, I am so
fearful of being detected and consigned to an underground cell and
total darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no
confusion or failure in my memory; it can recall, and could detail,
every word that was ever spoken between me and those brothers.

"She lingered for a week. Towards the last, I could understand some
few syllables that she said to me, by placing my ear close to her lips.
She asked me where she was, and I told her; who I was, and I told her.
It was in vain that I asked her for her family name. She faintly
shook her head upon the pillow, and kept her secret, as the boy had done.

"I had no opportunity of asking her any question, until I had told
the brothers she was sinking fast, and could not live another day.
Until then, though no one was ever presented to her consciousness
save the woman and myself, one or other of them had always jealously
sat behind the curtain at the head of the bed when I was there.
But when it came to that, they seemed careless what communication I
might hold with her; as if--the thought passed through my mind--I
were dying too.

"I always observed that their pride bitterly resented the younger
brother's (as I call him) having crossed swords with a peasant, and
that peasant a boy. The only consideration that appeared to affect
the mind of either of them was the consideration that this was highly
degrading to the family, and was ridiculous. As often as I caught
the younger brother's eyes, their expression reminded me that he
disliked me deeply, for knowing what I knew from the boy. He was
smoother and more polite to me than the elder; but I saw this.
I also saw that I was an incumbrance in the mind of the elder, too.

"My patient died, two hours before midnight--at a time, by my watch,
answering almost to the minute when I had first seen her. I was
alone with her, when her forlorn young head drooped gently on one
side, and all her earthly wrongs and sorrows ended.

"The brothers were waiting in a room down-stairs, impatient to ride
away. I had heard them, alone at the bedside, striking their boots
with their riding-whips, and loitering up and down.

"`At last she is dead?' said the elder, when I went in.

"`She is dead,' said I.

"`I congratulate you, my brother,' were his words as he turned round.

"He had before offered me money, which I had postponed taking. He
now gave me a rouleau of gold. I took it from his hand, but laid it
on the table. I had considered the question, and had resolved to
accept nothing.

"`Pray excuse me,' said I. `Under the circumstances, no.'

"They exchanged looks, but bent their heads to me as I bent mine to
them, and we parted without another word on either side.

* * * *

"I am weary, weary, weary-worn down by misery. I cannot read what I
have written with this gaunt hand.

"Early in the morning, the rouleau of gold was left at my door in a
little box, with my name on the outside. From the first, I had
anxiously considered what I ought to do. I decided, that day, to
write privately to the Minister, stating the nature of the two cases
to which I had been summoned, and the place to which I had gone: in
effect, stating all the circumstances. I knew what Court influence
was, and what the immunities of the Nobles were, and I expected that
the matter would never be heard of; but, I wished to relieve my own
mind. I had kept the matter a profound secret, even from my wife;
and this, too, I resolved to state in my letter. I had no apprehension
whatever of my real danger; but I was conscious that there might be
danger for others, if others were compromised by possessing the
knowledge that I possessed.

"I was much engaged that day, and could not complete my letter that
night. I rose long before my usual time next morning to finish it.
It was the last day of the year. The letter was lying before me just
completed, when I was told that a lady waited, who wished to see me.

* * * *

"I am growing more and more unequal to the task I have set myself.
It is so cold, so dark, my senses are so benumbed, and the gloom upon
me is so dreadful.

"The lady was young, engaging, and handsome, but not marked for long
life. She was in great agitation. She presented herself to me as
the wife of the Marquis St. Evremonde. I connected the title by
which the boy had addressed the elder brother, with the initial
letter embroidered on the scarf, and had no difficulty in arriving at
the conclusion that I had seen that nobleman very lately.

"My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of our
conversation. I suspect that I am watched more closely than I was,
and I know not at what times I may be watched. She had in part
suspected, and in part discovered, the main facts of the cruel story,
of her husband's share in it, and my being resorted to. She did not
know that the girl was dead. Her hope had been, she said in great
distress, to show her, in secret, a woman's sympathy. Her hope had
been to avert the wrath of Heaven from a House that had long been
hateful to the suffering many.

"She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister living,
and her greatest desire was, to help that sister. I could tell her
nothing but that there was such a sister; beyond that, I knew nothing.
Her inducement to come to me, relying on my confidence, had been the
hope that I could tell her the name and place of abode. Whereas,
to this wretched hour I am ignorant of both.

* * * *

"These scraps of paper fail me. One was taken from me, with a
warning, yesterday. I must finish my record to-day.

"She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her marriage.
How could she be! The brother distrusted and disliked her, and his
influence was all opposed to her; she stood in dread of him, and in
dread of her husband too. When I handed her down to the door, there
was a child, a pretty boy from two to three years old, in her carriage.

"`For his sake, Doctor,' she said, pointing to him in tears, `I would
do all I can to make what poor amends I can. He will never prosper
in his inheritance otherwise. I have a presentiment that if no other
innocent atonement is made for this, it will one day be required of
him. What I have left to call my own--it is little beyond the worth
of a few jewels--I will make it the first charge of his life to
bestow, with the compassion and lamenting of his dead mother, on this
injured family, if the sister can be discovered.'

"She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, `It is for thine own
dear sake. Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?' The child
answered her bravely, `Yes!' I kissed her hand, and she took him in
her arms, and went away caressing him. I never saw her more.

"As she had mentioned her husband's name in the faith that I knew it,
I added no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my letter, and, not
trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that day.

"That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o'clock, a man
in a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly
followed my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs. When my
servant came into the room where I sat with my wife--O my wife,
beloved of my heart! My fair young English wife!--we saw the man,
who was supposed to be at the gate, standing silent behind him.

"An urgent case in the Rue St. Honore, he said. It would not detain
me, he had a coach in waiting.

"It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was clear of
the house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from
behind, and my arms were pinioned. The two brothers crossed the road
from a dark corner, and identified me with a single gesture. The
Marquis took from his pocket the letter I had written, showed it me,
burnt it in the light of a lantern that was held, and extinguished
the ashes with his foot. Not a word was spoken. I was brought here,
I was brought to my living grave.

"If it had pleased GOD to put it in the hard heart of either of the
brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of my
dearest wife--so much as to let me know by a word whether alive or
dead--I might have thought that He had not quite abandoned them.
But, now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to them,
and that they have no part in His mercies. And them and their
descendants, to the last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy
prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony,
denounce to the times when all these things shall be answered for.
I denounce them to Heaven and to earth."

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was done. A
sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but
blood. The narrative called up the most revengeful passions of the
time, and there was not a head in the nation but must have dropped
before it.

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to show
how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the other
captured Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had kept it,
biding their time. Little need to show that this detested family
name had long been anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was wrought
into the fatal register. The man never trod ground whose virtues and
services would have sustained him in that place that day, against
such denunciation.

And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was a
well-known citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife.
One of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations
of the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices
and self-immolations on the people's altar. Therefore when the
President said (else had his own head quivered on his shoulders),
that the good physician of the Republic would deserve better still of
the Republic by rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, and
would doubtless feel a sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a
widow and her child an orphan, there was wild excitement, patriotic
fervour, not a touch of human sympathy.

"Much influence around him, has that Doctor?" murmured Madame Defarge,
smiling to The Vengeance. "Save him now, my Doctor, save him!"

At every juryman's vote, there was a roar. Another and another.
Roar and roar.

Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent an Aristocrat, an enemy
of the Republic, a notorious oppressor of the People. Back to the
Conciergerie, and Death within four-and-twenty hours!

0108 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 9

2006-09-16T22:48:00.000-07:00

The Game Made

While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the
adjoining dark room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard,
Mr. Lorry looked at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That
honest tradesman's manner of receiving the look, did not inspire
confidence; he changed the leg on which he rested, as often as if he
had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he examined his
finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of attention; and
whenever Mr. Lorry's eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar
kind of short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which
is seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect
openness of character.

"Jerry," said Mr. Lorry. "Come here."

Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in
advance of him.

"What have you been, besides a messenger?"

After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his patron,
Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, "Agicultooral
character."

"My mind misgives me much," said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a
forefinger at him, "that you have used the respectable and great
house of Tellson's as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful
occupation of an infamous description. If you have, don't expect me
to befriend you when you get back to England. If you have, don't
expect me to keep your secret. Tellson's shall not be imposed upon."

"I hope, sir," pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, "that a gentleman
like yourself wot I've had the honour of odd jobbing till I'm grey at
it, would think twice about harming of me, even if it wos so--I don't
say it is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be took into
account that if it wos, it wouldn't, even then, be all o' one side.
There'd be two sides to it. There might be medical doctors at the
present hour, a picking up their guineas where a honest tradesman
don't pick up his fardens--fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens--
half fardens! no, nor yet his quarter--a banking away like smoke at
Tellson's, and a cocking their medical eyes at that tradesman on the
sly, a going in and going out to their own carriages--ah! equally
like smoke, if not more so. Well, that 'ud be imposing, too, on
Tellson's. For you cannot sarse the goose and not the gander.
And here's Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways wos in the Old England times,
and would be to-morrow, if cause given, a floppin' again the business
to that degree as is ruinating--stark ruinating! Whereas them medical
doctors' wives don't flop--catch 'em at it! Or, if they flop, their
toppings goes in favour of more patients, and how can you rightly
have one without t'other? Then, wot with undertakers, and wot with
parish clerks, and wot with sextons, and wot with private watchmen
(all awaricious and all in it), a man wouldn't get much by it, even
if it wos so. And wot little a man did get, would never prosper with
him, Mr. Lorry. He'd never have no good of it; he'd want all along
to be out of the line, if he, could see his way out, being once in--
even if it wos so."

"Ugh!" cried Mr. Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless, "I am shocked
at the sight of you."

"Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir," pursued Mr. Cruncher,
"even if it wos so, which I don't say it is--"

"Don't prevaricate," said Mr. Lorry.

"No, I will NOT, sir," returned Mr. Crunches as if nothing were
further from his thoughts or practice--"which I don't say it is--wot
I would humbly offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that there
stool, at that there Bar, sets that there boy of mine, brought up and
growed up to be a man, wot will errand you, message you, general-
light-job you, till your heels is where your head is, if such should
be your wishes. If it wos so, which I still don't say it is (for I
will not prewaricate to you, sir), let that there boy keep his
father's place, and take care of his mother; don't blow upon that
boy's father--do not do it, sir--and let that father go into the line
of the reg'lar diggin', and make amends for what he would have
undug--if it wos so-by diggin' of 'em in with a will, and with
conwictions respectin' the futur' keepin' of 'em safe. That,
Mr. Lorry," said Mr. Cruncher, wiping his forehead with his arm, as
an announcement that he had arrived at the peroration of his
discourse, "is wot I would respectfully offer to you, sir. A man
don't see all this here a goin' on dreadful round him, in the way of
Subjects without heads, dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the
price down to porterage and hardly that, without havin' his serious
thoughts of things. And these here would be mine, if it wos so,
entreatin' of you fur to bear in mind that wot I said just now, I up
and said in the good cause when I might have kep' it back."

"That at least is true," said Mr. Lorry. "Say no more now. It may be
that I shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and repent in
action--not in words. I want no more words."

Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the spy
returned from the dark room. "Adieu, Mr. Barsad," said the former;
"our arrangement thus made, you have nothing to fear from me."

He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr. Lorry.
When they were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done?

"Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have ensured
access to him, once."

Mr. Lorry's countenance fell.

"It is all I could do," said Carton. "To propose too much, would be
to put this man's head under the axe, and, as he himself said,
nothing worse could happen to him if he were denounced. It was
obviously the weakness of the position. There is no help for it."

"But access to him," said Mr. Lorry, "if it should go ill before the
Tribunal, will not save him."

"I never said it would."

Mr. Lorry's eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy with his
darling, and the heavy disappointment of his second arrest, gradually
weakened them; he was an old man now, overborne with anxiety of late,
and his tears fell.

"You are a good man and a true friend," said Carton, in an altered
voice. "Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I could not
see my father weep, and sit by, careless. And I could not respect
your sorrow more, if you were my father. You are free from that
misfortune, however."

Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual manner,
there was a true feeling and respect both in his tone and in his
touch, that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of him,
was wholly unprepared for. He gave him his hand, and Carton gently
pressed it.

"To return to poor Darnay," said Carton. "Don't tell Her of this
interview, or this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to see
him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the worse, to
convey to him the means of anticipating the sentence."

Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to
see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned the look,
and evidently understood it.

"She might think a thousand things," Carton said, "and any of them
would only add to her trouble. Don't speak of me to her. As I said
to you when I first came, I had better not see her. I can put my
hand out, to do any little helpful work for her that my hand can find
to do, without that. You are going to her, I hope? She must be very
desolate to-night."

"I am going now, directly."

"I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you and
reliance on you. How does she look?"

"Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful."

"Ah!"

It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh--almost like a sob. It
attracted Mr. Lorry's eyes to Carton's face, which was turned to the
fire. A light, or a shade (the old gentleman could not have said
which), passed from it as swiftly as a change will sweep over a
hill-side on a wild bright day, and he lifted his foot to put back
one of the little flaming logs, which was tumbling forward. He wore
the white riding-coat and top-boots, then in vogue, and the light of
the fire touching their light surfaces made him look very pale, with
his long brown hair, all untrimmed, hanging loose about him. His
indifference to fire was sufficiently remarkable to elicit a word of
remonstrance from Mr. Lorry; his boot was still upon the hot embers
of the flaming log, when it had broken under the weight of his foot.

"I forgot it," he said.

Mr. Lorry's eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of
the wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features, and
having the expression of prisoners' faces fresh in his mind, he was
strongly reminded of that expression.

"And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?" said Carton,
turning to him.

"Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so
unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped
to have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris.
I have my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go."

They were both silent.

"Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?" said Carton, wistfully.

"I am in my seventy-eighth year."

"You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly occupied;
trusted, respected, and looked up to?"

"I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man.
indeed, I may say that I was a man of business when a boy."

"See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people will
miss you when you leave it empty!"

"A solitary old bachelor," answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his
head. "There is nobody to weep for me."

"How can you say that? Wouldn't She weep for you? Wouldn't her child?"

"Yes, yes, thank God. I didn't quite mean what I said."

"It IS a thing to thank God for; is it not?"

"Surely, surely."

"If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night,
'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no
regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!'
your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would
they not?"

"You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be."

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a
few moments, said:

"I should like to ask you:--Does your childhood seem far off? Do the
days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?"

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:

"Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw
closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings
and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many
remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother
(and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we
call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not
confirmed in me."

"I understand the feeling!" exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush.
"And you are the better for it?"

"I hope so."

Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him on
with his outer coat; "But you," said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the theme,
"you are young."

"Yes," said Carton. "I am not old, but my young way was never the
way to age. Enough of me."

"And of me, I am sure," said Mr. Lorry. "Are you going out?"

"I'll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless
habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, don't be
uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the Court to-morrow?"

"Yes, unhappily."

"I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find a
place for me. Take my arm, sir."

Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the streets.
A few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry's destination. Carton left
him there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned back to the
gate again when it was shut, and touched it. He had heard of her
going to the prison every day. "She came out here," he said, looking
about him, "turned this way, must have trod on these stones often.
Let me follow in her steps."

It was ten o'clock at night when he stood before the prison of La
Force, where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-sawyer,
having closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-door.

"Good night, citizen," said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by;
for, the man eyed him inquisitively.

"Good night, citizen."

"How goes the Republic?"

"You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall
mount to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain sometimes, of
being exhausted. Ha, ha, ha! He is so droll, that Samson.
Such a Barber!"

"Do you often go to see him--"

"Shave? Always. Every day. What a barber! You have seen him at work?"

"Never."

"Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to yourself,
citizen; he shaved the sixty-three to-day, in less than two pipes!
Less than two pipes. Word of honour!"

As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking, to
explain how he timed the executioner, Carton was so sensible of a
rising desire to strike the life out of him, that he turned away.

"But you are not English," said the wood-sawyer, "though you wear
English dress?"

"Yes," said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his shoulder.

"You speak like a Frenchman."

"I am an old student here."

"Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman."

"Good night, citizen."

"But go and see that droll dog," the little man persisted, calling
after him. "And take a pipe with you!"

Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the middle
of the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his pencil on a
scrap of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step of one who
remembered the way well, several dark and dirty streets--much dirtier
than usual, for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in
those times of terror--he stopped at a chemist's shop, which the
owner was closing with his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop,
kept in a tortuous, up-hill thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.

Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his
counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. "Whew!" the chemist
whistled softly, as he read it. "Hi! hi! hi!"

Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:

"For you, citizen?"

"For me."

"You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen? You know the
consequences of mixing them?"

"Perfectly."

Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put them, one
by one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the money for
them, and deliberately left the shop. "There is nothing more to do,"
said he, glancing upward at the moon, "until to-morrow. I can't sleep."

It was not a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these words
aloud under the fast-sailing clouds, nor was it more expressive of
negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner of a tired man,
who had wandered and struggled and got lost, but who at length struck
into his road and saw its end.

Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest competitors as a
youth of great promise, he had followed his father to the grave.
His mother had died, years before. These solemn words, which had
been read at his father's grave, arose in his mind as he went down
the dark streets, among the heavy shadows, with the moon and the
clouds sailing on high above him. "I am the resurrection and the
life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead,
yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall
never die."

In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural sorrow
rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put to death,
and for to-morrow's victims then awaiting their doom in the prisons,
and still of to-morrow's and to-morrow's, the chain of association
that brought the words home, like a rusty old ship's anchor from the
deep, might have been easily found. He did not seek it, but repeated
them and went on.

With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people were
going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the horrors
surrounding them; in the towers of the churches, where no prayers
were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled that length
of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors, plunderers, and
profligates; in the distant burial-places, reserved, as they wrote
upon the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding gaols; and in the
streets along which the sixties rolled to a death which had become so
common and material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit
ever arose among the people out of all the working of the Guillotine;
with a solemn interest in the whole life and death of the city
settling down to its short nightly pause in fury; Sydney Carton
crossed the Seine again for the lighter streets.

Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be
suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on
heavy shoes, and trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled,
and the people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went chatting
home. At one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl with a
mother, looking for a way across the street through the mud.
He carried the child over, and before, the timid arm was loosed from
his neck asked her for a kiss.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die."

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words
were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm
and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but,
he heard them always.

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the
water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where
the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the
light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out
of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale
and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were
delivered over to Death's dominion.

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that
burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long
bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes,
a bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun,
while the river sparkled under it.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial
friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from
the houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the
bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a
little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless,
until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.--"Like me."

A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf,
then glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its
silent track in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken up
out of his heart for a merciful consideration of all his poor
blindnesses and errors, ended in the words, "I am the resurrection
and the life."

Mr. Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to
surmise where the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank nothing
but a little coffee, ate some bread, and, having washed and changed
to refresh himself, went out to the place of trial.

The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep--whom many
fell away from in dread--pressed him into an obscure corner among the
crowd. Mr. Lorry was there, and Doctor Manette was there. She was
there, sitting beside her father.

When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him, so
sustaining, so encouraging, so full of admiring love and pitying
tenderness, yet so courageous for his sake, that it called the
healthy blood into his face, brightened his glance, and animated his
heart. If there had been any eyes to notice the influence of her
look, on Sydney Carton, it would have been seen to be the same
influence exactly.

Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of
procedure, ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing.
There could have been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and
ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused, that the
suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the
winds.

Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patriots and
good republicans as yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow and
the day after. Eager and prominent among them, one man with a
craving face, and his fingers perpetually hovering about his lips,
whose appearance gave great satisfaction to the spectators. A life-
thirsting, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman, the Jacques Three
of St. Antoine. The whole jury, as a jury of dogs empannelled to try
the deer.

Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public prosecutor.
No favourable leaning in that quarter to-day. A fell, uncompromising,
murderous business-meaning there. Every eye then sought some other
eye in the crowd, and gleamed at it approvingly; and heads nodded at
one another, before bending forward with a strained attention.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday. Reaccused and
retaken yesterday. Indictment delivered to him last night. Suspected
and Denounced enemy of the Republic, Aristocrat, one of a family of
tyrants, one of a race proscribed, for that they had used their
abolished privileges to the infamous oppression of the people.
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, in right of such proscription,
absolutely Dead in Law.

To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor.

The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or secretly?

"Openly, President."

"By whom?"

"Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine-vendor of St. Antoine."

"Good."

"Therese Defarge, his wife."

"Good."

"Alexandre Manette, physician."

A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it,
Doctor Manette was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he had
been seated.

"President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and a
fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My
daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life.
Who and where is the false conspirator who says that I denounce the
husband of my child!"

"Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the
authority of the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law.
As to what is dearer to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a
good citizen as the Republic."

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell,
and with warmth resumed.

"If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child
herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what
is to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent!"

Frantic acclamations were again raised. Doctor Manette sat down,
with his eyes looking around, and his lips trembling; his daughter
drew closer to him. The craving man on the jury rubbed his hands
together, and restored the usual hand to his mouth.

Defarge was produced, when the court was quiet enough to admit of his
being heard, and rapidly expounded the story of the imprisonment, and
of his having been a mere boy in the Doctor's service, and of the
release, and of the state of the prisoner when released and delivered
to him. This short examination followed, for the court was quick
with its work.

"You did good service at the taking of the Bastille, citizen?"

"I believe so."

Here, an excited woman screeched from the crowd: "You were one of the
best patriots there. Why not say so? You were a cannoneer that day
there, and you were among the first to enter the accursed fortress
when it fell. Patriots, I speak the truth!"

It was The Vengeance who, amidst the warm commendations of the
audience, thus assisted the proceedings. The President rang his
bell; but, The Vengeance, warming with encouragement, shrieked,
"I defy that bell!" wherein she was likewise much commended.

"Inform the Tribunal of what you did that day within the Bastille,
citizen."

"I knew," said Defarge, looking down at his wife, who stood at the
bottom of the steps on which he was raised, looking steadily up at
him; "I knew that this prisoner, of whom I speak, had been confined
in a cell known as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. I knew it from
himself. He knew himself by no other name than One Hundred and Five,
North Tower, when he made shoes under my care. As I serve my gun
that day, I resolve, when the place shall fall, to examine that cell.
It falls. I mount to the cell, with a fellow-citizen who is one of
the Jury, directed by a gaoler. I examine it, very closely. In a
hole in the chimney, where a stone has been worked out and replaced,
I find a written paper. This is that written paper. I have made it
my business to examine some specimens of the writing of Doctor
Manette. This is the writing of Doctor Manette. I confide this
paper, in the writing of Doctor Manette, to the hands of the President."

"Let it be read."

In a dead silence and stillness--the prisoner under trial looking
lovingly at his wife, his wife only looking from him to look with
solicitude at her father, Doctor Manette keeping his eyes fixed on
the reader, Madame Defarge never taking hers from the prisoner,
Defarge never taking his from his feasting wife, and all the other
eyes there intent upon the Doctor, who saw none of them--the paper
was read, as follows.

0107 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 8

2006-09-16T22:47:00.000-07:00

A Hand at Cards

Happily unconscious of the new calamity at home, Miss Pross threaded
her way along the narrow streets and crossed the river by the bridge
of the Pont-Neuf, reckoning in her mind the number of indispensable
purchases she had to make. Mr. Cruncher, with the basket, walked at
her side. They both looked to the right and to the left into most of
the shops they passed, had a wary eye for all gregarious assemblages
of people, and turned out of their road to avoid any very excited
group of talkers. It was a raw evening, and the misty river, blurred
to the eye with blazing lights and to the ear with harsh noises,
showed where the barges were stationed in which the smiths worked,
making guns for the Army of the Republic. Woe to the man who played
tricks with THAT Army, or got undeserved promotion in it! Better
for him that his beard had never grown, for the National Razor shaved
him close.

Having purchased a few small articles of grocery, and a measure of
oil for the lamp, Miss Pross bethought herself of the wine they
wanted. After peeping into several wine-shops, she stopped at the
sign of the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, not far from the
National Palace, once (and twice) the Tuileries, where the aspect of
things rather took her fancy. It had a quieter look than any other
place of the same description they had passed, and, though red with
patriotic caps, was not so red as the rest. Sounding Mr. Cruncher,
and finding him of her opinion, Miss Pross resorted to the Good
Republican Brutus of Antiquity, attended by her cavalier.

Slightly observant of the smoky lights; of the people, pipe in mouth,
playing with limp cards and yellow dominoes; of the one bare-
breasted, bare-armed, soot-begrimed workman reading a journal aloud,
and of the others listening to him; of the weapons worn, or laid
aside to be resumed; of the two or three customers fallen forward
asleep, who in the popular high-shouldered shaggy black spencer
looked, in that attitude, like slumbering bears or dogs; the two
outlandish customers approached the counter, and showed what they wanted.

As their wine was measuring out, a man parted from another man in a
corner, and rose to depart. In going, he had to face Miss Pross.
No sooner did he face her, than Miss Pross uttered a scream, and
clapped her hands.

In a moment, the whole company were on their feet. That somebody was
assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of opinion was the
likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see somebody fall, but
only saw a man and a woman standing staring at each other; the man
with all the outward aspect of a Frenchman and a thorough Republican;
the woman, evidently English.

What was said in this disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples of
the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except that it was something
very voluble and loud, would have been as so much Hebrew or Chaldean
to Miss Pross and her protector, though they had been all ears. But,
they had no ears for anything in their surprise. For, it must be
recorded, that not only was Miss Pross lost in amazement and
agitation, but, Mr. Cruncher--though it seemed on his own separate
and individual account--was in a state of the greatest wonder.

"What is the matter?" said the man who had caused Miss Pross to scream;
speaking in a vexed, abrupt voice (though in a low tone), and in
English.

"Oh, Solomon, dear Solomon!" cried Miss Pross, clapping her hands
again. "After not setting eyes upon you or hearing of you for so
long a time, do I find you here!"

"Don't call me Solomon. Do you want to be the death of me?" asked
the man, in a furtive, frightened way.

"Brother, brother!" cried Miss Pross, bursting into tears. "Have I
ever been so hard with you that you ask me such a cruel question?"

"Then hold your meddlesome tongue," said Solomon, "and come out, if
you want to speak to me. Pay for your wine, and come out.
Who's this man?"

Miss Pross, shaking her loving and dejected head at her by no means
affectionate brother, said through her tears, "Mr. Cruncher."

"Let him come out too," said Solomon. "Does he think me a ghost?"

Apparently, Mr. Cruncher did, to judge from his looks. He said not a
word, however, and Miss Pross, exploring the depths of her reticule
through her tears with great difficulty paid for her wine. As she
did so, Solomon turned to the followers of the Good Republican Brutus
of Antiquity, and offered a few words of explanation in the French
language, which caused them all to relapse into their former places
and pursuits.

"Now," said Solomon, stopping at the dark street corner, "what do you want?"

"How dreadfully unkind in a brother nothing has ever turned my love
away from!" cried Miss Pross, "to give me such a greeting, and show
me no affection."

"There. Confound it! There," said Solomon, making a dab at Miss
Pross's lips with his own. "Now are you content?"

Miss Pross only shook her head and wept in silence.

"If you expect me to be surprised," said her brother Solomon, "I am
not surprised; I knew you were here; I know of most people who are
here. If you really don't want to endanger my existence--which I half
believe you do--go your ways as soon as possible, and let me go mine.
I am busy. I am an official."

"My English brother Solomon," mourned Miss Pross, casting up her
tear-fraught eyes, "that had the makings in him of one of the best
and greatest of men in his native country, an official among
foreigners, and such foreigners! I would almost sooner have seen the
dear boy lying in his--"

"I said so!" cried her brother, interrupting. "I knew it. You want
to be the death of me. I shall be rendered Suspected, by my own
sister. Just as I am getting on!"

"The gracious and merciful Heavens forbid!" cried Miss Pross. "Far
rather would I never see you again, dear Solomon, though I have ever
loved you truly, and ever shall. Say but one affectionate word to
me, and tell me there is nothing angry or estranged between us, and I
will detain you no longer."

Good Miss Pross! As if the estrangement between them had come of any
culpability of hers. As if Mr. Lorry had not known it for a fact,
years ago, in the quiet corner in Soho, that this precious brother
had spent her money and left her!

He was saying the affectionate word, however, with a far more
grudging condescension and patronage than he could have shown if
their relative merits and positions had been reversed (which is
invariably the case, all the world over), when Mr. Cruncher, touching
him on the shoulder, hoarsely and unexpectedly interposed with the
following singular question:

"I say! Might I ask the favour? As to whether your name is John
Solomon, or Solomon John?"

The official turned towards him with sudden distrust. He had not
previously uttered a word.

"Come!" said Mr. Cruncher. "Speak out, you know." (Which, by the
way, was more than he could do himself.) "John Solomon, or Solomon
John? She calls you Solomon, and she must know, being your sister.
And _I_ know you're John, you know. Which of the two goes first?
And regarding that name of Pross, likewise. That warn't your name
over the water."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I don't know all I mean, for I can't call to mind what your
name was, over the water."

"No?"

"No. But I'll swear it was a name of two syllables."

"Indeed?"

"Yes. T'other one's was one syllable. I know you. You was a spy--
witness at the Bailey. What, in the name of the Father of Lies,
own father to yourself, was you called at that time?"

"Barsad," said another voice, striking in.

"That's the name for a thousand pound!" cried Jerry.

The speaker who struck in, was Sydney Carton. He had his hands
behind him under the skirts of his riding-coat, and he stood at
Mr. Cruncher's elbow as negligently as he might have stood at the Old
Bailey itself.

"Don't be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr. Lorry's,
to his surprise, yesterday evening; we agreed that I would not
present myself elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could be
useful; I present myself here, to beg a little talk with your brother.
I wish you had a better employed brother than Mr. Barsad. I wish
for your sake Mr. Barsad was not a Sheep of the Prisons."

Sheep was a cant word of the time for a spy, under the gaolers.
The spy, who was pale, turned paler, and asked him how he dared--

"I'll tell you," said Sydney. "I lighted on you, Mr. Barsad, coming
out of the prison of the Conciergerie while I was contemplating the
walls, an hour or more ago. You have a face to be remembered, and I
remember faces well. Made curious by seeing you in that connection,
and having a reason, to which you are no stranger, for associating
you with the misfortunes of a friend now very unfortunate, I walked
in your direction. I walked into the wine-shop here, close after you,
and sat near you. I had no difficulty in deducing from your unreserved
conversation, and the rumour openly going about among your admirers,
the nature of your calling. And gradually, what I had done at random,
seemed to shape itself into a purpose, Mr. Barsad."

"What purpose?" the spy asked.

"It would be troublesome, and might be dangerous, to explain in the
street. Could you favour me, in confidence, with some minutes of
your company--at the office of Tellson's Bank, for instance?"

"Under a threat?"

"Oh! Did I say that?"

"Then, why should I go there?"

"Really, Mr. Barsad, I can't say, if you can't."

"Do you mean that you won't say, sir?" the spy irresolutely asked.

"You apprehend me very clearly, Mr. Barsad. I won't."

Carton's negligent recklessness of manner came powerfully in aid of
his quickness and skill, in such a business as he had in his secret
mind, and with such a man as he had to do with. His practised eye
saw it, and made the most of it.

"Now, I told you so," said the spy, casting a reproachful look at his
sister; "if any trouble comes of this, it's your doing."

"Come, come, Mr. Barsad!" exclaimed Sydney. "Don't be
ungrateful. But for my great respect for your sister, I might not
have led up so pleasantly to a little proposal that I wish to make
for our mutual satisfaction. Do you go with me to the Bank?"

"I'll hear what you have got to say. Yes, I'll go with you."

"I propose that we first conduct your sister safely to the corner of
her own street. Let me take your arm, Miss Pross. This is not a
good city, at this time, for you to be out in, unprotected; and as
your escort knows Mr. Barsad, I will invite him to Mr. Lorry's with us.
Are we ready? Come then!"

Miss Pross recalled soon afterwards, and to the end of her life
remembered, that as she pressed her hands on Sydney's arm and looked
up in his face, imploring him to do no hurt to Solomon, there was a
braced purpose in the arm and a kind of inspiration in the eyes,
which not only contradicted his light manner, but changed and raised
the man. She was too much occupied then with fears for the brother
who so little deserved her affection, and with Sydney's friendly
reassurances, adequately to heed what she observed.

They left her at the corner of the street, and Carton led the way to
Mr. Lorry's, which was within a few minutes' walk. John Barsad, or
Solomon Pross, walked at his side.

Mr. Lorry had just finished his dinner, and was sitting before a
cheery little log or two of fire--perhaps looking into their blaze
for the picture of that younger elderly gentleman from Tellson's, who
had looked into the red coals at the Royal George at Dover, now a
good many years ago. He turned his head as they entered, and showed
the surprise with which he saw a stranger.

"Miss Pross's brother, sir," said Sydney. "Mr. Barsad."

"Barsad?" repeated the old gentleman, "Barsad? I have an association
with the name--and with the face."

"I told you you had a remarkable face, Mr. Barsad," observed Carton,
coolly. "Pray sit down."

As he took a chair himself, he supplied the link that Mr. Lorry
wanted, by saying to him with a frown, "Witness at that trial."
Mr. Lorry immediately remembered, and regarded his new visitor with
an undisguised look of abhorrence.

"Mr. Barsad has been recognised by Miss Pross as the affectionate
brother you have heard of," said Sydney, "and has acknowledged the
relationship. I pass to worse news. Darnay has been arrested again."

Struck with consternation, the old gentleman exclaimed, "What do you
tell me! I left him safe and free within these two hours, and am
about to return to him!"

"Arrested for all that. When was it done, Mr. Barsad?"

"Just now, if at all."

"Mr. Barsad is the best authority possible, sir," said Sydney, "and I
have it from Mr. Barsad's communication to a friend and brother Sheep
over a bottle of wine, that the arrest has taken place. He left the
messengers at the gate, and saw them admitted by the porter.
There is no earthly doubt that he is retaken."

Mr. Lorry's business eye read in the speaker's face that it was loss
of time to dwell upon the point. Confused, but sensible that
something might depend on his presence of mind, he commanded himself,
and was silently attentive.

"Now, I trust," said Sydney to him, "that the name and influence of
Doctor Manette may stand him in as good stead to-morrow--you said he
would be before the Tribunal again to-morrow, Mr. Barsad?--"

"Yes; I believe so."

"--In as good stead to-morrow as to-day. But it may not be so.
I own to you, I am shaken, Mr. Lorry, by Doctor Manette's not having
had the power to prevent this arrest."

"He may not have known of it beforehand," said Mr. Lorry.

"But that very circumstance would be alarming, when we remember how
identified he is with his son-in-law."

"That's true," Mr. Lorry acknowledged, with his troubled hand at his
chin, and his troubled eyes on Carton.

"In short," said Sydney, "this is a desperate time, when desperate
games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the
winning game; I will play the losing one. No man's life here is
worth purchase. Any one carried home by the people to-day, may be
condemned tomorrow. Now, the stake I have resolved to play for, in
case of the worst, is a friend in the Conciergerie. And the friend I
purpose to myself to win, is Mr. Barsad."

"You need have good cards, sir," said the spy.

"I'll run them over. I'll see what I hold,--Mr. Lorry, you know
what a brute I am; I wish you'd give me a little brandy."

It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful--drank off another
glassful--pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.

"Mr. Barsad," he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking
over a hand at cards: "Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican
committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret
informer, so much the more valuable here for being English that an
Englishman is less open to suspicion of subornation in those
characters than a Frenchman, represents himself to his employers
under a false name. That's a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the
employ of the republican French government, was formerly in the
employ of the aristocratic English government, the enemy of France
and freedom. That's an excellent card. Inference clear as day in
this region of suspicion, that Mr. Barsad, still in the pay of the
aristocratic English government, is the spy of Pitt, the treacherous
foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom, the English traitor and
agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so difficult to find.
That's a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my hand, Mr. Barsad?"

"Not to understand your play," returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.

"I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section
Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have.
Don't hurry."

He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy,
and drank it off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking
himself into a fit state for the immediate denunciation of him.
Seeing it, he poured out and drank another glassful.

"Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time."

It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards
in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Thrown out of his
honourable employment in England, through too much unsuccessful hard
swearing there--not because he was not wanted there; our English
reasons for vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very
modern date--he knew that he had crossed the Channel, and accepted
service in France: first, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among his
own countrymen there: gradually, as a tempter and an eavesdropper
among the natives. He knew that under the overthrown government he
had been a spy upon Saint Antoine and Defarge's wine-shop; had
received from the watchful police such heads of information
concerning Doctor Manette's imprisonment, release, and history, as
should serve him for an introduction to familiar conversation with
the Defarges; and tried them on Madame Defarge, and had broken down
with them signally. He always remembered with fear and trembling,
that that terrible woman had knitted when he talked with her, and had
looked ominously at him as her fingers moved. He had since seen her,
in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over again produce her
knitted registers, and denounce people whose lives the guillotine
then surely swallowed up. He knew, as every one employed as he was
did, that he was never safe; that flight was impossible; that he was
tied fast under the shadow of the axe; and that in spite of his
utmost tergiversation and treachery in furtherance of the reigning
terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once denounced, and on
such grave grounds as had just now been suggested to his mind, he
foresaw that the dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had
seen many proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and
would quash his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are
men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit,
to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

"You scarcely seem to like your hand," said Sydney, with the greatest
composure. "Do you play?"

"I think, sir," said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned to
Mr. Lorry, "I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and benevolence,
to put it to this other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he
can under any circumstances reconcile it to his station to play that
Ace of which he has spoken. I admit that _I_ am a spy, and that it
is considered a discreditable station--though it must be filled by
somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean
himself as to make himself one?"

"I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad," said Carton, taking the answer on himself,
and looking at his watch, "without any scruple, in a very few minutes."

"I should have hoped, gentlemen both," said the spy, always striving
to hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, "that your respect for my
sister--"

"I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by
finally relieving her of her brother," said Sydney Carton.

"You think not, sir?"

"I have thoroughly made up my mind about it."

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his
ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour,
received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,--who was a
mystery to wiser and honester men than he,--that it faltered here and
failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton said, resuming his former
air of contemplating cards:

"And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I
have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and
fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the country prisons;
who was he?"

"French. You don't know him," said the spy, quickly.

"French, eh?" repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to notice
him at all, though he echoed his word. "Well; he may be."

"Is, I assure you," said the spy; "though it's not important."

"Though it's not important," repeated Carton, in the same mechanical
way--"though it's not important--No, it's not important. No. Yet I
know the face."

"I think not. I am sure not. It can't be," said the spy.

"It-can't-be," muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and idling
his glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. "Can't-be.
Spoke good French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?"

"Provincial," said the spy.

"No. Foreign!" cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table, as
a light broke clearly on his mind. "Cly! Disguised, but the same man.
We had that man before us at the Old Bailey."

"Now, there you are hasty, sir," said Barsad, with a smile that gave
his aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; "there you really
give me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit,
at this distance of time, was a partner of mine) has been dead
several years. I attended him in his last illness. He was buried in
London, at the church of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. His unpopularity
with the blackguard multitude at the moment prevented my following
his remains, but I helped to lay him in his coffin."

Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable
goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered
it to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and stiffening of
all the risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher's head.

"Let us be reasonable," said the spy, "and let us be fair. To show
you how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assumption yours is,
I will lay before you a certificate of Cly's burial, which I happened
to have carried in my pocket-book," with a hurried hand he produced
and opened it, "ever since. There it is. Oh, look at it, look at it!
You may take it in your hand; it's no forgery."

Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, and
Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been
more violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow
with the crumpled horn in the house that Jack built.

Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on
the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.

"That there Roger Cly, master," said Mr. Cruncher, with a taciturn
and iron-bound visage. "So YOU put him in his coffin?"

"I did."

"Who took him out of it?"

Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, "What do you mean?"

"I mean," said Mr. Cruncher, "that he warn't never in it. No! Not he!
I'll have my head took off, if he was ever in it."

The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in
unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.

"I tell you," said Jerry, "that you buried paving-stones and earth in
that there coffin. Don't go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was
a take in. Me and two more knows it."

"How do you know it?"

"What's that to you? Ecod!" growled Mr. Cruncher, "it's you I have got
a old grudge again, is it, with your shameful impositions upon tradesmen!
I'd catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea."

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in amazement at
this turn of the business, here requested Mr. Cruncher to moderate
and explain himself.

"At another time, sir," he returned, evasively, "the present time is
ill-conwenient for explainin'. What I stand to, is, that he knows
well wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say
he was, in so much as a word of one syllable, and I'll either catch
hold of his throat and choke him for half a guinea;" Mr. Cruncher
dwelt upon this as quite a liberal offer; "or I'll out and announce him."

"Humph! I see one thing," said Carton. "I hold another card,
Mr. Barsad. Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling
the air, for you to outlive denunciation, when you are in communication
with another aristocratic spy of the same antecedents as yourself,
who, moreover, has the mystery about him of having feigned death and
come to life again! A plot in the prisons, of the foreigner against
the Republic. A strong card--a certain Guillotine card! Do you play?"

"No!" returned the spy. "I throw up. I confess that we were so
unpopular with the outrageous mob, that I only got away from England
at the risk of being ducked to death, and that Cly was so ferreted up
and down, that he never would have got away at all but for that sham.
Though how this man knows it was a sham, is a wonder of wonders to me."

"Never you trouble your head about this man," retorted the
contentious Mr. Cruncher; "you'll have trouble enough with giving
your attention to that gentleman. And look here! Once more!"--
Mr. Cruncher could not be restrained from making rather an ostentatious
parade of his liberality--"I'd catch hold of your throat and choke
you for half a guinea."

The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said,
with more decision, "It has come to a point. I go on duty soon, and
can't overstay my time. You told me you had a proposal; what is it?
Now, it is of no use asking too much of me. Ask me to do anything in
my office, putting my head in great extra danger, and I had better
trust my life to the chances of a refusal than the chances of consent.
In short, I should make that choice. You talk of desperation.
We are all desperate here. Remember! I may denounce you if I think
proper, and I can swear my way through stone walls, and so can others.
Now, what do you want with me?"

"Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?"

"I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape possible,"
said the spy, firmly.

"Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a turnkey at the
Conciergerie?"

"I am sometimes."

"You can be when you choose?"

"I can pass in and out when I choose."

Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly out
upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all spent,
he said, rising:

"So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well that
the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me.
Come into the dark room here, and let us have one final word alone."

0106 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 7

2006-09-16T22:46:00.001-07:00

A Knock at the Door

"I have saved him." It was not another of the dreams in which he had
often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and
a vague but heavy fear was upon her.

All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so
passionately revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly
put to death on vague suspicion and black malice, it was so
impossible to forget that many as blameless as her husband and as
dear to others as he was to her, every day shared the fate from which
he had been clutched, that her heart could not be as lightened of its
load as she felt it ought to be. The shadows of the wintry afternoon
were beginning to fall, and even now the dreadful carts were rolling
through the streets. Her mind pursued them, looking for him among
the Condemned; and then she clung closer to his real presence and
trembled more.

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this
woman's weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking,
no One Hundred and Five, North Tower, now! He had accomplished the
task he had set himself, his promise was redeemed, he had saved Charles.
Let them all lean upon him.

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only because that
was the safest way of life, involving the least offence to the
people, but because they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his
imprisonment, had had to pay heavily for his bad food, and for his
guard, and towards the living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on
this account, and partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no
servant; the citizen and citizeness who acted as porters at the
courtyard gate, rendered them occasional service; and Jerry (almost
wholly transferred to them by Mr. Lorry) had become their daily
retainer, and had his bed there every night.

It was an ordinance of the Republic One and Indivisible of Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, or Death, that on the door or doorpost of every
house, the name of every inmate must be legibly inscribed in letters
of a certain size, at a certain convenient height from the ground.
Mr. Jerry Cruncher's name, therefore, duly embellished the doorpost
down below; and, as the afternoon shadows deepened, the owner of that
name himself appeared, from overlooking a painter whom Doctor Manette
had employed to add to the list the name of Charles Evremonde, called
Darnay.

In the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time, all the
usual harmless ways of life were changed. In the Doctor's little
household, as in very many others, the articles of daily consumption
that were wanted were purchased every evening, in small quantities
and at various small shops. To avoid attracting notice, and to give
as little occasion as possible for talk and envy, was the general desire.

For some months past, Miss Pross and Mr. Cruncher had discharged the
office of purveyors; the former carrying the money; the latter, the
basket. Every afternoon at about the time when the public lamps were
lighted, they fared forth on this duty, and made and brought home
such purchases as were needful. Although Miss Pross, through her
long association with a French family, might have known as much of
their language as of her own, if she had had a mind, she had no mind
in that direction; consequently she knew no more of that "nonsense"
(as she was pleased to call it) than Mr. Cruncher did. So her
manner of marketing was to plump a noun-substantive at the head of a
shopkeeper without any introduction in the nature of an article, and,
if it happened not to be the name of the thing she wanted, to look
round for that thing, lay hold of it, and hold on by it until the
bargain was concluded. She always made a bargain for it, by holding
up, as a statement of its just price, one finger less than the merchant
held up, whatever his number might be.

"Now, Mr. Cruncher," said Miss Pross, whose eyes were red with
felicity; "if you are ready, I am."

Jerry hoarsely professed himself at Miss Pross's service. He had worn
all his rust off long ago, but nothing would file his spiky head down.

"There's all manner of things wanted," said Miss Pross, "and we shall
have a precious time of it. We want wine, among the rest.
Nice toasts these Redheads will be drinking, wherever we buy it."

"It will be much the same to your knowledge, miss, I should think,"
retorted Jerry, "whether they drink your health or the Old Un's."

"Who's he?" said Miss Pross.

Mr. Cruncher, with some diffidence, explained himself as meaning "Old
Nick's."

"Ha!" said Miss Pross, "it doesn't need an interpreter to explain the
meaning of these creatures. They have but one, and it's Midnight
Murder, and Mischief."

"Hush, dear! Pray, pray, be cautious!" cried Lucie.

"Yes, yes, yes, I'll be cautious," said Miss Pross; "but I may say
among ourselves, that I do hope there will be no oniony and tobaccoey
smotherings in the form of embracings all round, going on in the
streets. Now, Ladybird, never you stir from that fire till I come
back! Take care of the dear husband you have recovered, and don't
move your pretty head from his shoulder as you have it now, till you
see me again! May I ask a question, Doctor Manette, before I go?"

"I think you may take that liberty," the Doctor answered, smiling.

"For gracious sake, don't talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of
that," said Miss Pross.

"Hush, dear! Again?" Lucie remonstrated.

"Well, my sweet," said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically,
"the short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most
Gracious Majesty King George the Third;" Miss Pross curtseyed at the
name; "and as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate
their knavish tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!"

Mr. Cruncher, in an access of loyalty, growlingly repeated the words
after Miss Pross, like somebody at church.

"I am glad you have so much of the Englishman in you, though I wish
you had never taken that cold in your voice," said Miss Pross,
approvingly. "But the question, Doctor Manette. Is there"--it was
the good creature's way to affect to make light of anything that was
a great anxiety with them all, and to come at it in this chance
manner--"is there any prospect yet, of our getting out of this place?"

"I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet."

"Heigh-ho-hum!" said Miss Pross, cheerfully repressing a sigh as she
glanced at her darling's golden hair in the light of the fire,
"then we must have patience and wait: that's all. We must hold up
our heads and fight low, as my brother Solomon used to say.
Now, Mr. Cruncher!--Don't you move, Ladybird!"

They went out, leaving Lucie, and her husband, her father, and the
child, by a bright fire. Mr. Lorry was expected back presently from
the Banking House. Miss Pross had lighted the lamp, but had put it
aside in a corner, that they might enjoy the fire-light undisturbed.
Little Lucie sat by her grandfather with her hands clasped through
his arm: and he, in a tone not rising much above a whisper, began to
tell her a story of a great and powerful Fairy who had opened a
prison-wall and let out a captive who had once done the Fairy a
service. All was subdued and quiet, and Lucie was more at ease than
she had been.

"What is that?" she cried, all at once.

"My dear!" said her father, stopping in his story, and laying his
hand on hers, "command yourself. What a disordered state you are in!
The least thing--nothing--startles you! YOU, your father's daughter!"

"I thought, my father," said Lucie, excusing herself, with a pale face
and in a faltering voice, "that I heard strange feet upon the stairs."

"My love, the staircase is as still as Death."

As he said the word, a blow was struck upon the door.

"Oh father, father. What can this be! Hide Charles. Save him!"

"My child," said the Doctor, rising, and laying his hand upon her
shoulder, "I HAVE saved him. What weakness is this, my dear!
Let me go to the door."

He took the lamp in his hand, crossed the two intervening outer
rooms, and opened it. A rude clattering of feet over the floor,
and four rough men in red caps, armed with sabres and pistols,
entered the room.

"The Citizen Evremonde, called Darnay," said the first.

"Who seeks him?" answered Darnay.

"I seek him. We seek him. I know you, Evremonde; I saw you before
the Tribunal to-day. You are again the prisoner of the Republic."

The four surrounded him, where he stood with his wife and child
clinging to him.

"Tell me how and why am I again a prisoner?"

"It is enough that you return straight to the Conciergerie, and will
know to-morrow. You are summoned for to-morrow."

Doctor Manette, whom this visitation had so turned into stone, that
be stood with the lamp in his hand, as if be woe a statue made to
hold it, moved after these words were spoken, put the lamp down, and
confronting the speaker, and taking him, not ungently, by the loose
front of his red woollen shirt, said:

"You know him, you have said. Do you know me?"

"Yes, I know you, Citizen Doctor."

"We all know you, Citizen Doctor," said the other three.

He looked abstractedly from one to another, and said, in a lower
voice, after a pause:

"Will you answer his question to me then? How does this happen?"

"Citizen Doctor," said the first, reluctantly, "he has been denounced
to the Section of Saint Antoine. This citizen," pointing out the
second who had entered, "is from Saint Antoine."

The citizen here indicated nodded his head, and added:

"He is accused by Saint Antoine."

"Of what?" asked the Doctor.

"Citizen Doctor," said the first, with his former reluctance, "ask no
more. If the Republic demands sacrifices from you, without doubt you
as a good patriot will be happy to make them. The Republic goes
before all. The People is supreme. Evremonde, we are pressed."

"One word," the Doctor entreated. "Will you tell me who denounced him?"

"It is against rule," answered the first; "but you can ask Him of
Saint Antoine here."

The Doctor turned his eyes upon that man. Who moved uneasily on his
feet, rubbed his beard a little, and at length said:

"Well! Truly it is against rule. But he is denounced--and
gravely--by the Citizen and Citizeness Defarge. And by one other."

"What other?"

"Do YOU ask, Citizen Doctor?"

"Yes."

"Then," said he of Saint Antoine, with a strange look, "you will be
answered to-morrow. Now, I am dumb!"

0105 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 6

2006-09-16T22:46:00.000-07:00

Triumph

The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determined
Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and were
read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners.
The standard gaoler-joke was, "Come out and listen to the Evening Paper,
you inside there!"

"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!"

So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.

When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved
for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles
Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen
hundreds pass away so.

His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over
them to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through
the list, making a similar short pause at each name. There were
twenty-three names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of the
prisoners so summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two
had already been guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in
the vaulted chamber where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners on
the night of his arrival. Every one of those had perished in the
massacre; every human creature he had since cared for and parted with,
had died on the scaffold.

There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting
was soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of
La Force were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits
and a little concert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates
and shed tears there; but, twenty places in the projected
entertainments had to be refilled, and the time was, at best, short
to the lock-up hour, when the common rooms and corridors would be
delivered over to the great dogs who kept watch there through the
night. The prisoners were far from insensible or unfeeling; their
ways arose out of the condition of the time. Similarly, though with
a subtle difference, a species of fervour or intoxication, known,
without doubt, to have led some persons to brave the guillotine
unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere boastfulness, but a
wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In seasons of
pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--
a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like
wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in its
vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners
were put to the bar before Charles Darnay's name was called. All the
fifteen were condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hour
and a half.

"Charles Evremonde, called Darnay," was at length arraigned.

His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red
cap and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing.
Looking at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought
that the usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons were
trying the honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a
city, never without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the
directing spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding,
disapproving, anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a
check. Of the men, the greater part were armed in various ways; of
the women, some wore knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they
looked on, many knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare
piece of knitting under her arm as she worked. She was in a front
row, by the side of a man whom he had never seen since his arrival at
the Barrier, but whom he directly remembered as Defarge. He noticed
that she once or twice whispered in his ear, and that she seemed to
be his wife; but, what he most noticed in the two figures was, that
although they were posted as close to himself as they could be, they
never looked towards him. They seemed to be waiting for something
with a dogged determination, and they looked at the Jury, but at
nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette, in his usual
quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr. Lorry
were the only men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who wore their
usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of the Carmagnole.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public
prosecutor as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic,
under the decree which banished all emigrants on pain of Death.
It was nothing that the decree bore date since his return to France.
There he was, and there was the decree; he had been taken in France,
and his head was demanded.

"Take off his head!" cried the audience. "An enemy to the Republic!"

The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the
prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in England?

Undoubtedly it was.

Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?

Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.

Why not? the President desired to know.

Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distasteful
to him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left his
country--he submitted before the word emigrant in the present
acceptation by the Tribunal was in use--to live by his own industry
in England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of
France.

What proof had he of this?

He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, and
Alexandre Manette.

But he had married in England? the President reminded him.

True, but not an English woman.

A citizeness of France?

Yes. By birth.

Her name and family?

"Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good physician
who sits there."

This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in
exaltation of the well-known good physician rent the hall. So
capriciously were the people moved, that tears immediately rolled
down several ferocious countenances which had been glaring at the
prisoner a moment before, as if with impatience to pluck him out into
the streets and kill him.

On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set his
foot according to Doctor Manette's reiterated instructions. The same
cautious counsel directed every step that lay before him, and had
prepared every inch of his road.

The President asked, why had he returned to France when he did,
and not sooner?

He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no
means of living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in
England, he lived by giving instruction in the French language and
literature. He had returned when he did, on the pressing and written
entreaty of a French citizen, who represented that his life was
endangered by his absence. He had come back, to save a citizen's life,
and to bear his testimony, at whatever personal hazard, to the truth.
Was that criminal in the eyes of the Republic?

The populace cried enthusiastically, "No!" and the President rang his
bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry
"No!" until they left off, of their own will.

The President required the name of that citizen. The accused
explained that the citizen was his first witness. He also referred
with confidence to the citizen's letter, which had been taken from
him at the Barrier, but which he did not doubt would be found among
the papers then before the President.

The Doctor had taken care that it should be there--had assured him
that it would be there--and at this stage of the proceedings it was
produced and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did
so. Citizen Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness,
that in the pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by the
multitude of enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he
had been slightly overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye--in fact,
had rather passed out of the Tribunal's patriotic remembrance--until
three days ago; when he had been summoned before it, and had been set
at liberty on the Jury's declaring themselves satisfied that the
accusation against him was answered, as to himself, by the surrender
of the citizen Evremonde, called Darnay.

Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity,
and the clearness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as he
proceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on his
release from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained in
England, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself in
their exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocrat
government there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, as
the foe of England and friend of the United States--as he brought
these circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and with
the straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and the
populace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to Monsieur
Lorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,
had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate his
account of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and that
they were ready with their votes if the President were content to
receive them.

At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the
populace set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the
prisoner's favour, and the President declared him free.

Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populace
sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulses
towards generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some set-off
against their swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide now
to which of these motives such extraordinary scenes were referable;
it is probable, to a blending of all the three, with the second
predominating. No sooner was the acquittal pronounced, than tears
were shed as freely as blood at another time, and such fraternal
embraces were bestowed upon the prisoner by as many of both sexes as
could rush at him, that after his long and unwholesome confinement he
was in danger of fainting from exhaustion; none the less because he
knew very well, that the very same people, carried by another current,
would have rushed at him with the very same intensity, to rend him to
pieces and strew him over the streets.

His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be
tried, rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to
be tried together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as
they had not assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal
to compensate itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these
five came down to him before he left the place, condemned to die
within twenty-four hours. The first of them told him so, with the
customary prison sign of Death--a raised finger--and they all added
in words, "Long live the Republic!"

The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their
proceedings, for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate,
there was a great crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every
face he had seen in Court--except two, for which he looked in vain.
On his coming out, the concourse made at him anew, weeping,
embracing, and shouting, all by turns and all together, until the
very tide of the river on the bank of which the mad scene was acted,
seemed to run mad, like the people on the shore.

They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they
had taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or
passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the back
of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car
of triumph, not even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being
carried to his home on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of red
caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deep
such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mind
being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the
Guillotine.

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing
him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the
prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them,
as they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they
carried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.
Her father had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband
stood upon his feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.

As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between his
face and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might
come together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly,
all the rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with the
Carmagnole. Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young woman
from the crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and then
swelling and overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along the
river's bank, and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every
one and whirled them away.

After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood victorious and proud
before him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting in
breathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole;
after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms round
his neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful Pross who
lifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up to their
rooms.

"Lucie! My own! I am safe."

"O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I have
prayed to Him."

They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again
in his arms, he said to her:

"And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this
France could have done what he has done for me."

She laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poor
head on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return
he had made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud
of his strength. "You must not be weak, my darling," he remonstrated;
"don't tremble so. I have saved him."

0104 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 5

2006-09-16T22:45:00.002-07:00

The Wood-Sawyer

One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was never
sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike off her
husband's head next day. Every day, through the stony streets, the
tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. Lovely girls;
bright women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart
men and old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La
Guillotine, all daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the
loathsome prisons, and carried to her through the streets to slake
her devouring thirst. Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;--the
last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!

If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling wheels of the
time, had stunned the Doctor's daughter into awaiting the result in
idle despair, it would but have been with her as it was with many.
But, from the hour when she had taken the white head to her fresh
young bosom in the garret of Saint Antoine, she had been true to her
duties. She was truest to them in the season of trial, as all the
quietly loyal and good will always be.

As soon as they were established in their new residence, and her
father had entered on the routine of his avocations, she arranged the
little household as exactly as if her husband had been there.
Everything had its appointed place and its appointed time. Little
Lucie she taught, as regularly, as if they had all been united in
their English home. The slight devices with which she cheated
herself into the show of a belief that they would soon be reunited--
the little preparations for his speedy return, the setting aside of
his chair and his books--these, and the solemn prayer at night for
one dear prisoner especially, among the many unhappy souls in prison
and the shadow of death--were almost the only outspoken reliefs of
her heavy mind.

She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark dresses,
akin to mourning dresses, which she and her child wore, were as neat
and as well attended to as the brighter clothes of happy days.
She lost her colour, and the old and intent expression was a constant,
not an occasional, thing; otherwise, she remained very pretty and
comely. Sometimes, at night on kissing her father, she would burst
into the grief she had repressed all day, and would say that her sole
reliance, under Heaven, was on him. He always resolutely answered:
"Nothing can happen to him without my knowledge, and I know that I
can save him, Lucie."

They had not made the round of their changed life many weeks,
when her father said to her, on coming home one evening:

"My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to which Charles
can sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. When he can get
to it--which depends on many uncertainties and incidents--he might
see you in the street, he thinks, if you stood in a certain place
that I can show you. But you will not be able to see him, my poor
child, and even if you could, it would be unsafe for you to make a
sign of recognition."

"O show me the place, my father, and I will go there every day."

From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two hours.
As the clock struck two, she was there, and at four she turned
resignedly away. When it was not too wet or inclement for her child
to be with her, they went together; at other times she was alone;
but, she never missed a single day.

It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding street.
The hovel of a cutter of wood into lengths for burning, was the only
house at that end; all else was wall. On the third day of her being
there, he noticed her.

"Good day, citizeness."

"Good day, citizen."

This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It had been
established voluntarily some time ago, among the more thorough
patriots; but, was now law for everybody.

"Walking here again, citizeness?"

"You see me, citizen!"

The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a redundancy of gesture
(he had once been a mender of roads), cast a glance at the prison,
pointed at the prison, and putting his ten fingers before his face to
represent bars, peeped through them jocosely.

"But it's not my business," said he. And went on sawing his wood.

Next day he was looking out for her, and accosted her the moment she
appeared.

"What? Walking here again, citizeness?"

"Yes, citizen."

"Ah! A child too! Your mother, is it not, my little citizeness?"

"Do I say yes, mamma?" whispered little Lucie, drawing close to her.

"Yes, dearest."

"Yes, citizen."

"Ah! But it's not my business. My work is my business. See my saw!
I call it my Little Guillotine. La, la, la; La, la, la! And off his
head comes!"

The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket.

"I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again!
Loo, loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off HER head comes! Now, a child.
Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off ITS head comes. All the family!"

Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his basket, but it
was impossible to be there while the wood-sawyer was at work, and not
be in his sight. Thenceforth, to secure his good will, she always
spoke to him first, and often gave him drink-money, which he readily
received.

He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she had quite
forgotten him in gazing at the prison roof and grates, and in lifting
her heart up to her husband, she would come to herself to find him
looking at her, with his knee on his bench and his saw stopped in its
work. "But it's not my business!" he would generally say at those
times, and would briskly fall to his sawing again.

In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter winds
of spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of autumn, and
again in the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed two hours of
every day at this place; and every day on leaving it, she kissed the
prison wall. Her husband saw her (so she learned from her father) it
might be once in five or six times: it might be twice or thrice running:
it might be, not for a week or a fortnight together. It was enough
that he could and did see her when the chances served, and on that
possibility she would have waited out the day, seven days a week.

These occupations brought her round to the December month, wherein
her father walked among the terrors with a steady head. On a
lightly-snowing afternoon she arrived at the usual corner. It was a
day of some wild rejoicing, and a festival. She had seen the houses,
as she came along, decorated with little pikes, and with little red
caps stuck upon them; also, with tricoloured ribbons; also, with the
standard inscription (tricoloured letters were the favourite),
Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!

The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small, that its whole
surface furnished very indifferent space for this legend. He had got
somebody to scrawl it up for him, however, who had squeezed Death in
with most inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he displayed
pike and cap, as a good citizen must, and in a window he had
stationed his saw inscribed as his "Little Sainte Guillotine"--
for the great sharp female was by that time popularly canonised.
His shop was shut and he was not there, which was a relief to Lucie,
and left her quite alone.

But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled movement
and a shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A moment
afterwards, and a throng of people came pouring round the corner by
the prison wall, in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in
hand with The Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five hundred
people, and they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was
no other music than their own singing. They danced to the popular
Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of
teeth in unison. Men and women danced together, women danced
together, men danced together, as hazard had brought them together.
At first, they were a mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse
woollen rags; but, as they filled the place, and stopped to dance
about Lucie, some ghastly apparition of a dance-figure gone raving
mad arose among them. They advanced, retreated, struck at one
another's hands, clutched at one another's heads, spun round alone,
caught one another and spun round in pairs, until many of them
dropped. While those were down, the rest linked hand in hand, and
all spun round together: then the ring broke, and in separate rings
of two and four they turned and turned until they all stopped at
once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore, and then reversed the
spin, and all spun round another way. Suddenly they stopped again,
paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width of
the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high
up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible
as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something,
once innocent, delivered over to all devilry--a healthy pastime
changed into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses,
and steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the
uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature
were become. The maidenly bosom bared to this, the pretty
almost-child's head thus distracted, the delicate foot mincing in
this slough of blood and dirt, were types of the disjointed time.

This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and
bewildered in the doorway of the wood-sawyer's house, the feathery
snow fell as quietly and lay as white and soft, as if it had never been.

"O my father!" for he stood before her when she lifted up the eyes
she had momentarily darkened with her hand; "such a cruel, bad sight."

"I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times. Don't be
frightened! Not one of them would harm you."

"I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I think of my
husband, and the mercies of these people--"

"We will set him above their mercies very soon. I left him climbing
to the window, and I came to tell you. There is no one here to see.
You may kiss your hand towards that highest shelving roof."

"I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it!"

"You cannot see him, my poor dear?"

"No, father," said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she kissed her hand,
"no."

A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. "I salute you, citizeness,"
from the Doctor. "I salute you, citizen." This in passing. Nothing
more. Madame Defarge gone, like a shadow over the white road.

"Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here with an air of cheerfulness
and courage, for his sake. That was well done;" they had left the spot;
"it shall not be in vain. Charles is summoned for to-morrow."

"For to-morrow!"

"There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there are
precautions to be taken, that could not be taken until he was actually
summoned before the Tribunal. He has not received the notice yet,
but I know that he will presently be summoned for to-morrow, and
removed to the Conciergerie; I have timely information.
You are not afraid?"

She could scarcely answer, "I trust in you."

"Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my darling; he
shall be restored to you within a few hours; I have encompassed him
with every protection. I must see Lorry."

He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within hearing.
They both knew too well what it meant. One. Two. Three. Three
tumbrils faring away with their dread loads over the hushing snow.

"I must see Lorry," the Doctor repeated, turning her another way.

The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust; had never left it.
He and his books were in frequent requisition as to property
confiscated and made national. What he could save for the owners, he
saved. No better man living to hold fast by what Tellson's had in
keeping, and to hold his peace.

A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the Seine, denoted
the approach of darkness. It was almost dark when they arrived at
the Bank. The stately residence of Monseigneur was altogether
blighted and deserted. Above a heap of dust and ashes in the court,
ran the letters: National Property. Republic One and Indivisible.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!

Who could that be with Mr. Lorry--the owner of the riding-coat upon
the chair--who must not be seen? From whom newly arrived, did he come
out, agitated and surprised, to take his favourite in his arms? To
whom did he appear to repeat her faltering words, when, raising his
voice and turning his head towards the door of the room from which he
had issued, he said: "Removed to the Conciergerie, and summoned for
to-morrow?"

0103 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 4

2006-09-16T22:45:00.001-07:00

Calm in Storm

Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of
his absence. So much of what had happened in that dreadful time as
could be kept from the knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from
her, that not until long afterwards, when France and she were far apart,
did she know that eleven hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes
and all ages had been killed by the populace; that four days and
nights had been darkened by this deed of horror; and that the air
around her had been tainted by the slain. She only knew that there
had been an attack upon the prisons, that all political prisoners had
been in danger, and that some had been dragged out by the crowd and
murdered.

To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of secrecy
on which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken him
through a scene of carnage to the prison of La Force. That, in the
prison he had found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before which
the prisoners were brought singly, and by which they were rapidly
ordered to be put forth to be massacred, or to be released, or (in a
few cases) to be sent back to their cells. That, presented by his
conductors to this Tribunal, he had announced himself by name and
profession as having been for eighteen years a secret and unaccused
prisoner in the Bastille; that, one of the body so sitting in
judgment had risen and identified him, and that this man was Defarge.

That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the table,
that his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had pleaded
hard to the Tribunal--of whom some members were asleep and some awake,
some dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some not--for
his life and liberty. That, in the first frantic greetings lavished
on himself as a notable sufferer under the overthrown system, it had
been accorded to him to have Charles Darnay brought before the lawless
Court, and examined. That, he seemed on the point of being at once
released, when the tide in his favour met with some unexplained check
(not intelligible to the Doctor), which led to a few words of secret
conference. That, the man sitting as President had then informed
Doctor Manette that the prisoner must remain in custody, but should,
for his sake, be held inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately,
on a signal, the prisoner was removed to the interior of the prison
again; but, that he, the Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for
permission to remain and assure himself that his son-in-law was,
through no malice or mischance, delivered to the concourse whose
murderous yells outside the gate had often drowned the proceedings,
that he had obtained the permission, and had remained in that Hall of
Blood until the danger was over.

The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep
by intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners
who were saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity
against those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he
said, who had been discharged into the street free, but at whom a
mistaken savage had thrust a pike as he passed out. Being besought
to go to him and dress the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the
same gate, and had found him in the arms of a company of Samaritans,
who were seated on the bodies of their victims. With an inconsistency
as monstrous as anything in this awful nightmare, they had helped the
healer, and tended the wounded man with the gentlest solicitude--
had made a litter for him and escorted him carefully from the spot--
had then caught up their weapons and plunged anew into a butchery so
dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes with his hands, and
swooned away in the midst of it.

As Mr. Lorry received these confidences, and as he watched the face
of his friend now sixty-two years of age, a misgiving arose within
him that such dread experiences would revive the old danger.

But, he had never seen his friend in his present aspect: he had never
at all known him in his present character. For the first time the
Doctor felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. For the
first time he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the
iron which could break the prison door of his daughter's husband, and
deliver him. "It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was not
mere waste and ruin. As my beloved child was helpful in restoring me
to myself, I will be helpful now in restoring the dearest part of
herself to her; by the aid of Heaven I will do it!" Thus, Doctor
Manette. And when Jarvis Lorry saw the kindled eyes, the resolute
face, the calm strong look and bearing of the man whose life always
seemed to him to have been stopped, like a clock, for so many years,
and then set going again with an energy which had lain dormant during
the cessation of its usefulness, he believed.

Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to contend with,
would have yielded before his persevering purpose. While he kept
himself in his place, as a physician, whose business was with all
degrees of mankind, bond and free, rich and poor, bad and good, he
used his personal influence so wisely, that he was soon the inspecting
physician of three prisons, and among them of La Force. He could now
assure Lucie that her husband was no longer confined alone, but was
mixed with the general body of prisoners; he saw her husband weekly,
and brought sweet messages to her, straight from his lips; sometimes
her husband himself sent a letter to her (though never by the Doctor's
hand), but she was not permitted to write to him: for, among the many
wild suspicions of plots in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed
at emigrants who were known to have made friends or permanent
connections abroad.

This new life of the Doctor's was an anxious life, no doubt; still,
the sagacious Mr. Lorry saw that there was a new sustaining pride in it.
Nothing unbecoming tinged the pride; it was a natural and worthy one;
but he observed it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, that up to that
time, his imprisonment had been associated in the minds of his
daughter and his friend, with his personal affliction, deprivation,
and weakness. Now that this was changed, and he knew himself to be
invested through that old trial with forces to which they both looked
for Charles's ultimate safety and deliverance, he became so far exalted
by the change, that he took the lead and direction, and required them
as the weak, to trust to him as the strong. The preceding relative
positions of himself and Lucie were reversed, yet only as the
liveliest gratitude and affection could reverse them, for he could
have had no pride but in rendering some service to her who had
rendered so much to him. "All curious to see," thought Mr. Lorry,
in his amiably shrewd way, "but all natural and right; so, take the
lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it couldn't be in better hands."

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get
Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial,
the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him.
The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the
Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for
victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved
night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred
thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose
from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon's teeth had
been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain,
on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the
South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the
vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the
stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers,
and in the sand of the sea-shore. What private solicitude could rear
itself against the deluge of the Year One of Liberty--the deluge
rising from below, not falling from above, and with the windows of
Heaven shut, not opened!

There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest,
no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly
as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first
day, other count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the
raging fever of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient.
Now, breaking the unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner
showed the people the head of the king--and now, it seemed almost in
the same breath, the head of his fair wife which had had eight weary
months of imprisoned widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.

And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in
all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast.
A revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand
revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected,
which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered
over any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons
gorged with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no
hearing; these things became the established order and nature of
appointed things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were
many weeks old. Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if
it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the
world--the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for
headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it
imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National
Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through
the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the
regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of
it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it
was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most
polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a
toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together again when the
occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful,
abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends of high public
mark, twenty-one living and one dead, it had lopped the heads off,
in one morning, in as many minutes. The name of the strong man of
Old Scripture had descended to the chief functionary who worked it;
but, so armed, he was stronger than his namesake, and blinder, and
tore away the gates of God's own Temple every day.

Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them, the Doctor
walked with a steady head: confident in his power, cautiously
persistent in his end, never doubting that he would save Lucie's
husband at last. Yet the current of the time swept by, so strong and
deep, and carried the time away so fiercely, that Charles had lain in
prison one year and three months when the Doctor was thus steady and
confident. So much more wicked and distracted had the Revolution
grown in that December month, that the rivers of the South were
encumbered with the bodies of the violently drowned by night, and
prisoners were shot in lines and squares under the southern wintry sun.
Still, the Doctor walked among the terrors with a steady head.
No man better known than he, in Paris at that day; no man in a
stranger situation. Silent, humane, indispensable in hospital and
prison, using his art equally among assassins and victims, he was a
man apart. In the exercise of his skill, the appearance and the
story of the Bastille Captive removed him from all other men. He was
not suspected or brought in question, any more than if he had indeed
been recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were a Spirit
moving among mortals.

0102 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 3

2006-09-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

The Shadow

One of the first considerations which arose in the business mind of
Mr. Lorry when business hours came round, was this:--that he had no
right to imperil Tellson's by sheltering the wife of an emigrant
prisoner under the Bank roof, His own possessions, safety, life,
he would have hazarded for Lucie and her child, without a moment's
demur; but the great trust he held was not his own, and as to that
business charge he was a strict man of business.

At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding out
the wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in reference
to the safest dwelling-place in the distracted state of the city.
But, the same consideration that suggested him, repudiated him; he
lived in the most violent Quarter, and doubtless was influential
there, and deep in its dangerous workings.

Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute's delay
tending to compromise Tellson's, Mr. Lorry advised with Lucie.
She said that her father had spoken of hiring a lodging for a short
term, in that Quarter, near the Banking-house. As there was no
business objection to this, and as he foresaw that even if it were
all well with Charles, and he were to be released, he could not hope
to leave the city, Mr. Lorry went out in quest of such a lodging, and
found a suitable one, high up in a removed by-street where the closed
blinds in all the other windows of a high melancholy square of buildings
marked deserted homes.

To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and Miss
Pross: giving them what comfort he could, and much more than he had
himself. He left Jerry with them, as a figure to fill a doorway that
would bear considerable knocking on the head, and retained to his own
occupations. A disturbed and doleful mind he brought to bear upon them,
and slowly and heavily the day lagged on with him.

It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank closed.
He was again alone in his room of the previous night, considering
what to do next, when he heard a foot upon the stair. In a few
moments, a man stood in his presence, who, with a keenly observant
look at him, addressed him by his name.

"Your servant," said Mr. Lorry. "Do you know me?"

He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty-five to
fifty years of age. For answer he repeated, without any change of
emphasis, the words:

"Do you know me?"

"I have seen you somewhere."

"Perhaps at my wine-shop?"

Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said: "You come from Doctor
Manette?"

"Yes. I come from Doctor Manette."

"And what says he? What does he send me?"

Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It bore
the words in the Doctor's writing:

"Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet.
I have obtained the favour that the bearer has a short note
from Charles to his wife. Let the bearer see his wife."

It was dated from La Force, within an hour.

"Will you accompany me," said Mr. Lorry, joyfully relieved after
reading this note aloud, "to where his wife resides?"

"Yes," returned Defarge.

Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved and mechanical
way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his hat and they went down into
the courtyard. There, they found two women; one, knitting.

"Madame Defarge, surely!" said Mr. Lorry, who had left her in exactly
the same attitude some seventeen years ago.

"It is she," observed her husband.

"Does Madame go with us?" inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing that she moved
as they moved.

"Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know the persons.
It is for their safety."

Beginning to be struck by Defarge's manner, Mr. Lorry looked
dubiously at him, and led the way. Both the women followed; the
second woman being The Vengeance.

They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they might,
ascended the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted by Jerry,
and found Lucie weeping, alone. She was thrown into a transport by
the tidings Mr. Lorry gave her of her husband, and clasped the hand
that delivered his note--little thinking what it had been doing near
him in the night, and might, but for a chance, have done to him.

"DEAREST,--Take courage. I am well, and your father has
influence around me. You cannot answer this.
Kiss our child for me."

That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her who
received it, that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and kissed one
of the hands that knitted. It was a passionate, loving, thankful,
womanly action, but the hand made no response--dropped cold and
heavy, and took to its knitting again.

There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check.
She stopped in the act of putting the note in her bosom, and,
with her hands yet at her neck, looked terrified at Madame Defarge.
Madame Defarge met the lifted eyebrows and forehead with a cold,
impassive stare.

"My dear," said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; "there are
frequent risings in the streets; and, although it is not likely they
will ever trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom she
has the power to protect at such times, to the end that she may know
them--that she may identify them. I believe," said Mr. Lorry,
rather halting in his reassuring words, as the stony manner of all
the three impressed itself upon him more and more, "I state the case,
Citizen Defarge?"

Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer than a
gruff sound of acquiescence.

"You had better, Lucie," said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to
propitiate, by tone and manner, "have the dear child here, and our
good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and knows
no French."

The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more than
a match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and,
danger, appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to The
Vengeance, whom her eyes first encountered, "Well, I am sure, Boldface!
I hope YOU are pretty well!" She also bestowed a British cough on
Madame Defarge; but, neither of the two took much heed of her.

"Is that his child?" said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for
the first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as
if it were the finger of Fate.

"Yes, madame," answered Mr. Lorry; "this is our poor prisoner's
darling daughter, and only child."

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall
so threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively
kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The
shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall,
threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child.

"It is enough, my husband," said Madame Defarge. "I have seen them.
We may go."

But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it--not visible
and presented, but indistinct and withheld--to alarm Lucie into
saying, as she laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge's dress:

"You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no harm.
You will help me to see him if you can?"

"Your husband is not my business here," returned Madame Defarge,
looking down at her with perfect composure. "It is the daughter of
your father who is my business here."

"For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child's sake!
She will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We are
more afraid of you than of these others."

Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her
husband. Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and
looking at her, collected his face into a sterner expression.

"What is it that your husband says in that little letter?" asked
Madame Defarge, with a lowering smile. "Influence; he says something
touching influence?"

"That my father," said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from her
breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it,
"has much influence around him."

"Surely it will release him!" said Madame Defarge. "Let it do so."

"As a wife and mother," cried Lucie, most earnestly, "I implore you
to have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess,
against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf.
O sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!"

Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said,
turning to her friend The Vengeance:

"The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as
little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly
considered? We have known THEIR husbands and fathers laid in prison
and kept from them, often enough? All our lives, we have seen our
sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty,
nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect
of all kinds?"

"We have seen nothing else," returned The Vengeance.

"We have borne this a long time," said Madame Defarge, turning her
eyes again upon Lucie. "Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of
one wife and mother would be much to us now?"

She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance followed.
Defarge went last, and closed the door.

"Courage, my dear Lucie," said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her.
"Courage, courage! So far all goes well with us--much, much better
than it has of late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and have a
thankful heart."

"I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to throw a
shadow on me and on all my hopes."

"Tut, tut!" said Mr. Lorry; "what is this despondency in the brave
little breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie."

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself,
for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.

0101 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 2

2006-09-16T22:44:00.000-07:00

The Grindstone

Tellson's Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris,
was in a wing of a large house, approached by a courtyard and shut
off from the street by a high wall and a strong gate. The house
belonged to a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a
flight from the troubles, in his own cook's dress, and got across the
borders. A mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still
in his metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the
preparation of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three
strong men besides the cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from
the sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and
willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and
indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur's
house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all
things moved so fast, and decree followed decree with that fierce
precipitation, that now upon the third night of the autumn month of
September, patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of
Monseigneur's house, and had marked it with the tri-colour, and were
drinking brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson's place of business in
Paris, would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the
Gazette. For, what would staid British responsibility and
respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard,
and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were.
Tellson's had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen on
the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does) at
money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of
this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained
alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass
let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who danced in
public on the slightest provocation. Yet, a French Tellson's could
get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as long as the times
held together, no man had taken fright at them, and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson's henceforth, and what would
lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in
Tellson's hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons, and
when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with
Tellson's never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over
into the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than
Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions.
He sat by a newly-lighted wood fire (the blighted and unfruitful year
was prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face there
was a deeper shade than the pendent lamp could throw, or any object
in the room distortedly reflect--a shade of horror.

He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of which
he had grown to be a part, lie strong root-ivy. it chanced that they
derived a kind of security from the patriotic occupation of the main
building, but the true-hearted old gentleman never calculated about
that. All such circumstances were indifferent to him, so that he did
his duty. On the opposite side of the courtyard, under a colonnade,
was extensive standing--for carriages--where, indeed, some carriages
of Monseigneur yet stood. Against two of the pillars were fastened
two great flaring flambeaux, and in the light of these, standing out
in the open air, was a large grindstone: a roughly mounted thing
which appeared to have hurriedly been brought there from some
neighbouring smithy, or other workshop. Rising and looking out of
window at these harmless objects, Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to
his seat by the fire. He had opened, not only the glass window, but
the lattice blind outside it, and he had closed both again, and he
shivered through his frame.

From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate, there came
the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable
ring in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a
terrible nature were going up to Heaven.

"Thank God," said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, "that no one near
and dear to me is in this dreadful town to-night. May He have mercy
on all who are in danger!"

Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and he thought,
"They have come back!" and sat listening. But, there was no loud
irruption into the courtyard, as he had expected, and he heard the
gate clash again, and all was quiet.

The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that vague
uneasiness respecting the Bank, which a great change would naturally
awaken, with such feelings roused. It was well guarded, and he got
up to go among the trusty people who were watching it, when his door
suddenly opened, and two figures rushed in, at sight of which he fell
back in amazement.

Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him, and
with that old look of earnestness so concentrated and intensified,
that it seemed as though it had been stamped upon her face expressly
to give force and power to it in this one passage of her life.

"What is this?" cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused.
"What is the matter? Lucie! Manette! What has happened? What has
brought you here? What is it?"

With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness,
she panted out in his arms, imploringly, "O my dear friend!
My husband!"

"Your husband, Lucie?"

"Charles."

"What of Charles?"

"Here.

"Here, in Paris?"

"Has been here some days--three or four--I don't know how many--
I can't collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity brought him
here unknown to us; he was stopped at the barrier, and sent to prison."

The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same moment,
the beg of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of feet and
voices came pouring into the courtyard.

"What is that noise?" said the Doctor, turning towards the window.

"Don't look!" cried Mr. Lorry. "Don't look out! Manette,
for your life, don't touch the blind!"

The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the window,
and said, with a cool, bold smile:

"My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been a
Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris--in Paris? In
France--who, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the Bastille,
would touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, or carry me in
triumph. My old pain has given me a power that has brought us
through the barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and brought
us here. I knew it would be so; I knew I could help Charles out of
all danger; I told Lucie so.--What is that noise?" His hand was again
upon the window.

"Don't look!" cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate. "No, Lucie, my
dear, nor you!" He got his arm round her, and held her. "Don't be so
terrified, my love. I solemnly swear to you that I know of no harm
having happened to Charles; that I had no suspicion even of his being
in this fatal place. What prison is he in?"

"La Force!"

"La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and serviceable in
your life--and you were always both--you will compose yourself now,
to do exactly as I bid you; for more depends upon it than you can think,
or I can say. There is no help for you in any action on your part
to-night; you cannot possibly stir out. I say this, because what I
must bid you to do for Charles's sake, is the hardest thing to do of all.
You must instantly be obedient, still, and quiet. You must let me
put you in a room at the back here. You must leave your father and
me alone for two minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the
world you must not delay."

"I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you know I can
do nothing else than this. I know you are true."

The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and turned the
key; then, came hurrying back to the Doctor, and opened the window
and partly opened the blind, and put his hand upon the Doctor's arm,
and looked out with him into the courtyard.

Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not enough in number, or
near enough, to fill the courtyard: not more than forty or fifty in
all. The people in possession of the house had let them in at the
gate, and they had rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had
evidently been set up there for their purpose, as in a convenient and
retired spot.

But, such awful workers, and such awful work!

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two
men, whose faces, as their long hair Rapped back when the whirlings
of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and
cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous
disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them,
and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all
awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly
excitement and want of sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned,
their matted locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung
backward over their necks, some women held wine to their mouths that
they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with
dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the
stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye
could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood.
Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men
stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and
bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men
devilishly set off with spoils of women's lace and silk and ribbon,
with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets,
knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red
with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those
who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress:
ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as
the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream
of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
their frenzied eyes;--eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have
given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.

All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, or of
any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world if it
were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor looked
for explanation in his friend's ashy face.

"They are," Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully round
at the locked room, "murdering the prisoners. If you are sure of
what you say; if you really have the power you think you have--as I
believe you have--make yourself known to these devils, and get taken
to La Force. It may be too late, I don't know, but let it not be a
minute later!"

Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of the room,
and was in the courtyard when Mr. Lorry regained the blind.

His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetuous
confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside like water,
carried him in an instant to the heart of the concourse at the stone.
For a few moments there was a pause, and a hurry, and a murmur, and
the unintelligible sound of his voice; and then Mr. Lorry saw him,
surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line of twenty men long, all
linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand to shoulder, hurried out with
cries of--"Live the Bastille prisoner! Help for the Bastille
prisoner's kindred in La Force! Room for the Bastille prisoner in
front there! Save the prisoner Evremonde at La Force!" and a thousand
answering shouts.

He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the
window and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her
father was assisted by the people, and gone in search of her husband.
He found her child and Miss Pross with her; but, it never occurred to
him to be surprised by their appearance until a long time afterwards,
when he sat watching them in such quiet as the night knew.

Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his feet,
clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on his own bed,
and her head had gradually fallen on the pillow beside her pretty charge.
O the long, long night, with the moans of the poor wife! And O the long,
long night, with no return of her father and no tidings!

Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded,
and the irruption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and
spluttered. "What is it?" cried Lucie, affrighted. "Hush! The
soldiers' swords are sharpened there," said Mr. Lorry. "The place
is national property now, and used as a kind of armoury, my love."

Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble and fitful.
Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly detached himself
from the clasping hand, and cautiously looked out again. A man, so
besmeared that he might have been a sorely wounded soldier creeping
back to consciousness on a field of slain, was rising from the
pavement by the side of the grindstone, and looking about him with a
vacant air. Shortly, this worn-out murderer descried in the imperfect
light one of the carriages of Monseigneur, and, staggering to that
gorgeous vehicle, climbed in at the door, and shut himself up to take
his rest on its dainty cushions.

The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again,
and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone
stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that
the sun had never given, and would never take away.

0100 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 3: CHAPTER 1

2006-09-16T22:43:00.001-07:00

Book the Third--the Track of a Storm

In Secret

The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris from
England in the autumn of the year one thousand seven hundred and
ninety-two. More than enough of bad roads, bad equipages, and bad
horses, he would have encountered to delay him, though the fallen and
unfortunate King of France had been upon his throne in all his glory;
but, the changed times were fraught with other obstacles than these.
Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of citizen-
patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state of
readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them,
inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own,
turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in
hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the
dawning Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, or Death.

A very few French leagues of his journey were accomplished, when
Charles Darnay began to perceive that for him along these country
roads there was no hope of return until he should have been declared
a good citizen at Paris. Whatever might befall now, he must on to
his journey's end. Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common
barrier dropped across the road behind him, but he knew it to be
another iron door in the series that was barred between him and
England. The universal watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he
had been taken in a net, or were being forwarded to his destination
in a cage, he could not have felt his freedom more completely gone.

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway
twenty times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a
day, by riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and
stopping him by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in
charge. He had been days upon his journey in France alone, when he
went to bed tired out, in a little town on the high road, still a
long way from Paris.

Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle's letter from his
prison of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. His difficulty at
the guard-house in this small place had been such, that he felt his
journey to have come to a crisis. And he was, therefore, as little
surprised as a man could be, to find himself awakened at the small
inn to which he had been remitted until morning, in the middle of the
night.

Awakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots in
rough red caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down on the bed.

"Emigrant," said the functionary, "I am going to send you on to Paris,
under an escort."

"Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I could
dispense with the escort."

"Silence!" growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the
butt-end of his musket. "Peace, aristocrat!"

"It is as the good patriot says," observed the timid functionary.
"You are an aristocrat, and must have an escort--and must pay for it."

"I have no choice," said Charles Darnay.

"Choice! Listen to him!" cried the same scowling red-cap. "As if it
was not a favour to be protected from the lamp-iron!"

"It is always as the good patriot says," observed the functionary.
"Rise and dress yourself, emigrant."

Darnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house, where other
patriots in rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleeping, by a
watch-fire. Here he paid a heavy price for his escort, and hence he
started with it on the wet, wet roads at three o'clock in the morning.

The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tri-coloured
cockades, armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one on
either side of him.

The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached to
his bridle, the end of which one of the patriots kept girded round
his wrist. In this state they set forth with the sharp rain driving
in their faces: clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven
town pavement, and out upon the mire-deep roads. In this state they
traversed without change, except of horses and pace, all the mire-
deep leagues that lay between them and the capital.

They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after daybreak,
and lying by until the twilight fell. The escort were so wretchedly
clothed, that they twisted straw round their bare legs, and thatched
their ragged shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart from the personal
discomfort of being so attended, and apart from such considerations
of present danger as arose from one of the patriots being chronically
drunk, and carrying his musket very recklessly, Charles Darnay did
not allow the restraint that was laid upon him to awaken any serious
fears in his breast; for, he reasoned with himself that it could have
no reference to the merits of an individual case that was not yet
stated, and of representations, confirmable by the prisoner in the
Abbaye, that were not yet made.

But when they came to the town of Beauvais--which they did at
eventide, when the streets were filled with people--he could not
conceal from himself that the aspect of affairs was very alarming.
An ominous crowd gathered to see him dismount of the posting-yard,
and many voices called out loudly, "Down with the emigrant!"

He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and,
resuming it as his safest place, said:

"Emigrant, my friends! Do you not see me here, in France, of my own will?"

"You are a cursed emigrant," cried a farrier, making at him in a
furious manner through the press, hammer in hand; "and you are a
cursed aristocrat!"

The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider's
bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly said,
"Let him be; let him be! He will be judged at Paris."

"Judged!" repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer.
"Ay! and condemned as a traitor." At this the crowd roared approval.

Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse's head to the
yard (the drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle looking on,
with the line round his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make
his voice heard:

"Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am not a traitor."

"He lies!" cried the smith. "He is a traitor since the decree.
His life is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!"

At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd,
which another instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster
turned his horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon his
horse's flanks, and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy double
gates. The farrier struck a blow upon them with his hammer, and the
crowd groaned; but, no more was done.

"What is this decree that the smith spoke of?" Darnay asked the
postmaster, when he had thanked him, and stood beside him in the yard.

"Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants."

"When passed?"

"On the fourteenth."

"The day I left England!"

"Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be
others--if there are not already-banishing all emigrants, and
condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant when he
said your life was not your own."

"But there are no such decrees yet?"

"What do I know!" said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders;
"there may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would
you have?"

They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night,
and then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the
many wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild
ride unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep.
After long and lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to
a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all
glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly
manner in the dead of the night, circling hand in hand round a
shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn up together singing a
Liberty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in Beauvais that
night to help them out of it and they passed on once more into
solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and wet,
among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth
that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and
by the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across
their way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.

Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier
was closed and strongly guarded when they rode up to it.

"Where are the papers of this prisoner?" demanded a resolute-looking
man in authority, who was summoned out by the guard.

Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay requested
the speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller and French
citizen, in charge of an escort which the disturbed state of the
country had imposed upon him, and which he had paid for.

"Where," repeated the same personage, without taking any heed of him
whatever, "are the papers of this prisoner?"

The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them. Casting his
eyes over Gabelle's letter, the same personage in authority showed
some disorder and surprise, and looked at Darnay with a close attention.

He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however, and went
into the guard-room; meanwhile, they sat upon their horses outside
the gate. Looking about him while in this state of suspense, Charles
Darnay observed that the gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers
and patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former; and that while
ingress into the city for peasants' carts bringing in supplies, and
for similar traffic and traffickers, was easy enough, egress, even
for the homeliest people, was very difficult. A numerous medley of
men and women, not to mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts,
was waiting to issue forth; but, the previous identification was so
strict, that they filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of
these people knew their turn for examination to be so far off, that
they lay down on the ground to sleep or smoke, while others talked
together, or loitered about. The red cap and tri-colour cockade were
universal, both among men and women.

When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of these
things, Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in authority,
who directed the guard to open the barrier. Then he delivered to the
escort, drunk and sober, a receipt for the escorted, and requested him
to dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, leading his tired horse,
turned and rode away without entering the city.

He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of common
wine and tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots, asleep and
awake, drunk and sober, and in various neutral states between
sleeping and waking, drunkenness and sobriety, were standing and
lying about. The light in the guard-house, half derived from the
waning oil-lamps of the night, and half from the overcast day, was in
a correspondingly uncertain condition. Some registers were lying
open on a desk, and an officer of a coarse, dark aspect, presided
over these.

"Citizen Defarge," said he to Darnay's conductor, as he took a slip
of paper to write on. "Is this the emigrant Evremonde?"

"This is the man."

"Your age, Evremonde?"

"Thirty-seven."

"Married, Evremonde?"

"Yes."

"Where married?"

"In England."

"Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evremonde?"

"In England."

"Without doubt. You are consigned, Evremonde, to the prison of La Force."

"Just Heaven!" exclaimed Darnay. "Under what law, and for what offence?"

The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment.

"We have new laws, Evremonde, and new offences, since you were here."
He said it with a hard smile, and went on writing.

"I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response
to that written appeal of a fellow-countryman which lies before you.
I demand no more than the opportunity to do so without delay.
Is not that my right?"

"Emigrants have no rights, Evremonde," was the stolid reply.
The officer wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what he
had written, sanded it, and handed it to Defarge, with the words
"In secret."

Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must
accompany him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed
patriots attended them.

"Is it you," said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the
guardhouse steps and turned into Paris, "who married the daughter of
Doctor Manette, once a prisoner in the Bastille that is no more?"

"Yes," replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.

"My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter Saint
Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me."

"My wife came to your house to reclaim her father? Yes!"

The word "wife" seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to Defarge,
to say with sudden impatience, "In the name of that sharp female
newly-born, and called La Guillotine, why did you come to France?"

"You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it is the
truth?"

"A bad truth for you," said Defarge, speaking with knitted brows,
and looking straight before him.

"Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so changed,
so sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will you render me
a little help?"

"None." Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him.

"Will you answer me a single question?"

"Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is."

"In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I have some
free communication with the world outside?"

"You will see."

"I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without any means of
presenting my case?"

"You will see. But, what then? Other people have been similarly
buried in worse prisons, before now."

"But never by me, Citizen Defarge."

Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a steady
and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the fainter
hope there was--or so Darnay thought--of his softening in any slight
degree. He, therefore, made haste to say:

"It is of the utmost importance to me (you know, Citizen, even better
than I, of how much importance), that I should be able to communicate
to Mr. Lorry of Tellson's Bank, an English gentleman who is now in
Paris, the simple fact, without comment, that I have been thrown into
the prison of La Force. Will you cause that to be done for me?"

"I will do," Defarge doggedly rejoined, "nothing for you. My duty is
to my country and the People. I am the sworn servant of both,
against you. I will do nothing for you."

Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his pride
was touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could not but
see how used the people were to the spectacle of prisoners passing
along the streets. The very children scarcely noticed him. A few
passers turned their heads, and a few shook their fingers at him as
an aristocrat; otherwise, that a man in good clothes should be going
to prison, was no more remarkable than that a labourer in working
clothes should be going to work. In one narrow, dark, and dirty
street through which they passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool,
was addressing an excited audience on the crimes against the people,
of the king and the royal family. The few words that he caught from
this man's lips, first made it known to Charles Darnay that the king
was in prison, and that the foreign ambassadors had one and all left
Paris. On the road (except at Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing.
The escort and the universal watchfulness had completely isolated him.

That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which had
developed themselves when he left England, he of course knew now.
That perils had thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster
and faster yet, he of course knew now. He could not but admit to
himself that he might not have made this journey, if he could have
foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his misgivings were not
so dark as, imagined by the light of this later time, they would appear.
Troubled as the future was, it was the unknown future, and in its
obscurity there was ignorant hope. The horrible massacre, days and
nights long, which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a
great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest, was
as far out of his knowledge as if it had been a hundred thousand
years away. The "sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine,"
was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name.
The frightful deeds that were to be soon done, were probably
unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. How could they
have a place in the shadowy conceptions of a gentle mind?

Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel
separation from his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood,
or the certainty; but, beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly.
With this on his mind, which was enough to carry into a dreary prison
courtyard, he arrived at the prison of La Force.

A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom Defarge
presented "The Emigrant Evremonde."

"What the Devil! How many more of them!" exclaimed the man with
the bloated face.

Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation,
and withdrew, with his two fellow-patriots.

"What the Devil, I say again!" exclaimed the gaoler, left with his wife.
"How many more!"

The gaoler's wife, being provided with no answer to the question,
merely replied, "One must have patience, my dear!" Three turnkeys who
entered responsive to a bell she rang, echoed the sentiment, and one
added, "For the love of Liberty;" which sounded in that place like an
inappropriate conclusion.

The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy, and with
a horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how soon the
noisome flavour of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in all such
places that are ill cared for!

"In secret, too," grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written paper.
"As if I was not already full to bursting!"

He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles Darnay
awaited his further pleasure for half an hour: sometimes, pacing to
and fro in the strong arched room: sometimes, resting on a stone seat:
in either case detained to be imprinted on the memory of the chief
and his subordinates.

"Come!" said the chief, at length taking up his keys, "come with me, emigrant."

Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge accompanied him by
corridor and staircase, many doors clanging and locking behind them,
until they came into a large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with
prisoners of both sexes. The women were seated at a long table,
reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroidering; the men were
for the most part standing behind their chairs, or lingering up and
down the room.

In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime and
disgrace, the new-comer recoiled from this company. But the crowning
unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once rising to
receive him, with every refinement of manner known to the time, and
with all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and
gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and
misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to
stand in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty,
the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride,
the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the
ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore,
all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died
in coming there.

It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and the
other gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough as to
appearance in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked so
extravagantly coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming
daughters who were there--with the apparitions of the coquette,
the young beauty, and the mature woman delicately bred--that the
inversion of all experience and likelihood which the scene of shadows
presented, was heightened to its utmost. Surely, ghosts all.
Surely, the long unreal ride some progress of disease that had
brought him to these gloomy shades!

"In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune," said a
gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward,
"I have the honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of
condoling with you on the calamity that has brought you among us.
May it soon terminate happily! It would be an impertinence elsewhere,
but it is not so here, to ask your name and condition?"

Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required information,
in words as suitable as he could find.

"But I hope," said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler with his
eyes, who moved across the room, "that you are not in secret?"

"I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have heard them
say so."

"Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take courage; several
members of our society have been in secret, at first, and it has
lasted but a short time." Then he added, raising his voice,
"I grieve to inform the society--in secret."

There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay crossed the
room to a grated door where the gaoler awaited him, and many
voices--among which, the soft and compassionate voices of women were
conspicuous--gave him good wishes and encouragement. He turned at
the grated door, to render the thanks of his heart; it closed under
the gaoler's hand; and the apparitions vanished from his sight forever.

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When they
bad ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already
counted them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they passed
into a solitary cell. It struck cold and damp, but was not dark.

"Yours," said the gaoler.

"Why am I confined alone?"

"How do I know!"

"I can buy pen, ink, and paper?"

"Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then.
At present, you may buy your food, and nothing more."

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress.
As the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of the
four walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered through the
mind of the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him, that
this gaoler was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and person,
as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled with water.
When the gaoler was gone, he thought in the same wandering way,
"Now am I left, as if I were dead." Stopping then, to look down at
the mattress, he turned from it with a sick feeling, and thought,
"And here in these crawling creatures is the first condition of the
body after death."

"Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five
paces by four and a half." The prisoner walked to and fro in his
cell, counting its measurement, and the roar of the city arose like
muffled drums with a wild swell of voices added to them. "He made
shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes." The prisoner counted the
measurement again, and paced faster, to draw his mind with him from
that latter repetition. "The ghosts that vanished when the wicket
closed. There was one among them, the appearance of a lady dressed
in black, who was leaning in the embrasure of a window, and she had a
light shining upon her golden hair, and she looked like * * * * Let
us ride on again, for God's sake, through the illuminated villages
with the people all awake! * * * * He made shoes, he made shoes,
he made shoes. * * * * Five paces by four and a half." With such scraps
tossing and rolling upward from the depths of his mind, the prisoner
walked faster and faster, obstinately counting and counting; and the
roar of the city changed to this extent--that it still rolled in like
muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he knew, in the swell
that rose above them.

0099 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 24

2006-09-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

In such risings of fire and risings of sea--the firm earth shaken by
the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on
the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders
on the shore--three years of tempest were consumed. Three more
birthdays of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into
the peaceful tissue of the life of her home.

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in
the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging
feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps
of a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared
in danger, changed into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long
persisted in.

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon
of his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France,
as to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it,
and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil
with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he
could ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled; so, Monseigneur,
after boldly reading the Lord's Prayer backwards for a great number of
years, and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil
One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.

The shining Bull's Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been
the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a
good eye to see with--had long had the mote in it of Lucifer's pride,
Sardana--palus's luxury, and a mole's blindness--but it had dropped
out and was gone. The Court, from that exclusive inner circle to its
outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was
all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged in its Palace
and "suspended," when the last tidings came over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was
come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.

As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson's Bank. Spirits are supposed to
haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur
without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be.
Moreover, it was the spot to which such French intelligence as was
most to be relied upon, came quickest. Again: Tellson's was a
munificent house, and extended great liberality to old customers who
had fallen from their high estate. Again: those nobles who had seen
the coming storm in time, and anticipating plunder or confiscation,
had made provident remittances to Tellson's, were always to be heard
of there by their needy brethren. To which it must be added that every
new-comer from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson's,
almost as a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson's
was at that time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange;
and this was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there
were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson's sometimes wrote the
latest news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows,
for all who ran through Temple Bar to read.

On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles
Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The
penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House, was now
the news-Exchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half
an hour or so of the time of closing.

"But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived," said Charles
Darnay, rather hesitating, "I must still suggest to you--"

"I understand. That I am too old?" said Mr. Lorry.

"Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a
disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for you."

"My dear Charles," said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, "you
touch some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying away.
It is safe enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with an old
fellow of hard upon fourscore when there are so many people there
much better worth interfering with. As to its being a disorganised
city, if it were not a disorganised city there would be no occasion
to send somebody from our House here to our House there, who knows
the city and the business, of old, and is in Tellson's confidence.
As to the uncertain travelling, the long journey, and the winter
weather, if I were not prepared to submit myself to a few inconveniences
for the sake of Tellson's, after all these years, who ought to be?"

"I wish I were going myself," said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly,
and like one thinking aloud.

"Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!" exclaimed
Mr. Lorry. "You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman
born? You are a wise counsellor."

"My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that the
thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed
through my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having had some
sympathy for the miserable people, and having abandoned something to
them," he spoke here in his former thoughtful manner, "that one might
be listened to, and might have the power to persuade to some restraint.
Only last night, after you had left us, when I was talking to Lucie--"

"When you were talking to Lucie," Mr. Lorry repeated. "Yes. I wonder
you are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie! Wishing you were
going to France at this time of day!"

"However, I am not going," said Charles Darnay, with a smile. "It is
more to the purpose that you say you are."

"And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles," Mr. Lorry
glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, "you can have no
conception of the difficulty with which our business is transacted,
and of the peril in which our books and papers over yonder are involved.
The Lord above knows what the compromising consequences would be to
numbers of people, if some of our documents were seized or destroyed;
and they might be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris
is not set afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow! Now, a judicious selection
from these with the least possible delay, and the burying of them,
or otherwise getting of them out of harm's way, is within the power
(without loss of precious time) of scarcely any one but myself,
if any one. And shall I hang back, when Tellson's knows this and says
this--Tellson's, whose bread I have eaten these sixty years--because
I am a little stiff about the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half
a dozen old codgers here!"

"How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. Lorry."

"Tut! Nonsense, sir!--And, my dear Charles," said Mr. Lorry, glancing
at the House again, "you are to remember, that getting things out of
Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is next to an
impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this very day brought
to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not business-like to
whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers you can imagine,
every one of whom had his head hanging on by a single hair as he
passed the Barriers. At another time, our parcels would come and go,
as easily as in business-like Old England; but now, everything
is stopped."

"And do you really go to-night?"

"I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to
admit of delay."

"And do you take no one with you?"

"All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have
nothing to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has
been my bodyguard on Sunday nights for a long time past and I am used
to him. Nobody will suspect Jerry of being anything but an English
bull-dog, or of having any design in his head but to fly at anybody
who touches his master."

"I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and
youthfulness."

"I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed this
little commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson's proposal to retire
and live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about growing old."

This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry's usual desk, with Monseigneur
swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he would do to
avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too much the
way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it was much
too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible
Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies
that had not been sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted
to be done, that had led to it--as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it
was such vapouring all about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of
blood in his own head, added to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which
had already made Charles Darnay restless, and which still kept him so.

Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, far on his
way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching
to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up and
exterminating them from the face of the earth, and doing without them:
and for accomplishing many similar objects akin in their nature to
the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails of the race.
Him, Darnay heard with a particular feeling of objection; and Darnay
stood divided between going away that he might hear no more, and
remaining to interpose his word, when the thing that was to be, went
on to shape itself out.

The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened
letter before him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the
person to whom it was addressed? The House laid the letter down so
close to Darnay that he saw the direction--the more quickly because
it was his own right name. The address, turned into English, ran:

"Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evremonde,
of France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson and Co., Bankers,
London, England."

On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent
and express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name
should be--unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obligation--kept
inviolate between them. Nobody else knew it to be his name; his own
wife had no suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry could have none.

"No," said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; "I have referred it,
I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
gentleman is to be found."

The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank,
there was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry's
desk. He held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at
it, in the person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and
Monseigneur looked at it in the person of that plotting and indignant
refugee; and This, That, and The Other, all had something disparaging
to say, in French or in English, concerning the Marquis who was not
to be found.

"Nephew, I believe--but in any case degenerate successor--of the
polished Marquis who was murdered," said one. "Happy to say, I never
knew him."

"A craven who abandoned his post," said another--this Monseigneur
had been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a
load of hay--"some years ago."

"Infected with the new doctrines," said a third, eyeing the direction
through his glass in passing; "set himself in opposition to the last
Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them
to the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I hope,
as he deserves."

"Hey?" cried the blatant Stryver. "Did he though? Is that the sort
of fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D--n the fellow!"

Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. Stryver on
the shoulder, and said:

"I know the fellow."

"Do you, by Jupiter?" said Stryver. "I am sorry for it."

"Why?"

"Why, Mr. Darnay? D'ye hear what he did? Don't ask, why,
in these times."

"But I do ask why?"

"Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to
hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow,
who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry
that ever was known, abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the
earth that ever did murder by wholesale, and you ask me why I am
sorry that a man who instructs youth knows him? Well, but I'll
answer you. I am sorry because I believe there is contamination in
such a scoundrel. That's why."

Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself,
and said: "You may not understand the gentleman."

"I understand how to put YOU in a corner, Mr. Darnay," said Bully
Stryver, "and I'll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I DON'T
understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. You may
also tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly goods and
position to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the head of them.
But, no, gentlemen," said Stryver, looking all round, and snapping his
fingers, "I know something of human nature, and I tell you that you'll
never find a fellow like this fellow, trusting himself to the mercies
of such precious PROTEGES. No, gentlemen; he'll always show 'em
a clean pair of heels very early in the scuffle, and sneak away."

With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr. Stryver
shouldered himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approbation
of his hearers. Mr. Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone at the
desk, in the general departure from the Bank.

"Will you take charge of the letter?" said Mr. Lorry. "You know
where to deliver it?"

"I do."

"Will you undertake to explain, that we suppose it to have been
addressed here, on the chance of our knowing where to forward it,
and that it has been here some time?"

"I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here?"

"From here, at eight."

"I will come back, to see you off."

Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other men,
Darnay made the best of his way into the quiet of the Temple,
opened the letter, and read it. These were its contents:

"Prison of the Abbaye, Paris.

"June 21, 1792.
"MONSIEUR HERETOFORE THE MARQUIS.

"After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the
village, I have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and
brought a long journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suffered
a great deal. Nor is that all; my house has been destroyed--razed
to the ground.

"The crime for which I am imprisoned, Monsieur heretofore the
Marquis, and for which I shall be summoned before the tribunal, and
shall lose my life (without your so generous help), is, they tell me,
treason against the majesty of the people, in that I have acted
against them for an emigrant. It is in vain I represent that I have
acted for them, and not against, according to your commands. It is
in vain I represent that, before the sequestration of emigrant
property, I had remitted the imposts they had ceased to pay; that I
had collected no rent; that I had had recourse to no process. The
only response is, that I have acted for an emigrant, and where is
that emigrant?

"Ah! most gracious Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, where is that
emigrant? I cry in my sleep where is he? I demand of Heaven, will
he not come to deliver me? No answer. Ah Monsieur heretofore the
Marquis, I send my desolate cry across the sea, hoping it may perhaps
reach your ears through the great bank of Tilson known at Paris!

"For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
your noble name, I supplicate you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
to succour and release me. My fault is, that I have been true to you.
Oh Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I pray you be you true to me!

"From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend nearer
and nearer to destruction, I send you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
the assurance of my dolorous and unhappy service.

"Your afflicted,

"Gabelle."

The latent uneasiness in Darnay's mind was roused to vigourous life
by this letter. The peril of an old servant and a good one, whose
only crime was fidelity to himself and his family, stared him so
reproachfully in the face, that, as he walked to and fro in the Temple
considering what to do, he almost hid his face from the passersby.

He knew very well, that in his horror of the deed which had culminated
the bad deeds and bad reputation of the old family house, in his
resentful suspicions of his uncle, and in the aversion with which his
conscience regarded the crumbling fabric that he was supposed to
uphold, he had acted imperfectly. He knew very well, that in his love
for Lucie, his renunciation of his social place, though by no means
new to his own mind, had been hurried and incomplete. He knew that
he ought to have systematically worked it out and supervised it, and
that he had meant to do it, and that it had never been done.

The happiness of his own chosen English home, the necessity of being
always actively employed, the swift changes and troubles of the time
which had followed on one another so fast, that the events of this
week annihilated the immature plans of last week, and the events of
the week following made all new again; he knew very well, that to the
force of these circumstances he had yielded:--not without disquiet,
but still without continuous and accumulating resistance. That he
had watched the times for a time of action, and that they had shifted
and struggled until the time had gone by, and the nobility were
trooping from France by every highway and byway, and their property
was in course of confiscation and destruction, and their very names
were blotting out, was as well known to himself as it could be to any
new authority in France that might impeach him for it.

But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man; he was so far
from having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that he had
relinquished them of his own will, thrown himself on a world with no
favour in it, won his own private place there, and earned his own
bread. Monsieur Gabelle had held the impoverished and involved estate
on written instructions, to spare the people, to give them what little
there was to give--such fuel as the heavy creditors would let them
have in the winter, and such produce as could be saved from the same
grip in the summer--and no doubt he had put the fact in plea and proof,
for his own safety, so that it could not but appear now.

This favoured the desperate resolution Charles Darnay had begun to make,
that he would go to Paris.

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had
driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was
drawing him to itself, and he must go. Everything that arose before
his mind drifted him on, faster and faster, more and more steadily,
to the terrible attraction. His latent uneasiness had been, that bad
aims were being worked out in his own unhappy land by bad instruments,
and that he who could not fail to know that he was better than they,
was not there, trying to do something to stay bloodshed, and assert
the claims of mercy and humanity. With this uneasiness half stifled,
and half reproaching him, he had been brought to the pointed comparison
of himself with the brave old gentleman in whom duty was so strong;
upon that comparison (injurious to himself) had instantly followed
the sneers of Monseigneur, which had stung him bitterly, and those of
Stryver, which above all were coarse and galling, for old reasons.
Upon those, had followed Gabelle's letter: the appeal of an innocent
prisoner, in danger of death, to his justice, honour, and good name.

His resolution was made. He must go to Paris.

Yes. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until
he struck. He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger. The
intention with which he had done what he had done, even although he
had left it incomplete, presented it before him in an aspect that
would be gratefully acknowledged in France on his presenting himself
to assert it. Then, that glorious vision of doing good, which is so
often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him,
and he even saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide
this raging Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.

As he walked to and fro with his resolution made, he considered that
neither Lucie nor her father must know of it until he was gone.
Lucie should be spared the pain of separation; and her father, always
reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the dangerous ground of old,
should come to the knowledge of the step, as a step taken, and not in
the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the incompleteness of
his situation was referable to her father, through the painful
anxiety to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he
did not discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too,
had had its influence in his course.

He walked to and fro, with thoughts very busy, until it was time to
return to Tellson's and take leave of Mr. Lorry. As soon as he
arrived in Paris he would present himself to this old friend, but he
must say nothing of his intention now.

A carriage with post-horses was ready at the Bank door, and Jerry
was booted and equipped.

"I have delivered that letter," said Charles Darnay to Mr. Lorry.
"I would not consent to your being charged with any written answer,
but perhaps you will take a verbal one?"

"That I will, and readily," said Mr. Lorry, "if it is not dangerous."

"Not at all. Though it is to a prisoner in the Abbaye."

"What is his name?" said Mr. Lorry, with his open pocket-book in his hand.

"Gabelle."

"Gabelle. And what is the message to the unfortunate Gabelle in prison?"

"Simply, `that he has received the letter, and will come.'"

"Any time mentioned?"

"He will start upon his journey to-morrow night."

"Any person mentioned?"

"No."

He helped Mr. Lorry to wrap himself in a number of coats and cloaks,
and went out with him from the warm atmosphere of the old Bank, into
the misty air of Fleet-street. "My love to Lucie, and to little
Lucie," said Mr. Lorry at parting, "and take precious care of them
till I come back." Charles Darnay shook his head and doubtfully smiled,
as the carriage rolled away.

That night--it was the fourteenth of August--he sat up late, and
wrote two fervent letters; one was to Lucie, explaining the strong
obligation he was under to go to Paris, and showing her, at length,
the reasons that he had, for feeling confident that he could become
involved in no personal danger there; the other was to the Doctor,
confiding Lucie and their dear child to his care, and dwelling on
the same topics with the strongest assurances. To both, he wrote
that he would despatch letters in proof of his safety, immediately
after his arrival.

It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first
reservation of their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter
to preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly
unsuspicious. But, an affectionate glance at his wife, so happy and
busy, made him resolute not to tell her what impended (he had been
half moved to do it, so strange it was to him to act in anything
without her quiet aid), and the day passed quickly. Early in the
evening he embraced her, and her scarcely less dear namesake, pretending
that he would return by-and-bye (an imaginary engagement took him out,
and he had secreted a valise of clothes ready), and so he emerged
into the heavy mist of the heavy streets, with a heavier heart.

The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the
tides and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left
his two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour
before midnight, and no sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his
journey. "For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the
honour of your noble name!" was the poor prisoner's cry with which
he strengthened his sinking heart, as he left all that was dear on
earth behind him, and floated away for the Loadstone Rock.

The end of the second book.

0098 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 23

2006-09-16T22:42:00.001-07:00

Fire Rises

There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where
the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on
the highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold
his poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison
on the crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard
it, but not many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not
one of them knew what his men would do--beyond this: that it would
probably not be what he was ordered.

Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation.
Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as
shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed
down, dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences,
domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore
them--all worn out.

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of
luxurious and shining fife, and a great deal more to equal purpose;
nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought
things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for
Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must
be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements, surely! Thus
it was, however; and the last drop of blood having been extracted from
the flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often
that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing
to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low
and unaccountable.

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village
like it. For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it
and wrung it, and had seldom graced it with his presence except for
the pleasures of the chase--now, found in hunting the people; now,
found in hunting the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made
edifying spaces of barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change
consisted in the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than
in the disappearance of the high caste, chiselled, and otherwise
beautified and beautifying features of Monseigneur.

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the
dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to
dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in
thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat
if he had it--in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely
labour, and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure
approaching on foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those
parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender
of roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired
man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were
clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart,
steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy
moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves
and moss of many byways through woods.

Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather,
as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as
he could get from a shower of hail.

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the
mill, and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these
objects in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that
was just intelligible:

"How goes it, Jacques?"

"All well, Jacques."

"Touch then!"

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

"No dinner?"

"Nothing but supper now," said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.

"It is the fashion," growled the man. "I meet no dinner anywhere."

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and
steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held
it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and
thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.

"Touch then." It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this
time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands.

"To-night?" said the mender of roads.

"To-night," said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

"Where?"

"Here."

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently
at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy
charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.

"Show me!" said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.

"See!" returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. "You go
down here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain--"

"To the Devil with all that!" interrupted the other, rolling his eye
over the landscape. "_I_ go through no streets and past no fountains.
Well?"

"Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above
the village."

"Good. When do you cease to work?"

"At sunset."

"Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without
resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will
you wake me?"

"Surely."

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off
his great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones.
He was fast asleep directly.

As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling
away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to
by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap
now, in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the
heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned towards it, that he
used his tools mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor
account. The bronze face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse
woollen red cap, the rough medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy
skins of beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and
the sullen and desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired
the mender of roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and
his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great
shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the
many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself
was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to
get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain,
for he slept with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as
his lips. Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates,
trenches, and drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much
air as against this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to
the horizon and looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures,
stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres all over France.

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering lumps
of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed
them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing.
Then, the mender of roads having got his tools together and all things
ready to go down into the village, roused him.

"Good!" said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. "Two leagues beyond
the summit of the hill?"

"About."

"About. Good!"

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him
according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain,
squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and
appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the village.
When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not creep to bed,
as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and remained there.
A curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when it
gathered together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion
of looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur
Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on
his house-top alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced down
from behind his chimneys at the darkening faces by the fountain below,
and sent word to the sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that
there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping
its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they
threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up
the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at
the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy
rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old spears and knives,
and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the curtains of the bed
where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and South, through
the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass
and cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come together in
the courtyard. Four lights broke out there, and moved away in different
directions, and all was black again.

But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself
strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing
luminous. Then, a flickering streak played behind the architecture
of the front, picking out transparent places, and showing where
balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it soared higher, and
grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a score of the great windows,
flames burst forth, and the stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.

A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left
there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was
spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in
the space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at
Monsieur Gabelle's door. "Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!" The
tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was
none. The mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular
friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar
of fire in the sky. "It must be forty feet high," said they, grimly;
and never moved.

The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away
through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison
on the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at the
fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. "Help, gentlemen--
officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from
the flames by timely aid! Help, help!" The officers looked towards
the soldiers who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered,
with shrugs and biting of lips, "It must burn."

As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the
village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred
and fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the
idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were putting
candles in every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of
everything, occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory
manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation
on that functionary's part, the mender of roads, once so submissive
to authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires
with, and that post-horses would roast.

The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and
raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from
the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the
rising and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as if they were
in torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell, the face with
the two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the
smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel Marquis, burning at
the stake and contending with the fire.

The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten
lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water
ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice before
the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great
rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, like crystallisation;
stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into the furnace; four fierce
figures trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the night-
enshrouded roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their
next destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the
tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.

Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and
bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do
with the collection of rent and taxes--though it was but a small
instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those
latter days--became impatient for an interview with him, and,
surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference.
Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door, and retire to
hold counsel with himself. The result of that conference was, that
Gabelle again withdrew himself to his housetop behind his stack of
chimneys; this time resolved, if his door were broken in (he was a
small Southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head
foremost over the parapet, and crush a man or two below.

Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the
distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having
an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour.
A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of
the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur
Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing at last, and
the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people happily
dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him
for that while.

Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were
other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom
the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they
had been born and bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople
less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom
the functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they
strung up in their turn. But, the fierce figures were steadily wending
East, West, North, and South, be that as it would; and whosoever hung,
fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that would turn to water
and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was
able to calculate successfully.

0097 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 22

2006-09-16T22:42:00.000-07:00

The Sea Still Rises

Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to
soften his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he
could, with the relish of fraternal embraces and congratulations,
when Madame Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, presiding over the
customers. Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the great
brotherhood of Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely
chary of trusting themselves to the saint's mercies. The lamps across
his streets had a portentously elastic swing with them.

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat,
contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several
knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense
of power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on
the wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it: "I know how
hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself;
but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to
destroy life in you?" Every lean bare arm, that had been without work
before, had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike.
The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that
they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint Antoine;
the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the
last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.

Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was
to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her
sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a
starved grocer, and the mother of two children withal, this lieutenant
had already earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.

"Hark!" said The Vengeance. "Listen, then! Who comes?"

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine
Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading
murmur came rushing along.

"It is Defarge," said madame. "Silence, patriots!"

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked
around him! "Listen, everywhere!" said madame again. "Listen to him!"
Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open
mouths, formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had
sprung to their feet.

"Say then, my husband. What is it?"

"News from the other world!"

"How, then?" cried madame, contemptuously. "The other world?"

"Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people
that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?"

"Everybody!" from all throats.

"The news is of him. He is among us!"

"Among us!" from the universal throat again. "And dead?"

"Not dead! He feared us so much--and with reason--that he caused
himself to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But
they have found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him
in. I have seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a
prisoner. I have said that he had reason to fear us. Say all!
HAD he reason?"

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had
never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if
he could have heard the answering cry.

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked
steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of
a drum was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.

"Patriots!" said Defarge, in a determined voice, "are we ready?"

Instantly Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating
in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and
The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about
her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to
house, rousing the women.

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked
from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into
the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From
such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their
children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground
famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one
another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.
Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother!
Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into
the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and
screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they
might eat grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat
grass, when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it
might suck grass, when these breasts where dry with want! O mother
of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our suffering! Hear me, my dead baby
and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge
you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us the blood
of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon,
Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig
him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries,
numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking
and tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate
swoon, and were only saved by the men belonging to them from being
trampled under foot.

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was
at the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine
knew his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women
flocked out of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs
after them with such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an
hour there was not a human creature in Saint Antoine's bosom but a
few old crones and the wailing children.

No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where
this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent
open space and streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance,
and Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great distance
from him in the Hall.

"See!" cried madame, pointing with her knife. "See the old villain
bound with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon
his back. Ha, ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!" Madame
put her knife under her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play.

The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause of
her satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining
to others, and those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with
the clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl,
and the winnowing of many bushels of words, Madame Defarge's frequent
expressions of impatience were taken up, with marvellous quickness,
at a distance: the more readily, because certain men who had by some
wonderful exercise of agility climbed up the external architecture to
look in from the windows, knew Madame Defarge well, and acted as a
telegraph between her and the crowd outside the building.

At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope
or protection, directly down upon the old prisoner's head. The favour
was too much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that
had stood surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had
got him!

It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge
had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable
wretch in a deadly embrace--Madame Defarge had but followed and turned
her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied--The Vengeance
and Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows
had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high
perches--when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, "Bring him
out! Bring him to the lamp!"

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on
his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at,
and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his
face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always
entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of
action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one
another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through
a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one
of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go--as a
cat might have done to a mouse--and silently and composedly looked
at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women
passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly
calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went
aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went
aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope
was merciful, and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with
grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.

Nor was this the end of the day's bad work, for Saint Antoine so
shouted and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on
hearing when the day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched,
another of the people's enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris
under a guard five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine
wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of paper, seized him--would have
torn him out of the breast of an army to bear Foulon company--set
his head and heart on pikes, and carried the three spoils of the day,
in Wolf-procession through the streets.

Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children,
wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers' shops were beset
by long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while
they waited with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by
embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them
again in gossip. Gradually, these strings of ragged people shortened
and frayed away; and then poor lights began to shine in high windows,
and slender fires were made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked
in common, afterwards supping at their doors.

Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of
most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused
some nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of
cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full
share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre
children; and lovers, with such a world around them and before them,
loved and hoped.

It was almost morning, when Defarge's wine-shop parted with its last
knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in
husky tones, while fastening the door:

"At last it is come, my dear!"

"Eh well!" returned madame. "Almost."

Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with
her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum's was the only
voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The
Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up and had
the same speech out of him as before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon
was seized; not so with the hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint
Antoine's bosom.

0096 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 21

2006-09-16T22:41:00.001-07:00

Echoing Footsteps

A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where
the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound
her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and
companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the
tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young
wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes
would be dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes,
something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred
her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts--hopes, of a love as
yet unknown to her: doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that
new delight--divided her breast. Among the echoes then, there would
arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of
the husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn for
her so much, swelled to her eyes, and broke like waves.

That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then,
among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and
the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they
would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh,
and the Divine friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had
confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He took the
child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together,
weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all
their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the
echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband's
step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal.
Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an
unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under
the plane-tree in the garden!

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not
harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo
on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a
radiant smile, "Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both,
and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!"
those were not tears all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek,
as the spirit departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it.
Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my Father's face.
O Father, blessed words!

Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got blended with the other
echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath
of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were
mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed
murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore
--as the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning,
or dressing a doll at her mother's footstool, chattered in the
tongues of the Two Cities that were blended in her life.

The Echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton.
Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming
in uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening, as he had
once done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one other
thing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been
whispered by all true echoes for ages and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a
blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother,
but her children had a strange sympathy with him--an instinctive
delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched
in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here.
Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby
arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy had
spoken of him, almost at the last. "Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!"

Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine
forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in
his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually
in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped life
of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and
stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made
it the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his
state of lion's jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think
of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow
with property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about
them but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most
offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three
sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie's
husband: delicately saying "Halloa! here are three lumps of bread-and-
cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!" The polite rejection
of the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver
with indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the training
of the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride of
Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming
to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had
once put in practice to "catch" him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond
arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him "not to be caught."
Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were occasionally parties
to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by saying
that he had told it so often, that he believed it himself--which is
surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence,
as to justify any such offender's being carried off to some suitably
retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive,
sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until
her little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes
of her child's tread came, and those of her own dear father's, always
active and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband's, need not
be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed
by herself with such a wise and elegant thrift that it was more
abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoes
all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had
told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be)
than single, and of the many times her husband had said to her that no
cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him,
and asked her "What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being
everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us,
yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?"

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly
in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about
little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound,
as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.

On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine,
Mr. Lorry came in late, from Tellson's, and sat himself down by Lucie
and her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and
they were all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had
looked at the lightning from the same place.

"I began to think," said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, "that
I should have to pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so full of
business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or which
way to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have
actually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem
not to be able to confide their property to us fast enough. There is
positively a mania among some of them for sending it to England."

"That has a bad look," said Darnay--

"A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don't know what
reason there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at
Tellson's are getting old, and we really can't be troubled out of
the ordinary course without due occasion."

"Still," said Darnay, "you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is."

"I know that, to be sure," assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade
himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled,
"but I am determined to be peevish after my long day's botheration.
Where is Manette?"

"Here he is," said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.

"I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by
which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous
without reason. You are not going out, I hope?"

"No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,"
said the Doctor.

"I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to
be pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie?
I can't see."

"Of course, it has been kept for you."

"Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?"

"And sleeping soundly."

"That's right; all safe and well! I don't know why anything should
be otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so
put out all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear!
Thank ye. Now, come and take your place in the circle, and let us
sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory."

"Not a theory; it was a fancy."

"A fancy, then, my wise pet," said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. "They
are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!"

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's
life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the
footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat
in the dark London window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows
heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy
heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous
roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms
struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind:
all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of
a weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through
what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over
the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng
could have told; but, muskets were being distributed--so were
cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes,
pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise.
People who could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding
hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every
pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at
high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account,
and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging
circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron
had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself,
already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms,
thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm
another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.

"Keep near to me, Jacques Three," cried Defarge; "and do you,
Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of
as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?"

"Eh, well! Here you see me!" said madame, composed as ever, but not
knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe,
in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol
and a cruel knife.

"Where do you go, my wife?"

"I go," said madame, "with you at present. You shall see me at the
head of women, by-and-bye."

"Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. "Patriots and
friends, we are ready! The Bastille!"

With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been
shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave,
depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells
ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach,
the attack began.

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through
the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against
a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier--Defarge of the
wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! "Work, comrades
all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand,
Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of
all the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!" Thus Defarge
of the wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot.

"To me, women!" cried madame his wife. "What! We can kill as well as
the men when the place is taken!" And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry,
trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and revenge.

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single
drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight
displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing
weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work
at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,
execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the
furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the
single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great
towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly
hot by the service of Four fierce hours.

A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimly
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenly
the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the
wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer
walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!

So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even
to draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had
been struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in
the outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of a
wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly
at his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was
visible in the inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywhere
was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding
noise, yet furious dumb-show.

"The Prisoners!"

"The Records!"

"The secret cells!"

"The instruments of torture!"

"The Prisoners!"

Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, "The Prisoners!"
was the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were
an eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost
billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with them, and
threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook remained
undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of one of
these men--a man with a grey head, who had a lighted torch in his hand--
separated him from the rest, and got him between himself and the wall.

"Show me the North Tower!" said Defarge. "Quick!"

"I will faithfully," replied the man, "if you will come with me. But
there is no one there."

"What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?"
asked Defarge. "Quick!"

"The meaning, monsieur?"

"Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that
I shall strike you dead?"

"Kill him!" croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.

"Monsieur, it is a cell."

"Show it me!"

"Pass this way, then."

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently
disappointed by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promise
bloodshed, held by Defarge's arm as he held by the turnkey's. Their
three heads had been close together during this brief discourse, and
it had been as much as they could do to hear one another, even then:
so tremendous was the noise of the living ocean, in its irruption into
the Fortress, and its inundation of the courts and passages and
staircases. All around outside, too, it beat the walls with a deep,
hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult
broke and leaped into the air like spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past
hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,
and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry
waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three,
linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here
and there, especially at first, the inundation started on them and
swept by; but when they had done descending, and were winding and
climbing up a tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massive
thickness of walls and arches, the storm within the fortress and without
was only audible to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of
which they had come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock,
swung the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads
and passed in:

"One hundred and five, North Tower!"

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall,
with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by
stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred
across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There
were the four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.

"Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,"
said Defarge to the turnkey.

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.

"Stop!--Look here, Jacques!"

"A. M.!" croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.

"Alexandre Manette," said Defarge in his ear, following the letters
with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. "And here
he wrote `a poor physician.' And it was he, without doubt, who scratched
a calendar on this stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar?
Give it me!"

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a
sudden exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten
stool and table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.

"Hold the light higher!" he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey.
"Look among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,"
throwing it to him; "rip open that bed, and search the straw.
Hold the light higher, you!"

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth,
and, peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the
crowbar, and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes,
some mortar and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face to
avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the
chimney into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped
with a cautious touch.

"Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?"

"Nothing."

"Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So!
Light them, you!"

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping
again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and
retraced their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover their sense of
hearing as they came down, until they were in the raging flood once more.

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself.
Saint Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in
the guard upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the
people. Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel de
Ville for judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the
people's blood (suddenly of some value, after many years of
worthlessness) be unavenged.

In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to
encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red
decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a
woman's. "See, there is my husband!" she cried, pointing him out.
"See Defarge!" She stood immovable close to the grim old officer,
and remained immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him
through the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remained
immovable close to him when he was got near his destination, and began
to be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when the
long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him
when he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot
upon his neck, and with her cruel knife--long ready--hewed off his head.

The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea
of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint
Antoine's blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by
the iron hand was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville where
the governor's body lay--down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation.
"Lower the lamp yonder!" cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a
new means of death; "here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!"
The swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.

The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving
of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose
forces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying
shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of
suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression
was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces--each seven in number
--so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which
bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly
released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high
overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the
Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits.
Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose
drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive
faces, yet with a suspended--not an abolished--expression on them; faces,
rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of
the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, "THOU DIDST IT!"

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the
accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters
and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken
hearts,--such, and such--like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint
Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven
hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay,
and keep these feet far out of her life! For, they are headlong, mad,
and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask
at Defarge's wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once
stained red.

0095 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 20

2006-09-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

A Plea

When the newly-married pair came home, the first person who appeared,
to offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They had not been
at home many hours, when he presented himself. He was not improved in
habits, or in looks, or in manner; but there was a certain rugged air of
fidelity about him, which was new to the observation of Charles Darnay.

He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a window, and
of speaking to him when no one overheard.

"Mr. Darnay," said Carton, "I wish we might be friends."

"We are already friends, I hope."

"You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don't
mean any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we might be friends,
I scarcely mean quite that, either."

Charles Darnay--as was natural--asked him, in all good-humour and
good-fellowship, what he did mean?

"Upon my life," said Carton, smiling, "I find that easier to comprehend
in my own mind, than to convey to yours. However, let me try. You
remember a certain famous occasion when I was more drunk than--
than usual?"

"I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess
that you had been drinking."

"I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon me,
for I always remember them. I hope it may be taken into account one
day, when all days are at an end for me! Don't be alarmed;
I am not going to preach."

"I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but
alarming to me."

"Ah!" said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he waved
that away. "On the drunken occasion in question (one of a large number,
as you know), I was insufferable about liking you, and not liking you.
I wish you would forget it."

"I forgot it long ago."

"Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to
me, as you represent it to be to you. I have by no means forgotten it,
and a light answer does not help me to forget it."

"If it was a light answer," returned Darnay, "I beg your forgiveness
for it. I had no other object than to turn a slight thing, which,
to my surprise, seems to trouble you too much, aside. I declare to you,
on the faith of a gentleman, that I have long dismissed it from my mind.
Good Heaven, what was there to dismiss! Have I had nothing more
important to remember, in the great service you rendered me that day?"

"As to the great service," said Carton, "I am bound to avow to you,
when you speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional
claptrap, I don't know that I cared what became of you, when I
rendered it.--Mind! I say when I rendered it; I am speaking of the past."

"You make light of the obligation," returned Darnay, "but I will not
quarrel with YOUR light answer."

"Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my
purpose; I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me;
you know I am incapable of all the higher and better flights of men.
If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and he'll tell you so."

"I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his."

"Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never
done any good, and never will."

"I don't know that you `never will.'"

"But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could
endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent
reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be
permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might be
regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the
resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of
furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of.
I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one
if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me,
I dare say, to know that I had it."

"Will you try?"

"That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have
indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?"

"I think so, Carton, by this time."

They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a minute
afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.

When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with Miss Pross,
the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some mention of this
conversation in general terms, and spoke of Sydney Carton as a problem
of carelessness and recklessness. He spoke of him, in short, not
bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but as anybody might who
saw him as he showed himself.

He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young
wife; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found
her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead
strongly marked.

"We are thoughtful to-night!" said Darnay, drawing his arm about her.

"Yes, dearest Charles," with her hands on his breast, and the
inquiring and attentive expression fixed upon him; "we are rather
thoughtful to-night, for we have something on our mind to-night."

"What is it, my Lucie?"

"Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you
not to ask it?"

"Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?"

What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the
cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!

"I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and
respect than you expressed for him to-night."

"Indeed, my own? Why so?"

"That is what you are not to ask me. But I think--I know--he does."

"If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?"

"I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and
very lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to
believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there
are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding."

"It is a painful reflection to me," said Charles Darnay, quite astounded,
"that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this of him."

"My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is
scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable
now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things,
even magnanimous things."

She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man,
that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours.

"And, O my dearest Love!" she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying
her head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, "remember how
strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!"

The supplication touched him home. "I will always remember it, dear
Heart! I will remember it as long as I live."

He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded
her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets,
could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops
of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of
that husband, he might have cried to the night--and the words would not
have parted from his lips for the first time--

"God bless her for her sweet compassion!"

0094 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 19

2006-09-16T22:40:00.001-07:00

An Opinion

Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On
the tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of
the sun into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it
was dark night.

He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had
done so, whether he was not still asleep. For, going to the door of
the Doctor's room and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker's
bench and tools were put aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat
reading at the window. He was in his usual morning dress, and his face
(which Mr. Lorry could distinctly see), though still very pale, was
calmly studious and attentive.

Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. Lorry felt
giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking
might not be a disturbed dream of his own; for, did not his eyes show
him his friend before him in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and
employed as usual; and was there any sign within their range, that the
change of which he had so strong an impression had actually happened?

It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the
answer being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real
corresponding and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis Lorry, there?
How came he to have fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in
Doctor Manette's consulting-room, and to be debating these points
outside the Doctor's bedroom door in the early morning?

Within a few minutes, Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he
had had any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity have
resolved it; but he was by that time clear-headed, and had none. He
advised that they should let the time go by until the regular
breakfast-hour, and should then meet the Doctor as if nothing unusual
had occurred. If he appeared to be in his customary state of mind,
Mr. Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek direction and guidance
from the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so anxious to obtain.

Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked
out with care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical
toilette, Mr. Lorry presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his
usual white linen, and with his usual neat leg. The Doctor was
summoned in the usual way, and came to breakfast.

So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping
those delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt to be the
only safe advance, he at first supposed that his daughter's marriage
had taken place yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown
out, to the day of the week, and the day of the month, set him thinking
and counting, and evidently made him uneasy. In all other respects,
however, he was so composedly himself, that Mr. Lorry determined to
have the aid he sought. And that aid was his own.

Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and
the Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly:

"My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence,
on a very curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say,
it is very curious to me; perhaps, to your better information it may
be less so."

Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, the
Doctor looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had already
glanced at his hands more than once.

"Doctor Manette," said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately on the
arm, "the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine.
Pray give your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake--and
above all, for his daughter's--his daughter's, my dear Manette."

"If I understand," said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, "some mental
shock--?"

"Yes!"

"Be explicit," said the Doctor. "Spare no detail."

Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded.

"My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged shock, of
great acuteness and severity to the affections, the feelings,
the--the--as you express it--the mind. The mind. It is the case of
a shock under which the sufferer was borne down, one cannot say for
how long, because I believe he cannot calculate the time himself, and
there are no other means of getting at it. It is the case of a shock
from which the sufferer recovered, by a process that he cannot trace
himself--as I once heard him publicly relate in a striking manner.
It is the case of a shock from which he has recovered, so completely,
as to be a highly intelligent man, capable of close application of mind,
and great exertion of body, and of constantly making fresh additions to
his stock of knowledge, which was already very large. But, unfortunately,
there has been," he paused and took a deep breath--"a slight relapse."

The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, "Of how long duration?"

"Nine days and nights."

"How did it show itself? I infer," glancing at his hands again,
"in the resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock?"

"That is the fact."

"Now, did you ever see him," asked the Doctor, distinctly and
collectedly, though in the same low voice, "engaged in that
pursuit originally?"

"Once."

"And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects--or in
all respects--as he was then?"

"I think in all respects."

"You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the relapse?"

"No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be kept from
her. It is known only to myself, and to one other who may be trusted."

The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, "That was very kind.
That was very thoughtful!" Mr. Lorry grasped his hand in return,
and neither of the two spoke for a little while.

"Now, my dear Manette," said Mr. Lorry, at length, in his most
considerate and most affectionate way, "I am a mere man of business,
and unfit to cope with such intricate and difficult matters. I do
not possess the kind of information necessary; I do not possess the
kind of intelligence; I want guiding. There is no man in this world
on whom I could so rely for right guidance, as on you. Tell me, how
does this relapse come about? Is there danger of another? Could a
repetition of it be prevented? How should a repetition of it be
treated? How does it come about at all? What can I do for my friend?
No man ever can have been more desirous in his heart to serve a friend,
than I am to serve mine, if I knew how.

But I don't know how to originate, in such a case. If your sagacity,
knowledge, and experience, could put me on the right track, I might be
able to do so much; unenlightened and undirected, I can do so little.
Pray discuss it with me; pray enable me to see it a little more clearly,
and teach me how to be a little more useful."

Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were spoken,
and Mr. Lorry did not press him.

"I think it probable," said the Doctor, breaking silence with an
effort, "that the relapse you have described, my dear friend, was
not quite unforeseen by its subject."

"Was it dreaded by him?" Mr. Lorry ventured to ask.

"Very much." He said it with an involuntary shudder.

"You have no idea how such an apprehension weighs on the sufferer's
mind, and how difficult--how almost impossible--it is, for him to force
himself to utter a word upon the topic that oppresses him."

"Would he," asked Mr. Lorry, "be sensibly relieved if he could
prevail upon himself to impart that secret brooding to any one,
when it is on him?"

"I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible.
I even believe it--in some cases--to be quite impossible."

"Now," said Mr. Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor's arm
again, after a short silence on both sides, "to what would you refer
this attack?"

"I believe," returned Doctor Manette, "that there had been a strong
and extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that
was the first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a
most distressing nature were vividly recalled, I think. It is probable
that there had long been a dread lurking in his mind, that those
associations would be recalled--say, under certain circumstances--say,
on a particular occasion. He tried to prepare himself in vain; perhaps
the effort to prepare himself made him less able to bear it."

"Would he remember what took place in the relapse?" asked Mr. Lorry,
with natural hesitation.

The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, and
answered, in a low voice, "Not at all."

"Now, as to the future," hinted Mr. Lorry.

"As to the future," said the Doctor, recovering firmness, "I should
have great hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to restore him so
soon, I should have great hope. He, yielding under the pressure of a
complicated something, long dreaded and long vaguely foreseen and
contended against, and recovering after the cloud had burst and passed,
I should hope that the worst was over."

"Well, well! That's good comfort. I am thankful!" said Mr. Lorry.

"I am thankful!" repeated the Doctor, bending his head with reverence.

"There are two other points," said Mr. Lorry, "on which I am anxious
to be instructed. I may go on?"

"You cannot do your friend a better service." The Doctor gave him
his hand.

"To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually
energetic; he applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition
of professional knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to
many things. Now, does he do too much?"

"I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be always in
singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in
part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy
things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy
direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery."

"You are sure that he is not under too great a strain?"

"I think I am quite sure of it."

"My dear Manette, if he were overworked now--"

"My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a
violent stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight."

"Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment,
that he WAS overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this disorder?"

"I do not think so. I do not think," said Doctor Manette with the
firmness of self-conviction, "that anything but the one train of
association would renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but
some extraordinary jarring of that chord could renew it. After what
has happened, and after his recovery, I find it difficult to imagine
any such violent sounding of that string again. I trust, and I almost
believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are exhausted."

He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing
would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the
confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal
endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that
confidence. He professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he
really was, and approached his second and last point. He felt it to
be the most difficult of all; but, remembering his old Sunday morning
conversation with Miss Pross, and remembering what he had seen in the
last nine days, he knew that he must face it.

"The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction
so happily recovered from," said Mr. Lorry, clearing his throat, "we will
call--Blacksmith's work, Blacksmith's work. We will say, to put a case
and for the sake of illustration, that he had been used, in his bad time,
to work at a little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly found
at his forge again. Is it not a pity that he should keep it by him?"

The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot nervously
on the ground.

"He has always kept it by him," said Mr. Lorry, with an anxious look
at his friend. "Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?"

Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on
the ground.

"You do not find it easy to advise me?" said Mr. Lorry. "I quite
understand it to be a nice question. And yet I think--" And there he
shook his head, and stopped.

"You see," said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause,
"it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings of
this poor man's mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that
occupation, and it was so welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved
his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for
the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he became more
practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenuity of the
mental torture; that he has never been able to bear the thought of
putting it quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is
more hopeful of himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of
himself with a kind of confidence, the idea that he might need that
old employment, and not find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror,
like that which one may fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child."

He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to
Mr. Lorry's face.

"But may not--mind! I ask for information, as a plodding man of
business who only deals with such material objects as guineas,
shillings, and bank-notes--may not the retention of the thing involve
the retention of the idea? If the thing were gone, my dear Manette,
might not the fear go with it? In short, is it not a concession to
the misgiving, to keep the forge?"

There was another silence.

"You see, too," said the Doctor, tremulously, "it is such an
old companion."

"I would not keep it," said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained
in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. "I would recommend him
to sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no
good. Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his
daughter's sake, my dear Manette!"

Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!

"In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not
take it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not
there; let him miss his old companion after an absence."

Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended.
They passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored.
On the three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the
fourteenth day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The
precaution that had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry
had previously explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in
accordance with it, and she had no suspicions.

On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went
into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by
Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a
mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench
to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting
at a murder--for which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable
figure. The burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces
convenient for the purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen
fire; and the tools, shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden.
So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds, that
Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross, while engaged in the commission of their
deed and in the removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked,
like accomplices in a horrible crime.

0093 A TALE OF TWO CITIES: BOOK 2: CHAPTER 18

2006-09-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

Nine Days

The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside
the closed door of the Doctor's room, where he was speaking with
Charles Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride,
Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross--to whom the event, through a gradual process
of reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute
bliss, but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother
Solomon should have been the bridegroom.

"And so," said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride,
and who had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet,
pretty dress; "and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought
you across the Channel, such a baby' Lord bless me' How little I
thought what I was doing! How lightly I valued the obligation I was
conferring on my friend Mr. Charles!"

"You didn't mean it," remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross, "and
therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!"

"Really? Well; but don't cry," said the gentle Mr. Lorry.

"I am not crying," said Miss Pross; "YOU are."

"I, my Pross?" (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant with
her, on occasion.)

"You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don't wonder at it. Such
a present of plate as you have made 'em, is enough to bring tears into
anybody's eyes. There's not a fork or a spoon in the collection,"
said Miss Pross, "that I didn't cry over, last night after the box came,
till I couldn't see it."

"I am highly gratified," said Mr. Lorry, "though, upon my honour, I
had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance
invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man
speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there
might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!"

"Not at all!" From Miss Pross.

"You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?" asked the
gentleman of that name.

"Pooh!" rejoined Miss Pross; "you were a bachelor in your cradle."

"Well!" observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig,
"that seems probable, too."

"And you were cut out for a bachelor," pursued Miss Pross, "before
you were put in your cradle."

"Then, I think," said Mr. Lorry, "that I was very unhandsomely dealt
with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my
pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie," drawing his arm soothingly
round her waist, "I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross
and I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the
final opportunity of saying something to you that you wish to hear.
You leave your good father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as
loving as your own; he shall be taken every conceivable care of;
during the next fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts,
even Tellson's shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him.
And when, at the fortnight's end, he comes to join you and your beloved
husband, on your other fortnight's trip in Wales, you shall say that
we have sent him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame.
Now, I hear Somebody's step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear
girl with an old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes
to claim his own."

For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the
well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright
golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and
delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.

The door of the Doctor's room opened, and he came out with Charles
Darnay. He was so deadly pale--which had not been the case when they
went in together--that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face.
But, in the composure of his manner he was unaltered, except that to
the shrewd glance of Mr. Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication
that the old air of avoidance and dread had lately passed over him,
like a cold wind.

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs to the chariot
which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in
another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange
eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.

Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little
group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling,
glanced on the bride's hand, which were newly released from the dark
obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry's pockets. They returned home to
breakfast, and all went well, and in due course the golden hair that
had mingled with the poor shoemaker's white locks in the Paris garret,
were mingled with them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold
of the door at parting.

It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her father
cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her
enfolding arms, "Take her, Charles! She is yours!"

And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and
she was gone.

The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the
preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. Lorry,
and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they turned into
the welcome shade of the cool old hall, that Mr. Lorry observed a
great change to have come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm
uplifted there, had struck him a poisoned blow.

He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been
expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it
was the old scared lost look that troubled Mr. Lorry; and through
his absent manner of clasping his head and drearily wandering away
into his own room when they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry was reminded of
Defarge the wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride.

"I think," he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration,
"I think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him.
I must look in at Tellson's; so I will go there at once and come back
presently. Then, we will take him a ride into the country, and dine
there, and all will be well."

It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson's, than to look
out of Tellson's. He was detained two hours. When he came back,
he ascended the old staircase alone, having asked no question of
the servant; going thus into the Doctor's rooms, he was stopped by
a low sound of knocking.

"Good God!" he said, with a start. "What's that?"

Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. "O me, O me!
All is lost!" cried she, wringing her hands. "What is to be told
to Ladybird? He doesn't know me, and is making shoes!"

Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the
Doctor's room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it had
been when he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and his head
was bent down, and he was very busy.

"Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!"

The Doctor looked at him for a moment--half inquiringly, half as if
he were angry at being spoken to--and bent over his work again.

He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; his shirt was open at the
throat, as it used to be when he did that work; and even the old
haggard, faded surface of face had come back to him. He worked hard--
impatiently--as if in some sense of having been interrupted.

Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was
a shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying
by him, and asked what it was.

"A young lady's walking shoe," he muttered, without looking up.
"It ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be."

"But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!"

He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without
pausing in his work.

"You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper
occupation. Think, dear friend!"

Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant
at a time, when he was requested to do so; but, no persuasion would
extract a word from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence,
and words fell on him as they would have fallen on an echoless wall,
or on the air. The only ray of hope that Mr. Lorry could discover,
was, that he sometimes furtively looked up without being asked. In that,
there seemed a faint expression of curiosity or perplexity--as though
he were trying to reconcile some doubts in his mind.

Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr. Lorry, as important
above all others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie;
the second, that it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In
conjunction with Miss Pross, he took immediate steps towards the
latter precaution, by giving out that the Doctor was not well, and
required a few days of complete rest. In aid of the kind deception
to be practised on his daughter, Miss Pross was to write, describing
his having been called away professionally, and referring to an
imaginary letter of two or three hurried lines in his own hand,
represented to have been addressed to her by the same post.

These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry took in
the hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept
another course in reserve; which was, to have a certain opinion that he
thought the best, on the Doctor's case.

In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course being
thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him
attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so.
He therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson's for the
first time in his life, and took his post by the window in the same room.

He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak
to him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He abandoned that
attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always
before him, as a silent protest against the delusion into which he had
fallen, or was falling. He remained, therefore, in his seat near the
window, reading and writing, and expressing in as many pleasant and
natural ways as he could think of, that it was a free place.

Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked on,
that first day, until it was too dark to see--worked on, half an hour
after Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write.
When he put his tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr. Lorry rose
and said to him:

"Will you go out?"

He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner,
looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice:

"Out?"

"Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?"

He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But,
Mr. Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the
dusk, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, that he
was in some misty way asking himself, "Why not?" The sagacity of the
man of business perceived an advantage here, and determined to hold it.

Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him
at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long
time before he lay down; but, when he did finally lay himself down,
he fell asleep. In the morning, he was up betimes, and went straight
to his bench and to work.

On this second day, Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name, and
spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He
returned no reply, but it was evident that he heard what was said,
and that he thought about it, however confusedly. This encouraged
Mr. Lorry to have Miss Pross in with her work, several times during the
day; at those times, they quietly spoke of Lucie, and of her father then
present, precisely in the usual manner, and as if there were nothing
amiss. This was done without any demonstrative accompaniment, not long
enough, or often enough to harass him; and it lightened Mr. Lorry's
friendly heart to believe that he looked up oftener, and that he appeared
to be stirred by some perception of inconsistencies surrounding him.

When it fell dark again, Mr. Lorry asked him as before:

"Dear Doctor, will you go out?"

As before, he repeated, "Out?"

"Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?"

This time, Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer
from him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. In the
meanwhile, the Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had
sat there looking down at the plane-tree; but, on Mr. Lorry's return,
be slipped away to his bench.

The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry's hope darkened, and his
heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day.
The third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six
days, seven days, eight days, nine days.

With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier
and heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret
was well kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but he could not
fail to observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out
at first, was growing dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been
so intent on his work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and
expert, as in the dusk of the ninth evening.