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Chapter IV. Congratulatory From the dimly-lighted passages of the court,
the last sediment of the human stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining
off, when Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the solicitor for the
defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood gathered round Mr. Charles Darnay—just released—congratulating
him on his escape from death. It would have been difficult by a far brighter
light, to recognise in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the shoemaker
of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him twice, without looking
again: even though the opportunity of observation had not extended to the mournful cadence of
his low grave voice, and to the abstraction that overclouded him fitfully, without any
apparent reason. While one external cause, and that a reference to his long lingering
agony, would always—as on the trial—evoke this condition from the depths of his soul,
it was also in its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as incomprehensible
to those unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the shadow of the actual Bastille
thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the substance was three hundred miles away.
Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from his mind. She was
the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his misery, and to a Present beyond
his misery: and the sound of her voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand,
had a strong beneficial influence with him almost always. Not absolutely always, for
she could recall some occasions on which her power had failed; but they were few and slight,
and she believed them over. Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and
gratefully, and had turned to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stryver, a man
of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red,
bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally
and physically) into companies and conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way
up in life. He still had his wig and gown on, and he said,
squaring himself at his late client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. Lorry
clean out of the group: "I am glad to have brought you off with honour, Mr. Darnay. It
was an infamous prosecution, grossly infamous; but not the less likely to succeed on that
account." "You have laid me under an obligation to you
for life—in two senses," said his late client, taking his hand.
"I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay; and my best is as good as another man's, I
believe." It clearly being incumbent on some one to
say, "Much better," Mr. Lorry said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested
object of squeezing himself back again. "You think so?" said Mr. Stryver. "Well! you
have been present all day, and you ought to know. You are a man of business, too."
"And as such," quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law had now shouldered back
into the group, just as he had previously shouldered him out of it—"as such I will
appeal to Doctor Manette, to break up this conference and order us all to our homes.
Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr. Darnay has had a terrible day, we are worn out."
"Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry," said Stryver; "I have a night's work to do yet. Speak for
yourself." "I speak for myself," answered Mr. Lorry,
"and for Mr. Darnay, and for Miss Lucie, and—Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us
all?" He asked her the question pointedly, and with a glance at her father.
His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at Darnay: an intent look,
deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust, not even unmixed with fear. With this strange
expression on him his thoughts had wandered away.
"My father," said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.
He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.
"Shall we go home, my father?" With a long breath, he answered "Yes."
The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the impression—which he
himself had originated—that he would not be released that night. The lights were nearly
all extinguished in the passages, the iron gates were being closed with a jar and a rattle,
and the dismal place was deserted until to-morrow morning's interest of gallows, pillory, whipping-post,
and branding-iron, should repeople it. Walking between her father and Mr. Darnay, Lucie Manette
passed into the open air. A hackney-coach was called, and the father and daughter departed
in it. Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages,
to shoulder his way back to the robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the group,
or interchanged a word with any one of them, but who had been leaning against the wall
where its shadow was darkest, had silently strolled out after the rest, and had looked
on until the coach drove away. He now stepped up to where Mr. Lorry and Mr. Darnay stood
upon the pavement. "So, Mr. Lorry! Men of business may speak
to Mr. Darnay now?" Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr.
Carton's part in the day's proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none
the better for it in appearance. "If you knew what a conflict goes on in the
business mind, when the business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business
appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay." Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, "You
have mentioned that before, sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own
masters. We have to think of the House more than ourselves."
"_I_ know, _I_ know," rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly. "Don't be nettled, Mr. Lorry.
You are as good as another, I have no doubt: better, I dare say."
"And indeed, sir," pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, "I really don't know what you
have to do with the matter. If you'll excuse me, as very much your elder, for saying so,
I really don't know that it is your business." "Business! Bless you, _I_ have no business,"
said Mr. Carton. "It is a pity you have not, sir."
"I think so, too." "If you had," pursued Mr. Lorry, "perhaps
you would attend to it." "Lord love you, no!—I shouldn't," said Mr.
Carton. "Well, sir!" cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated
by his indifference, "business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And,
sir, if business imposes its restraints and its silences and impediments, Mr. Darnay as
a young gentleman of generosity knows how to make allowance for that circumstance. Mr.
Darnay, good night, God bless you, sir! I hope you have been this day preserved for
a prosperous and happy life.—Chair there!" Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well
as with the barrister, Mr. Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson's.
Carton, who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober, laughed then, and
turned to Darnay: "This is a strange chance that throws you
and me together. This must be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart
on these street stones?" "I hardly seem yet," returned Charles Darnay,
"to belong to this world again." "I don't wonder at it; it's not so long since
you were pretty far advanced on your way to another. You speak faintly."
"I begin to think I _am_ faint." "Then why the devil don't you dine? I dined,
myself, while those numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this, or
some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at."
Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate-hill to Fleet-street, and so,
up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were shown into a little room, where Charles
Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton
sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and
his fully half-insolent manner upon him. "Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this
terrestrial scheme again, Mr. Darnay?" "I am frightfully confused regarding time
and place; but I am so far mended as to feel that."
"It must be an immense satisfaction!" He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass
again: which was a large one. "As to me, the greatest desire I have, is
to forget that I belong to it. It has no good in it for me—except wine like this—nor
I for it. So we are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are
not much alike in any particular, you and I."
Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with this Double of coarse
deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay was at a loss how to answer; finally, answered
not at all. "Now your dinner is done," Carton presently
said, "why don't you call a health, Mr. Darnay; why don't you give your toast?"
"What health? What toast?" "Why, it's on the tip of your tongue. It ought
to be, it must be, I'll swear it's there." "Miss Manette, then!"
"Miss Manette, then!" Looking his companion full in the face while
he drank the toast, Carton flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where
it shivered to pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.
"That's a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr. Darnay!" he said, filling
his new goblet. A slight frown and a laconic "Yes," were the
answer. "That's a fair young lady to be pitied by
and wept for by! How does it feel? Is it worth being tried for one's life, to be the object
of such sympathy and compassion, Mr. Darnay?" Again Darnay answered not a word.
"She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it her. Not that she showed she
was pleased, but I suppose she was." The allusion served as a timely reminder to
Darnay that this disagreeable companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in the
strait of the day. He turned the dialogue to that point, and thanked him for it.
"I neither want any thanks, nor merit any," was the careless rejoinder. "It was nothing
to do, in the first place; and I don't know why I did it, in the second. Mr. Darnay, let
me ask you a question." "Willingly, and a small return for your good
offices." "Do you think I particularly like you?"
"Really, Mr. Carton," returned the other, oddly disconcerted, "I have not asked myself
the question." "But ask yourself the question now."
"You have acted as if you do; but I don't think you do."
"_I_ don't think I do," said Carton. "I begin to have a very good opinion of your understanding."
"Nevertheless," pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, "there is nothing in that,
I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and our parting without ill-blood on either
side." Carton rejoining, "Nothing in life!" Darnay
rang. "Do you call the whole reckoning?" said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative,
"Then bring me another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and wake me at ten."
The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good night. Without returning the
wish, Carton rose too, with something of a threat of defiance in his manner, and said,
"A last word, Mr. Darnay: you think I am drunk?" "I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton."
"Think? You know I have been drinking." "Since I must say so, I know it."
"Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I care for no man
on earth, and no man on earth cares for me." "Much to be regretted. You might have used
your talents better." "May be so, Mr. Darnay; may be not. Don't
let your sober face elate you, however; you don't know what it may come to. Good night!"
When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to a glass that hung
against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in it.
"Do you particularly like the man?" he muttered, at his own image; "why should you particularly
like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound
you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he
shows you what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change places
with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated
by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the
fellow." He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation,
drank it all in a few minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over
the table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.
End of Book 2, Chapter 4
Chapter V. The Jackal Those were drinking days, and most men drank
hard. So very great is the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate
statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course
of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these
days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind
any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr. Stryver, already
fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular,
any more than in the drier parts of the legal race.
A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had begun cautiously
to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey
had now to summon their favourite, specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself
towards the visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King's Bench, the florid countenance
of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower
pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.
It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib man, and an unscrupulous,
and a ready, and a bold, he had not that faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements,
which is among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's accomplishments. But, a
remarkable improvement came upon him as to this. The more business he got, the greater
his power seemed to grow of getting at its pith and marrow; and however late at night
he sat carousing with Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his fingers' ends in the
morning. Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising
of men, was Stryver's great ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and
Michaelmas, might have floated a king's ship. Stryver never had a case in hand, anywhere,
but Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling of the court;
they went the same Circuit, and even there they prolonged their usual *** late into
the night, and Carton was rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily
to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about, among such as
were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton would never be a lion, he was
an amazingly good jackal, and that he rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble
capacity. "Ten o'clock, sir," said the man at the tavern,
whom he had charged to wake him—"ten o'clock, sir."
"_What's_ the matter?" "Ten o'clock, sir."
"What do you mean? Ten o'clock at night?" "Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you."
"Oh! I remember. Very well, very well." After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again,
which the man dexterously combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes, he
got up, tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned into the Temple, and, having revived
himself by twice pacing the pavements of King's Bench-walk and Paper-buildings, turned into
the Stryver chambers. The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these
conferences, had gone home, and the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers
on, and a loose bed-gown, and his throat was bare for his greater ease. He had that rather
wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes, which may be observed in all free livers of
his class, from the portrait of Jeffries downward, and which can be traced, under various disguises
of Art, through the portraits of every Drinking Age.
"You are a little late, Memory," said Stryver. "About the usual time; it may be a quarter
of an hour later." They went into a dingy room lined with books
and littered with papers, where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the
hob, and in the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon it,
and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons. "You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney."
"Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day's client; or seeing him dine—it's
all one!" "That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought
to bear upon the identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?"
"I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have been much the
same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck." Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious
paunch. "You and your luck, Sydney! Get to work, get
to work." Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress,
went into an adjoining room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and
a towel or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them out, he
folded them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down at the table, and said,
"Now I am ready!" "Not much boiling down to be done to-night,
Memory," said Mr. Stryver, gaily, as he looked among his papers.
"How much?" "Only two sets of them."
"Give me the worst first." "There they are, Sydney. Fire away!"
The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side of the drinking-table,
while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn table proper, on the other side of it, with
the bottles and glasses ready to his hand. Both resorted to the drinking-table without
stint, but each in a different way; the lion for the most part reclining with his hands
in his waistband, looking at the fire, or occasionally flirting with some lighter document;
the jackal, with knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did
not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass—which often groped about,
for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or three times, the
matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up,
and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such
eccentricities of damp headgear as no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous
by his anxious gravity. At length the jackal had got together a compact
repast for the lion, and proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and
caution, made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal assisted
both. When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his hands in his waistband again,
and lay down to meditate. The jackal then invigorated himself with a bumper for his
throttle, and a fresh application to his head, and applied himself to the collection of a
second meal; this was administered to the lion in the same manner, and was not disposed
of until the clocks struck three in the morning. "And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper
of punch," said Mr. Stryver. The jackal removed the towels from his head,
which had been steaming again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.
"You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses to-day. Every question
told." "I always am sound; am I not?"
"I don't gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to it and smooth it
again." With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again
complied. "The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,"
said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past,
"the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!"
"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then,
I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own."
"And why not?" "God knows. It was my way, I suppose."
He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before him, looking
at the fire. "Carton," said his friend, squaring himself
at him with a bullying air, as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour
was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury
School was to shoulder him into it, "your way is, and always was, a lame way. You summon
no energy and purpose. Look at me." "Oh, botheration!" returned Sydney, with a
lighter and more good-humoured laugh, "don't _you_ be moral!"
"How have I done what I have done?" said Stryver; "how do I do what I do?"
"Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it's not worth your while to apostrophise
me, or the air, about it; what you want to do, you do. You were always in the front rank,
and I was always behind." "I had to get into the front rank; I was not
born there, was I?" "I was not present at the ceremony; but my
opinion is you were," said Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.
"Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury," pursued Carton, "you
have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into mine. Even when we were fellow-students
in the Student-Quarter of Paris, picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs
that we didn't get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always nowhere."
"And whose fault was that?" "Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not
yours. You were always driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless
degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose. It's a gloomy thing, however,
to talk about one's own past, with the day breaking. Turn me in some other direction
before I go." "Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,"
said Stryver, holding up his glass. "Are you turned in a pleasant direction?"
Apparently not, for he became gloomy again. "Pretty witness," he muttered, looking down
into his glass. "I have had enough of witnesses to-day and to-night; who's your pretty witness?"
"The picturesque doctor's daughter, Miss Manette." "_She_ pretty?"
"Is she not?" "No."
"Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!"
"Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a judge of beauty? She
was a golden-haired doll!" "Do you know, Sydney," said Mr. Stryver, looking
at him with sharp eyes, and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: "do you know,
I rather thought, at the time, that you sympathised with the golden-haired doll, and were quick
to see what happened to the golden-haired doll?"
"Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons within a yard or two of
a man's nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass. I pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now
I'll have no more drink; I'll get to bed." When his host followed him out on the staircase
with a candle, to light him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its
grimy windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the dull sky overcast,
the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were
spinning round and round before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far
away, and the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the city.
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across
a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of
honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were
airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits
of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was
gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes
on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities
and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his
own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
End of Book 2, Chapter 5
Chapter VI. Hundreds of People The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were
in a quiet street-corner not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday
when the waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason, and carried it, as
to the public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis Lorry walked along the
sunny streets from Clerkenwell where he lived, on his way to dine with the Doctor. After
several relapses into business-absorption, Mr. Lorry had become the Doctor's friend,
and the quiet street-corner was the sunny part of his life.
On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, early in the afternoon, for
three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine Sundays, he often walked out, before
dinner, with the Doctor and Lucie; secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed
to be with them as the family friend, talking, reading, looking out of window, and generally
getting through the day; thirdly, because he happened to have his own little shrewd
doubts to solve, and knew how the ways of the Doctor's household pointed to that time
as a likely time for solving them. A quainter corner than the corner where the
Doctor lived, was not to be found in London. There was no way through it, and the front
windows of the Doctor's lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that had
a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then, north of the Oxford-road,
and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now
vanished fields. As a consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom,
instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a settlement; and there
was many a good south wall, not far off, on which the peaches ripened in their season.
The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part of the day; but, when
the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow, though not in shadow so remote but that you
could see beyond it into a glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a
wonderful place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets.
There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and there was. The Doctor
occupied two floors of a large stiff house, where several callings purported to be pursued
by day, but whereof little was audible any day, and which was shunned by all of them
at night. In a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane-tree rustled
its green leaves, church-organs claimed to be made, and silver to be chased, and likewise
gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall
of the front hall—as if he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a similar conversion
of all visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a lonely lodger rumoured to live up-stairs,
or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted to have a counting-house below, was ever heard
or seen. Occasionally, a stray workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger
peered about there, or a distant clink was heard across the courtyard, or a thump from
the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions required to prove the rule
that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind the house, and the echoes in the corner before
it, had their own way from Sunday morning unto Saturday night.
Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, and its revival in
the floating whispers of his story, brought him. His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance
and skill in conducting ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request,
and he earned as much as he wanted. These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry's
knowledge, thoughts, and notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the
corner, on the fine Sunday afternoon. "Doctor Manette at home?"
Expected home. "Miss Lucie at home?"
Expected home. "Miss Pross at home?"
Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to anticipate intentions of Miss
Pross, as to admission or denial of the fact. "As I am at home myself," said Mr. Lorry,
"I'll go upstairs." Although the Doctor's daughter had known nothing
of the country of her birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability
to make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most agreeable characteristics.
Simple as the furniture was, it was set off by so many little adornments, of no value
but for their taste and fancy, that its effect was delightful. The disposition of everything
in the rooms, from the largest object to the least; the arrangement of colours, the elegant
variety and contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and
good sense; were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of their originator, that,
as Mr. Lorry stood looking about him, the very chairs and tables seemed to ask him,
with something of that peculiar expression which he knew so well by this time, whether
he approved? There were three rooms on a floor, and, the
doors by which they communicated being put open that the air might pass freely through
them all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful resemblance which he detected
all around him, walked from one to another. The first was the best room, and in it were
Lucie's birds, and flowers, and books, and desk, and work-table, and box of water-colours;
the second was the Doctor's consulting-room, used also as the dining-room; the third, changingly
speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the Doctor's bedroom, and there,
in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker's bench and tray of tools, much as it had stood
on the fifth floor of the dismal house by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine
in Paris. "I wonder," said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his
looking about, "that he keeps that reminder of his sufferings about him!"
"And why wonder at that?" was the abrupt inquiry that made him start.
It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose acquaintance
he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and had since improved.
"I should have thought—" Mr. Lorry began. "Pooh! You'd have thought!" said Miss Pross;
and Mr. Lorry left off. "How do you do?" inquired that lady then—sharply,
and yet as if to express that she bore him no malice.
"I am pretty well, I thank you," answered Mr. Lorry, with meekness; "how are you?"
"Nothing to boast of," said Miss Pross. "Indeed?"
"Ah! indeed!" said Miss Pross. "I am very much put out about my Ladybird."
"Indeed?" "For gracious sake say something else besides
'indeed,' or you'll fidget me to death," said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated from
stature) was shortness. "Really, then?" said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment.
"Really, is bad enough," returned Miss Pross, "but better. Yes, I am very much put out."
"May I ask the cause?" "I don't want dozens of people who are not
at all worthy of Ladybird, to come here looking after her," said Miss Pross.
"_Do_ dozens come for that purpose?" "Hundreds," said Miss Pross.
It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before her time and since)
that whenever her original proposition was questioned, she exaggerated it.
"Dear me!" said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.
"I have lived with the darling—or the darling has lived with me, and paid me for it; which
she certainly should never have done, you may take your affidavit, if I could have afforded
to keep either myself or her for nothing—since she was ten years old. And it's really very
hard," said Miss Pross. Not seeing with precision what was very hard,
Mr. Lorry shook his head; using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak that
would fit anything. "All sorts of people who are not in the least
degree worthy of the pet, are always turning up," said Miss Pross. "When you began it—"
"_I_ began it, Miss Pross?" "Didn't you? Who brought her father to life?"
"Oh! If _that_ was beginning it—" said Mr. Lorry.
"It wasn't ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was hard enough; not that
I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette, except that he is not worthy of such a daughter,
which is no imputation on him, for it was not to be expected that anybody should be,
under any circumstances. But it really is doubly and trebly hard to have crowds and
multitudes of people turning up after him (I could have forgiven him), to take Ladybird's
affections away from me." Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous,
but he also knew her by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those
unselfish creatures—found only among women—who will, for pure love and admiration, bind themselves
willing slaves, to youth when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments
that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon their
own sombre lives. He knew enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better
than the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so free from any mercenary taint,
he had such an exalted respect for it, that in the retributive arrangements made by his
own mind—we all make such arrangements, more or less—he stationed Miss Pross much
nearer to the lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably better got up both by Nature
and Art, who had balances at Tellson's. "There never was, nor will be, but one man
worthy of Ladybird," said Miss Pross; "and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn't
made a mistake in life." Here again: Mr. Lorry's inquiries into Miss
Pross's personal history had established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless
scoundrel who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to speculate with,
and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with no touch of compunction. Miss Pross's
fidelity of belief in Solomon (deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake) was quite
a serious matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in his good opinion of her.
"As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of business," he said,
when they had got back to the drawing-room and had sat down there in friendly relations,
"let me ask you—does the Doctor, in talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemaking
time, yet?" "Never."
"And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?"
"Ah!" returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. "But I don't say he don't refer to it within
himself." "Do you believe that he thinks of it much?"
"I do," said Miss Pross. "Do you imagine—" Mr. Lorry had begun, when
Miss Pross took him up short with: "Never imagine anything. Have no imagination
at all." "I stand corrected; do you suppose—you go
so far as to suppose, sometimes?" "Now and then," said Miss Pross.
"Do you suppose," Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in his bright eye, as it
looked kindly at her, "that Doctor Manette has any theory of his own, preserved through
all those years, relative to the cause of his being so oppressed; perhaps, even to the
name of his oppressor?" "I don't suppose anything about it but what
Ladybird tells me." "And that is—?"
"That she thinks he has." "Now don't be angry at my asking all these
questions; because I am a mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of business."
"Dull?" Miss Pross inquired, with placidity. Rather wishing his modest adjective away,
Mr. Lorry replied, "No, no, no. Surely not. To return to business:—Is it not remarkable
that Doctor Manette, unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are all well assured he
is, should never touch upon that question? I will not say with me, though he had business
relations with me many years ago, and we are now intimate; I will say with the fair daughter
to whom he is so devotedly attached, and who is so devotedly attached to him? Believe me,
Miss Pross, I don't approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of zealous
interest." "Well! To the best of my understanding, and
bad's the best, you'll tell me," said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology,
"he is afraid of the whole subject." "Afraid?"
"It's plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It's a dreadful remembrance. Besides
that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he
recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn't
make the subject pleasant, I should think." It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry
had looked for. "True," said he, "and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my
mind, Miss Pross, whether it is good for Doctor Manette to have that suppression always shut
up within him. Indeed, it is this doubt and the uneasiness it sometimes causes me that
has led me to our present confidence." "Can't be helped," said Miss Pross, shaking
her head. "Touch that string, and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone.
In short, must leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets up in the dead of
the night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking up and down, walking up and
down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to know then that his mind is walking up and
down, walking up and down, in his old prison. She hurries to him, and they go on together,
walking up and down, walking up and down, until he is composed. But he never says a
word of the true reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it best not to hint
at it to him. In silence they go walking up and down together, walking up and down together,
till her love and company have brought him to himself."
Notwithstanding Miss Pross's denial of her own imagination, there was a perception of
the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea, in her repetition of the phrase,
walking up and down, which testified to her possessing such a thing.
The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it had begun to echo so
resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it seemed as though the very mention
of that weary pacing to and fro had set it going.
"Here they are!" said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference; "and now we shall
have hundreds of people pretty soon!" It was such a curious corner in its acoustical
properties, such a peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window,
looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied they would never
approach. Not only would the echoes die away, as though the steps had gone; but, echoes
of other steps that never came would be heard in their stead, and would die away for good
when they seemed close at hand. However, father and daughter did at last appear, and Miss
Pross was ready at the street door to receive them.
Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, taking off her darling's
bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touching it up with the ends of her handkerchief, and
blowing the dust off it, and folding her mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing her rich
hair with as much pride as she could possibly have taken in her own hair if she had been
the vainest and handsomest of women. Her darling was a pleasant sight too, embracing her and
thanking her, and protesting against her taking so much trouble for her—which last she only
dared to do playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt, would have retired to her own chamber
and cried. The Doctor was a pleasant sight too, looking on at them, and telling Miss
Pross how she spoilt Lucie, in accents and with eyes that had as much spoiling in them
as Miss Pross had, and would have had more if it were possible. Mr. Lorry was a pleasant
sight too, beaming at all this in his little wig, and thanking his bachelor stars for having
lighted him in his declining years to a Home. But, no Hundreds of people came to see the
sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain for the fulfilment of Miss Pross's prediction.
Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of the little household,
Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and always acquitted herself marvellously.
Her dinners, of a very modest quality, were so well cooked and so well served, and so
neat in their contrivances, half English and half French, that nothing could be better.
Miss Pross's friendship being of the thoroughly practical kind, she had ravaged Soho and the
adjacent provinces, in search of impoverished French, who, tempted by shillings and half-crowns,
would impart culinary mysteries to her. From these decayed sons and daughters of Gaul,
she had acquired such wonderful arts, that the woman and girl who formed the staff of
domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress, or Cinderella's Godmother: who would send
out for a fowl, a rabbit, a vegetable or two from the garden, and change them into anything
she pleased. On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor's
table, but on other days persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either in the
lower regions, or in her own room on the second floor—a blue chamber, to which no one but
her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this occasion, Miss Pross, responding to Ladybird's
pleasant face and pleasant efforts to please her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was
very pleasant, too. It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner,
Lucie proposed that the wine should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should
sit there in the air. As everything turned upon her, and revolved about her, they went
out under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down for the special benefit of Mr.
Lorry. She had installed herself, some time before, as Mr. Lorry's cup-bearer; and while
they sat under the plane-tree, talking, she kept his glass replenished. Mysterious backs
and ends of houses peeped at them as they talked, and the plane-tree whispered to them
in its own way above their heads. Still, the Hundreds of people did not present
themselves. Mr. Darnay presented himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but
he was only One. Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so
did Lucie. But, Miss Pross suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head and
body, and retired into the house. She was not unfrequently the victim of this disorder,
and she called it, in familiar conversation, "a fit of the jerks."
The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young. The resemblance between
him and Lucie was very strong at such times, and as they sat side by side, she leaning
on his shoulder, and he resting his arm on the back of her chair, it was very agreeable
to trace the likeness. He had been talking all day, on many subjects,
and with unusual vivacity. "Pray, Doctor Manette," said Mr. Darnay, as they sat under the plane-tree—and
he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic in hand, which happened to be the old buildings
of London—"have you seen much of the Tower?" "Lucie and I have been there; but only casually.
We have seen enough of it, to know that it teems with interest; little more."
"_I_ have been there, as you remember," said Darnay, with a smile, though reddening a little
angrily, "in another character, and not in a character that gives facilities for seeing
much of it. They told me a curious thing when I was there."
"What was that?" Lucie asked. "In making some alterations, the workmen came
upon an old dungeon, which had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone
of its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which had been carved by prisoners—dates,
names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner stone in an angle of the wall, one prisoner,
who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They
were done with some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand. At first,
they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more carefully examined, the last letter was
found to be G. There was no record or legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many
fruitless guesses were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested
that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The floor was examined
very carefully under the inscription, and, in the earth beneath a stone, or tile, or
some fragment of paving, were found the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small
leathern case or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he had
written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler."
"My father," exclaimed Lucie, "you are ill!" He had suddenly started up, with his hand
to his head. His manner and his look quite terrified them all.
"No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and they made me start. We
had better go in." He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain
was really falling in large drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops
on it. But, he said not a single word in reference to the discovery that had been told of, and,
as they went into the house, the business eye of Mr. Lorry either detected, or fancied
it detected, on his face, as it turned towards Charles Darnay, the same singular look that
had been upon it when it turned towards him in the passages of the Court House.
He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had doubts of his business
eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall was not more steady than he was, when he stopped
under it to remark to them that he was not yet proof against slight surprises (if he
ever would be), and that the rain had startled him.
Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks upon her, and yet
no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had lounged in, but he made only Two.
The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and windows open, they
were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was done with, they all moved to one of the
windows, and looked out into the heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside
her; Carton leaned against a window. The curtains were long and white, and some of the thunder-gusts
that whirled into the corner, caught them up to the ceiling, and waved them like spectral
wings. "The rain-drops are still falling, large,
heavy, and few," said Doctor Manette. "It comes slowly."
"It comes surely," said Carton. They spoke low, as people watching and waiting
mostly do; as people in a dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.
There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to get shelter before
the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes resounded with the echoes of footsteps
coming and going, yet not a footstep was there. "A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!"
said Darnay, when they had listened for a while.
"Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?" asked Lucie. "Sometimes, I have sat here of an evening,
until I have fancied—but even the shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night,
when all is so black and solemn—" "Let us shudder too. We may know what it is."
"It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we originate them, I think;
they are not to be communicated. I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until
I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by-and-bye
into our lives." "There is a great crowd coming one day into
our lives, if that be so," Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more rapid. The corner
echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some,
as it seemed, in the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether;
all in the distant streets, and not one within sight.
"Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or are we to divide
them among us?" "I don't know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was
a foolish fancy, but you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone,
and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come into my life,
and my father's." "I take them into mine!" said Carton. "_I_
ask no questions and make no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us,
Miss Manette, and I see them—by the Lightning." He added the last words, after there had been
a vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.
"And I hear them!" he added again, after a peal of thunder. "Here they come, fast, fierce,
and furious!" It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified,
and it stopped him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder
and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment's interval in crash,
and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at midnight.
The great bell of Saint Paul's was striking one in the cleared air, when Mr. Lorry, escorted
by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a lantern, set forth on his return-passage to Clerkenwell.
There were solitary patches of road on the way between Soho and Clerkenwell, and Mr.
Lorry, mindful of foot-pads, always retained Jerry for this service: though it was usually
performed a good two hours earlier. "What a night it has been! Almost a night,
Jerry," said Mr. Lorry, "to bring the dead out of their graves."
"I never see the night myself, master—nor yet I don't expect to—what would do that,"
answered Jerry. "Good night, Mr. Carton," said the man of
business. "Good night, Mr. Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!"
Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar, bearing down upon
them, too.
End of Book 2, Chapter 6
Chapter VII. Monseigneur in Town Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power
at the Court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was
in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers
in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur
could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed
to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's chocolate could not so much
as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them
unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and
chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips.
One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and
frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented
the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It
was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate
and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon
his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have
died of two. Monseigneur had been out at a little supper
last night, where the Comedy and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur
was out at a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so impressible
was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more influence with him in the
tiresome articles of state affairs and state secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy
circumstance for France, as the like always is for all countries similarly favoured!—always
was for England (by way of example), in the regretted days of the merry Stuart who sold
it. Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general
public business, which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go his way—tend
to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the
other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of his order (altered
from the original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: "The earth and the fulness
thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur." Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar
embarrassments crept into his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both
classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances public,
because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and must consequently let
them out to somebody who could; as to finances private, because Farmer-Generals were rich,
and Monseigneur, after generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time to ward off the impending
veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very
rich Farmer-General, poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane
with a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer rooms,
much prostrated before by mankind—always excepting superior mankind of the blood of
Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him with the loftiest contempt.
A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his stables, twenty-four male
domestics sat in his halls, six body-women waited on his wife. As one who pretended to
do nothing but plunder and forage where he could, the Farmer-General—howsoever his
matrimonial relations conduced to social morality—was at least the greatest reality among the personages
who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.
For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with every device of
decoration that the taste and skill of the time could achieve, were, in truth, not a
sound business; considered with any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps
elsewhere (and not so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost
equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would have been an exceedingly
uncomfortable business—if that could have been anybody's business, at the house of Monseigneur.
Military officers destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil
officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly,
with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for their several
callings, all lying horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely
of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which
anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score. People not
immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally unconnected with anything
that was real, or with lives passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end,
were no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary
disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly patients in the ante-chambers
of Monseigneur. Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils
with which the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to root
out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of,
at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world
with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated
by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable
time—and has been since—to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of exhaustion, at the hotel
of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various notabilities left behind them in the fine
world of Paris, that the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur—forming a goodly
half of the polite company—would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that
sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed,
except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world—which does not
go far towards the realisation of the name of mother—there was no such thing known
to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming
grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur.
In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some
vague misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way
of setting them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic sect of
Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves whether they should foam,
rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the spot—thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post
to the Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other three
who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a jargon about "the Centre of
Truth:" holding that Man had got out of the Centre of Truth—which did not need much
demonstration—but had not got out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept
from flying out of the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre,
by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much discoursing with spirits
went on—and it did a world of good which never became manifest.
But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly
dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there
would have been eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such
delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant swords to look at,
and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever
and ever. The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that
chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells; and
what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there
was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring hunger far away.
Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all things in their places.
Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was never to leave off. From the Palace of
the Tuileries, through Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals
of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball descended to the Common Executioner:
who, in pursuance of the charm, was required to officiate "frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced
coat, pumps, and white silk stockings." At the gallows and the wheel—the axe was a
rarity—Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his brother Professors of the provinces,
Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among
the company at Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year
of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled hangman, powdered,
gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would see the very stars out!
Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his chocolate, caused the
doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown open, and issued forth. Then, what submission,
what cringing and fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down
in body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven—which may have been one
among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never troubled it.
Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one happy slave and a
wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably passed through his rooms to the remote region
of the Circumference of Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due
course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate sprites, and was
seen no more. The show being over, the flutter in the air
became quite a little storm, and the precious little bells went ringing downstairs. There
was soon but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm and his
snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his way out.
"I devote you," said this person, stopping at the last door on his way, and turning in
the direction of the sanctuary, "to the Devil!" With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers
as if he had shaken the dust from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.
He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and with a face like a
fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every feature in it clearly defined; one set
expression on it. The nose, beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the
top of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little change that the
face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing colour sometimes, and they would
be occasionally dilated and contracted by something like a faint pulsation; then, they
gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with attention,
its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the line of the mouth, and the
lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect
of the face made, it was a handsome face, and a remarkable one.
Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and drove away. Not
many people had talked with him at the reception; he had stood in a little space apart, and
Monseigneur might have been warmer in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances,
rather agreeable to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and often
barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were charging an enemy, and
the furious recklessness of the man brought no check into the face, or to the lips, of
the master. The complaint had sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and
dumb age, that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician custom of hard
driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a barbarous manner. But, few cared enough
for that to think of it a second time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common
wretches were left to get out of their difficulties as they could.
With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of consideration not easy to be
understood in these days, the carriage dashed through streets and swept round corners, with
women screaming before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of its
way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its wheels came to a
sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a number of voices, and the horses
reared and plunged. But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage
probably would not have stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their
wounded behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry, and there were
twenty hands at the horses' bridles. "What has gone wrong?" said Monsieur, calmly
looking out. A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle
from among the feet of the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and
was down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.
"Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!" said a ragged and submissive man, "it is a child."
"Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?"
"Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis—it is a pity—yes."
The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was, into a space
some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly got up from the ground, and came
running at the carriage, Monsieur the Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.
"Killed!" shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their length above
his head, and staring at him. "Dead!" The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur
the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness
and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the people say anything;
after the first cry, they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of the submissive
man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran
his eyes over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.
He took out his purse. "It is extraordinary to me," said he, "that
you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you
is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give
him that." He threw out a gold coin for the valet to
pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as
it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, "Dead!"
He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing
him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying, and pointing
to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently
about it. They were as silent, however, as the men.
"I know all, I know all," said the last comer. "Be a brave man, my Gaspard! It is better
for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died in a moment without pain.
Could it have lived an hour as happily?" "You are a philosopher, you there," said the
Marquis, smiling. "How do they call you?" "They call me Defarge."
"Of what trade?" "Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine."
"Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine," said the Marquis, throwing him another gold
coin, "and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they right?"
Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis leaned
back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally
broke some common thing, and had paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his
ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.
"Hold!" said Monsieur the Marquis. "Hold the horses! Who threw that?"
He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a moment before; but the
wretched father was grovelling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure
that stood beside him was the figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.
"You dogs!" said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to
the spots on his nose: "I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate
you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand
were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels."
So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man
could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an
eye was raised. Among the men, not one. But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily,
and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous
eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again,
and gave the word "Go on!" He was driven on, and other carriages came
whirling by in quick succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the
Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball
in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats had crept out of their holes
to look on, and they remained looking on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between
them and the spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which
they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and bidden himself away with
it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain,
sat there watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball—when the
one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of
Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much
life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man,
the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted
up at supper, all things ran their course.
End of Book 2, Chapter 7
Chapter VIII. Monseigneur in the Country A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright
in it, but not abundant. Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor
peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature,
as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance
of vegetating unwillingly—a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.
Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been lighter), conducted
by four post-horses and two postilions, *** up a steep hill. A blush on the countenance
of Monsieur the Marquis was no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within;
it was occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control—the setting sun.
The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it gained the hill-top,
that its occupant was steeped in crimson. "It will die out," said Monsieur the Marquis,
glancing at his hands, "directly." In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped
at the moment. When the heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid
down hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed quickly; the
sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow left when the drag was taken off.
But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village at the bottom of
the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the
chase, and a crag with a fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening
objects as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was coming
near home. The village had its one poor street, with
its poor brewery, poor tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses,
poor fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All its people
were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors, shredding spare onions and the
like for supper, while many were at the fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such
small yieldings of the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them
poor, were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax for the lord,
tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be paid there, according to solemn
inscription in the little village, until the wonder was, that there was any village left
unswallowed. Few children were to be seen, and no dogs.
As to the men and women, their choice on earth was stated in the prospect—Life on the lowest
terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill; or captivity and Death
in the dominant prison on the crag. Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the
cracking of his postilions' whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening
air, as if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his travelling
carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the fountain, and the peasants suspended
their operations to look at him. He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing
it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the meagreness
of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the truth through the best
part of a hundred years. Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the
submissive faces that drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before
Monseigneur of the Court—only the difference was, that these faces drooped merely to suffer
and not to propitiate—when a grizzled mender of the roads joined the group.
"Bring me hither that fellow!" said the Marquis to the courier.
The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round to look and listen,
in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain. "I passed you on the road?"
"Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road."
"Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?"
"Monseigneur, it is true." "What did you look at, so fixedly?"
"Monseigneur, I looked at the man." He stooped a little, and with his tattered
blue cap pointed under the carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.
"What man, pig? And why look there?" "Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain
of the shoe—the drag." "Who?" demanded the traveller.
"Monseigneur, the man." "May the Devil carry away these idiots! How
do you call the man? You know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?"
"Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of all the days
of my life, I never saw him." "Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?"
"With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur. His head hanging
over—like this!" He turned himself sideways to the carriage,
and leaned back, with his face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered
himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.
"What was he like?" "Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller.
All covered with dust, white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!"
The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all eyes, without
comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe
whether he had any spectre on his conscience. "Truly, you did well," said the Marquis, felicitously
sensible that such vermin were not to ruffle him, "to see a thief accompanying my carriage,
and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur Gabelle!"
Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary united; he had come
out with great obsequiousness to assist at this examination, and had held the examined
by the drapery of his arm in an official manner. "Bah! Go aside!" said Monsieur Gabelle.
"Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village to-night, and be sure
that his business is honest, Gabelle." "Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself
to your orders." "Did he run away, fellow?—where is that
Accursed?" The accursed was already under the carriage
with some half-dozen particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some half-dozen
other particular friends promptly hauled him out, and presented him breathless to Monsieur
the Marquis. "Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped
for the drag?" "Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over
the hill-side, head first, as a person plunges into the river."
"See to it, Gabelle. Go on!" The half-dozen who were peering at the chain
were still among the wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky
to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or they might not have
been so fortunate. The burst with which the carriage started
out of the village and up the rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill.
Gradually, it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet
scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about
them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the
valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.
At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground, with a Cross and a
new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor figure in wood, done by some inexperienced
rustic carver, but he had studied the figure from the life—his own life, maybe—for
it was dreadfully spare and thin. To this distressful emblem of a great distress
that had long been growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She
turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented herself at
the carriage-door. "It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition."
With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face, Monseigneur looked
out. "How, then! What is it? Always petitions!"
"Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester."
"What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He cannot pay something?"
"He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead." "Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?"
"Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor grass."
"Well?" "Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps
of poor grass?" "Again, well?"
She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate grief; by turns
she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together with wild energy, and laid one of
them on the carriage-door—tenderly, caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could
be expected to feel the appealing touch. "Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my
petition! My husband died of want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want."
"Again, well? Can I feed them?" "Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don't
ask it. My petition is, that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be placed
over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly forgotten, it will
never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I shall be laid under some other heap
of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want.
Monseigneur! Monseigneur!" The valet had put her away from the door,
the carriage had broken into a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she
was left far behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly diminishing
the league or two of distance that remained between him and his chateau.
The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as the rain falls,
impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group at the fountain not far away; to whom
the mender of roads, with the aid of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged
upon his man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they could bear
no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements; which
lights, as the casements darkened, and more stars came out, seemed to have shot up into
the sky instead of having been extinguished. The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and
of many over-hanging trees, was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was
exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door of
his chateau was opened to him. "Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived
from England?" "Monseigneur, not yet."
End of Book 2, Chapter 8
Chapter IX. The Gorgon's Head It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau
of Monsieur the Marquis, with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps
of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony business altogether,
with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of men,
and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it, when
it was finished, two centuries ago. Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur
the Marquis, flambeau preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the
darkness to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile of stable
building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the flambeau carried up the
steps, and the other flambeau held at the great door, burnt as if they were in a close
room of state, instead of being in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl's voice
there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those
dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh,
and hold their breath again. The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur
the Marquis crossed a hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the
chase; grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a peasant,
gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord was angry.
Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night, Monsieur the
Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up the staircase to a door in
a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him to his own private apartment of three rooms:
his bed-chamber and two others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs
upon the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries befitting the
state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country. The fashion of the last Louis but
one, of the line that was never to break—the fourteenth Louis—was conspicuous in their
rich furniture; but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old
pages in the history of France. A supper-table was laid for two, in the third
of the rooms; a round room, in one of the chateau's four extinguisher-topped towers.
A small lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds closed, so
that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of black, alternating with
their broad lines of stone colour. "My nephew," said the Marquis, glancing at
the supper preparation; "they said he was not arrived."
Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.
"Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the table as it is. I
shall be ready in a quarter of an hour." In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready,
and sat down alone to his sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window,
and he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when he
put it down. "What is that?" he calmly asked, looking with
attention at the horizontal lines of black and stone colour.
"Monseigneur? That?" "Outside the blinds. Open the blinds."
It was done. "Well?"
"Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are here."
The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into the vacant darkness,
and stood with that blank behind him, looking round for instructions.
"Good," said the imperturbable master. "Close them again."
That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was half way through it,
when he again stopped with his glass in his hand, hearing the sound of wheels. It came
on briskly, and came up to the front of the chateau.
"Ask who is arrived." It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been
some few leagues behind Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance
rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road. He had heard
of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.
He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and there, and that
he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came. He had been known in England as Charles
Darnay. Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner,
but they did not shake hands. "You left Paris yesterday, sir?" he said to
Monseigneur, as he took his seat at table. "Yesterday. And you?"
"I come direct." "From London?"
"Yes." "You have been a long time coming," said the
Marquis, with a smile. "On the contrary; I come direct."
"Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time intending the journey."
"I have been detained by"—the nephew stopped a moment in his answer—"various business."
"Without doubt," said the polished uncle. So long as a servant was present, no other
words passed between them. When coffee had been served and they were alone together,
the nephew, looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a fine
mask, opened a conversation. "I have come back, sir, as you anticipate,
pursuing the object that took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril;
but it is a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have sustained
me." "Not to death," said the uncle; "it is not
necessary to say, to death." "I doubt, sir," returned the nephew, "whether,
if it had carried me to the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there."
The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight lines in the cruel face,
looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a graceful gesture of protest, which was so
clearly a slight form of good breeding that it was not reassuring.
"Indeed, sir," pursued the nephew, "for anything I know, you may have expressly worked to give
a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me."
"No, no, no," said the uncle, pleasantly. "But, however that may be," resumed the nephew,
glancing at him with deep distrust, "I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,
and would know no scruple as to means." "My friend, I told you so," said the uncle,
with a fine pulsation in the two marks. "Do me the favour to recall that I told you so,
long ago." "I recall it."
"Thank you," said the Marquis—very sweetly indeed.
His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical instrument.
"In effect, sir," pursued the nephew, "I believe it to be at once your bad fortune, and my
good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in France here."
"I do not quite understand," returned the uncle, sipping his coffee. "Dare I ask you
to explain?" "I believe that if you were not in disgrace
with the Court, and had not been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter de
cachet would have sent me to some fortress indefinitely."
"It is possible," said the uncle, with great calmness. "For the honour of the family, I
could even resolve to incommode you to that extent. Pray excuse me!"
"I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before yesterday was, as usual,
a cold one," observed the nephew. "I would not say happily, my friend," returned
the uncle, with refined politeness; "I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence your destiny
to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself. But it is useless to discuss
the question. I am, as you say, at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these
gentle aids to the power and honour of families, these slight favours that might so incommode
you, are only to be obtained now by interest and importunity. They are sought by so many,
and they are granted (comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all
such things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right of life
and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such dogs have been taken
out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom), one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded
on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter—_his_ daughter?
We have lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the assertion of
our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as to say would, but might) cause
us real inconvenience. All very bad, very bad!"
The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head; as elegantly despondent
as he could becomingly be of a country still containing himself, that great means of regeneration.
"We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern time also,"
said the nephew, gloomily, "that I believe our name to be more detested than any name
in France." "Let us hope so," said the uncle. "Detestation
of the high is the involuntary homage of the low."
"There is not," pursued the nephew, in his former tone, "a face I can look at, in all
this country round about us, which looks at me with any deference on it but the dark deference
of fear and slavery." "A compliment," said the Marquis, "to the
grandeur of the family, merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.
Hah!" And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly crossed his legs.
But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes thoughtfully and
dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at him sideways with a stronger concentration
of keenness, closeness, and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer's assumption
of indifference. "Repression is the only lasting philosophy.
The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep
the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts out the
sky." That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed.
If a picture of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like
it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night,
he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked
rains. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in
a new way—to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired,
out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets. "Meanwhile," said the Marquis, "I will preserve
the honour and repose of the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall
we terminate our conference for the night?" "A moment more."
"An hour, if you please." "Sir," said the nephew, "we have done wrong,
and are reaping the fruits of wrong." "_We_ have done wrong?" repeated the Marquis,
with an inquiring smile, and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.
"Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account to both of us,
in such different ways. Even in my father's time, we did a world of wrong, injuring every
human creature who came between us and our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak
of my father's time, when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin-brother, joint
inheritor, and next successor, from himself?" "Death has done that!" said the Marquis.
"And has left me," answered the nephew, "bound to a system that is frightful to me, responsible
for it, but powerless in it; seeking to execute the last request of my dear mother's lips,
and obey the last look of my dear mother's eyes, which implored me to have mercy and
to redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain."
"Seeking them from me, my nephew," said the Marquis, touching him on the breast with his
forefinger—they were now standing by the hearth—"you will for ever seek them in vain,
be assured." Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness
of his face, was cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly
at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the breast, as
though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse,
he ran him through the body, and said, "My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system
under which I have lived." When he had said it, he took a culminating
pinch of snuff, and put his box in his pocket. "Better to be a rational creature," he added
then, after ringing a small bell on the table, "and accept your natural destiny. But you
are lost, Monsieur Charles, I see." "This property and France are lost to me,"
said the nephew, sadly; "I renounce them." "Are they both yours to renounce? France may
be, but is the property? It is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?"
"I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed to me from you,
to-morrow—" "Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable."
"—or twenty years hence—" "You do me too much honour," said the Marquis;
"still, I prefer that supposition." "—I would abandon it, and live otherwise
and elsewhere. It is little to relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and
ruin!" "Hah!" said the Marquis, glancing round the
luxurious room. "To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen
in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,
mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering."
"Hah!" said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.
"If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better qualified to free it
slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the weight that drags it down, so that the
miserable people who cannot leave it and who have been long wrung to the last point of
endurance, may, in another generation, suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse
on it, and on all this land." "And you?" said the uncle. "Forgive my curiosity;
do you, under your new philosophy, graciously intend to live?"
"I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at their backs, may have
to do some day—work." "In England, for example?"
"Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The family name can suffer
from me in no other, for I bear it in no other." The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining
bed-chamber to be lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The Marquis
looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his valet.
"England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have prospered there,"
he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew with a smile.
"I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may be indebted to
you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge." "They say, those boastful English, that it
is the Refuge of many. You know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?"
"Yes." "With a daughter?"
"Yes." "Yes," said the Marquis. "You are fatigued.
Good night!" As he bent his head in his most courtly manner,
there was a secrecy in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,
which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same time, the thin straight
lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin straight lips, and the markings in the
nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic.
"Yes," repeated the Marquis. "A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So commences the new philosophy!
You are fatigued. Good night!" It would have been of as much avail to interrogate
any stone face outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew looked at him,
in vain, in passing on to the door. "Good night!" said the uncle. "I look to the
pleasure of seeing you again in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his
chamber there!—And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will," he added to himself,
before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his valet to his own bedroom.
The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his loose chamber-robe,
to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still night. Rustling about the room,
his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:—looked
like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose periodical change
into tiger form was either just going off, or just coming on.
He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the scraps of the
day's journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow toil up the hill at sunset,
the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the prison on the crag, the little village in
the hollow, the peasants at the fountain, and the mender of roads with his blue cap
pointing out the chain under the carriage. That fountain suggested the Paris fountain,
the little bundle lying on the step, the women bending over it, and the tall man with his
arms up, crying, "Dead!" "I am cool now," said Monsieur the Marquis,
"and may go to bed." So, leaving only one light burning on the
large hearth, he let his thin gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break
its silence with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.
The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three heavy
hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs
barked, and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally
assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly
ever to say what is set down for them. For three heavy hours, the stone faces of
the chateau, lion and human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the
landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads. The
burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable
from one another; the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could
be seen of it. In the village, taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps,
of banquets, as the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and
the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed.
The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain at the chateau
dropped unseen and unheard—both melting away, like the minutes that were falling from
the spring of Time—through three dark hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly
in the light, and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.
Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still trees, and poured
its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water of the chateau fountain seemed to turn
to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and,
on the weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur the Marquis,
one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might. At this, the nearest stone
face seemed to stare amazed, and, with open mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.
Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement windows opened, crazy
doors were unbarred, and people came forth shivering—chilled, as yet, by the new sweet
air. Then began the rarely lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some,
to the fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men and
women there, to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows out, to such pasture
as could be found by the roadside. In the church and at the Cross, a kneeling figure
or two; attendant on the latter prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the
weeds at its foot. The chateau awoke later, as became its quality,
but awoke gradually and surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase
had been reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine; now, doors
and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked round over their shoulders
at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated
windows, dogs pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.
All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of morning.
Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the chateau, nor the running up and down
the stairs; nor the hurried figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here
and there and everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?
What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already at work on the hill-top
beyond the village, with his day's dinner (not much to carry) lying in a bundle that
it was worth no crow's while to peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying
some grains of it to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether
or no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life, down the hill,
knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the fountain.
All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about in their depressed
manner, and whispering low, but showing no other emotions than grim curiosity and surprise.
The led cows, hastily brought in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking
stupidly on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their trouble,
which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of the people of the chateau,
and some of those of the posting-house, and all the taxing authorities, were armed more
or less, and were crowded on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way,
that was highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated into the
midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting himself in the breast with
his blue cap. What did all this portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur
Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden
though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora?
It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.
The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added the one stone
face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited through about two hundred years.
It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine mask, suddenly
startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached
to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:
"Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques."
End of Book 2, Chapter 9
Chapter X. Two Promises More months, to the number of twelve, had
come and gone, and Mr. Charles Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher
of the French language who was conversant with French literature. In this age, he would
have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He read with young men who could
find any leisure and interest for the study of a living tongue spoken all over the world,
and he cultivated a taste for its stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them,
besides, in sound English, and render them into sound English. Such masters were not
at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were to be, were not
yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had dropped out of Tellson's ledgers, to turn
cooks and carpenters. As a tutor, whose attainments made the student's way unusually pleasant
and profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to his work besides
mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay soon became known and encouraged. He was well
acquainted, more-over, with the circumstances of his country, and those were of ever-growing
interest. So, with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.
In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on beds of
roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would not have prospered. He had expected
labour, and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.
A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he read with undergraduates
as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a contraband trade in European languages,
instead of conveying Greek and Latin through the Custom-house. The rest of his time he
passed in London. Now, from the days when it was always summer
in Eden, to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has
invariably gone one way—Charles Darnay's way—the way of the love of a woman.
He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never heard a sound so
sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice; he had never seen a face so tenderly
beautiful, as hers when it was confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that
had been dug for him. But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject; the assassination
at the deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long, long, dusty roads—the
solid stone chateau which had itself become the mere mist of a dream—had been done a
year, and he had never yet, by so much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the
state of his heart. That he had his reasons for this, he knew
full well. It was again a summer day when, lately arrived in London from his college
occupation, he turned into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity of
opening his mind to Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer day, and he knew Lucie
to be out with Miss Pross. He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair
at a window. The energy which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and
aggravated their sharpness, had been gradually restored to him. He was now a very energetic
man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength of resolution, and vigour of action.
In his recovered energy he was sometimes a little fitful and sudden, as he had at first
been in the exercise of his other recovered faculties; but, this had never been frequently
observable, and had grown more and more rare. He studied much, slept little, sustained a
great deal of fatigue with ease, and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay,
at sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.
"Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your return these three
or four days past. Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton were both here yesterday, and both
made you out to be more than due." "I am obliged to them for their interest in
the matter," he answered, a little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor.
"Miss Manette—" "Is well," said the Doctor, as he stopped
short, "and your return will delight us all. She has gone out on some household matters,
but will soon be home." "Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home.
I took the opportunity of her being from home, to beg to speak to you."
There was a blank silence. "Yes?" said the Doctor, with evident constraint.
"Bring your chair here, and speak on." He complied as to the chair, but appeared
to find the speaking on less easy. "I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette,
of being so intimate here," so he at length began, "for some year and a half, that I hope
the topic on which I am about to touch may not—"
He was stayed by the Doctor's putting out his hand to stop him. When he had kept it
so a little while, he said, drawing it back: "Is Lucie the topic?"
"She is." "It is hard for me to speak of her at any
time. It is very hard for me to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay."
"It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor Manette!" he
said deferentially. There was another blank silence before her
father rejoined: "I believe it. I do you justice; I believe
it." His constraint was so manifest, and it was
so manifest, too, that it originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that
Charles Darnay hesitated. "Shall I go on, sir?"
Another blank. "Yes, go on."
"You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly I say it, how earnestly
I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and the hopes and fears and anxieties with
which it has long been laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly,
disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her. You have
loved yourself; let your old love speak for me!"
The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the ground. At the last
words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly, and cried:
"Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!"
His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles Darnay's ears long
after he had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had extended, and it seemed to be
an appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter so received it, and remained silent.
"I ask your pardon," said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some moments. "I do not
doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it."
He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or raise his eyes. His chin
dropped upon his hand, and his white hair overshadowed his face:
"Have you spoken to Lucie?" "No."
"Nor written?" "Never."
"It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is to be referred to
your consideration for her father. Her father thanks you."
He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.
"I know," said Darnay, respectfully, "how can I fail to know, Doctor Manette, I who
have seen you together from day to day, that between you and Miss Manette there is an affection
so unusual, so touching, so belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured,
that it can have few parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and child. I know,
Doctor Manette—how can I fail to know—that, mingled with the affection and duty of a daughter
who has become a woman, there is, in her heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of
infancy itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted to
you with all the constancy and fervour of her present years and character, united to
the trustfulness and attachment of the early days in which you were lost to her. I know
perfectly well that if you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you
could hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred character than that in which
you are always with her. I know that when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby,
girl, and woman, all in one, are round your neck. I know that in loving you she sees and
loves her mother at her own age, sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted,
loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I have known
this, night and day, since I have known you in your home."
Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a little quickened;
but he repressed all other signs of agitation. "Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this,
always seeing her and you with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne,
as long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even now feel,
that to bring my love—even mine—between you, is to touch your history with something
not quite so good as itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness that I love her!"
"I believe it," answered her father, mournfully. "I have thought so before now. I believe it."
"But, do not believe," said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice struck with a reproachful
sound, "that if my fortune were so cast as that, being one day so happy as to make her
my wife, I must at any time put any separation between her and you, I could or would breathe
a word of what I now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I should know it to
be a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at a remote distance of years, harboured
in my thoughts, and hidden in my heart—if it ever had been there—if it ever could
be there—I could not now touch this honoured hand."
He laid his own upon it as he spoke. "No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary
exile from France; like you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries;
like you, striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting in a happier
future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your life and home, and being faithful
to you to the death. Not to divide with Lucie her privilege as your child, companion, and
friend; but to come in aid of it, and bind her closer to you, if such a thing can be."
His touch still lingered on her father's hand. Answering the touch for a moment, but not
coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of his chair, and looked up for the first
time since the beginning of the conference. A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle
with that occasional look which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.
"You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank you with all my heart,
and will open all my heart—or nearly so. Have you any reason to believe that Lucie
loves you?" "None. As yet, none."
"Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once ascertain that, with
my knowledge?" "Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness
to do it for weeks; I might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow."
"Do you seek any guidance from me?" "I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible
that you might have it in your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some."
"Do you seek any promise from me?" "I do seek that."
"What is it?" "I well understand that, without you, I could
have no hope. I well understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in
her innocent heart—do not think I have the presumption to assume so much—I could retain
no place in it against her love for her father." "If that be so, do you see what, on the other
hand, is involved in it?" "I understand equally well, that a word from
her father in any suitor's favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason,
Doctor Manette," said Darnay, modestly but firmly, "I would not ask that word, to save
my life." "I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries
arise out of close love, as well as out of wide division; in the former case, they are
subtle and delicate, and difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one respect,
such a mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her heart."
"May I ask, sir, if you think she is—" As he hesitated, her father supplied the rest.
"Is sought by any other suitor?" "It is what I meant to say."
Her father considered a little before he answered: "You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself.
Mr. Stryver is here too, occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these."
"Or both," said Darnay. "I had not thought of both; I should not think
either, likely. You want a promise from me. Tell me what it is."
"It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own part, such
a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will bear testimony to what I have
said, and to your belief in it. I hope you may be able to think so well of me, as to
urge no influence against me. I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is what I ask.
The condition on which I ask it, and which you have an undoubted right to require, I
will observe immediately." "I give the promise," said the Doctor, "without
any condition. I believe your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated
it. I believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties between me and
my other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me that you are essential to her
perfect happiness, I will give her to you. If there were—Charles Darnay, if there were—"
The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as the Doctor spoke:
"—any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or old, against the
man she really loved—the direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head—they should
all be obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to
me than wrong, more to me—Well! This is idle talk."
So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange his fixed look when
he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own hand turn cold in the hand that slowly
released and dropped it. "You said something to me," said Doctor Manette,
breaking into a smile. "What was it you said to me?"
He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a condition. Relieved as
his mind reverted to that, he answered: "Your confidence in me ought to be returned
with full confidence on my part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my
mother's, is not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and
why I am in England." "Stop!" said the Doctor of Beauvais.
"I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no secret from you."
"Stop!" For an instant, the Doctor even had his two
hands at his ears; for another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay's lips.
"Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie should love
you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you promise?"
"Willingly. "Give me your hand. She will be home directly,
and it is better she should not see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!"
It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and darker when Lucie
came home; she hurried into the room alone—for Miss Pross had gone straight up-stairs—and
was surprised to find his reading-chair empty. "My father!" she called to him. "Father dear!"
Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his bedroom. Passing
lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at his door and came running back
frightened, crying to herself, with her blood all chilled, "What shall I do! What shall
I do!" Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried
back, and tapped at his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of her
voice, and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down together for a long
time. She came down from her bed, to look at him
in his sleep that night. He slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his
old unfinished work, were all as usual.
End of Book 2, Chapter 10
Chapter XI. A Companion Picture "Sydney," said Mr. Stryver, on that self-same
night, or morning, to his jackal; "mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to
you." Sydney had been working double tides that
night, and the night before, and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession,
making a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver's papers before the setting in of the long vacation.
The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver arrears were handsomely fetched up; everything
was got rid of until November should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal,
and bring grist to the mill again. Sydney was none the livelier and none the
soberer for so much application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him
through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded the towelling;
and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled his turban off and threw it
into the basin in which he had steeped it at intervals for the last six hours.
"Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?" said Stryver the portly, with his hands in
his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on his back.
"I am." "Now, look here! I am going to tell you something
that will rather surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as shrewd
as you usually do think me. I intend to marry." "_Do_ you?"
"Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?" "I don't feel disposed to say much. Who is
she?" "Guess."
"Do I know her?" "Guess."
"I am not going to guess, at five o'clock in the morning, with my brains frying and
sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask me to dinner."
"Well then, I'll tell you," said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting posture. "Sydney,
I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible
dog." "And you," returned Sydney, busy concocting
the punch, "are such a sensitive and poetical spirit—"
"Come!" rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, "though I don't prefer any claim to being
the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still I am a tenderer sort of fellow than
_you_." "You are a luckier, if you mean that."
"I don't mean that. I mean I am a man of more—more—" "Say gallantry, while you are about it," suggested
Carton. "Well! I'll say gallantry. My meaning is that
I am a man," said Stryver, inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, "who cares
more to be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how to be
agreeable, in a woman's society, than you do."
"Go on," said Sydney Carton. "No; but before I go on," said Stryver, shaking
his head in his bullying way, "I'll have this out with you. You've been at Doctor Manette's
house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your moroseness
there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and hangdog kind, that, upon my
life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney!"
"It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to be ashamed of
anything," returned Sydney; "you ought to be much obliged to me."
"You shall not get off in that way," rejoined Stryver, shouldering the rejoinder at him;
"no, Sydney, it's my duty to tell you—and I tell you to your face to do you good—that
you are a devilish ill-conditioned fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable
fellow." Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had
made, and laughed. "Look at me!" said Stryver, squaring himself;
"I have less need to make myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances.
Why do I do it?" "I never saw you do it yet," muttered Carton.
"I do it because it's politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I get on."
"You don't get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions," answered Carton,
with a careless air; "I wish you would keep to that. As to me—will you never understand
that I am incorrigible?" He asked the question with some appearance
of scorn. "You have no business to be incorrigible,"
was his friend's answer, delivered in no very soothing tone.
"I have no business to be, at all, that I know of," said Sydney Carton. "Who is the
lady?" "Now, don't let my announcement of the name
make you uncomfortable, Sydney," said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness
for the disclosure he was about to make, "because I know you don't mean half you say; and if
you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I make this little preface, because you once
mentioned the young lady to me in slighting terms."
"I did?" "Certainly; and in these chambers."
Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend; drank his punch
and looked at his complacent friend. "You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired
doll. The young lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or
delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a little resentful of your
employing such a designation; but you are not. You want that sense altogether; therefore
I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion
of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures: or of a piece of music of mine, who had no
ear for music." Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate;
drank it by bumpers, looking at his friend. "Now you know all about it, Syd," said Mr.
Stryver. "I don't care about fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up
my mind to please myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She will
have in me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man, and a man of some
distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her, but she is worthy of good fortune.
Are you astonished?" Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined,
"Why should I be astonished?" "You approve?"
Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, "Why should I not approve?"
"Well!" said his friend Stryver, "you take it more easily than I fancied you would, and
are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would be; though, to be sure, you know
well enough by this time that your ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes,
Sydney, I have had enough of this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I
feel that it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels inclined to go
to it (when he doesn't, he can stay away), and I feel that Miss Manette will tell well
in any station, and will always do me credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney,
old boy, I want to say a word to _you_ about _your_ prospects. You are in a bad way, you
know; you really are in a bad way. You don't know the value of money, you live hard, you'll
knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor; you really ought to think about a nurse."
The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as big as he was,
and four times as offensive. "Now, let me recommend you," pursued Stryver,
"to look it in the face. I have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it
in the face, you, in your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of you. Never
mind your having no enjoyment of women's society, nor understanding of it, nor tact for it.
Find out somebody. Find out some respectable woman with a little property—somebody in
the landlady way, or lodging-letting way—and marry her, against a rainy day. That's the
kind of thing for _you_. Now think of it, Sydney."
"I'll think of it," said Sydney.
End of Book 2, Chapter 11
Chapter XII. The Fellow of Delicacy Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that
magnanimous bestowal of good fortune on the Doctor's daughter, resolved to make her happiness
known to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental debating of the
point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as well to get all the preliminaries done
with, and they could then arrange at their leisure whether he should give her his hand
a week or two before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it and
Hilary. As to the strength of his case, he had not
a doubt about it, but clearly saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial
worldly grounds—the only grounds ever worth taking into account—it was a plain case,
and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the plaintiff, there was no getting over
his evidence, the counsel for the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even
turn to consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer case
could be. Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long
Vacation with a formal proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing,
to Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present himself in Soho,
and there declare his noble mind. Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered
his way from the Temple, while the bloom of the Long Vacation's infancy was still upon
it. Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet on Saint Dunstan's
side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way along the pavement, to the jostlement
of all weaker people, might have seen how safe and strong he was.
His way taking him past Tellson's, and he both banking at Tellson's and knowing Mr.
Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr. Stryver's mind to enter the
bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the
door with the weak rattle in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient
cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr. Lorry sat at great
books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron bars to his window as if that were ruled
for figures too, and everything under the clouds were a sum.
"Halloa!" said Mr. Stryver. "How do you do? I hope you are well!"
It was Stryver's grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any place, or space.
He was so much too big for Tellson's, that old clerks in distant corners looked up with
looks of remonstrance, as though he squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently
reading the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if the Stryver head
had been butted into its responsible waistcoat. The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone
of the voice he would recommend under the circumstances, "How do you do, Mr. Stryver?
How do you do, sir?" and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner of shaking
hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson's who shook hands with a customer when the House
pervaded the air. He shook in a self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.
"Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?" asked Mr. Lorry, in his business character.
"Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I have come for a
private word." "Oh indeed!" said Mr. Lorry, bending down
his ear, while his eye strayed to the House afar off.
"I am going," said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the desk: whereupon,
although it was a large double one, there appeared to be not half desk enough for him:
"I am going to make an offer of myself in marriage to your agreeable little friend,
Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry." "Oh dear me!" cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his
chin, and looking at his visitor dubiously. "Oh dear me, sir?" repeated Stryver, drawing
back. "Oh dear you, sir? What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?"
"My meaning," answered the man of business, "is, of course, friendly and appreciative,
and that it does you the greatest credit, and—in short, my meaning is everything you
could desire. But—really, you know, Mr. Stryver—" Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his
head at him in the oddest manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally,
"you know there really is so much too much of you!"
"Well!" said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand, opening his eyes wider,
and taking a long breath, "if I understand you, Mr. Lorry, I'll be hanged!"
Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that end, and bit
the feather of a pen. "D—n it all, sir!" said Stryver, staring
at him, "am I not eligible?" "Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you're eligible!"
said Mr. Lorry. "If you say eligible, you are eligible."
"Am I not prosperous?" asked Stryver. "Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,"
said Mr. Lorry. "And advancing?"
"If you come to advancing you know," said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be able to make another
admission, "nobody can doubt that." "Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?"
demanded Stryver, perceptibly crestfallen. "Well! I—Were you going there now?" asked
Mr. Lorry. "Straight!" said Stryver, with a plump of
his fist on the desk. "Then I think I wouldn't, if I was you."
"Why?" said Stryver. "Now, I'll put you in a corner," forensically shaking a forefinger
at him. "You are a man of business and bound to have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn't
you go?" "Because," said Mr. Lorry, "I wouldn't go
on such an object without having some cause to believe that I should succeed."
"D—n _me_!" cried Stryver, "but this beats everything."
Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry Stryver.
"Here's a man of business—a man of years—a man of experience—_in_ a Bank," said Stryver;
"and having summed up three leading reasons for complete success, he says there's no reason
at all! Says it with his head on!" Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would
have been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.
"When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and when I speak of causes
and reasons to make success probable, I speak of causes and reasons that will tell as such
with the young lady. The young lady, my good sir," said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver
arm, "the young lady. The young lady goes before all."
"Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry," said Stryver, squaring his elbows, "that it is
your deliberate opinion that the young lady at present in question is a mincing Fool?"
"Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver," said Mr. Lorry, reddening, "that I will hear
no disrespectful word of that young lady from any lips; and that if I knew any man—which
I hope I do not—whose taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that
he could not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at this
desk, not even Tellson's should prevent my giving him a piece of my mind."
The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver's blood-vessels into
a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry; Mr. Lorry's veins, methodical as
their courses could usually be, were in no better state now it was his turn.
"That is what I mean to tell you, sir," said Mr. Lorry. "Pray let there be no mistake about
it." Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for
a little while, and then stood hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave
him the toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:
"This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not to go up to Soho
and offer myself—_my_self, Stryver of the King's Bench bar?"
"Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?" "Yes, I do."
"Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly."
"And all I can say of it is," laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, "that this—ha, ha!—beats
everything past, present, and to come." "Now understand me," pursued Mr. Lorry. "As
a man of business, I am not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man
of business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried Miss Manette
in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and of her father too, and who
has a great affection for them both, I have spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking,
recollect. Now, you think I may not be right?" "Not I!" said Stryver, whistling. "I can't
undertake to find third parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose
sense in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It's new to me,
but you are right, I dare say." "What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise
for myself—And understand me, sir," said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, "I will
not—not even at Tellson's—have it characterised for me by any gentleman breathing."
"There! I beg your pardon!" said Stryver. "Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I
was about to say:—it might be painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be
painful to Doctor Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very
painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You know the terms
upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with the family. If you please, committing
you in no way, representing you in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the
exercise of a little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon it. If you
should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its soundness for yourself; if, on
the other hand, you should be satisfied with it, and it should be what it now is, it may
spare all sides what is best spared. What do you say?"
"How long would you keep me in town?" "Oh! It is only a question of a few hours.
I could go to Soho in the evening, and come to your chambers afterwards."
"Then I say yes," said Stryver: "I won't go up there now, I am not so hot upon it as that
comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look in to-night. Good morning."
Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a concussion of air on
his passage through, that to stand up against it bowing behind the two counters, required
the utmost remaining strength of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons
were always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly believed, when
they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in the empty office until they bowed
another customer in. The barrister was keen enough to divine that
the banker would not have gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground
than moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to swallow, he got
it down. "And now," said Mr. Stryver, shaking his forensic forefinger at the Temple in general,
when it was down, "my way out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong."
It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found great relief. "You shall
not put me in the wrong, young lady," said Mr. Stryver; "I'll do that for you."
Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o'clock, Mr. Stryver, among
a quantity of books and papers littered out for the purpose, seemed to have nothing less
on his mind than the subject of the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry,
and was altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.
"Well!" said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless attempts to bring
him round to the question. "I have been to Soho."
"To Soho?" repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. "Oh, to be sure! What am I thinking of!"
"And I have no doubt," said Mr. Lorry, "that I was right in the conversation we had. My
opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my advice." "I assure you," returned Mr. Stryver, in the
friendliest way, "that I am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor
father's account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let us
say no more about it." "I don't understand you," said Mr. Lorry.
"I dare say not," rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and final way; "no
matter, no matter." "But it does matter," Mr. Lorry urged.
"No it doesn't; I assure you it doesn't. Having supposed that there was sense where there
is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is not a laudable ambition, I am well
out of my mistake, and no harm is done. Young women have committed similar follies often
before, and have repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish
aspect, I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been a bad thing for
me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am glad that the thing has dropped,
because it would have been a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view—it is hardly
necessary to say I could have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have
not proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means certain, on reflection,
that I ever should have committed myself to that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control
the mincing vanities and giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you
will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you, I regret it
on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account. And I am really very much
obliged to you for allowing me to sound you, and for giving me your advice; you know the
young lady better than I do; you were right, it never would have done."
Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr. Stryver shouldering
him towards the door, with an appearance of showering generosity, forbearance, and goodwill,
on his erring head. "Make the best of it, my dear sir," said Stryver; "say no more about
it; thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!"
Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr. Stryver was lying back
on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.
End of Book 2, Chapter 12
Chapter XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly
never shone in the house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year,
and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he cared to talk, he talked
well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness,
was very rarely pierced by the light within him.
And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house, and for the senseless
stones that made their pavements. Many a night he vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when
wine had brought no transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary
figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams of the sun brought
into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture in spires of churches and lofty buildings,
as perhaps the quiet time brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable,
into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had known him more ***
than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon it no longer than a few minutes, he had
got up again, and haunted that neighbourhood. On a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after
notifying to his jackal that "he had thought better of that marrying matter") had carried
his delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the City streets
had some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health for the sickliest, and of
youth for the oldest, Sydney's feet still trod those stones. From being irresolute and
purposeless, his feet became animated by an intention, and, in the working out of that
intention, they took him to the Doctor's door. He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at
her work, alone. She had never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with
some little embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at his face
in the interchange of the first few common-places, she observed a change in it.
"I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!" "No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is
not conducive to health. What is to be expected of, or by, such profligates?"
"Is it not—forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips—a pity to live no better
life?" "God knows it is a shame!"
"Then why not change it?" Looking gently at him again, she was surprised
and saddened to see that there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice
too, as he answered: "It is too late for that. I shall never be
better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse."
He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The table trembled
in the silence that followed. She had never seen him softened, and was much
distressed. He knew her to be so, without looking at her, and said:
"Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of what I want to say
to you. Will you hear me?" "If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if
it would make you happier, it would make me very glad!"
"God bless you for your sweet compassion!" He unshaded his face after a little while,
and spoke steadily. "Don't be afraid to hear me. Don't shrink
from anything I say. I am like one who died young. All my life might have been."
"No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am sure that you might
be much, much worthier of yourself." "Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I
know better—although in the mystery of my own wretched heart I know better—I shall
never forget it!" She was pale and trembling. He came to her
relief with a fixed despair of himself which made the interview unlike any other that could
have been holden. "If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that
you could have returned the love of the man you see before yourself—flung away, wasted,
drunken, poor creature of misuse as you know him to be—he would have been conscious this
day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would bring you to misery, bring you to
sorrow and repentance, blight you, disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well
that you can have no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot
be." "Without it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton?
Can I not recall you—forgive me again!—to a better course? Can I in no way repay your
confidence? I know this is a confidence," she modestly said, after a little hesitation,
and in earnest tears, "I know you would say this to no one else. Can I turn it to no good
account for yourself, Mr. Carton?" He shook his head.
"To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very little more, all
you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you have been the last dream
of my soul. In my degradation I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with
your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that
I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that
I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling
me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving
afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned
fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay
down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it."
"Will nothing of it remain? O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!"
"No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And
yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what
a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire—a fire, however, inseparable
in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning
away." "Since it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to
have made you more unhappy than you were before you knew me—"
"Don't say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if anything could. You
will not be the cause of my becoming worse." "Since the state of your mind that you describe,
is, at all events, attributable to some influence of mine—this is what I mean, if I can make
it plain—can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for good, with you, at
all?" "The utmost good that I am capable of now,
Miss Manette, I have come here to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected
life, the remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world; and that there
was something left in me at this time which you could deplore and pity."
"Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with all my heart,
was capable of better things, Mr. Carton!" "Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette.
I have proved myself, and I know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will
you let me believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life was reposed
in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there alone, and will be shared by
no one?" "If that will be a consolation to you, yes."
"Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?"
"Mr. Carton," she answered, after an agitated pause, "the secret is yours, not mine; and
I promise to respect it." "Thank you. And again, God bless you."
He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.
"Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this conversation by so much
as a passing word. I will never refer to it again. If I were dead, that could not be surer
than it is henceforth. In the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred the one good remembrance—and
shall thank and bless you for it—that my last avowal of myself was made to you, and
that my name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried in your heart. May it otherwise
be light and happy!" He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself
to be, and it was so sad to think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every
day kept down and perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he stood looking
back at her. "Be comforted!" he said, "I am not worth such
feeling, Miss Manette. An hour or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that
I scorn but yield to, will render me less worth such tears as those, than any wretch
who creeps along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself, I shall always be, towards
you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be what you have heretofore seen me. The last
supplication but one I make to you, is, that you will believe this of me."
"I will, Mr. Carton." "My last supplication of all, is this; and
with it, I will relieve you of a visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison,
and between whom and you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say it, I know, but
it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my
career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice
in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold me
in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one thing. The time will
come, the time will not be long in coming, when new ties will be formed about you—ties
that will bind you yet more tenderly and strongly to the home you so adorn—the dearest ties
that will ever grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a happy
father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright beauty springing up anew
at your feet, think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep
a life you love beside you!" He said, "Farewell!" said a last "God bless
you!" and left her.
End of Book 2, Chapter 13