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Book the Second: The Golden Thread
Chapter II.
A Sight
"You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?"
said one of the oldest of clerks to Jerry
the messenger.
"Ye-es, sir," returned Jerry, in something
of a dogged manner.
"I _do_ know the Bailey."
"Just so.
And you know Mr. Lorry."
"I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I
know the Bailey.
Much better," said Jerry, not unlike a
reluctant witness at the establishment in
question, "than I, as a honest tradesman,
wish to know the Bailey."
"Very well.
Find the door where the witnesses go in,
and show the door-keeper this note for Mr.
Lorry.
He will then let you in."
"Into the court, sir?"
"Into the court."
Mr. Cruncher's eyes seemed to get a little
closer to one another, and to interchange
the inquiry, "What do you think of this?"
"Am I to wait in the court, sir?" he asked,
as the result of that conference.
"I am going to tell you.
The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr.
Lorry, and do you make any gesture that
will attract Mr. Lorry's attention, and
show him where you stand.
Then what you have to do, is, to remain
there until he wants you."
"Is that all, sir?"
"That's all.
He wishes to have a messenger at hand.
This is to tell him you are there."
As the ancient clerk deliberately folded
and superscribed the note, Mr. Cruncher,
after surveying him in silence until he
came to the blotting-paper stage, remarked:
"I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this
morning?"
"Treason!"
"That's quartering," said Jerry.
"Barbarous!"
"It is the law," remarked the ancient
clerk, turning his surprised spectacles
upon him.
"It is the law."
"It's hard in the law to spile a man, I
think.
It's hard enough to kill him, but it's wery
hard to spile him, sir."
"Not at all," retained the ancient clerk.
"Speak well of the law.
Take care of your chest and voice, my good
friend, and leave the law to take care of
itself.
I give you that advice."
"It's the damp, sir, what settles on my
chest and voice," said Jerry.
"I leave you to judge what a damp way of
earning a living mine is."
"Well, well," said the old clerk; "we all
have our various ways of gaining a
livelihood.
Some of us have damp ways, and some of us
have dry ways.
Here is the letter.
Go along."
Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to
himself with less internal deference than
he made an outward show of, "You are a lean
old one, too," made his bow, informed his
son, in passing, of his destination, and
went his way.
They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so
the street outside Newgate had not obtained
one infamous notoriety that has since
attached to it.
But, the gaol was a vile place, in which
most kinds of debauchery and villainy were
practised, and where dire diseases were
bred, that came into court with the
prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight
from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice
himself, and pulled him off the bench.
It had more than once happened, that the
Judge in the black cap pronounced his own
doom as certainly as the prisoner's, and
even died before him.
For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as
a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale
travellers set out continually, in carts
and coaches, on a violent passage into the
other world: traversing some two miles and
a half of public street and road, and
shaming few good citizens, if any.
So powerful is use, and so desirable to be
good use in the beginning.
It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise
old institution, that inflicted a
punishment of which no one could foresee
the extent; also, for the whipping-post,
another dear old institution, very
humanising and softening to behold in
action; also, for extensive transactions in
blood-money, another fragment of ancestral
wisdom, systematically leading to the most
frightful mercenary crimes that could be
committed under Heaven.
Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date,
was a choice illustration of the precept,
that "Whatever is is right;" an aphorism
that would be as final as it is lazy, did
it not include the troublesome consequence,
that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making his way through the tainted crowd,
dispersed up and down this hideous scene of
action, with the skill of a man accustomed
to make his way quietly, the messenger
found out the door he sought, and handed in
his letter through a trap in it.
For, people then paid to see the play at
the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see
the play in Bedlam--only the former
entertainment was much the dearer.
Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were
well guarded--except, indeed, the social
doors by which the criminals got there, and
those were always left wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door
grudgingly turned on its hinges a very
little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher
to squeeze himself into court.
"What's on?" he asked, in a whisper, of the
man he found himself next to.
"Nothing yet."
"What's coming on?"
"The Treason case."
"The quartering one, eh?"
"Ah!" returned the man, with a relish;
"he'll be drawn on a hurdle to be half
hanged, and then he'll be taken down and
sliced before his own face, and then his
inside will be taken out and burnt while he
looks on, and then his head will be chopped
off, and he'll be cut into quarters.
That's the sentence."
"If he's found Guilty, you mean to say?"
Jerry added, by way of proviso.
"Oh! they'll find him guilty," said the
other.
"Don't you be afraid of that."
Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted
to the door-keeper, whom he saw making his
way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his
hand.
Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the
gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged
gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had
a great bundle of papers before him: and
nearly opposite another wigged gentleman
with his hands in his pockets, whose whole
attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him
then or afterwards, seemed to be
concentrated on the ceiling of the court.
After some gruff coughing and rubbing of
his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry
attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had
stood up to look for him, and who quietly
nodded and sat down again.
"What's _he_ got to do with the case?"
asked the man he had spoken with.
"Blest if I know," said Jerry.
"What have _you_ got to do with it, then,
if a person may inquire?"
"Blest if I know that either," said Jerry.
The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent
great stir and settling down in the court,
stopped the dialogue.
Presently, the dock became the central
point of interest.
Two gaolers, who had been standing there,
went out, and the prisoner was brought in,
and put to the bar.
Everybody present, except the one wigged
gentleman who looked at the ceiling, stared
at him.
All the human breath in the place, rolled
at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire.
Eager faces strained round pillars and
corners, to get a sight of him; spectators
in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair
of him; people on the floor of the court,
laid their hands on the shoulders of the
people before them, to help themselves, at
anybody's cost, to a view of him--stood a-
tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to
nothing, to see every inch of him.
Conspicuous among these latter, like an
animated bit of the spiked wall of Newgate,
Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the
beery breath of a whet he had taken as he
came along, and discharging it to mingle
with the waves of other beer, and gin, and
tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed
at him, and already broke upon the great
windows behind him in an impure mist and
rain.
The object of all this staring and blaring,
was a young man of about five-and-twenty,
well-grown and well-looking, with a
sunburnt cheek and a dark eye.
His condition was that of a young
gentleman.
He was plainly dressed in black, or very
dark grey, and his hair, which was long and
dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back
of his neck; more to be out of his way than
for ornament.
As an emotion of the mind will express
itself through any covering of the body, so
the paleness which his situation engendered
came through the brown upon his cheek,
showing the soul to be stronger than the
sun.
He was otherwise quite self-possessed,
bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.
The sort of interest with which this man
was stared and breathed at, was not a sort
that elevated humanity.
Had he stood in peril of a less horrible
sentence--had there been a chance of any
one of its savage details being spared--by
just so much would he have lost in his
fascination.
The form that was to be doomed to be so
shamefully mangled, was the sight; the
immortal creature that was to be so
butchered and torn asunder, yielded the
sensation.
Whatever gloss the various spectators put
upon the interest, according to their
several arts and powers of self-deceit, the
interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.
Silence in the court!
Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not
Guilty to an indictment denouncing him
(with infinite jingle and jangle) for that
he was a false traitor to our serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth,
prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his
having, on divers occasions, and by divers
means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French
King, in his wars against our said serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that
was to say, by coming and going, between
the dominions of our said serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and
those of the said French Lewis, and
wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and
otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to
the said French Lewis what forces our said
serene, illustrious, excellent, and so
forth, had in preparation to send to Canada
and North America.
This much, Jerry, with his head becoming
more and more spiky as the law terms
bristled it, made out with huge
satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously
at the understanding that the aforesaid,
and over and over again aforesaid, Charles
Darnay, stood there before him upon his
trial; that the jury were swearing in; and
that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready
to speak.
The accused, who was (and who knew he was)
being mentally hanged, beheaded, and
quartered, by everybody there, neither
flinched from the situation, nor assumed
any theatrical air in it.
He was quiet and attentive; watched the
opening proceedings with a grave interest;
and stood with his hands resting on the
slab of wood before him, so composedly,
that they had not displaced a leaf of the
herbs with which it was strewn.
The court was all bestrewn with herbs and
sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution
against gaol air and gaol fever.
Over the prisoner's head there was a
mirror, to throw the light down upon him.
Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had
been reflected in it, and had passed from
its surface and this earth's together.
Haunted in a most ghastly manner that
abominable place would have been, if the
glass could ever have rendered back its
reflections, as the ocean is one day to
give up its dead.
Some passing thought of the infamy and
disgrace for which it had been reserved,
may have struck the prisoner's mind.
Be that as it may, a change in his position
making him conscious of a bar of light
across his face, he looked up; and when he
saw the glass his face flushed, and his
right hand pushed the herbs away.
It happened, that the action turned his
face to that side of the court which was on
his left.
About on a level with his eyes, there sat,
in that corner of the Judge's bench, two
persons upon whom his look immediately
rested; so immediately, and so much to the
changing of his aspect, that all the eyes
that were turned upon him, turned to them.
The spectators saw in the two figures, a
young lady of little more than twenty, and
a gentleman who was evidently her father; a
man of a very remarkable appearance in
respect of the absolute whiteness of his
hair, and a certain indescribable intensity
of face: not of an active kind, but
pondering and self-communing.
When this expression was upon him, he
looked as if he were old; but when it was
stirred and broken up--as it was now, in a
moment, on his speaking to his daughter--he
became a handsome man, not past the prime
of life.
His daughter had one of her hands drawn
through his arm, as she sat by him, and the
other pressed upon it.
She had drawn close to him, in her dread of
the scene, and in her pity for the
prisoner.
Her forehead had been strikingly expressive
of an engrossing terror and compassion that
saw nothing but the peril of the accused.
This had been so very noticeable, so very
powerfully and naturally shown, that
starers who had had no pity for him were
touched by her; and the whisper went about,
"Who are they?"
Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own
observations, in his own manner, and who
had been sucking the rust off his fingers
in his absorption, stretched his neck to
hear who they were.
The crowd about him had pressed and passed
the inquiry on to the nearest attendant,
and from him it had been more slowly
pressed and passed back; at last it got to
Jerry:
"Witnesses."
"For which side?"
"Against."
"Against what side?"
"The prisoner's."
The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the
general direction, recalled them, leaned
back in his seat, and looked steadily at
the man whose life was in his hand, as Mr.
Attorney-General rose to spin the rope,
grind the axe, and hammer the nails into
the scaffold.