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Book the Second: The Golden Thread
Chapter XXI.
Echoing Footsteps
A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been
remarked, that corner where the Doctor
lived.
Ever busily winding the golden thread which
bound her husband, and her father, and
herself, and her old directress and
companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie
sat in the still house in the tranquilly
resounding corner, listening to the echoing
footsteps of years.
At first, there were times, though she was
a perfectly happy young wife, when her work
would slowly fall from her hands, and her
eyes would be dimmed.
For, there was something coming in the
echoes, something light, afar off, and
scarcely audible yet, that stirred her
heart too much.
Fluttering hopes and doubts--hopes, of a
love as yet unknown to her: doubts, of her
remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new
delight--divided her breast.
Among the echoes then, there would arise
the sound of footsteps at her own early
grave; and thoughts of the husband who
would be left so desolate, and who would
mourn for her so much, swelled to her eyes,
and broke like waves.
That time passed, and her little Lucie lay
on her ***.
Then, among the advancing echoes, there was
the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of
her prattling words.
Let greater echoes resound as they would,
the young mother at the cradle side could
always hear those coming.
They came, and the shady house was sunny
with a child's laugh, and the Divine friend
of children, to whom in her trouble she had
confided hers, seemed to take her child in
his arms, as He took the child of old, and
made it a sacred joy to her.
Ever busily winding the golden thread that
bound them all together, weaving the
service of her happy influence through the
tissue of all their lives, and making it
predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the
echoes of years none but friendly and
soothing sounds.
Her husband's step was strong and
prosperous among them; her father's firm
and equal.
Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string,
awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger,
whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the
earth under the plane-tree in the garden!
Even when there were sounds of sorrow among
the rest, they were not harsh nor cruel.
Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in
a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a
little boy, and he said, with a radiant
smile, "Dear papa and mamma, I am very
sorry to leave you both, and to leave my
pretty sister; but I am called, and I must
go!" those were not tears all of agony that
wetted his young mother's cheek, as the
spirit departed from her embrace that had
been entrusted to it.
Suffer them and forbid them not.
They see my Father's face.
O Father, blessed words!
Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got
blended with the other echoes, and they
were not wholly of earth, but had in them
that breath of Heaven.
Sighs of the winds that blew over a little
garden-tomb were mingled with them also,
and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed
murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea
asleep upon a sandy shore--as the little
Lucie, comically studious at the task of
the morning, or dressing a doll at her
mother's footstool, chattered in the
tongues of the Two Cities that were blended
in her life.
The Echoes rarely answered to the actual
tread of Sydney Carton.
Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he
claimed his privilege of coming in
uninvited, and would sit among them through
the evening, as he had once done often.
He never came there heated with wine.
And one other thing regarding him was
whispered in the echoes, which has been
whispered by all true echoes for ages and
ages.
No man ever really loved a woman, lost her,
and knew her with a blameless though an
unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a
mother, but her children had a strange
sympathy with him--an instinctive delicacy
of pity for him.
What fine hidden sensibilities are touched
in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is
so, and it was so here.
Carton was the first stranger to whom
little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and
he kept his place with her as she grew.
The little boy had spoken of him, almost at
the last.
"Poor Carton!
Kiss him for me!"
Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the
law, like some great engine forcing itself
through turbid water, and dragged his
useful friend in his wake, like a boat
towed astern.
As the boat so favoured is usually in a
rough plight, and mostly under water, so,
Sydney had a swamped life of it.
But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so
much easier and stronger in him than any
stimulating sense of desert or disgrace,
made it the life he was to lead; and he no
more thought of emerging from his state of
lion's jackal, than any real jackal may be
supposed to think of rising to be a lion.
Stryver was rich; had married a florid
widow with property and three boys, who had
nothing particularly shining about them but
the straight hair of their dumpling heads.
These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver,
exuding patronage of the most offensive
quality from every pore, had walked before
him like three sheep to the quiet corner in
Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie's
husband: delicately saying "Halloa! here
are three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards
your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!"
The polite rejection of the three lumps of
bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr.
Stryver with indignation, which he
afterwards turned to account in the
training of the young gentlemen, by
directing them to beware of the pride of
Beggars, like that tutor-fellow.
He was also in the habit of declaiming to
Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on
the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in
practice to "catch" him, and on the
diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam,
which had rendered him "not to be caught."
Some of his King's Bench familiars, who
were occasionally parties to the full-
bodied wine and the lie, excused him for
the latter by saying that he had told it so
often, that he believed it himself--which
is surely such an incorrigible aggravation
of an originally bad offence, as to justify
any such offender's being carried off to
some suitably retired spot, and there
hanged out of the way.
These were among the echoes to which Lucie,
sometimes pensive, sometimes amused and
laughing, listened in the echoing corner,
until her little daughter was six years
old.
How near to her heart the echoes of her
child's tread came, and those of her own
dear father's, always active and self-
possessed, and those of her dear husband's,
need not be told.
Nor, how the lightest echo of their united
home, directed by herself with such a wise
and elegant thrift that it was more
abundant than any waste, was music to her.
Nor, how there were echoes all about her,
sweet in her ears, of the many times her
father had told her that he found her more
devoted to him married (if that could be)
than single, and of the many times her
husband had said to her that no cares and
duties seemed to divide her love for him or
her help to him, and asked her "What is the
magic secret, my darling, of your being
everything to all of us, as if there were
only one of us, yet never seeming to be
hurried, or to have too much to do?"
But, there were other echoes, from a
distance, that rumbled menacingly in the
corner all through this space of time.
And it was now, about little Lucie's sixth
birthday, that they began to have an awful
sound, as of a great storm in France with a
dreadful sea rising.
On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven
hundred and eighty-nine, Mr. Lorry came in
late, from Tellson's, and sat himself down
by Lucie and her husband in the dark
window.
It was a hot, wild night, and they were all
three reminded of the old Sunday night when
they had looked at the lightning from the
same place.
"I began to think," said Mr. Lorry, pushing
his brown wig back, "that I should have to
pass the night at Tellson's.
We have been so full of business all day,
that we have not known what to do first, or
which way to turn.
There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that
we have actually a run of confidence upon
us!
Our customers over there, seem not to be
able to confide their property to us fast
enough.
There is positively a mania among some of
them for sending it to England."
"That has a bad look," said Darnay--
"A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay?
Yes, but we don't know what reason there is
in it.
People are so unreasonable!
Some of us at Tellson's are getting old,
and we really can't be troubled out of the
ordinary course without due occasion."
"Still," said Darnay, "you know how gloomy
and threatening the sky is."
"I know that, to be sure," assented Mr.
Lorry, trying to persuade himself that his
sweet temper was soured, and that he
grumbled, "but I am determined to be
peevish after my long day's botheration.
Where is Manette?"
"Here he is," said the Doctor, entering the
dark room at the moment.
"I am quite glad you are at home; for these
hurries and forebodings by which I have
been surrounded all day long, have made me
nervous without reason.
You are not going out, I hope?"
"No; I am going to play backgammon with
you, if you like," said the Doctor.
"I don't think I do like, if I may speak my
mind.
I am not fit to be pitted against you to-
night.
Is the teaboard still there, Lucie?
I can't see."
"Of course, it has been kept for you."
"Thank ye, my dear.
The precious child is safe in bed?"
"And sleeping soundly."
"That's right; all safe and well!
I don't know why anything should be
otherwise than safe and well here, thank
God; but I have been so put out all day,
and I am not as young as I was!
My tea, my dear!
Thank ye.
Now, come and take your place in the
circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the
echoes about which you have your theory."
"Not a theory; it was a fancy."
"A fancy, then, my wise pet," said Mr.
Lorry, patting her hand.
"They are very numerous and very loud,
though, are they not?
Only hear them!"
Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to
force their way into anybody's life,
footsteps not easily made clean again if
once stained red, the footsteps raging in
Saint Antoine afar off, as the little
circle sat in the dark London window.
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a
vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to
and fro, with frequent gleams of light
above the billowy heads, where steel blades
and bayonets shone in the sun.
A tremendous roar arose from the throat of
Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms
struggled in the air like shrivelled
branches of trees in a winter wind: all the
fingers convulsively clutching at every
weapon or semblance of a weapon that was
thrown up from the depths below, no matter
how far off.
Who gave them out, whence they last came,
where they began, through what agency they
crookedly quivered and ***, scores at a
time, over the heads of the crowd, like a
kind of lightning, no eye in the throng
could have told; but, muskets were being
distributed--so were cartridges, powder,
and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives,
axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted
ingenuity could discover or devise.
People who could lay hold of nothing else,
set themselves with bleeding hands to force
stones and bricks out of their places in
walls.
Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was
on high-fever strain and at high-fever
heat.
Every living creature there held life as of
no account, and was demented with a
passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a
centre point, so, all this raging circled
round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human
drop in the caldron had a tendency to be
sucked towards the vortex where Defarge
himself, already begrimed with gunpowder
and sweat, issued orders, issued arms,
thrust this man back, dragged this man
forward, disarmed one to arm another,
laboured and strove in the thickest of the
uproar.
"Keep near to me, Jacques Three," cried
Defarge; "and do you, Jacques One and Two,
separate and put yourselves at the head of
as many of these patriots as you can.
Where is my wife?"
"Eh, well!
Here you see me!" said madame, composed as
ever, but not knitting to-day.
Madame's resolute right hand was occupied
with an axe, in place of the usual softer
implements, and in her girdle were a pistol
and a cruel knife.
"Where do you go, my wife?"
"I go," said madame, "with you at present.
You shall see me at the head of women, by-
and-bye."
"Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a
resounding voice.
"Patriots and friends, we are ready!
The Bastille!"
With a roar that sounded as if all the
breath in France had been shaped into the
detested word, the living sea rose, wave on
wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the
city to that point.
Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea
raging and thundering on its new beach, the
attack began.
Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive
stone walls, eight great towers, cannon,
muskets, fire and smoke.
Through the fire and through the smoke--in
the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast
him up against a cannon, and on the instant
he became a cannonier--Defarge of the wine-
shop worked like a manful soldier, Two
fierce hours.
Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive
stone walls, eight great towers, cannon,
muskets, fire and smoke.
One drawbridge down!
"Work, comrades all, work!
Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One
Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques
Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of
all the Angels or the Devils--which you
prefer--work!"
Thus Defarge of the wine-shop, still at his
gun, which had long grown hot.
"To me, women!" cried madame his wife.
"What!
We can kill as well as the men when the
place is taken!"
And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry,
trooping women variously armed, but all
armed alike in hunger and revenge.
Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still
the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the
massive stone walls, and the eight great
towers.
Slight displacements of the raging sea,
made by the falling wounded.
Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking
waggonloads of wet straw, hard work at
neighbouring barricades in all directions,
shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery
without stint, boom smash and rattle, and
the furious sounding of the living sea;
but, still the deep ditch, and the single
drawbridge, and the massive stone walls,
and the eight great towers, and still
Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown
doubly hot by the service of Four fierce
hours.
A white flag from within the fortress, and
a parley--this dimly perceptible through
the raging storm, nothing audible in it--
suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider
and higher, and swept Defarge of the wine-
shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the
massive stone outer walls, in among the
eight great towers surrendered!
So resistless was the force of the ocean
bearing him on, that even to draw his
breath or turn his head was as
impracticable as if he had been struggling
in the surf at the South Sea, until he was
landed in the outer courtyard of the
Bastille.
There, against an angle of a wall, he made
a struggle to look about him.
Jacques Three was nearly at his side;
Madame Defarge, still heading some of her
women, was visible in the inner distance,
and her knife was in her hand.
Everywhere was tumult, exultation,
deafening and maniacal bewilderment,
astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show.
"The Prisoners!"
"The Records!"
"The secret cells!"
"The instruments of torture!"
"The Prisoners!"
Of all these cries, and ten thousand
incoherences, "The Prisoners!" was the cry
most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as
if there were an eternity of people, as
well as of time and space.
When the foremost billows rolled past,
bearing the prison officers with them, and
threatening them all with instant death if
any secret nook remained undisclosed,
Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast
of one of these men--a man with a grey
head, who had a lighted torch in his hand--
separated him from the rest, and got him
between himself and the wall.
"Show me the North Tower!" said Defarge.
"Quick!"
"I will faithfully," replied the man, "if
you will come with me.
But there is no one there."
"What is the meaning of One Hundred and
Five, North Tower?" asked Defarge.
"Quick!"
"The meaning, monsieur?"
"Does it mean a captive, or a place of
captivity?
Or do you mean that I shall strike you
dead?"
"Kill him!" croaked Jacques Three, who had
come close up.
"Monsieur, it is a cell."
"Show it me!"
"Pass this way, then."
Jacques Three, with his usual craving on
him, and evidently disappointed by the
dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to
promise bloodshed, held by Defarge's arm as
he held by the turnkey's.
Their three heads had been close together
during this brief discourse, and it had
been as much as they could do to hear one
another, even then: so tremendous was the
noise of the living ocean, in its irruption
into the Fortress, and its inundation of
the courts and passages and staircases.
All around outside, too, it beat the walls
with a deep, hoarse roar, from which,
occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult
broke and leaped into the air like spray.
Through gloomy vaults where the light of
day had never shone, past hideous doors of
dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights
of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents
of stone and brick, more like dry
waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the
turnkey, and Jacques Three, linked hand and
arm, went with all the speed they could
make.
Here and there, especially at first, the
inundation started on them and swept by;
but when they had done descending, and were
winding and climbing up a tower, they were
alone.
Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of
walls and arches, the storm within the
fortress and without was only audible to
them in a dull, subdued way, as if the
noise out of which they had come had almost
destroyed their sense of hearing.
The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a
key in a clashing lock, swung the door
slowly open, and said, as they all bent
their heads and passed in:
"One hundred and five, North Tower!"
There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed
window high in the wall, with a stone
screen before it, so that the sky could be
only seen by stooping low and looking up.
There was a small chimney, heavily barred
across, a few feet within.
There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
on the hearth.
There was a stool, and table, and a straw
bed.
There were the four blackened walls, and a
rusted iron ring in one of them.
"Pass that torch slowly along these walls,
that I may see them," said Defarge to the
turnkey.
The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the
light closely with his eyes.
"Stop!--Look here, Jacques!"
"A.M.!" croaked Jacques Three, as he read
greedily.
"Alexandre Manette," said Defarge in his
ear, following the letters with his swart
forefinger, deeply engrained with
gunpowder.
"And here he wrote 'a poor physician.'
And it was he, without doubt, who scratched
a calendar on this stone.
What is that in your hand?
A crowbar?
Give it me!"
He had still the linstock of his gun in his
own hand.
He made a sudden exchange of the two
instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten
stool and table, beat them to pieces in a
few blows.
"Hold the light higher!" he said,
wrathfully, to the turnkey.
"Look among those fragments with care,
Jacques.
And see!
Here is my knife," throwing it to him; "rip
open that bed, and search the straw.
Hold the light higher, you!"
With a menacing look at the turnkey he
crawled upon the hearth, and, peering up
the chimney, struck and prised at its sides
with the crowbar, and worked at the iron
grating across it.
In a few minutes, some mortar and dust came
dropping down, which he averted his face to
avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-
ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney into
which his weapon had slipped or wrought
itself, he groped with a cautious touch.
"Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the
straw, Jacques?"
"Nothing."
"Let us collect them together, in the
middle of the cell.
So! Light them, you!"
The turnkey fired the little pile, which
blazed high and hot.
Stooping again to come out at the low-
arched door, they left it burning, and
retraced their way to the courtyard;
seeming to recover their sense of hearing
as they came down, until they were in the
raging flood once more.
They found it surging and tossing, in quest
of Defarge himself.
Saint Antoine was clamorous to have its
wine-shop keeper foremost in the guard upon
the governor who had defended the Bastille
and shot the people.
Otherwise, the governor would not be
marched to the Hotel de Ville for judgment.
Otherwise, the governor would escape, and
the people's blood (suddenly of some value,
after many years of worthlessness) be
unavenged.
In the howling universe of passion and
contention that seemed to encompass this
grim old officer conspicuous in his grey
coat and red decoration, there was but one
quite steady figure, and that was a
woman's.
"See, there is my husband!" she cried,
pointing him out.
"See Defarge!"
She stood immovable close to the grim old
officer, and remained immovable close to
him; remained immovable close to him
through the streets, as Defarge and the
rest bore him along; remained immovable
close to him when he was got near his
destination, and began to be struck at from
behind; remained immovable close to him
when the long-gathering rain of stabs and
blows fell heavy; was so close to him when
he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly
animated, she put her foot upon his neck,
and with her cruel knife--long ready--hewed
off his head.
The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was
to execute his horrible idea of hoisting up
men for lamps to show what he could be and
do.
Saint Antoine's blood was up, and the blood
of tyranny and domination by the iron hand
was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de
Ville where the governor's body lay--down
on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
where she had trodden on the body to steady
it for mutilation.
"Lower the lamp yonder!" cried Saint
Antoine, after glaring round for a new
means of death; "here is one of his
soldiers to be left on guard!"
The swinging sentinel was posted, and the
sea rushed on.
The sea of black and threatening waters,
and of destructive upheaving of wave
against wave, whose depths were yet
unfathomed and whose forces were yet
unknown.
The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying
shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces
hardened in the furnaces of suffering until
the touch of pity could make no mark on
them.
But, in the ocean of faces where every
fierce and furious expression was in vivid
life, there were two groups of faces--each
seven in number--so fixedly contrasting
with the rest, that never did sea roll
which bore more memorable wrecks with it.
Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released
by the storm that had burst their tomb,
were carried high overhead: all scared, all
lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the
Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced
around them were lost spirits.
Other seven faces there were, carried
higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping
eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last
Day.
Impassive faces, yet with a suspended--not
an abolished--expression on them; faces,
rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet
to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and
bear witness with the bloodless lips, "THOU
DIDST IT!"
Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads
on pikes, the keys of the accursed fortress
of the eight strong towers, some discovered
letters and other memorials of prisoners of
old time, long dead of broken hearts,--
such, and such--like, the loudly echoing
footsteps of Saint Antoine escort through
the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand
seven hundred and eighty-nine.
Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie
Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her
life!
For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous;
and in the years so long after the breaking
of the cask at Defarge's wine-shop door,
they are not easily purified when once
stained red.