sat upon their horses outside the gate. Looking about him
while in this state of suspense, Charles Darnay observed
that the gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers and
patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former; and that
while ingress into the city for peasants’ carts bringing in
supplies, and for similar traffic and traffickers, was easy
enough, egress, even for the homeliest people, was very
difficult. A numerous medley of men and women, not to
mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts, was waiting
to issue forth; but, the previous identification was so strict,
that they filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of
these people knew their turn for examination to be so far
off, that they lay down on the ground to sleep or smoke,
while others talked together, or loitered about. The red
cap and tri-colour cockade were universal, both among
men and women.
When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking
note of these things, Darnay found himself confronted by
the same man in authority, who directed the guard to
open the barrier. Then he delivered to the escort, drunk
and sober, a receipt for the escorted, and requested him to
dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, leading his
tired horse, turned and rode away without entering the
city.
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He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room,
smelling of common wine and tobacco, where certain
soldiers and patriots, asleep and awake, drunk and sober,
and in various neutral states between sleeping and waking,
drunkenness and sobriety, were standing and lying about.
The light in the guard-house, half derived from the
waning oil-lamps of the night, and half from the overcast
day, was in a correspondingly uncertain condition. Some
registers were lying open on a desk, and an officer of a
coarse, dark aspect, presided over these.
‘Citizen Defarge,’ said he to Darnay’s
conductor, as he took a slip of paper to write on. ‘Is this
the emigrant Evremonde?’
‘This is the man.’
‘Your age, Evremonde?’
‘Thirty-seven.’
‘Married, Evremonde?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where married?’
‘In England.’
‘Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evremonde?’
‘In England.’
‘Without doubt. You are consigned, Evremonde, to
the prison of La Force.’
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‘Just Heaven!’ exclaimed Darnay. ‘Under what law, and
for what offence?’
The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a
moment.
‘We have new laws, Evremonde, and new offences,
since you were here.’ He said it with a hard smile, and
went on writing.
‘I entreat you to observe that I have come here
voluntarily, in response to that written appeal of a fellowcountryman
which lies before you. I demand no more
than the opportunity to do so without delay. Is not that
my right?’
‘Emigrants have no rights, Evremonde,’ was the stolid
reply. The officer wrote until he had finished, read over to
himself what he had written, sanded it, and handed it to
Defarge, with the words ‘In secret.’
Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that
he must accompany him. The prisoner obeyed, and a
guard of two armed patriots attended them.
‘Is it you,’ said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went
down the guardhouse steps and turned into Paris, ‘who
married the daughter of Doctor Manette, once a prisoner
in the Bastille that is no more?’
‘Yes,’ replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.
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‘My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the
Quarter Saint Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me.’
‘My wife came to your house to reclaim her father?
Yes!’
The word ‘wife’ seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder
to Defarge, to say with sudden impatience, ‘In the name
of that sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine,
why did you come to France?’
‘You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not
believe it is the truth?’
‘A bad truth for you,’ said Defarge, speaking with
knitted brows, and looking straight before him.
‘Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so
changed, so sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost.
Will you render me a little help?’
‘None.’ Defarge spoke, always looking straight before
him.
‘Will you answer me a single question?’
‘Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it
is.’
‘In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I
have some free communication with the world outside?’
‘You will see.’
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‘I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without
any means of presenting my case?’
‘You will see. But, what then? Other people have been
similarly buried in worse prisons, before now.’
‘But never by me, Citizen Defarge.’
Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked
on in a steady and set silence. The deeper he sank into this
silence, the fainter hope there was—or so Darnay
thought—of his softening in any slight degree. He,
therefore, made haste to say:
‘It is of the utmost importance to me (you know,
Citizen, even better than I, of how much importance),
that I should be able to communicate to Mr. Lorry of
Tellson’s Bank, an English gentleman who is now in Paris,
the simple fact, without comment, that I have been
thrown into the prison of La Force. Will you cause that to
be done for me?’
‘I will do,’ Defarge doggedly rejoined, ‘nothing for
you. My duty is to my country and the People. I am the
sworn servant of both, against you. I will do nothing for
you.’
Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further,
and his pride was touched besides. As they walked on in
silence, he could not but see how used the people were to
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the spectacle of prisoners passing along the streets. The
very children scarcely noticed him. A few passers turned
their heads, and a few shook their fingers at him as an
aristocrat; otherwise, that a man in good clothes should be
going to prison, was no more remarkable than that a
labourer in working clothes should be going to work. In
one narrow, dark, and dirty street through which they
passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool, was
addressing an excited audience on the crimes against the
people, of the king and the royal family. The few words
that he caught from this man’s lips, first made it known to
Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the
foreign ambassadors had one and all left Paris. On the road
(except at Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing. The
escort and the universal watchfulness had completely
isolated him.
That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those
which had developed themselves when he left England, he
of course knew now. That perils had thickened about him
fast, and might thicken faster and faster yet, he of course
knew now. He could not but admit to himself that he
might not have made this journey, if he could have
foreseen the events of a few days. And yet his misgivings
were not so dark as, imagined by the light of this later
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time, they would appear. Troubled as the future was, it
was the unknown future, and in its obscurity there was
ignorant hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights
long, which, within a few rounds of the clock, was to set a
great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of
harvest, was as far out of his knowledge as if it had been a
hundred thousand years away. The ‘sharp female newlyborn,
and called La Guillotine,’ was hardly known to him,
or to the generality of people, by name. The frightful
deeds that were to be soon done, were probably
unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. How
could they have a place in the shadowy conceptions of a
gentle mind?
Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in
cruel separation from his wife and child, he foreshadowed
the likelihood, or the certainty; but, beyond this, he
dreaded nothing distinctly. With this on his mind, which
was enough to carry into a dreary prison courtyard, he
arrived at the prison of La Force.
A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to
whom Defarge presented ‘The Emigrant Evremonde.’
‘What the Devil! How many more of them!’ exclaimed
the man with the bloated face.
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Defarge took his receipt without noticing the
exclamation, and withdrew, with his two fellow-patriots.
‘What the Devil, I say again!’ exclaimed the gaoler, left
with his wife. ‘How many more!’
The gaoler’s wife, being provided with no answer to
the question, merely replied, ‘One must have patience, my
dear!’ Three turnkeys who entered responsive to a bell she
rang, echoed the sentiment, and one added, ‘For the love
of Liberty;’ which sounded in that place like an
inappropriate conclusion.
The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and
filthy, and with a horrible smell of foul sleep in it.
Extraordinary how soon the noisome flavour of
imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in all such places that
are ill cared for!
‘In secret, too,’ grumbled the gaoler, looking at the
written paper. ‘As if I was not already full to bursting!’
He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and
Charles Darnay awaited his further pleasure for half an
hour: sometimes, pacing to and fro in the strong arched
room: sometimes, resting on a stone seat: in either case
detained to be imprinted on the memory of the chief and
his subordinates.
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‘Come!’ said the chief, at length taking up his keys,
‘come with me, emigrant.’
Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge
accompanied him by corridor and staircase, many doors
clanging and locking behind them, until they came into a
large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with prisoners of
both sexes. The women were seated at a long table,
reading and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroidering;
the men were for the most part standing behind their
chairs, or lingering up and down the room.
In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful
crime and disgrace, the new-comer recoiled from this
company. But the crowning unreality of his long unreal
ride, was, their all at once rising to receive him, with
every refinement of manner known to the time, and with
all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.
So strangely clouded were these refinements by the
prison manners and gloom, so spectral did they become in
the inappropriate squalor and misery through which they
were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand in a
company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the
ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of
pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of
youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the
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desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed
by the death they had died in coming there.
It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his
side, and the other gaolers moving about, who would
have been well enough as to appearance in the ordinary
exercise of their functions, looked so extravagantly coarse
contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming
daughters who were there—with the apparitions of the
coquette, the young beauty, and the mature woman
delicately bred—that the inversion of all experience and
likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was
heightened to its utmost. Surely, ghosts all. Surely, the
long unreal ride some progress of disease that had brought
him to these gloomy shades!
‘In the name of the assembled companions in
misfortune,’ said a gentleman of courtly appearance and
address, coming forward, ‘I have the honour of giving you
welcome to La Force, and of condoling with you on the
calamity that has brought you among us. May it soon
terminate happily! It would be an impertinence elsewhere,
but it is not so here, to ask your name and condition?’
Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required
information, in words as suitable as he could find.
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‘But I hope,’ said the gentleman, following the chief
gaoler with his eyes, who moved across the room, ‘that
you are not in secret?’
‘I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I
have heard them say so.’
‘Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take
courage; several members of our society have been in
secret, at first, and it has lasted but a short time.’ Then he
added, raising his voice, ‘I grieve to inform the society—in
secret.’
There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles
Darnay crossed the room to a grated door where the
gaoler awaited him, and many voices—among which, the
soft and compassionate voices of women were
conspicuous—gave him good wishes and encouragement.
He turned at the grated door, to render the thanks of his
heart; it closed under the gaoler’s hand; and the apparitions
vanished from his sight forever.
The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading
upward. When they bad ascended forty steps (the prisoner
of half an hour already counted them), the gaoler opened a
low black door, and they passed into a solitary cell. It
struck cold and damp, but was not dark.
‘Yours,’ said the gaoler.
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‘Why am I confined alone?’
‘How do I know!’
‘I can buy pen, ink, and paper?’
‘Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can
ask then. At present, you may buy your food, and nothing
more.’
There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw
mattress. As the gaoler made a general inspection of these
objects, and of the four walls, before going out, a
wandering fancy wandered through the mind of the
prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him, that this
gaoler was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and
person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and
filled with water. When the gaoler was gone, he thought
in the same wandering way, ‘Now am I left, as if I were
dead.’ Stopping then, to look down at the mattress, he
turned from it with a sick feeling, and thought, ‘And here
in these crawling creatures is the first condition of the
body after death.’
‘Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a
half, five paces by four and a half.’ The prisoner walked to
and fro in his cell, counting its measurement, and the roar
of the city arose like muffled drums with a wild swell of
voices added to them. ‘He made shoes, he made shoes, he
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made shoes.’ The prisoner counted the measurement
again, and paced faster, to draw his mind with him from
that latter repetition. ‘The ghosts that vanished when the
wicket closed. There was one among them, the
appearance of a lady dressed in black, who was leaning in
the embrasure of a window, and she had a light shining
upon her golden hair, and she looked like * * * * Let us
ride on again, for God’s sake, through the illuminated
villages with the people all awake! * * * * He made shoes,
he made shoes, he made shoes. * * * * Five paces by four
and a half.’ With such scraps tossing and rolling upward
from the depths of his mind, the prisoner walked faster
and faster, obstinately counting and counting; and the roar
of the city changed to this extent—that it still rolled in like
muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he knew,
in the swell that rose above them.
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II
The Grindstone
Tellson’s Bank, established in the Saint Germain
Quarter of Paris, was in a wing of a large house,
approached by a courtyard and shut off from the street by
a high wall and a strong gate. The house belonged to a
great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a flight
from the troubles, in his own cook’s dress, and got across
the borders. A mere beast of the chase flying from hunters,
he was still in his metempsychosis no other than the same
Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate for
whose lips had once occupied three strong men besides
the cook in question.
Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving
themselves from the sin of having drawn his high wages,
by being more than ready and willing to cut his throat on
the altar of the dawning Republic one and indivisible of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur’s
house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated.
For, all things moved so fast, and decree followed decree
with that fierce precipitation, that now upon the third
night of the autumn month of September, patriot
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emissaries of the law were in possession of Monseigneur’s
house, and had marked it with the tri-colour, and were
drinking brandy in its state apartments.
A place of business in London like Tellson’s place of
business in Paris, would soon have driven the House out
of its mind and into the Gazette. For, what would staid
British responsibility and respectability have said to
orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard, and even to a
Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were. Tellson’s
had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen on
the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often
does) at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must
inevitably have come of this young Pagan, in Lombardstreet,
London, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of
the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the
wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who danced in public
on the slightest provocation. Yet, a French Tellson’s could
get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as long as
the times held together, no man had taken fright at them,
and drawn out his money.
What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s
henceforth, and what would lie there, lost and forgotten;
what plate and jewels would tarnish in Tellson’s hidingplaces,
while the depositors rusted in prisons, and when
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they should have violently perished; how many accounts
with Tellson’s never to be balanced in this world, must be
carried over into the next; no man could have said, that
night, any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he
thought heavily of these questions. He sat by a newlylighted
wood fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was
prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face
there was a deeper shade than the pendent lamp could
throw, or any object in the room distortedly reflect—a
shade of horror.
He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the
House of which he had grown to be a part, lie strong
root-ivy. it chanced that they derived a kind of security
from the patriotic occupation of the main building, but
the true-hearted old gentleman never calculated about
that. All such circumstances were indifferent to him, so
that he did his duty. On the opposite side of the
courtyard, under a colonnade, was extensive standing—for
carriages—where, indeed, some carriages of Monseigneur
yet stood. Against two of the pillars were fastened two
great flaring flambeaux, and in the light of these, standing
out in the open air, was a large grindstone: a roughly
mounted thing which appeared to have hurriedly been
brought there from some neighbouring smithy, or other
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workshop. Rising and looking out of window at these
harmless objects, Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat
by the fire. He had opened, not only the glass window,
but the lattice blind outside it, and he had closed both
again, and he shivered through his frame.
From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong
gate, there came the usual night hum of the city, with
now and then an indescribable ring in it, weird and
unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible nature
were going up to Heaven.
‘Thank God,’ said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, ‘that
no one near and dear to me is in this dreadful town tonight.
May He have mercy on all who are in danger!’
Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and
he thought, ‘They have come back!’ and sat listening. But,
there was no loud irruption into the courtyard, as he had
expected, and he heard the gate clash again, and all was
quiet.
The nervousness and dread that were upon him
inspired that vague uneasiness respecting the Bank, which
a great change would naturally awaken, with such feelings
roused. It was well guarded, and he got up to go among
the trusty people who were watching it, when his door
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suddenly opened, and two figures rushed in, at sight of
which he fell back in amazement.
Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out
to him, and with that old look of earnestness so
concentrated and intensified, that it seemed as though it
had been stamped upon her face expressly to give force
and power to it in this one passage of her life.
‘What is this?’ cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused.
‘What is the matter? Lucie! Manette! What has happened?
What has brought you here? What is it?’
With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and
wildness, she panted out in his arms, imploringly, ‘O my
dear friend! My husband!’
‘Your husband, Lucie?’
‘Charles.’
‘What of Charles?’
‘Here.
‘Here, in Paris?’
‘Has been here some days—three or four—I don’t
know how many— I can’t collect my thoughts. An errand
of generosity brought him here unknown to us; he was
stopped at the barrier, and sent to prison.’
The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the
same moment, the beg of the great gate rang again, and a
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loud noise of feet and voices came pouring into the
courtyard.
‘What is that noise?’ said the Doctor, turning towards
the window.
‘Don’t look!’ cried Mr. Lorry. ‘Don’t look out!
Manette, for your life, don’t touch the blind!’
The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening
of the window, and said, with a cool, bold smile:
‘My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I
have been a Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in
Paris—in Paris? In France—who, knowing me to have
been a prisoner in the Bastille, would touch me, except to
overwhelm me with embraces, or carry me in triumph.
My old pain has given me a power that has brought us
through the barrier, and gained us news of Charles there,
and brought us here. I knew it would be so; I knew I
could help Charles out of all danger; I told Lucie so.—
What is that noise?’ His hand was again upon the window.
‘Don’t look!’ cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate.
‘No, Lucie, my dear, nor you!’ He got his arm round her,
and held her. ‘Don’t be so terrified, my love. I solemnly
swear to you that I know of no harm having happened to
Charles; that I had no suspicion even of his being in this
fatal place. What prison is he in?’
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‘La Force!’
‘La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and
serviceable in your life—and you were always both—you
will compose yourself now, to do exactly as I bid you; for
more depends upon it than you can think, or I can say.
There is no help for you in any action on your part tonight;
you cannot possibly stir out. I say this, because what
I must bid you to do for Charles’s sake, is the hardest thing
to do of all. You must instantly be obedient, still, and
quiet. You must let me put you in a room at the back
here. You must leave your father and me alone for two
minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the world you
must not delay.’
‘I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you
know I can do nothing else than this. I know you are
true.’
The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room,
and turned the key; then, came hurrying back to the
Doctor, and opened the window and partly opened the
blind, and put his hand upon the Doctor’s arm, and
looked out with him into the courtyard.
Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not
enough in number, or near enough, to fill the courtyard:
not more than forty or fifty in all. The people in
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possession of the house had let them in at the gate, and
they had rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had
evidently been set up there for their purpose, as in a
convenient and retired spot.
But, such awful workers, and such awful work!
The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it
madly were two men, whose faces, as their long hair
Rapped back when the whirlings of the grindstone
brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than
the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous
disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck
upon them, and their hideous countenances were all
bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all
staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of
sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted
locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung
backward over their necks, some women held wine to
their mouths that they might drink; and what with
dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what
with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their
wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could
not detect one creature in the group free from the smear
of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the
sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with
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the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of
rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off
with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the
stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets,
knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened,
were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied
to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of
linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but
all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of
these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks
and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
their frenzied eyes;—eyes which any unbrutalised
beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify
with a well-directed gun.
All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a
drowning man, or of any human creature at any very great
pass, could see a world if it were there. They drew back
from the window, and the Doctor looked for explanation
in his friend’s ashy face.
‘They are,’ Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing
fearfully round at the locked room, ‘murdering the
prisoners. If you are sure of what you say; if you really
have the power you think you have—as I believe you
have—make yourself known to these devils, and get taken
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to La Force. It may be too late, I don’t know, but let it
not be a minute later!’
Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded
out of the room, and was in the courtyard when Mr.
Lorry regained the blind.
His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the
impetuous confidence of his manner, as he put the
weapons aside like water, carried him in an instant to the
heart of the concourse at the stone. For a few moments
there was a pause, and a hurry, and a murmur, and the
unintelligible sound of his voice; and then Mr. Lorry saw
him, surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line of
twenty men long, all linked shoulder to shoulder, and
hand to shoulder, hurried out with cries of—‘Live the
Bastille prisoner! Help for the Bastille prisoner’s kindred in
La Force! Room for the Bastille prisoner in front there!
Save the prisoner Evremonde at La Force!’ and a thousand
answering shouts.
He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart,
closed the window and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and
told her that her father was assisted by the people, and
gone in search of her husband. He found her child and
Miss Pross with her; but, it never occurred to him to be
surprised by their appearance until a long time afterwards,
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when he sat watching them in such quiet as the night
knew.
Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor
at his feet, clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the
child down on his own bed, and her head had gradually
fallen on the pillow beside her pretty charge. O the long,
long night, with the moans of the poor wife! And O the
long, long night, with no return of her father and no
tidings!
Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate
sounded, and the irruption was repeated, and the
grindstone whirled and spluttered. ‘What is it?’ cried
Lucie, affrighted. ‘Hush! The soldiers’ swords are
sharpened there,’ said Mr. Lorry. ‘The place is national
property now, and used as a kind of armoury, my love.’
Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble
and fitful. Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he
softly detached himself from the clasping hand, and
cautiously looked out again. A man, so besmeared that he
might have been a sorely wounded soldier creeping back
to consciousness on a field of slain, was rising from the
pavement by the side of the grindstone, and looking about
him with a vacant air. Shortly, this worn-out murderer
descried in the imperfect light one of the carriages of
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Monseigneur, and, staggering to that gorgeous vehicle,
climbed in at the door, and shut himself up to take his rest
on its dainty cushions.
The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr.
Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the
courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in
the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had
never given, and would never take away.
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III
The Shadow
One of the first considerations which arose in the
business mind of Mr. Lorry when business hours came
round, was this:—that he had no right to imperil Tellson’s
by sheltering the wife of an emigrant prisoner under the
Bank roof, His own possessions, safety, life, he would have
hazarded for Lucie and her child, without a moment’s
demur; but the great trust he held was not his own, and as
to that business charge he was a strict man of business.
At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought
of finding out the wine-shop again and taking counsel
with its master in reference to the safest dwelling-place in
the distracted state of the city. But, the same consideration
that suggested him, repudiated him; he lived in the most
violent Quarter, and doubtless was influential there, and
deep in its dangerous workings.
Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and
every minute’s delay tending to compromise Tellson’s,
Mr. Lorry advised with Lucie. She said that her father had
spoken of hiring a lodging for a short term, in that
Quarter, near the Banking-house. As there was no
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business objection to this, and as he foresaw that even if it
were all well with Charles, and he were to be released, he
could not hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry went out in
quest of such a lodging, and found a suitable one, high up
in a removed by-street where the closed blinds in all the
other windows of a high melancholy square of buildings
marked deserted homes.
To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her
child, and Miss Pross: giving them what comfort he could,
and much more than he had himself. He left Jerry with
them, as a figure to fill a doorway that would bear
considerable knocking on the head, and retained to his
own occupations. A disturbed and doleful mind he
brought to bear upon them, and slowly and heavily the
day lagged on with him.
It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the
Bank closed. He was again alone in his room of the
previous night, considering what to do next, when he
heard a foot upon the stair. In a few moments, a man
stood in his presence, who, with a keenly observant look
at him, addressed him by his name.
‘Your servant,’ said Mr. Lorry. ‘Do you know me?’
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He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair,
from forty-five to fifty years of age. For answer he
repeated, without any change of emphasis, the words:
‘Do you know me?’
‘I have seen you somewhere.’
‘Perhaps at my wine-shop?’
Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said: ‘You
come from Doctor Manette?’
‘Yes. I come from Doctor Manette.’
‘And what says he? What does he send me?’
Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of
paper. It bore the words in the Doctor’s writing:
"Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave
this place yet. I have obtained the favour
that the bearer has a short note from
Charles to his wife. Let the bearer see his
wife.’
It was dated from La Force, within an hour.
‘Will you accompany me,’ said Mr. Lorry, joyfully
relieved after reading this note aloud, ‘to where his wife
resides?’
‘Yes,’ returned Defarge.
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Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved
and mechanical way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his
hat and they went down into the courtyard. There, they
found two women; one, knitting.
‘Madame Defarge, surely!’ said Mr. Lorry, who had left
her in exactly the same attitude some seventeen years ago.
‘It is she,’ observed her husband.
‘Does Madame go with us?’ inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing
that she moved as they moved.
‘Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and
know the persons. It is for their safety.’
Beginning to be struck by Defarge’s manner, Mr. Lorry
looked dubiously at him, and led the way. Both the
women followed; the second woman being The
Vengeance.
They passed through the intervening streets as quickly
as they might, ascended the staircase of the new domicile,
were admitted by Jerry, and found Lucie weeping, alone.
She was thrown into a transport by the tidings Mr. Lorry
gave her of her husband, and clasped the hand that
delivered his note—little thinking what it had been doing
near him in the night, and might, but for a chance, have
done to him.
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"DEAREST,—Take courage. I am well,
and your father has influence around me.
You cannot answer this. Kiss our child for
me.’
That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to
her who received it, that she turned from Defarge to his
wife, and kissed one of the hands that knitted. It was a
passionate, loving, thankful, womanly action, but the hand
made no response—dropped cold and heavy, and took to
its knitting again.
There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a
check. She stopped in the act of putting the note in her
bosom, and, with her hands yet at her neck, looked
terrified at Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge met the
lifted eyebrows and forehead with a cold, impassive stare.
‘My dear,’ said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; ‘there
are frequent risings in the streets; and, although it is not
likely they will ever trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes
to see those whom she has the power to protect at such
times, to the end that she may know them—that she may
identify them. I believe,’ said Mr. Lorry, rather halting in
his reassuring words, as the stony manner of all the three
impressed itself upon him more and more, ‘I state the case,
Citizen Defarge?’
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Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other
answer than a gruff sound of acquiescence.
‘You had better, Lucie,’ said Mr. Lorry, doing all he
could to propitiate, by tone and manner, ‘have the dear
child here, and our good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge,
is an English lady, and knows no French.’
The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she
was more than a match for any foreigner, was not to be
shaken by distress and, danger, appeared with folded arms,
and observed in English to The Vengeance, whom her
eyes first encountered, ‘Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope
YOU are pretty well!’ She also bestowed a British cough
on Madame Defarge; but, neither of the two took much
heed of her.
‘Is that his child?’ said Madame Defarge, stopping in
her work for the first time, and pointing her knittingneedle
at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate.
‘Yes, madame,’ answered Mr. Lorry; ‘this is our poor
prisoner’s darling daughter, and only child.’
The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her
party seemed to fall so threatening and dark on the child,
that her mother instinctively kneeled on the ground beside
her, and held her to her breast. The shadow attendant on
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Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall,
threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child.
‘It is enough, my husband,’ said Madame Defarge. ‘I
have seen them. We may go.’
But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in
it—not visible and presented, but indistinct and
withheld—to alarm Lucie into saying, as she laid her
appealing hand on Madame Defarge’s dress:
‘You will be good to my poor husband. You will do
him no harm. You will help me to see him if you can?’
‘Your husband is not my business here,’ returned
Madame Defarge, looking down at her with perfect
composure. ‘It is the daughter of your father who is my
business here.’
‘For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my
child’s sake! She will put her hands together and pray you
to be merciful. We are more afraid of you than of these
others.’
Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and
looked at her husband. Defarge, who had been uneasily
biting his thumb-nail and looking at her, collected his face
into a sterner expression.
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‘What is it that your husband says in that little letter?’
asked Madame Defarge, with a lowering smile. ‘Influence;
he says something touching influence?’
‘That my father,’ said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper
from her breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her
questioner and not on it, ‘has much influence around
him.’
‘Surely it will release him!’ said Madame Defarge. ‘Let
it do so.’
‘As a wife and mother,’ cried Lucie, most earnestly, ‘I
implore you to have pity on me and not to exercise any
power that you possess, against my innocent husband, but
to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think of me. As a
wife and mother!’
Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the
suppliant, and said, turning to her friend The Vengeance:
‘The wives and mothers we have been used to see,
since we were as little as this child, and much less, have
not been greatly considered? We have known THEIR
husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them,
often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sisterwomen
suffer, in themselves and in their children,
poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery,
oppression and neglect of all kinds?’
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‘We have seen nothing else,’ returned The Vengeance.
‘We have borne this a long time,’ said Madame
Defarge, turning her eyes again upon Lucie. ‘Judge you! Is
it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother would be
much to us now?’
She resumed her knitting and went out. The
Vengeance followed. Defarge went last, and closed the
door.
‘Courage, my dear Lucie,’ said Mr. Lorry, as he raised
her. ‘Courage, courage! So far all goes well with us—
much, much better than it has of late gone with many
poor souls. Cheer up, and have a thankful heart.’
‘I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman
seems to throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes.’
‘Tut, tut!’ said Mr. Lorry; ‘what is this despondency in
the brave little breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in
it, Lucie.’
But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was
dark upon himself, for all that, and in his secret mind it
troubled him greatly.
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IV
Calm in Storm
Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of
the fourth day of his absence. So much of what had
happened in that dreadful time as could be kept from the
knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that
not until long afterwards, when France and she were far
apart, did she know that eleven hundred defenceless
prisoners of both sexes and all ages had been killed by the
populace; that four days and nights had been darkened by
this deed of horror; and that the air around her had been
tainted by the slain. She only knew that there had been an
attack upon the prisons, that all political prisoners had
been in danger, and that some had been dragged out by
the crowd and murdered.
To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an
injunction of secrecy on which he had no need to dwell,
that the crowd had taken him through a scene of carnage
to the prison of La Force. That, in the prison he had
found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before which the
prisoners were brought singly, and by which they were
rapidly ordered to be put forth to be massacred, or to be
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