He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light,
and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat,
with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He
never looked at the figure before him, without first
looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he
had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never
spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and
forgetting to speak.
‘Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?’
asked Defarge, motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.
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‘What did you say?’
‘Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?’
‘I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.’
But, the question reminded him of his work, and he
bent over it again.
Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter
by the door. When he had stood, for a minute or two, by
the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up. He showed
no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady
fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked
at it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale leadcolour),
and then the hand dropped to his work, and he
once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action
had occupied but an instant.
‘You have a visitor, you see,’ said Monsieur Defarge.
‘What did you say?’
‘Here is a visitor.’
The shoemaker looked up as before, but without
removing a hand from his work.
‘Come!’ said Defarge. ‘Here is monsieur, who knows a
well-made shoe when he sees one. Show him that shoe
you are working at. Take it, monsieur.’
Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.
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‘Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s
name.’
There was a longer pause than usual, before the
shoemaker replied:
‘I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?’
‘I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for
monsieur’s information?’
‘It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It
is in the present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a
pattern in my hand.’ He glanced at the shoe with some
little passing touch of pride.
‘And the maker’s name?’ said Defarge.
Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles
of the right hand in the hollow of the left, and then the
knuckles of the left hand in the hollow of the right, and
then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and so on in
regular changes, without a moment’s intermission. The
task of recalling him from the vagrancy into which he
always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling some
very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the
hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying
man.
‘Did you ask me for my name?’
‘Assuredly I did.’
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‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’
‘Is that all?’
‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’
With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan,
he bent to work again, until the silence was again broken.
‘You are not a shoemaker by trade?’ said Mr. Lorry,
looking steadfastly at him.
His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have
transferred the question to him: but as no help came from
that quarter, they turned back on the questioner when
they had sought the ground.
‘I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a
shoemaker by trade. I-I learnt it here. I taught myself. I
asked leave to—‘
He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those
measured changes on his hands the whole time. His eyes
came slowly back, at last, to the face from which they had
wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and
resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake,
reverting to a subject of last night.
‘I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much
difficulty after a long while, and I have made shoes ever
since.’
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As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been
taken from him, Mr. Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in
his face:
‘Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?’
The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking
fixedly at the questioner.
‘Monsieur Manette"; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon
Defarge’s arm; ‘do you remember nothing of this man?
Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old banker, no old
business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your mind,
Monsieur Manette?’
As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by
turns, at Mr. Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated
marks of an actively intent intelligence in the middle of
the forehead, gradually forced themselves through the
black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded
again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had
been there. And so exactly was the expression repeated on
the fair young face of her who had crept along the wall to
a point where she could see him, and where she now
stood looking at him, with hands which at first had been
only raised in frightened compassion, if not even to keep
him off and shut out the sight of him, but which were
now extending towards him, trembling with eagerness to
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lay the spectral face upon her warm young breast, and love
it back to life and hope—so exactly was the expression
repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young
face, that it looked as though it had passed like a moving
light, from him to her.
Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at
the two, less and less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy
abstraction sought the ground and looked about him in
the old way. Finally, with a deep long sigh, he took the
shoe up, and resumed his work.
‘Have you recognised him, monsieur?’ asked Defarge in
a whisper.
‘Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless,
but I have unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the
face that I once knew so well. Hush! Let us draw further
back. Hush!’
She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near
to the bench on which he sat. There was something awful
in his unconsciousness of the figure that could have put
out its hand and touched him as he stooped over his
labour.
Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She
stood, like a spirit, beside him, and he bent over his work.
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It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change
the instrument in his hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay
on that side of him which was not the side on which she
stood. He had taken it up, and was stooping to work
again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress. He
raised them, and saw her face. The two spectators started
forward, but she stayed them with a motion of her hand.
She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife,
though they had.
He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while
his lips began to form some words, though no sound
proceeded from them. By degrees, in the pauses of his
quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:
‘What is this?’
With the tears streaming down her face, she put her
two hands to her lips, and kissed them to him; then
clasped them on her breast, as if she laid his ruined head
there.
‘You are not the gaoler’s daughter?’
She sighed ‘No.’
‘Who are you?’
Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down
on the bench beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her
hand upon his arm. A strange thrill struck him when she
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did so, and visibly passed over his frame; he laid the knife
down’ softly, as he sat staring at her.
Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had
been hurriedly pushed aside, and fell down over her neck.
Advancing his hand by little and little, he took it up and
looked at it. In the midst of the action he went astray, and,
with another deep sigh, fell to work at his shoemaking.
But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand
upon his shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or
three times, as if to be sure that it was really there, he laid
down his work, put his hand to his neck, and took off a
blackened string with a scrap of folded rag attached to it.
He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained a
very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long
golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off
upon his finger.
He took her hair into his hand again, and looked
closely at it. ‘It is the same. How can it be! When was it!
How was it!’
As the concentrated expression returned to his
forehead, he seemed to become conscious that it was in
hers too. He turned her full to the light, and looked at
her.
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‘She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night
when I was summoned out—she had a fear of my going,
though I had none—and when I was brought to the
North Tower they found these upon my sleeve. ‘You will
leave me them? They can never help me to escape in the
body, though they may in the spirit.’ Those were the
words I said. I remember them very well.’
He formed this speech with his lips many times before
he could utter it. But when he did find spoken words for
it, they came to him coherently, though slowly.
‘How was this?—WAS IT YOU?’
Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned
upon her with a frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly
still in his grasp, and only said, in a low voice, ‘I entreat
you, good gentlemen, do not come near us, do not speak,
do not move!’
‘Hark!’ he exclaimed. ‘Whose voice was that?’
His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went
up to his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died
out, as everything but his shoemaking did die out of him,
and he refolded his little packet and tried to secure it in his
breast; but he still looked at her, and gloomily shook his
head.
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‘No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t
be. See what the prisoner is. These are not the hands she
knew, this is not the face she knew, this is not a voice she
ever heard. No, no. She was—and He was—before the
slow years of the North Tower—ages ago. What is your
name, my gentle angel?’
Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell
upon her knees before him, with her appealing hands
upon his breast.
‘O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and
who my mother was, and who my father, and how I
never knew their hard, hard history. But I cannot tell you
at this time, and I cannot tell you here. All that I may tell
you, here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch me and
to bless me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my dear, my dear!’
His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair,
which warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of
Freedom shining on him.
‘If you hear in my voice—I don’t know that it is so,
but I hope it is—if you hear in my voice any resemblance
to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep
for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair,
anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast
when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it!
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If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where
I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my
faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home
long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for
it, weep for it!’
She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him
on her breast like a child.
‘If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is
over, and that I have come here to take you from it, and
that we go to England to be at peace and at rest, I cause
you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our
native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it!
And if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father
who is living, and of my mother who is dead, you learn
that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore
his pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and
lain awake and wept all night, because the love of my
poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for it, weep
for it! Weep for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen,
thank God! I feel his sacred tears upon my face, and his
sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank God for us,
thank God!’
He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her
breast: a sight so touching, yet so terrible in the
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tremendous wrong and suffering which had gone before
it, that the two beholders covered their faces.
When the quiet of the garret had been long
undisturbed, and his heaving breast and shaken form had
long yielded to the calm that must follow all storms—
emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which
the storm called Life must hush at last—they came forward
to raise the father and daughter from the ground. He had
gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy,
worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his head
might lie upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him
curtained him from the light.
‘If, without disturbing him,’ she said, raising her hand
to Mr. Lorry as he stooped over them, after repeated
blowings of his nose, ‘all could be arranged for our leaving
Paris at once, so that, from the, very door, he could be
taken away—‘
‘But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?’ asked Mr.
Lorry.
‘More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so
dreadful to him.’
‘It is true,’ said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on
and hear. ‘More than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all
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reasons, best out of France. Say, shall I hire a carriage and
post-horses?’
‘That’s business,’ said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the
shortest notice his methodical manners; ‘and if business is
to be done, I had better do it.’
‘Then be so kind,’ urged Miss Manette, ‘as to leave us
here. You see how composed he has become, and you
cannot be afraid to leave him with me now. Why should
you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from
interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when
you come back, as quiet as you leave him. In any case, I
will take care of him until you return, and then we will
remove him straight.’
Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to
this course, and in favour of one of them remaining. But,
as there were not only carriage and horses to be seen to,
but travelling papers; and as time pressed, for the day was
drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily dividing
the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying
away to do it.
Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her
head down on the hard ground close at the father’s side,
and watched him. The darkness deepened and deepened,
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and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed through the
chinks in the wall.
Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready
for the journey, and had brought with them, besides
travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and meat, wine, and
hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the
lamp he carried, on the shoemaker’s bench (there was
nothing else in the garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr.
Lorry roused the captive, and assisted him to his feet.
No human intelligence could have read the mysteries
of his mind, in the scared blank wonder of his face.
Whether he knew what had happened, whether he
recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew
that he was free, were questions which no sagacity could
have solved. They tried speaking to him; but, he was so
confused, and so very slow to answer, that they took fright
at his bewilderment, and agreed for the time to tamper
with him no more. He had a wild, lost manner of
occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not
been seen in him before; yet, he had some pleasure in the
mere sound of his daughter’s voice, and invariably turned
to it when she spoke.
In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey
under coercion, he ate and drank what they gave him to
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eat and drink, and put on the cloak and other wrappings,
that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to his
daughter’s drawing her arm through his, and took—and
kept—her hand in both his own.
They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first
with the lamp, Mr. Lorry closing the little procession.
They had not traversed many steps of the long main
staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and
round at the wails.
‘You remember the place, my father? You remember
coming up here?’
‘What did you say?’
But, before she could repeat the question, he
murmured an answer as if she had repeated it.
‘Remember? No, I don’t remember. It was so very
long ago.’
That he had no recollection whatever of his having
been brought from his prison to that house, was apparent
to them. They heard him mutter, ‘One Hundred and
Five, North Tower;’ and when he looked about him, it
evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long
encompassed him. On their reaching the courtyard he
instinctively altered his tread, as being in expectation of a
drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge, and he
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saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his
daughter’s hand and clasped his head again.
No crowd was about the door; no people were
discernible at any of the many windows; not even a
chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural silence and
desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and
that was Madame Defarge—who leaned against the doorpost,
knitting, and saw nothing.
The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter
had followed him, when Mr. Lorry’s feet were arrested on
the step by his asking, miserably, for his shoemaking tools
and the unfinished shoes. Madame Defarge immediately
called to her husband that she would get them, and went,
knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She
quickly brought them down and handed them in;—and
immediately afterwards leaned against the door-post,
knitting, and saw nothing.
Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word ‘To the
Barrier!’ The postilion cracked his whip, and they
clattered away under the feeble over-swinging lamps.
Under the over-swinging lamps—swinging ever
brighter in the better streets, and ever dimmer in the
worse—and by lighted shops, gay crowds, illuminated
coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city gates.
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Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. ‘Your
papers, travellers!’ ‘See here then, Monsieur the Officer,’
said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart,
‘these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white
head. They were consigned to me, with him, at the—’ He
dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the military
lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by
an arm in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm
looked, not an every day or an every night look, at
monsieur with the white head. ‘It is well. Forward!’ from
the uniform. ‘Adieu!’ from Defarge. And so, under a short
grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out
under the great grove of stars.
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some,
so remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is
doubtful whether their rays have even yet discovered it, as
a point in space where anything is suffered or done: the
shadows of the night were broad and black. All through
the cold and restless interval, until dawn, they once more
whispered in the ears of Mr. Jarvis Lorry—sitting opposite
the buried man who had been dug out, and wondering
what subtle powers were for ever lost to him, and what
were capable of restoration—the old inquiry:
‘I hope you care to be recalled to life?’
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And the old answer:
‘I can’t say.’
The end of the first book.
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I
Five Years Later
Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned
place, even in the year one thousand seven hundred and
eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very
incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover,
in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were
proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its
ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness. They were even
boastful of its eminence in those particulars, and were fired
by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable,
it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief, but
an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient
places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbowroom,
Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no
embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks
Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven!—
Any one of these partners would have disinherited his
son on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect
the House was much on a par with the Country; which
did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting
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improvements in laws and customs that had long been
highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the
triumphant perfection of inconvenience. After bursting
open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its
throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came
to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little
counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque
shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the
signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always
under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which
were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and
the heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business
necessitated your seeing ‘the House,’ you were put into a
species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you
meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its
hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the
dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into,
wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up
your nose and down your throat when they were opened
and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they
were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was
stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools, and evil
communications corrupted its good polish in a day or two.
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Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms made of
kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their
parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes
of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room,
that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a
dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven
hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you by your
old love, or by your little children, were but newly
released from the horror of being ogled through the
windows, by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an
insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or
Ashantee.
But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe
much in vogue with all trades and professions, and not
least of all with Tellson’s. Death is Nature’s remedy for all
things, and why not Legislation’s? Accordingly, the forger
was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to
Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;
the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to
Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door, who made
off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling
was put to Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the
notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death.
Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention—it
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might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was
exactly the reverse—but, it cleared off (as to this world)
the trouble of each particular case, and left nothing else
connected with it to be looked after. Thus, Tellson’s, in its
day, like greater places of business, its contemporaries, had
taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it
had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately
disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little
light the ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.
Cramped in all kinds of dun cupboards and hutches at
Tellson’s, the oldest of men carried on the business
gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson’s
London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old.
They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had
the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then
only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring
over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into
the general weight of the establishment.
Outside Tellson’s—never by any means in it, unless
called in—was an odd-job-man, an occasional porter and
messenger, who served as the live sign of the house. He
was never absent during business hours, unless upon an
errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly
urchin of twelve, who was his express image. People
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understood that Tellson’s, in a stately way, tolerated the
odd-job-man. The house had always tolerated some
person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted this
person to the post. His surname was Cruncher, and on the
youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of
darkness, in the easterly parish church of Hounsditch, he
had received the added appellation of Jerry.
The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in
Hanging-sword-alley, Whitefriars: the time, half-past
seven of the clock on a windy March morning, Anno
Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher
himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna
Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the
Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game,
by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)
Mr. Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury
neighbourhood, and were but two in number, even if a
closet with a single pane of glass in it might be counted as
one. But they were very decently kept. Early as it was, on
the windy March morning, the room in which he lay abed
was already scrubbed throughout; and between the cups
and saucers arranged for breakfast, and the lumbering deal
table, a very clean white cloth was spread.
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Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane,
like a Harlequin at home. At fast, he slept heavily, but, by
degrees, began to roll and surge in bed, until he rose above
the surface, with his spiky hair looking as if it must tear
the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he exclaimed, in
a voice of dire exasperation:
‘Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!’
A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose
from her knees in a corner, with sufficient haste and
trepidation to show that she was the person referred to.
‘What!’ said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a
boot. ‘You’re at it agin, are you?’
After hailing the mom with this second salutation, he
threw a boot at the woman as a third. It was a very muddy
boot, and may introduce the odd circumstance connected
with Mr. Cruncher’s domestic economy, that, whereas he
often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he
often got up next morning to find the same boots covered
with clay.
‘What,’ said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after
missing his mark—‘what are you up to, Aggerawayter?’
‘I was only saying my prayers.’
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‘Saying your prayers! You’re a nice woman! What do
you mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin
me?’
‘I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.’
‘You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the
liberty with. Here! your mother’s a nice woman, young
Jerry, going a praying agin your father’s prosperity. You’ve
got a dutiful mother, you have, my son. You’ve got a
religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping
herself down, and praying that the bread-and-butter may
be snatched out of the mouth of her only child.’
Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very
ill, and, turning to his mother, strongly deprecated any
praying away of his personal board.
‘And what do you suppose, you conceited female,’ said
Mr. Cruncher, with unconscious inconsistency, ‘that the
worth of YOUR prayers may be? Name the price that
you put YOUR prayers at!’
‘They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth
no more than that.’
‘Worth no more than that,’ repeated Mr. Cruncher.
‘They ain’t worth much, then. Whether or no, I won’t be
prayed agin, I tell you. I can’t afford it. I’m not a going to
be made unlucky by YOUR sneaking. If you must go
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flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband
and child, and not in opposition to ‘em. If I had had any
but a unnat’ral wife, and this poor boy had had any but a
unnat’ral mother, I might have made some money last
week instead of being counter-prayed and countermined
and religiously circumwented into the worst of luck. B-uu-
ust me!’ said Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been
putting on his clothes, ‘if I ain’t, what with piety and one
blowed thing and another, been choused this last week
into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman
met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my boy, and while
I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and
then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a
call. For, I tell you,’ here he addressed his wife once more,
‘I won’t be gone agin, in this manner. I am as rickety as a
hackney-coach, I’m as sleepy as laudanum, my lines is
strained to that degree that I shouldn’t know, if it wasn’t
for the pain in ‘em, which was me and which somebody
else, yet I’m none the better for it in pocket; and it’s my
suspicion that you’ve been at it from morning to night to
prevent me from being the better for it in pocket, and I
won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say
now!’
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Growling, in addition, such phrases as ‘Ah! yes! You’re
religious, too. You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to
the interests of your husband and child, would you? Not
you!’ and throwing off other sarcastic sparks from the
whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher
betook himself to his boot-cleaning and his general
preparation for business. In the meantime, his son, whose
head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and whose young
eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did, kept
the required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed
that poor woman at intervals, by darting out of his
sleeping closet, where he made his toilet, with a
suppressed cry of ‘You are going to flop, mother. —
Halloa, father!’ and, after raising this fictitious alarm,
darting in again with an undutiful grin.
Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when
he came to his breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s
saying grace with particular animosity.
‘Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it again?’
His wife explained that she had merely ‘asked a
blessing.’
‘Don’t do it!’ said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he
rather expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy
of his wife’s petitions. ‘I ain’t a going to be blest out of
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house and home. I won’t have my wittles blest off my
table. Keep still!’
Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all
night at a party which had taken anything but a convivial
turn, Jerry Cruncher worried his breakfast rather than ate
it, growling over it like any four-footed inmate of a
menagerie. Towards nine o’clock he smoothed his ruffled
aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like an
exterior as he could overlay his natural self with, issued
forth to the occupation of the day.
It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his
favourite description of himself as ‘a honest tradesman.’
His stock consisted of a wooden stool, made out of a
broken-backed chair cut down, which stool, young Jerry,
walking at his father’s side, carried every morning to
beneath the banking-house window that was nearest
Temple Bar: where, with the addition of the first handful
of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to
keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet, it
formed the encampment for the day. On this post of his,
Mr. Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the
Temple, as the Bar itself,—and was almost as in-looking.
Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to
touch his three- cornered hat to the oldest of men as they
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passed in to Tellson’s, Jerry took up his station on this
windy March morning, with young Jerry standing by him,
when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to
inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description
on passing boys who were small enough for his amiable
purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other,
looking silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet-street,
with their two heads as near to one another as the two
eyes of each were, bore a considerable resemblance to a
pair of monkeys. The resemblance was not lessened by the
accidental circumstance, that the mature Jerry bit and spat
out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the youthful Jerry
were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything else in
Fleet-street.
The head of one of the regular indoor messengers
attached to Tellson’s establishment was put through the
door, and the word was given:
‘Porter wanted!’
‘Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!’
Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry
seated himself on the stool, entered on his reversionary
interest in the straw his father had been chewing, and
cogitated.
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‘Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!’ muttered
young Jerry. ‘Where does my father get all that iron rust
from? He don’t get no iron rust here!’
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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.
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‘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. Ifs 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.’
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‘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.’
‘WeB, well,’ said the old clerk; ‘we aa 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
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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
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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?’
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