‘For instance—‘
‘For instance,’ returned Madame Defarge, composedly,
‘shrouds.’
The man moved a little further away, as soon as he
could, and the mender of roads fanned himself with his
blue cap: feeling it mightily close and oppressive. If he
needed a King and Queen to restore him, he was
fortunate in having his remedy at hand; for, soon the
large-faced King and the fair-faced Queen came in their
golden coach, attended by the shining Bull’s Eye of their
Court, a glittering multitude of laughing ladies and fine
lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour
and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful
faces of both sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so
much to his temporary intoxication, that he cried Long
live the King, Long live the Queen, Long live everybody
and everything! as if he had never heard of ubiquitous
Jacques in his time. Then, there were gardens, courtyards,
terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen,
more Bull’s Eye,more lords and ladies, more Long live
they all! until he absolutely wept with sentiment. During
the whole of this scene, which lasted some three hours, he
had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental
company, and throughout Defarge held him by the collar,
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as if to restrain him from flying at the objects of his brief
devotion and tearing them to pieces.
‘Bravo!’ said Defarge, clapping him on the back when
it was over, like a patron; ‘you are a good boy!’
The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and
was mistrustful of having made a mistake in his late
demonstrations; but no.
‘You are the fellow we want,’ said Defarge, in his ear;
‘you make these fools believe that it will last for ever.
Then, they are the more insolent, and it is the nearer
ended.’
‘Hey!’ cried the mender of roads, reflectively; ‘that’s
true.’
‘These fools know nothing. While they despise your
breath, and would stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a
hundred like you rather than in one of their own horses or
dogs, they only know what your breath tells them. Let it
deceive them, then, a little longer; it cannot deceive them
too much.’
Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client,
and nodded in confirmation.
‘As to you,’ said she, ‘you would shout and shed tears
for anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would
you not?’
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‘Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.’
‘If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set
upon them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for
your own advantage, you would pick out the richest and
gayest. Say! Would you not?’
‘Truly yes, madame.’
‘Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to
fly, and were set upon them to strip them of their feathers
for your own advantage, you would set upon the birds of
the finest feathers; would you not?’
‘It is true, madame.’
‘You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,’ said
Madame Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the
place where they had last been apparent; ‘now, go home!’
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XVI
Still Knitting
Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned
amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in
a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the
dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside,
slowly tending towards that point of the compass where
the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave,
listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had
the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the
fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their
quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn,
strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and
terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy
that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just
lived in the village—had a faint and bare existence there,
as its people had—that when the knife struck home, the
faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and
pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up
forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and
bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would
henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great
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window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done,
two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose,
which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen
of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three
ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried
peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger
would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all
started away among the moss and leaves, like the more
fortunate hares who could find a living there.
Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the
red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the
village well—thousands of acres of land—a whole
province of France—all France itself—lay under the night
sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a
whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in
a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split
a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition,
so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of
this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and
virtue, of every responsible creature on it.
The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering
under the starlight, in their public vehicle, to that gate of
Paris whereunto their journey naturally tended. There was
the usual stoppage at the barrier guardhouse, and the usual
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lanterns came glancing forth for the usual examination and
inquiry. Monsieur Defarge alighted; knowing one or two
of the soldiery there, and one of the police. The latter he
was intimate with, and affectionately embraced.
When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges
in his dusky wings, and they, having finally alighted near
the Saint’s boundaries, were picking their way on foot
through the black mud and offal of his streets, Madame
Defarge spoke to her husband:
‘Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell
thee?’
‘Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another
spy commissioned for our quarter. There may be many
more, for all that he can say, but he knows of one.’
‘Eh well!’ said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows
with a cool business air. ‘It is necessary to register him.
How do they call that man?’
‘He is English.’
‘So much the better. His name?’
‘Barsad,’ said Defarge, making it French by
pronunciation. But, he had been so careful to get it
accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect correctness.
‘Barsad,’ repeated madame. ‘Good. Christian name?’
‘John.’
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‘John Barsad,’ repeated madame, after murmuring it
once to herself. ‘Good. His appearance; is it known?’
‘Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine;
black hair; complexion dark; generally, rather handsome
visage; eyes dark, face thin, long, and sallow; nose
aquiline, but not straight, having a peculiar inclination
towards the left cheek; expression, therefore, sinister.’
‘Eh my faith. It is a portrait!’ said madame, laughing.
‘He shall be registered to-morrow.’
They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for
it was midnight), and where Madame Defarge
immediately took her post at her desk, counted the small
moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined
the stock, went through the entries in the book, made
other entries of her own, checked the serving man in
every possible way, and finally dismissed him to bed. Then
she turned out the contents of the bowl of money for the
second time, and began knotting them up in her
handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for safe keeping
through the night. All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in
his mouth, walked up and down, complacently admiring,
but never interfering; in which condition, indeed, as to
the business and his domestic affairs, he walked up and
down through life.
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The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and
surrounded by so foul a neighbourhood, was ill-smelling.
Monsieur Defarge’s olfactory sense was by no means
delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than it
ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and
aniseed. He whiffed the compound of scents away, as he
put down his smoked-out pipe.
‘You are fatigued,’ said madame, raising her glance as
she knotted the money. ‘There are only the usual odours.’
‘I am a little tired,’ her husband acknowledged.
‘You are a little depressed, too,’ said madame, whose
quick eyes had never been so intent on the accounts, but
they had had a ray or two for him. ‘Oh, the men, the
men!’
‘But my dear!’ began Defarge.
‘But my dear!’ repeated madame, nodding firmly; ‘but
my dear! You are faint of heart to-night, my dear!’
‘Well, then,’ said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung
out of his breast, ‘it IS a long time.’
‘It is a long time,’ repeated his wife; ‘and when is it not
a long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long
time; it is the rule.’
‘It does not take a long time to strike a man with
Lightning,’ said Defarge.
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‘How long,’ demanded madame, composedly, ‘does it
take to make and store the lightning? Tell me.’
Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were
something in that too.
‘It does not take a long time,’ said madame, ‘for an
earthquake to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long
it takes to prepare the earthquake?’
‘A long time, I suppose,’ said Defarge.
‘But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to
pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always
preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your
consolation. Keep it.’
She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a
foe.
‘I tell thee,’ said madame, extending her right hand, for
emphasis, ‘that although it is a long time on the road, it is
on the road and coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and
never stops. I tell thee it is always advancing. Look around
and consider the lives of all the world that we know,
consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider
the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses
itself with more and more of certainty every hour. Can
such things last? Bah! I mock you.’
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‘My brave wife,’ returned Defarge, standing before her
with his head a little bent, and his hands clasped at his
back, like a docile and attentive pupil before his catechist,
‘I do not question all this. But it has lasted a long time,
and it is possible—you know well, my wife, it is
possible—that it may not come, during our lives.’
‘Eh well! How then?’ demanded madame, tying
another knot, as if there were another enemy strangled.
‘Well!’ said Defarge, with a half complaining and half
apologetic shrug. ‘We shall not see the triumph.’
‘We shall have helped it,’ returned madame, with her
extended hand in strong action. ‘Nothing that we do, is
done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see
the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew certainly not,
show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I
would—‘
Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible
knot indeed.
‘Hold!’ cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt
charged with cowardice; ‘I too, my dear, will stop at
nothing.’
‘Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need
to see your victim and your opportunity, to sustain you.
Sustain yourself without that. When the time comes, let
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loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the
tiger and the devil chained—not shown—yet always
ready.’
Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice
by striking her little counter with her chain of money as if
she knocked its brains out, and then gathering the heavy
handkerchief under her arm in a serene manner, and
observing that it was time to go to bed.
Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual
place in the wine-shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose
lay beside her, and if she now and then glanced at the
flower, it was with no infraction of her usual preoccupied
air. There were a few customers, drinking or not drinking,
standing or seated, sprinkled about. The day was very hot,
and heaps of flies, who were extending their inquisitive
and adventurous perquisitions into all the glutinous little
glasses near madame, fell dead at the bottom. Their
decease made no impression on the other flies out
promenading, who looked at them in the coolest manner
(as if they themselves were elephants, or something as far
removed), until they met the same fate. Curious to
consider how heedless flies are!—perhaps they thought as
much at Court that sunny summer day.
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A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on
Madame Defarge which she felt to be a new one. She laid
down her knitting, and began to pin her rose in her headdress,
before she looked at the figure.
It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up
the rose, the customers ceased talking, and began gradually
to drop out of the wine-shop.
‘Good day, madame,’ said the new-comer.
‘Good day, monsieur.’
She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed
her knitting: ‘Hah! Good day, age about forty, height
about five feet nine, black hair, generally rather handsome
visage, complexion dark, eyes dark, thin, long and sallow
face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a peculiar
inclination towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister
expression! Good day, one and all!’
‘Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old
cognac, and a mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.’
Madame complied with a polite air.
‘Marvellous cognac this, madame!’
It was the first time it had ever been so complemented,
and Madame Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to
know better. She said, however, that the cognac was
flattered, and took up her knitting. The visitor watched
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her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity
of observing the place in general.
‘You knit with great skill, madame.’
‘I am accustomed to it.’
‘A pretty pattern too!’
‘YOU think so?’ said madame, looking at him with a
smile.
‘Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?’
‘Pastime,’ said madame, still looking at him with a
smile while her fingers moved nimbly.
‘Not for use?’
‘That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do—
Well,’ said madame, drawing a breath and nodding her
head with a stern kind of coquetry, ‘I’ll use it!’
It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine
seemed to be decidedly opposed to a rose on the headdress
of Madame Defarge. Two men had entered
separately, and had been about to order drink, when,
catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a
pretence of looking about as if for some friend who was
not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been
there when this visitor entered, was there one left. They
had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open, but
had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away
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in a poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner,
quite natural and unimpeachable.
‘JOHN,’ thought madame, checking off her work as
her fingers knitted, and her eyes looked at the stranger.
‘Stay long enough, and I shall knit ‘BARSAD’ before you
go.’
‘You have a husband, madame?’
‘I have.’
‘Children?’
‘No children.’
‘Business seems bad?’
‘Business is very bad; the people are so poor.’
‘Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed,
too—as you say.’
‘As YOU say,’ madame retorted, correcting him, and
deftly knitting an extra something into his name that
boded him no good.
‘Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you
naturally think so. Of course.’
‘I think?’ returned madame, in a high voice. ‘I and my
husband have enough to do to keep this wine-shop open,
without thinking. All we think, here, is how to live. That
is the subject WE think of, and it gives us, from morning
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to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our
heads concerning others. I think for others? No, no.’
The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he
could find or make, did not allow his baffled state to
express itself in his sinister face; but, stood with an air of
gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame
Defarge’s little counter, and occasionally sipping his
cognac.
‘A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard’s execution.
Ah! the poor Gaspard!’ With a sigh of great compassion.
‘My faith!’ returned madame, coolly and lightly, ‘if
people use knives for such purposes, they have to pay for
it. He knew beforehand what the price of his luxury was;
he has paid the price.’
‘I believe,’ said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a
tone that invited confidence, and expressing an injured
revolutionary susceptibility in every muscle of his wicked
face: ‘I believe there is much compassion and anger in this
neighbourhood, touching the poor fellow? Between
ourselves.’
‘Is there?’ asked madame, vacantly.
‘Is there not?’
‘—Here is my husband!’ said Madame Defarge.
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As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the
spy saluted him by touching his hat, and saying, with an
engaging smile, ‘Good day, Jacques!’ Defarge stopped
short, and stared at him.
‘Good day, Jacques!’ the spy repeated; with not quite so
much confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.
‘You deceive yourself, monsieur,’ returned the keeper
of the wine-shop. ‘You mistake me for another. That is
not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.’
‘It is all the same,’ said the spy, airily, but discomfited
too: ‘good day!’
‘Good day!’ answered Defarge, drily.
‘I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure
of chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is—
and no wonder!—much sympathy and anger in Saint
Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.’
‘No one has told me so,’ said Defarge, shaking his head.
‘I know nothing of it.’
Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and
stood with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair,
looking over that barrier at the person to whom they were
both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot
with the greatest satisfaction.
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The spy, well used to his business, did not change his
unconscious attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac,
took a sip of fresh water, and asked for another glass of
cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him, took to
her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.
‘You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say,
better than I do?’ observed Defarge.
‘Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so
profoundly interested in its miserable inhabitants.’
‘Hah!’ muttered Defarge.
‘The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur
Defarge, recalls to me,’ pursued the spy, ‘that I have the
honour of cherishing some interesting associations with
your name.’
‘Indeed!’ said Defarge, with much indifference.
‘Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you,
his old domestic, had the charge of him, I know. He was
delivered to you. You see I am informed of the
circumstances?’
‘Such is the fact, certainly,’ said Defarge. He had had it
conveyed to him, in an accidental touch of his wife’s
elbow as she knitted and warbled, that he would do best
to answer, but always with brevity.
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‘It was to you,’ said the spy, ‘that his daughter came;
and it was from your care that his daughter took him,
accompanied by a neat brown monsieur; how is he
called?—in a little wig—Lorry—of the bank of Tellson
and Company—over to England.’
‘Such is the fact,’ repeated Defarge.
‘Very interesting remembrances!’ said the spy. ‘I have
known Doctor Manette and his daughter, in England.’
‘Yes?’ said Defarge.
‘You don’t hear much about them now?’ said the spy.
‘No,’ said Defarge.
‘In effect,’ madame struck in, looking up from her
work and her little song, ‘we never hear about them. We
received the news of their safe arrival, and perhaps another
letter, or perhaps two; but, since then, they have gradually
taken their road in life—we, ours—and we have held no
correspondence.’
‘Perfectly so, madame,’ replied the spy. ‘She is going to
be married.’
‘Going?’ echoed madame. ‘She was pretty enough to
have been married long ago. You English are cold, it
seems to me.’
‘Oh! You know I am English.’
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‘I perceive your tongue is,’ returned madame; ‘and
what the tongue is, I suppose the man is.’
He did not take the identification as a compliment; but
he made the best of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After
sipping his cognac to the end, he added:
‘Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to
an Englishman; to one who, like herself, is French by
birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was
cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to
marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom
Gaspard was exalted to that height of so many feet; in
other words, the present Marquis. But he lives unknown
in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles
Darnay. D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s family.’
Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence
had a palpable effect upon her husband. Do what he
would, behind the little counter, as to the striking of a
light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his
hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no
spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.
Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might
prove to be worth, and no customers coming in to help
him to any other, Mr. Barsad paid for what he had drunk,
and took his leave: taking occasion to say, in a genteel
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manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the
pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again.
For some minutes after he had emerged into the outer
presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife remained
exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back.
‘Can it be true,’ said Defarge, in a low voice, looking
down at his wife as he stood smoking with his hand on the
back of her chair: ‘what he has said of Ma’amselle
Manette?’
‘As he has said it,’ returned madame, lifting her
eyebrows a little, ‘it is probably false. But it may be true.’
‘If it is—’ Defarge began, and stopped.
‘If it is?’ repeated his wife.
‘—And if it does come, while we live to see it
triumph—I hope, for her sake, Destiny will keep her
husband out of France.’
‘Her husband’s destiny,’ said Madame Defarge, with
her usual composure, ‘will take him where he is to go, and
will lead him to the end that is to end him. That is all I
know.’
‘But it is very strange—now, at least, is it not very
strange’—said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to
induce her to admit it, ‘that, after all our sympathy for
Monsieur her father, and herself, her husband’s name
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should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by
the side of that infernal dog’s who has just left us?’
‘Stranger things than that will happen when it does
come,’ answered madame. ‘I have them both here, of a
certainty; and they are both here for their merits; that is
enough.’
She roiled up her knitting when she had said those
words, and presently took the rose out of the handkerchief
that was wound about her head. Either Saint Antoine had
an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was
gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its
disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge
in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered
its habitual aspect.
In the evening, at which season of all others Saint
Antoine turned himself inside out, and sat on door-steps
and window-ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets
and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her
work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to
place and from group to group: a Missionary—there were
many like her—such as the world will do well never to
breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted
worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a
mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands
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moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony
fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more
famine-pinched.
But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the
thoughts. And as Madame Defarge moved on from group
to group, all three went quicker and fiercer among every
little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left
behind.
Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with
admiration. ‘A great woman,’ said he, ‘a strong
woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman!’
Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of
church bells and the distant beating of the military drums
in the Palace Courtyard, as the women sat knitting,
knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness
was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then
ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France,
should be melted into thundering cannon; when the
military drums should be beating to drown a wretched
voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and
Plenty, Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about
the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their very
selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt,
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where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting
dropping heads.
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XVII
One Night
Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on
the quiet corner in Soho, than one memorable evening
when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree
together. Never did the moon rise with a milder radiance
over great London, than on that night when it found them
still seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces
through its leaves.
Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved
this last evening for her father, and they sat alone under
the plane-tree.
‘You are happy, my dear father?’
‘Quite, my child.’
They had said little, though they had been there a long
time. When it was yet light enough to work and read, she
had neither engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she
read to him. She had employed herself in both ways, at his
side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this time
was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it
so.
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‘And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply
happy in the love that Heaven has so blessed—my love for
Charles, and Charles’s love for me. But, if my life were
not to be still consecrated to you, or if my marriage were
so arranged as that it would part us, even by the length of
a few of these streets, I should be more unhappy and selfreproachful
now than I can tell you. Even as it is—‘
Even as it was, she could not command her voice.
In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and
laid her face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is
always sad, as the light of the sun itself is—as the light
called human life is—at its coming and its going.
‘Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you
feel quite, quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no
new duties of mine, will ever interpose between us? I
know it well, but do you know it? In your own heart, do
you feel quite certain?’
Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of
conviction he could scarcely have assumed, ‘Quite sure,
my darling! More than that,’ he added, as he tenderly
kissed her: ‘my future is far brighter, Lucie, seen through
your marriage, than it could have been—nay, than it ever
was—without it.’
‘If I could hope THAT, my father!—‘
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‘Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural
and how plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You,
devoted and young, cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I
have felt that your life should not be wasted—‘
She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in
his, and repeated the word.
‘—wasted, my child—should not be wasted, struck
aside from the natural order of things—for my sake. Your
unselfishness cannot entirely comprehend how much my
mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself, how could
my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?’
‘If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have
been quite happy with you.’
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would
have been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and
replied:
‘My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had
not been Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it
had been no other, I should have been the cause, and then
the dark part of my life would have cast its shadow beyond
myself, and would have fallen on you.’
It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever
hearing him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her
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a strange and new sensation while his words were in her
ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.
‘See!’ said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand
towards the moon. ‘I have looked at her from my prisonwindow,
when I could not bear her light. I have looked at
her when it has been such torture to me to think of her
shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head
against my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so
dun and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the
number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the
full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I
could intersect them.’ He added in his inward and
pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, ‘It was
twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was
difficult to squeeze in.’
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to
that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was
nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He
only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and
felicity with the dire endurance that was over.
‘I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times
upon the unborn child from whom I had been rent.
Whether it was alive. Whether it had been born alive, or
the poor mother’s shock had killed it. Whether it was a
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son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a
time in my imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance
was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would never
know his father’s story; who might even live to weigh the
possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own
will and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow
to be a woman.’
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his
hand.
‘I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly
forgetful of me —rather, altogether ignorant of me, and
unconscious of me. I have cast up the years of her age,
year after year. I have seen her married to a man who
knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from
the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation
my place was a blank.’
‘My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of
a daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I
had been that child.’
‘You, Lucie? It is out of the Consolation and
restoration you have brought to me, that these
remembrances arise, and pass between us and the moon on
this last night.—What did I say just now?’
‘She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.’
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‘So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness
and the silence have touched me in a different way—have
affected me with something as like a sorrowful sense of
peace, as any emotion that had pain for its foundations
could—I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell,
and leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I
have seen her image in the moonlight often, as I now see
you; except that I never held her in my arms; it stood
between the little grated window and the door. But, you
understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?’
‘The figure was not; the—the—image; the fancy?’
‘No. That was another thing. It stood before my
disturbed sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom
that my mind pursued, was another and more real child.
Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she
was like her mother. The other had that likeness too —as
you have—but was not the same. Can you follow me,
Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you must have been a
solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed
distinctions.’
His collected and calm manner could not prevent her
blood from running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his
old condition.
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‘In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the
moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to show me
that the home of her married life was full of her loving
remembrance of her lost father. My picture was in her
room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active,
cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all.’
‘I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but
in my love that was I.’
‘And she showed me her children,’ said the Doctor of
Beauvais, ‘and they had heard of me, and had been taught
to pity me. When they passed a prison of the State, they
kept far from its frowning walls, and looked up at its bars,
and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I
imagined that she always brought me back after showing
me such things. But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I
fell upon my knees, and blessed her.’
‘I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my
dear, will you bless me as fervently to-morrow?’
‘Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I
have to-night for loving you better than words can tell,
and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts,
when they were wildest, never rose near the happiness
that I have known with you, and that we have before us.’
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He embraced her, solemnly commended her to
Heaven, and humbly thanked Heaven for having
bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, they went into the
house.
There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr.
Lorry; there was even to be no bridesmaid but the gaunt
Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no change in their
place of residence; they had been able to extend it, by
taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging
to the apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired
nothing more.
Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper.
They were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the
third. He regretted that Charles was not there; was more
than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that
kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.
So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and
they separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the
morning, Lucie came downstairs again, and stole into his
room; not free from unshaped fears, beforehand.
All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet;
and he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the
untroubled pillow, and his hands lying quiet on the
coverlet. She put her needless candle in the shadow at a
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distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his; then,
leaned over him, and looked at him.
Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity
had worn; but, he covered up their tracks with a
determination so strong, that he held the mastery of them
even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet,
resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant,
was not to be beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep,
that night.
She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up
a prayer that she might ever be as true to him as her love
aspired to be, and as his sorrows deserved. Then, she
withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once more, and
went away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the
leaves of the plane-tree moved upon his face, as softly as
her lips had moved in praying for him.
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XVIII
Nine Days
The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were
ready outside the closed door of the Doctor’s room, where
he was speaking with Charles Darnay. They were ready to
go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr. Lorry, and Miss
Pross—to whom the event, through a gradual process of
reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of
absolute bliss, but for the yet lingering consideration that
her brother Solomon should have been the bridegroom.
‘And so,’ said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently
admire the bride, and who had been moving round her to
take in every point of her quiet, pretty dress; ‘and so it was
for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought you across the
Channel, such a baby’ Lord bless me’ How little I thought
what I was doing! How lightly I valued the obligation I
was conferring on my friend Mr. Charles!’
‘You didn’t mean it,’ remarked the matter-of-fact Miss
Pross, ‘and therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!’
‘Really? Well; but don’t cry,’ said the gentle Mr. Lorry.
‘I am not crying,’ said Miss Pross; ‘YOU are.’
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‘I, my Pross?’ (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be
pleasant with her, on occasion.)
‘You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t
wonder at it. Such a present of plate as you have made
‘em, is enough to bring tears into anybody’s eyes. There’s
not a fork or a spoon in the collection,’ said Miss Pross,
‘that I didn’t cry over, last night after the box came, till I
couldn’t see it.’
‘I am highly gratified,’ said Mr. Lorry, ‘though, upon
my honour, I had no intention of rendering those trifling
articles of remembrance invisible to any one. Dear me!
This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he
has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there might have
been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!’
‘Not at all!’ From Miss Pross.
‘You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?’
asked the gentleman of that name.
‘Pooh!’ rejoined Miss Pross; ‘you were a bachelor in
your cradle.’
‘Well!’ observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his
little wig, ‘that seems probable, too.’
‘And you were cut out for a bachelor,’ pursued Miss
Pross, ‘before you were put in your cradle.’
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‘Then, I think,’ said Mr. Lorry, ‘that I was very
unhandsomely dealt with, and that I ought to have had a
voice in the selection of my pattern. Enough! Now, my
dear Lucie,’ drawing his arm soothingly round her waist, ‘I
hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and I,
as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the
final opportunity of saying something to you that you
wish to hear. You leave your good father, my dear, in
hands as earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be
taken every conceivable care of; during the next fortnight,
while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts, even
Tellson’s shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking)
before him. And when, at the fortnight’s end, he comes to
join you and your beloved husband, on your other
fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent
him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame.
Now, I hear Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let me
kiss my dear girl with an old-fashioned bachelor blessing,
before Somebody comes to claim his own.’
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