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 elbow-room, 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 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 bunk 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. 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 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 dim 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
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.
Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin
at home. At first, 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 morn 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."
"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 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 circumvented into
the worst of luck. B-u-u-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!"
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. Cruncher, 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 house and home. I won't
have my vittles 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 ill-looking.
Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they 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.
"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!"
II A SIGHT
"YOU KNOW the Old Bailey, well, no doubt?" said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.
"Ye-es, sir." returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. "I do
know the Bailey."
"Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry."
"I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much
better," said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the
establishment in question, "than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to
know the Bailey."
"Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the
door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in."
"Into the court, sir?"
"Into the court."
Mr. Cruncher's eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another,
and to interchange the inquiry, "What do you think of this?"
"Am I to wait in the court, sir?" he asked, as the result of that
conference.
"I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr.
Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry's
attention, and show him where you stand. Then what you have to do, is,
to remain there until he wants you."
"Is that all, sir?"
"That's all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to
tell him you are there."
As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the
note, Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to
the blotting-paper stage, remarked:
"I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this morning?"
"Treason!"
"That's quartering," said Jerry. "Barbarous!"
"It is the law," remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him. "It is the law."
"It's hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It's hard enough to
kill him, but it's very hard to spile him, sir."
"Not at all," returned the ancient clerk. "Speak well of the law.
Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law
to take care of itself. I give you that advice."
"It's the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice," said
Jerry. "I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living
mine is."
"Well, well," said the old clerk; "we an have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have
dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along."
Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less
internal deference than he made an outward show of, "You are a lean
old one, too," made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his
destination, and went his way.
They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside
Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since
attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of
debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were
bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed
straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled
him off the bench. It had more than once happened, that the Judge in
the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the
prisoner's, and even died before him. For the rest, the Old Bailey was
famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set
out continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the
other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street and
road, and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and
so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous, too,
for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a punishment
of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post,
another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to
behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in blood-money,
another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the
most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under
Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice
illustration of the precept, that "Whatever is is right;" an
aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include
the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make
his way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and
handed in his letter through a trap in it. For, people then paid to
see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in
Bedlam-only the former entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore,
all the Old Bailey doors were well guarded- except, indeed, the social
doors by which the criminals got there, and those were always left
wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges
a very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself
into court.
"What's on?" he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself
next to.
"Nothing yet."
"What's coming on?"
"The Treason case."
"The quartering one, eh?"
"Ah!" returned the man, with a relish; "he'll be drawn on a hurdle
to be half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before
his own face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he
looks on, and then his head will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into
quarters. That's the sentence."
"If he's found Guilty, you mean to say?" Jerry added, by way of
proviso.
"Oh! they'll find him guilty," said the other. "Don't you be
afraid of that."
Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted to the door-keeper,
whom he saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand.
Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from
a wigged gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle
of papers before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman
with his hands in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr.
Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated
on the ceiling of the court. After some gruff coughing and rubbing
of his chin and signing with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of
Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look for him, and who quietly nodded
and sat down again.
"What's he got to do with the case?" asked the man he had spoken
with.
"Blest if I know," said Jerry.
"What have you got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?"
"Blest if I know that either," said Jerry.
The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and
settling down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the
dock became the central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had been
standing there, went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put
to the bar.
Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the
ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled at
him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round
pillars and comers, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows
stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court,
laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help
themselves, at anybody's cost, to a view of him- stood a-tiptoe, got
upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him.
Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked
wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery
breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it
to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and
coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the
great windows behind him in an impure mist and rain.
The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about
five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek
and a dark eye. His condition was that of a young gentleman. He was
plainly dressed in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was
long and dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck;
more to be out of his way than for ornament. As an emotion of the mind
will express itself through any covering of the body, so the
paleness which his situation engendered came through the brown upon
his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the sun. He was
otherwise quite self-possessed, bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.
The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at,
was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less
horrible sentence- had there been a chance of any one of its savage
details being spared- by just so much would he have lost in his
fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully
mangled, was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so
butchered and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss
the various spectators put upon the interest, according to their
several arts and powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the
root of it, Ogreish.
Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not
Guilty to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and
jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his
having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted
Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and
going, between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious,
excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and
wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously,
revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene,
illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to
Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his head becoming
more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with huge
satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that
the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay,
stood there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in;
and that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.
The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from the
situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He was quiet and
attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest;
and stood with his hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so
composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which
it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled
with vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.
Over the prisoner's head there was a mirror, to throw the light down
upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected
in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together.
Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have
been, if the glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as
the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of
the infamy and disgrace for which it had been reserved, may have
struck the prisoner's mind. Be that as it may, a change in his
position making him conscious of a bar of light across his face, he
looked up; and when he saw the glass his face flushed, and his right
hand pushed the herbs away.
It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the
court which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there
sat, in that corner of the Judge's bench, two persons upon whom his
look immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing
of his aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon him, turned
to them.
The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more
than twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of
a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of
his hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an
active kind, but pondering and self-communing. When this expression
was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred and
broken up- as it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his
daughter- he became a handsome man, not past the prime of life.
His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she
sat by him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him,
in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her
forehead had been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and
compassion that saw nothing but the peril of the accused. This had
been so very noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown,
that starers who had had no pity for him were touched by her; and
the whisper went about, "Who are they?"
Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his
own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his
absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The crowd
about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest
attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed and passed
back; at last it got to Jerry:
"Witnesses."
"For which side?"
"Against."
"Against what side?"
"The prisoner's."
The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled
them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose
life was in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope,
grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.
III A DISAPPOINTMENT
MR. ATTORNEY-GENERAL had to inform the jury, that the prisoner
before them, though young in years, was old in the treasonable
practices which claimed the forfeit of his life. That this
correspondence with the public enemy was not a correspondence of
to-day, or of yesterday, or even of last year, or of the year
before. That, it was certain the prisoner had, for longer than that,
been in the habit of passing and repassing between France and England,
on secret business of which he could give no honest account. That,
if it were in the nature of traitorous ways to thrive (which happily
it never was), the real wickedness and guilt of his business might
have remained undiscovered. That Providence, however, had put it
into the heart of a person who was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to
ferret out the nature of the prisoner's schemes, and, struck with
horror, to disclose them to his Majesty's Chief Secretary of State and
most honourable Privy Council. That, this patriot would be produced
before them. That, his position and attitude were, on the whole,
sublime. That, he had been the prisoner's friend, but, at once in an
auspicious and an evil hour detecting his infamy, had resolved to
immolate the traitor he could no longer cherish in his bosom, on the
sacred altar of his country. That, if statues were decreed in Britain,
as in ancient Greece and Rome, to public benefactors, this shining
citizen would assuredly have had one. That, as they were not so
decreed, he probably would not have one. That, Virtue, as had been
observed by the poets (in many passages which he well knew the jury
would have, word for word, at the tips of their tongues; whereat the
jury's countenances displayed a guilty consciousness that they knew
nothing about the passages), was in a manner contagious; more
especially the bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of
country. That, the lofty example of this immaculate and
unimpeachable witness for the Crown, to refer to whom however
unworthily was an honour, had communicated itself to the prisoner's
servant, and had engendered in him a holy determination to examine his
master's table-drawers and pockets, and secrete his papers. That, he
(Mr. Attorney-General) was prepared to hear some disparagement
attempted of this admirable servant; but that, in a general way, he
preferred him to his (Mr. Attorney-General's) brothers and sisters,
and honoured him more than his (Mr. Attorney-General's) father and
mother. That, he called with confidence on the jury to come and do
likewise. That, the evidence of these two witnesses, coupled with
the documents of their discovering that would be produced, would
show the prisoner to have been furnished with lists of his Majesty's
forces, and of their disposition and preparation, both by sea and
land, and would leave no doubt that he had habitually conveyed such
information to a hostile power. That, these lists could not be
proved to be in the prisoner's handwriting; but that it was all the
same; that, indeed, it was rather the better for the prosecution, as
showing the prisoner to be artful in his precautions. That, the
proof would go back five years, and would show the prisoner already
engaged in these pernicious missions, within a few weeks before the
date of the very first action fought between the British troops and
the Americans. That, for these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury
(as he knew they were), and being a responsible jury (as they knew
they were), must positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an
end of him, whether they liked it or not. That, they never could lay
their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could tolerate the
idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that,
they never could endure the notion of their children laying their
heads upon their pillows; in short, that there never more could be,
for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless
the prisoner's head was taken off. That head Mr. Attorney-General
concluded by demanding of them, in the name of everything he could
think of with a round turn in it, and on the faith of his solemn
asseveration that he already considered the prisoner as good as dead
and gone.
When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if
a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in
anticipation of what he was soon to become. When toned down again, the
unimpeachable patriot appeared in the witness-box.
Mr. Solicitor-General then, following his leader's lead, examined
the patriot: John Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his pure
soul was exactly what Mr. Attorney-General had described it to be-
perhaps, if it had a fault, a little too exactly. Having released
his noble bosom of its burden, he would have modestly withdrawn
himself, but that the wigged gentleman with the papers before him,
sitting not far from Mr. Lorry, begged to ask him a few questions. The
wigged gentleman sitting opposite, still looking at the ceiling of the
court.
Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation.
What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn't
precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of
anybody's. Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant
relation. Very distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not.
Never in a debtors' prison? Didn't see what that had to do with it.
Never in a debtors' prison?- Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many
times? Two or three times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what
profession? Gentleman. Ever been kicked? Might have been.
Frequently? No. Ever kicked downstairs? Decidedly not; once received a
kick on the top of a staircase, and fell down-stairs of his own
accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at dice? Something to
that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who committed the
assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true? Positively.
Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not more than
other gentlemen do. Ever borrow money of the prisoner? Yes. Ever pay
him? No. Was not this intimacy with the prisoner, in reality a very
slight one, forced upon the prisoner in coaches, inns, and packets?
No. Sure he saw the prisoner with these lists? Certain. Knew no more
about the lists? No. Had not procured them himself, for instance?
No. Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in regular
government pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do
anything? Oh dear no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives
but motives of sheer patriotism? None whatever.
The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case at a
great rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good faith
and simplicity, four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, aboard
the Calais packet, if he wanted a handy fellow, and the prisoner had
engaged him. He had not asked the prisoner to take the handy fellow as
an act of charity- never thought of such a thing. He began to have
suspicions of the prisoner, and to keep an eye upon him, soon
afterwards. In arranging his clothes, while travelling, he had seen
similar lists to these in the prisoner's pockets, over and over again.
He had taken these lists from the drawer of the prisoner's desk. He
had not put them there first. He had seen the prisoner show these
identical lists to French gentlemen at Calais, and similar lists to
French gentlemen, both at Calais and Boulogne. He loved his country,
and couldn't bear it, and had given information. He had never been
suspected of stealing a silver tea-pot; he had been maligned
respecting a mustard-pot, but it turned out to be only a plated one.
He had known the last witness seven or eight years; that was merely
a coincidence. He didn't call it a particularly curious coincidence;
most coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it a curious
coincidence that true patriotism was his only motive too. He was a
true Briton, and hoped there were many like him.
The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr. Attorney-General called Mr.
Jarvis Lorry.
"Mr. Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson's bank?"
"I am."
"On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred
and seventy-five, did business occasion you to travel between London
and Dover by the mail?"
"It did."
"Were there any other passengers in the mail?"
"Two."
"Did they alight on the road in the course of the night?"
"They did."
"Mr. Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two
passengers?"
"I cannot undertake to say that he was."
"Does he resemble either of these two passengers?"
"Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we were all
so reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that."
"Mr. Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him wrapped up
as those two passengers were, is there anything in his bulk and
stature to render it unlikely that he was one of them?"
"No."
"You will not swear, Mr. Lorry, that he was not one of them?"
"No."
"So at least you say he may have been one of them?"
"Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been- like myself
-timorous of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a timorous air."
"Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr. Lorry?"
"I certainly have seen that."
"Mr. Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen him,
to your certain knowledge, before?"
"I have."
"When?"
"I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at
Calais, the prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I
returned, and made the voyage with me."
"At what hour did he come on board?"
"At a little after midnight."
"In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who came on
board at that untimely hour?"
"He happened to be the only one."
"Never mind about 'happening,' Mr. Lorry. He was the only
passenger who came on board in the dead of the night?"
"He was."
"Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?"
"With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are here."
"They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner?"
"Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough,
and I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore."
"Miss Manette!"
The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were
now turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with
her, and kept her hand drawn through his arm.
"Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner."
To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and
beauty, was far more trying to the accused than to be confronted
with all the crowd. Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge
of his grave, not all the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for
the moment, nerve him to remain quite still. His hurried right hand
parcelled out the herbs before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a
garden; and his efforts to control and steady his breathing shook
the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. The buzz of the
great flies was loud again.
"Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before?"
"Yes, sir."
"Where?"
"On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on the
same occasion."
"You are the young lady just now referred to?"
"O! most unhappily, I am!"
The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musical
voice of the Judge, as he said something fiercely: "Answer the
questions put to you, and make no remark upon them."
"Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that
passage across the Channel?"
"Yes, sir."
"Recall it."
In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began:
"When the gentleman came on board--"
"Do you mean the prisoner?" inquired the Judge, knitting his brows.
"Yes, my Lord."
"Then say the prisoner."
"When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,"
turning her eyes lovingly to him as he stood beside her, "was much
fatigued and in a very weak state of health. My father was so
reduced that I was afraid to take him out of the air, and I had made a
bed for him on the deck near the cabin steps, and I sat on the deck at
his side to take care of him. There were no other passengers that
night, but we four. The prisoner was so good as to beg permission to
advise me how I could shelter my father from the wind and weather,
better than I had done. I had not known how to do it well, not
understanding how the wind would set when we were out of the
harbour. He did it for me. He expressed great gentleness and
kindness for my father's state, and I am sure he felt it. That was the
manner of our beginning to speak together."
"Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board alone?"
"No."
"How many were with him?"
"Two French gentlemen."
"Had they conferred together?"
"They had conferred together until the last moment, when it was
necessary for the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat."
"Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to these
lists?"
"Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don't know what
papers."
"Like these in shape and size?"
"Possibly, but indeed I don't know, although they stood whispering
very near to me: because they stood at the top of the cabin steps to
have the light of the lamp that was hanging there; it was a dull lamp,
and they spoke very low, and I did not hear what they said, and saw
only that they looked at papers."
"Now, to the prisoner's conversation, Miss Manette."
"The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me- which arose out
of my helpless situation- as he was kind, and good, and useful to my
father. I hope," bursting into tears, "I may not repay him by doing
him harm to-day."
Buzzing from the blue-flies.
"Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that
you give the evidence which it is your duty to give- which you must
give- and which you cannot escape from giving- with great
unwillingness, he is the only person present in that condition. Please
to go on."
"He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and
difficult nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he was
therefore travelling under an assumed name. He said that this business
had, within a few days, taken him to France, and might, at
intervals, take him backwards and forwards between France and
England for a long time to come."
"Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular."
"He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he
said that, so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on
England's part. He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George
Washington might gain almost as great a name in history as George
the Third. But there was no harm in his way of saying this: it was
said laughingly, and to beguile the time."
Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief
actor in a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed,
will be unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was
painfully anxious and instent as she gave this evidence, and, in the
pauses when she stopped for the Judge to write it down, watched its
effect upon the counsel for and against. Among the lookers-on there
was the same expression in all quarters of the court; insomuch, that a
great majority of the foreheads there, might have been mirrors
reflecting the witness, when the Judge looked up from his notes to
glare at that tremendous heresy about George Washington.
Mr. Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed it
necessary, as a matter of precaution and form, to call the young
lady's father, Doctor Manette. Who was called accordingly.
"Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen him
before?"
"Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some three years, or
three years and a half ago."
"Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the
packet, or speak to his conversation with your daughter?"
"Sir, I can do neither."
"Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable to
do either?"
He answered, in a low voice, "There is."
"Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, without
trial, or even accusation, in your native country, Doctor Manette?"
He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, "A long
imprisonment."
"Were you newly released on the occasion in question?"
"They tell me so."
"Have you no remembrance of the occasion?"
"None. My mind is a blank, from some time- I cannot even say what
time- when I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the
time when I found myself living in London with my dear daughter
here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God restored my
faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say how she had become
familiar. I have no remembrance of the process."
Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat
down together.
A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand
being to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter
untracked, in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five
years ago, and got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a
place where he did not remain, but from which he travelled back some
dozen miles or more, to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected
information; a witness was called to identify him as having been at
the precise time required, in the coffee-room of an hotel in that
garrison-and-dockyard town, waiting for another person. The prisoner's
counsel was cross-examining this witness with no result, except that
he had never seen the prisoner on any other occasion, when the
wigged gentleman who had all this time been looking at the ceiling
of the court, wrote a word or two on a little piece of paper,
screwed it up, and tossed it to him. Opening this piece of paper in
the next pause, the counsel looked with great attention and
curiosity at the prisoner.
"You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?"
The witness was quite sure.
"Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?"
Not so like (the witness said) as that he could be mistaken.
"Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there," pointing
to him who had tossed the paper over, "and then look well upon the
prisoner. How say you? Are they very like each other?"
Allowing for my learned friend's appearance being careless and
slovenly if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to
surprise, not only the witness, but everybody present, when they
were thus brought into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my
learned friend lay aside his wig, and giving no very gracious consent,
the likeness became much more remarkable. My Lord inquired of Mr.
Stryver (the prisoner's counsel), whether they were next to try Mr.
Carton (name of my learned friend) for treason? But, Mr. Stryver
replied to my Lord, no; but he would ask the witness to tell him
whether what happened once, might happen twice; whether he would
have been so confident if he had seen this illustration of his
rashness sooner, whether he would be so confident, having seen it; and
more. The upshot of which, was, to smash this witness like a
crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to useless lumber.
Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his
fingers in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while
Mr. Stryver fitted the prisoner's case on the jury, like a compact
suit of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy
and traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the
greatest scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas- which he
certainly did look rather like. How the virtuous servant, Cly, was his
friend and partner, and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of
those forgers and false swearers had rested on the prisoner as a
victim, because some family affairs in France, he being of French
extraction, did require his making those passages across the
Channel- though what those affairs were, a consideration for others
who were near and dear to him, forbade him, even for his life, to
disclose. How the evidence that had been warped and wrested from the
young lady, whose anguish in giving it they had witnessed, came to
nothing, involving the mere little innocent gallantries and
politenesses likely to pass between any young gentleman and young lady
so thrown together;- with the exception of that reference to George
Washington, which was altogether too extravagant and impossible to
be regarded in any other fight than as a monstrous joke. How it
would be a weakness in the government to break down in this attempt to
practise for popularity on the lowest national antipathies and
fears, and therefore Mr. Attorney-General had made the most of it;
how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and infamous
character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which
the State Trials of this country were full. But, there my Lord
interposed (with as grave a face as if it had not been true), saying
that he could not sit upon that Bench and suffer those allusions.
Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had next
to attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit of
clothes Mr. Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how
Barsad and Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought
them, and the prisoner a hundred times worse. Lastly, came my Lord
himself, turning the suit of clothes, now inside out, now outside
in, but on the whole decidedly trimming and shaping them into
grave-clothes for the prisoner.
And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed
again.
Mr. Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the court,
changed neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excitement.
While his learned friend, Mr. Stryver, massing his papers before
him, whispered with those who sat near, and from time to time
glanced anxiously at the jury; while all the spectators moved more
or less, and grouped themselves anew; while even my Lord himself arose
from his seat, and slowly paced up and down his platform, not
unattended by a suspicion in the minds of the audience that his
state was feverish; this one man sat leaning back, with his torn
gown half off him, his untidy wig put on just as it had happened to
light on his head after its removal, his hands in his pockets, and his
eyes on the ceiling as they had been all day. Something especially
reckless in his demeanour, not only gave him a disreputable look,
but so diminished the strong resemblance he undoubtedly bore to the
prisoner (which his momentary earnestness, when they were compared
together, had strengthened), that many of the lookers-on, taking
note of him now, said to one another they would hardly have thought
the two were so alike. Mr. Cruncher made the observation to his next
neighbour, and added, "I'd hold half a guinea that he don't get no
law-work to do. Don't look like the sort of one to get any, do he?"
Yet, this Mr. Carton took in more of the details of the scene than
he appeared to take in; for now, when Miss Manette's head dropped upon
her father's breast, he was the first to see it, and to say audibly:
"Officer! look to that young lady. Help the gentleman to take her out.
Don't you see she will fall!"
There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and much
sympathy with her father. It had evidently been a great distress to
him, to have the days of his imprisonment recalled. He had shown
strong internal agitation when he was questioned, and that pondering
or brooding look which made him old, had been upon him, like a heavy
cloud, ever since. As he passed out, the jury, who had turned back and
paused a moment, spoke, through their foreman.
They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps with
George Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that they were not
agreed, but signified his pleasure that they should retire under watch
and ward, and retired himself. The trial had lasted all day, and the
lamps in the court were now being lighted. It began to be rumoured
that the jury would be out a long while. The spectators dropped off to
get refreshment, and the prisoner withdrew to the back of the dock,
and sat down.
Mr. Lorry, who had gone out when the young lady and her father
went out, now reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry: who, in the slackened
interest, could easily get near him.
"Jerry, if you wish to take something to eat, you can. But, keep
in the way. You will be sure to hear when the jury come in. Don't be a
moment behind them, for I want you to take the verdict back to the
bank. You are the quickest messenger I know, and will get to Temple
Bar long before I can."
Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it in
acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr. Carton came
up at the moment, and touched Mr. Lorry on the arm.
"How is the young lady?"
"She is greatly distressed; but her father is comforting her, and
she feels the better for being out of court."
"I'll tell the prisoner so. It won't do for a respectable bank
gentleman like you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know."
Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the
point in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the
bar. The way out of court lay in that direction, and Jerry followed
him, all eyes, ears, and spikes.
"Mr. Darnay!"
The prisoner came forward directly.
"You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette.
She will do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation."
"I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you tell
her so for me, with my fervent acknowledgments?"
"Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it."
Mr. Carton's manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. He
stood, half turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow
against the bar.
"I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks."
"What," said Carton, still only half turned towards him, "do you
expect, Mr. Darnay?"
"The worst."
"It's the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think
their withdrawing is in your favour."
Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry heard
no more: but left them- so like each other in feature, so unlike
each other in manner- standing side by side, both reflected in the
glass above them.
An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal
crowded passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies
and ale. The hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form after
taking that refection, had dropped into a doze, when a loud murmur and
a rapid tide of people setting up the stairs that led to the court,
carried him along with them.
"Jerry! Jerry!" Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door when he
got there.
"Here, sir! It's a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!"
Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. "Quick! Have you
got it?"
"Yes, sir."
Hastily written on the paper was the word "AQUITTED."
"If you had sent the message, 'Recalled to Life,' again," muttered
Jerry, as he turned, "I should have known what you meant, this time."
He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything
else, until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came
pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and
a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were
dispersing in search of other carrion.
IV CONGRATULATORY
FROM the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment of
the human stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining off,
when Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the
solicitor for the defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood
gathered round Mr. Charles Darnay- just released- congratulating him
on his escape from death.
It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise
in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the
shoemaker of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him
twice, without looking again: even though the opportunity of
observation had not extended to the mournful cadence of his low
grave voice, and to the abstraction that overclouded him fitfully,
without any apparent reason. While one external cause, and that a
reference to his long lingering agony, would always- as on the
trial- evoke this condition from the depths of his soul, it was also
in its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as
incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story as if they had
seen the shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon him by a summer
sun, when the substance was three hundred miles away.
Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from
his mind. She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond
his misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her
voice, the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong
beneficial influence with him almost always. Not absolutely always,
for she could recall some occasions on which her power had failed; but
they were few and slight, and she believed them over.
Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and had
turned to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stryver, a man of
little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was,
stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a
pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into
companies and conversations, that argued well for his shouldering
his way up in life.
He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself at
his late client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. Lorry
clean out of the group: "I am glad to have brought you off with
honour, Mr. Darnay. It was an infamous prosecution, grossly
infamous; but not the less likely to succeed on that account."
"You have laid me under an obligation to you for life- in two
senses," said his late client, taking his hand.
"I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay; and my best is as good
as another man's, I believe."
It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, "Much better," Mr.
Lorry said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the
interested object of squeezing himself back again.
"You think so?" said Mr. Stryver. "Well! you have been present all
day, and you ought to know. You are a man of business, too."
"And as such," quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the
law had now shouldered back into the group, just as he had
previously shouldered him out of it- "as such I will appeal to
Doctor Manette, to break up this conference and order us all to our
homes. Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr. Darnay has had a terrible day, we are
worn out."
"Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry," said Stryver; "I have a night's
work to do yet. Speak for yourself."
"I speak for myself," answered Mr. Lorry, "and for Mr. Darnay, and
for Miss Lucie, and- Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us
all?" He asked her the question pointedly, and with a glance at her
father.
His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at
Darnay; an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and
distrust, not even unmixed with fear. With this strange expression
on him his thoughts had wandered away.
"My father," said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.
He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.
"Shall we go home, my father?"
With a long breath, he answered "Yes."
The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the
impression- which he himself had originated- that he would not be
released that night. The lights were nearly all extinguished in the
passages, the iron gates were being closed with a jar and a rattle,
and the dismal place was deserted until to-morrow morning's interest
of gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and branding-iron, should repeople
it. Walking between her father and Mr. Darnay, Lucie Manette passed
into the open air. A hackney-coach was called, and the father and
daughter departed in it.
Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way
back to the robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the group,
or interchanged a word with any one of them, but who had been
leaning against the wall where its shadow was darkest, had silently
strolled out after the rest, and had looked on until the coach drove
away. He now stepped up to where Mr. Lorry and Mr. Darnay stood upon
the pavement.
"So, Mr. Lorry! Men of business may speak to Mr. Darnay now?"
Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr. Carton's part in the day's
proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none
the better for it in appearance.
"If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when
the business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business
appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay."
Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, "You have mentioned that
before, sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own
masters. We have to think of the House more than ourselves."
"I know, I know," rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly. "Don't be
nettled, Mr. Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt:
better, I dare say."
"And indeed, sir," pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, "I really
don't know what you have to do with the matter. If you'll excuse me,
as very much your elder, for saying so, I really don't know that it is
your business."
"Business! Bless you, I have no business," said Mr. Carton.
"It is a pity you have not, sir."
"I think so, too."
"If you had," pursued Mr. Lorry, "perhaps you would attend to it."
"Lord love you, no!- I shouldn't," said Mr. Carton.
"Well, sir!" cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indifference,
"business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And,
sir, if business imposes its restraints and its silences and
impediments, Mr. Darnay as a young gentleman of generosity knows how
to make allowance for that circumstance. Mr. Darnay, good night, God
bless you, sir! I hope you have been this day preserved for a
prosperous and happy life.- Chair there!"
Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well the barrister, Mr.
Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson's.
Carton, who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite
sober, laughed then, and turned to Darnay:
"This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must
be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart
on these street stones?"
"I hardly seem yet," returned Charles Darnay, "to belong to this
world again."
"I don't wonder at it; it's not so long since you were pretty far
advanced on your way to another. You speak faintly."
"I begin to think I am faint."
"Then why the devil don't you dine? I dined, myself, while those
numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to- this, or
some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at."
Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate-hill to
Fleet-street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were
shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his
strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat
opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port
before him, and his fully half-insolent manner upon him.
"Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again,
Mr. Darnay?"
"I am frightfully confused regarding time and place; but I am so far
mended as to feel that."
"It must be an immense satisfaction!"
He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a
large one.
"As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to
it. It bas no good in it for me- except wine like this- nor I for
it. So we are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to
think we are not much alike in any particular, you and I."
Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with
this Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay
was at a loss how to answer; finally, answered not at all.
"Now your dinner is done," Carton presently said, "why don't you
call a health, Mr. Darnay; why don't you give your toast?"
"What health? What toast?"
"Why, it's on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it must be,
I'll swear it's there."
"Miss Manette, then!"
"Miss Manette, then!"
Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast,
Carton flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it
shivered to pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.
"That's a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr.
Darnay!" he said, filling his new goblet.
A slight frown and a laconic "Yes," were the answer.
"That's a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by! How
does it feel? Is it worth being tried for one's life, to be the object
of such sympathy and compassion, Mr. Darnay?"
Again Darnay answered not a word.
"She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it
her. Not that she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she was."
The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this
disagreeable companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in
the strait of the day. He turned the dialogue to that point, and
thanked him for it.
"I neither want any thanks, nor merit any," was the careless
rejoinder. "It was nothing to do, in the first place; and I don't know
why I did it, in the second. Mr. Darnay, let me ask you a question."
"Willingly, and a small return for your good offices."
"Do you think I particularly like you?"
"Really, Mr. Carton," returned the other, oddly disconcerted, "I
have not asked myself the question."
"But ask yourself the question now."
"You have acted as if you do; but I don't think you do."
"I don't think I do," said Carton. "I begin to have a very good
opinion of your understanding."
"Nevertheless," pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, "there is
nothing in that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and
our parting without ill-blood on either side."
Carton rejoining, "Nothing in life!" Darnay rang. "Do you call the
whole reckoning?" said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative,
"Then bring me another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and
wake me at ten."
The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good
night. Without returning the wish, Carton rose too, with something
of a threat of defiance in his manner, and said, "A last word, Mr.
Darnay: you think I am drunk?"
"I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton."
"Think? You know I have been drinking."
"Since I must say so, I know it."
"Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge,
sir. I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me."
"Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents better."
"May be so, Mr. Darnay; may be not. Don't let your sober face
elate you, however; you don't know what it may come to. Good night!"
When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to
a glass that hung against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in
it.
"Do you particularly like the man?" he muttered, at his own image;
"why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is
nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change
you have made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that
he shows you what you have fallen away from, and what you might have
been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by
those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as
he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow."
He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a
few minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling
over the table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down
upon him.
V THE JACKAL
THOSE WERE drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great
is the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a
moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man
would swallow in the course of a night, without any detriment to his
reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a
ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the law was
certainly not behind any other learned profession in its
Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr. Stryver, already fast
shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, behind his
compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier parts of the
legal race.
A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr.
Stryver had begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the
ladder on which he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to
summon their favourite, specially, to their longing arms; and
shouldering itself towards the visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the
Court of King's Bench, the florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might
be daily seen, bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower
pushing its way at the sun from among a rank garden-full of flaring
companions.
It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib
man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that
faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which
is among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's
accomplishments. But, a remarkable improvement came upon him as to
this. The more business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow
of getting at its pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat
carousing with Sydney Carton, he always had his points at his fingers'
ends in the morning.
Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver's
great ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and
Michaelmas, might have floated a king's ship. Stryver never had a case
in hand, anywhere, but Carton was there, with his hands in his
pockets, staring at the ceiling of the court; they went the same
Circuit, and even there they prolonged their usual orgies late into
the night, and Carton was rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home
stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At
last, it began to get about, among such as were interested in the
matter, that although Sydney Carton would never be a lion, he was an
amazingly good jackal, and that he rendered suit and service to
Stryver in that humble capacity.
"Ten o'clock, sir," said the man at the tavern, whom he had
charged to wake him- "ten o'clock, sir."
"What's the matter?"
"Ten o'clock, sir."
"What do you mean? Ten o'clock at night?"
"Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you."
"Oh! I remember. Very well, very well."
After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man
dexterously combated by stirring the fire continuously for five
minutes, he got up, tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned
into the Temple, and, having revived himself by twice pacing the
pavements of King's Bench-walk and Paper-buildings, turned into the
Stryver chambers.
The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had gone
home, and the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers
on, and a loose bed-gown, and his throat was bare for his greater
ease. He had that rather wild, strained, seared marking about the
eyes, which may be observed in all free livers of his class, from
the portrait of Jeffries downward, and which can be traced, under
various disguises of Art, through the portraits of every Drinking Age.
"You are a little late, Memory," said Stryver.
"About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later."
They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with
papers, where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the hob,
and in the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty
of wine upon it, and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons.
"You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney."
"Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day's client; or
seeing him dine- it's all one!"
"That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?"
"I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should
have been much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck."
Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.
"You and your luck, Sydney! Get to work, get to work."
Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an
adjoining room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin,
and a towel or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially
wringing them out, he folded them on his head in a manner hideous to
behold, sat down at the table, and said, "Now I am ready!"
"Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory," said Mr.
Stryver, gaily, as he looked among his papers.
"How much?"
"Only two sets of them."
"Give me the worst first."
"There they are, Sydney. Fire away!"
The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side
of the drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own
paper-bestrewn table proper, on the other side of it, with the bottles
and glasses ready to his hand. Both resorted to the drinking-table
without stint, but each in a different way; the lion for the most part
reclining with his hands in his waistband, looking at the fire, or
occasionally flirting with some lighter document; the jackal, with
knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes
did not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass- which
often groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass
for his lips. Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty,
that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his
towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he
returned with such eccentricities of damp headgear as no words can
describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious gravity.
At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion,
and proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and
caution, made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the
jackal assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed, the lion
put his hands in his waistband again, and lay down to mediate. The
jackal then invigorated himself with a bumper for his throttle, and
a fresh application to his head, and applied himself to the collection
of a second meal; this was administered to the lion in the same
manner, and was not disposed of until the clocks struck three in the
morning.
"And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch," said Mr.
Stryver.
The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming
again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.
"You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses
to-day. Every question told."
"I always am sound; am I not?"
"I don't gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some
punch to it and smooth it again."
With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.
"The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School," said Stryver,
nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the
past, "the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now
in spirits and now in despondency!"
"Ah!" returned the other, sighing: "yes! The same Sydney, with the
same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did
my own."
"And why not?"
"God knows. It was my way, I suppose."
He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out
before him, looking at the fire.
"Carton," said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying
air, as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained
endeavour was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the
old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into
it, "your way is, and always was, a lame way. You summon no energy and
purpose. Look at me."
"Oh, botheration!" returned Sydney, with a lighter and more
good-humoured laugh, "don't you be moral!"
"How have I done what I have done?" said Stryver; "how do I do
what I do?"
"Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it's not worth
your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want
to do, you do. You were always in the front rank, and I was always
behind."
"I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?"
"I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,"
said Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.
"Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury,"
pursued Carton, "you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen
into mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the Student-Quarter of
Paris, picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that
we didn't get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was
always- nowhere."
"And whose fault was that?"
"Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were
always driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that
restless degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and
repose. It's a gloomy thing, however, to talk about one's own past,
with the day breaking. Turn me in some other direction before I go."
"Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness," said Stryver,
holding up his glass. "Are you turned in a pleasant direction?"
Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.
"Pretty witness," he muttered, looking down into his glass. "I
have had enough of witnesses to-day and to-night; who's your pretty
witness?"
"The picturesque doctor's daughter, Miss Manette."
"She pretty?"
"Is she not?"
"No."
"Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!"
"Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a
judge of beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!"
"Do you know, Sydney," said Mr. Stryver, looking at him with sharp
eyes, and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: "do you
know, I rather thought, at the time, that you sympathised with the
golden-haired doll, and were quick to see what happened to the
golden-haired doll?"
"Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons
within a yard or two of a man's nose, he can see it without a
perspective-glass. I pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now I'll
have no more drink; I'll get to bed."
When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to
light him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its
grimy windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad,
the dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like
a lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round
before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away,
and the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the
city.
Waste forces within him. and a desert all around, this man stood
still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment,
lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage honourable ambition,
self-denial, and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision,
there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked
upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of
Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing
to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his
clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the
man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed
exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of
the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
VI HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE
THE QUIET LODGINGS of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner
not far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday
when the waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason,
and carried it, as to the public interest and memory, far out to
sea, Mr. Jarvis Lorry walked along the sunny streets from
Clerkenwell where he lived, on his way to dine with the Doctor.
After several relapses into business-absorption, Mr. Lorry had
become the Doctor's friend, and the quiet street-corner was the
sunny part of his life.
On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, early in
the afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine
Sundays, he often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor and
Lucie; secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed
to be with them as the family friend, talking, reading, looking out of
window, and generally getting through the day; thirdly, because be
happened to have his own little shrewd doubts to solve, and knew how
the ways of the Doctor's household pointed to that time as a likely
time for solving them.
A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to
be found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows
of the Doctor's lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street
that had a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings
then, north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and
wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished
fields. As a consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with
vigorous freedom, instead of languishing into the parish like stray
paupers without a settlement; and there was many a good south wall,
not far off, on which the peaches ripened in their season.
The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier
part of the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in
shadow, though not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond
it into a glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful,
a wonderful place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging
streets.
There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and
there was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large still house,
where several callings purported to be pursued by day, but whereof
little was audible any day, and which was shunned by all of them at
night. In a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a
plane-tree rustled its green leaves, church-organs claimed to be made,
and silver to be chased, and likewise gold to be beaten by some
mysterious giant who had a golden arm starting out of the wall of
the front hall- as if he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a
similar conversion of all visitors. Very little of these trades, or of
a lonely lodger rumoured to live up-stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming
maker asserted to have a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen.
Occasionally, a stray workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall,
or a stranger peered about there, or a distant clink was heard
across the courtyard, or a thump from the golden giant. These,
however, were only the exceptions required to prove the rule that
the sparrows in the plane-tree behind the house, and the echoes in the
corner before it, had their own way from Sunday morning unto
Saturday night.
Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation,
and its revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him.
His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting
ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request,
and he earned as much as he wanted.
These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry's knowledge, thoughts, and
notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the
corner, on the fine Sunday afternoon.
"Doctor Manette at home?"
Expected home.
"Miss Lucie at home?"
Expected home.
"Miss Pross at home?"
Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to
anticipate intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of
the fact.
"As I am at home myself," said Mr. Lorry, "I'll go upstairs."
Although the Doctor's daughter had known nothing of the country of
her birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that
ability to make much of little means, which is one of its most
useful and most agreeable characteristics. Simple as the furniture
was, it was set off by so many little adornments, of no value but
for their taste and fancy, that its effect was delightful. The
disposition of everything in the rooms, from the largest object to the
least; the arrangement of colours, the elegant variety and contrast
obtained by thrift in trifles, by delicate hands, clear eyes, and good
sense; were at once so pleasant in themselves, and so expressive of
their originator, that, as Mr. Lorry stood looking about him, the very
chairs and tables seemed to ask him, with something of that peculiar
expression which he knew so well by this time, whether he approved?
There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors by which they
communicated being put open that the air might pass freely through
them all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful
resemblance which he detected all around him, walked from one to
another. The first was the best room, and in it were Lucie's birds,
and flowers, and books, and desk, and work-table, and box of
water-colours; the second was the Doctor's consulting-room, used
also as the dining-room; the third, changingly speckled by the
rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the Doctor's bedroom, and
there, in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker's bench and tray of
tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the dismal house
by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris.
"I wonder," said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, "that he
keeps that reminder of his sufferings about him!"
"And why wonder at that?" was the abrupt inquiry that made him
start.
It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand,
whose acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at
Dover, and had since improved.
"I should have thought-" Mr. Lorry began.
"Pooh! You'd have thought!" said Miss Pross; and Mr. Lorry left off.
"How do you do?" inquired that lady then- sharply, and yet as if
to express that she bore him no malice.
"I am pretty well, I thank you," answered Mr. Lorry, with
meekness; "how are you?"
"Nothing to boast of," said Miss Pross.
"Indeed?"
"Ah! indeed!" said Miss Pross. "I am very much put out about my
Ladybird."
"Indeed?"
"For gracious sake say something else besides 'indeed,' or you'll
fidget me to death," said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated
from stature) was shortness.
"Really, then?" said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment.
"Really, is bad enough," returned Miss Pross, "but better. Yes, I am
very much put out."
"May I ask the cause?"
"I don't want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of
Ladybird, to come here looking after her," said Miss Pross.
"Do dozens come for that purpose?"
"Hundreds," said Miss Pross.
It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before
her time and since) that whenever her original proposition was
questioned, she exaggerated it.
"Dear me!" said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.
"I have lived with the darling- or the darling has lived with me,
and paid me for it; which she certainly should never have done, you
may take your affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either
myself or her for nothing- since she was ten years old. And it's
really very hard," said Miss Pross.
Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr. Lorry shook his
head; using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak
that would fit anything.
"All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the
pet, are always turning up," said Miss Pross. "When you began it--"
"I began it, Miss Pross?"
"Didn't you? Who brought her father to life?"
"Oh! If that was beginning it--" said Mr. Lorry.
"It wasn't ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was
hard enough; not that I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette,
except that he is not worthy of such a daughter, which is no
imputation on him, for it was not to be expected that anybody should
be, under any circumstances. But it really is doubly and trebly hard
to have crowds and multitudes of people turning up after him (I
could have forgiven him), to take Ladybird's affections away from me."
Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her
by this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of
those unselfish creatures- found only among women- who will, for
pure love and admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth
when they have lost it, to beauty that they never had, to
accomplishments that they were never fortunate enough to gain, to
bright hopes that never shone upon their own sombre lives. He knew
enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better than
the faithful service of the heart; so rendered and so free from any
mercenary taint, he had such an exalted respect for it, that in the
retributive arrangements made by his own mind- we all make such
arrangements, more or less- he stationed Miss Pross much nearer to the
lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably better got up both by
Nature and Art, who had balances at Tellson's.
"There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Ladybird," said
Miss Pross; "and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn't made a
mistake in life."
Here again: Mr. Lorry's inquiries into Miss Pross's personal history
had established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless
scoundrel who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake
to speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for
evermore, with no touch of compunction. Miss Pross's fidelity of
belief in Solomon (deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake)
was quite a serious matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in his
good opinion of her.
"As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of
business," he said, when they had got back to the drawing-room and had
sat down there in friendly relations, "Let me ask you- does the
Doctor, in talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemaking time,
yet?"
"Never."
"And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?"
"Ah!" returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. "But I don't say he
don't refer to it within himself."
"Do you believe that he thinks of it much?"
"I do," said Miss Pross.
"Do you imagine--" Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him
up short with:
"Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all."
"I stand corrected; do you suppose- you go so far as to suppose,
sometimes?"
"Now and then," said Miss Pross.
"Do you suppose," Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in
his bright eye, as it looked kindly at her, "that Doctor Manette has
any theory of his own, preserved through all those years, relative
to the cause of his being so oppressed; perhaps, even to the name of
his oppressor?"
"I don't suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells me."
"And that is--?"
"That she thinks he has."
"Now don't be angry at my asking all these questions; because I am a
mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of business."
"Dull?" Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.
Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr. Lorry replied, "No,
no, no. Surely not. To return to business:- Is it not remarkable
that Doctor Manette, unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are an
well assured he is, should never touch upon that question? I will
not say with me, though he had business relations with me many years
ago, and we are now intimate; I will say with the fair daughter to
whom he is so devotedly attached, and who is so devotedly attached
to him? Believe me, Miss Pross, I don't approach the topic with you,
out of curiosity, but out of zealous interest."
"Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad's the best, you'll
tell me," said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, "he is
afraid of the whole subject."
"Afraid?"
"It's plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It's a dreadful
remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not
knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never
feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn't make the
subject pleasant, I should think."
It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry had looked for. "True,"
said he, "and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my
mind, Miss Pross, whether it is good for Doctor Manette to have that
suppression always shut up within him. Indeed, it is this doubt and
the uneasiness it sometimes causes me that has led me to our present
confidence."
"Can't be helped," said Miss Pross, shaking her head. "Touch that
string, and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone.
In short, must leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets
up in the dead of the night, and will be heard, by us overhead
there, walking up and down, walking up and down, in his room. Ladybird
has learnt to know then that his mind is walking up and down,
walking up and down, in his old prison. She hurries to him, and they
go on together, walking up and down, walking up and down, until he
is composed. But he never says a word of the true reason of his
restlessness, to her, and she finds it best not to hint at it to
him. In silence they go walking up and down together, walking up and
down together, till her love and company have brought him to himself."
Notwithstanding Miss Pross's denial of her own imagination, there
was a perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one
sad idea, in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down,
which testified to her possessing such a thing.
The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it
had begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it
seemed as though the very mention of that weary pacing to and fro
had set it going.
"Here they are!" said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference;
"and now we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon!"
It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a
peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window,
looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied
they would never approach. Not only would the echoes die away, as
though the steps had gone; but, echoes of other steps that never
came would be heard in their stead, and would die away for good when
they seemed close at hand. However, father and daughter did at last
appear, and Miss Pross was ready at the street door to receive them.
Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim,
taking off her darling's bonnet when she came up-stairs, and
touching it up with the ends of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust
off it, and folding her mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing
her rich hair with as much pride as she could possibly have taken in
her own hair if she had been the vainest and handsomest of women.
Her darling was a pleasant sight too, embracing her and thanking
her, and protesting against her taking so much trouble for her-
which last she only dared to do playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt,
would have retired to her own chamber and cried. The Doctor was a
pleasant sight too, looking on at them, and telling Miss Pross how she
spoilt Lucie, in accents and with eyes that had as much spoiling in
them as Miss Pross had, and would have had more if it were possible.
Mr. Lorry was a pleasant sight too, beaming at all this in his
little wig, and thanking his bachelor stars for having lighted him
in his declining years to a Home. But, no Hundreds of people came to
see the sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain for the fulfilment of
Miss Pross's prediction.
Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of
the little household, Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and
always acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, of a very modest
quality, were so well cooked and so well served, and so neat in
their contrivances, half English and half French, that nothing could
be better. Miss Pross's friendship being of the thoroughly practical
kind, she had ravaged Soho and the adjacent provinces, in search of
impoverished French, who, tempted by shillings and half-crowns,
would impart culinary mysteries to her. From these decayed sons and
daughters of Gaul, she had acquired such wonderful arts, that the
woman and girl who formed the staff of domestics regarded her as quite
a Sorceress, or Cinderella's Godmother: who would send out for a fowl,
a rabbit, a vegetable or two from the garden, and change them into
anything she pleased.
On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor's table, but on other
days persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either in the
lower regions, or in her own room on the second floor- a blue chamber,
to which no one but her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this
occasion, Miss Pross, responding to Ladybird's pleasant face and
pleasant efforts to please her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner
was very pleasant, too.
It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that the
wine should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should sit
there in the air. As everything turned upon her, and revolved about
her, they went out under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down
for the special benefit of Mr. Lorry. She had installed herself,
some time before, as Mr. Lorry's cup-bearer; and while they sat
under the plane-tree, talking, she kept his glass replenished.
Mysterious backs and ends of houses peeped at them as they talked, and
the plane-tree whispered to them in its own way above their heads.
Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr. Darnay
presented himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but he
was only One.
Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, Miss
Pross suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head and body,
and retired into the house. She was not unfrequently the victim of
this disorder, and she called it, in familiar conversation, "a fit
of the jerks."
The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young.
The resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong at such times,
and as they sat side by side, she leaning on his shoulder, and he
resting his arm on the back of her chair, it was very agreeable to
trace the likeness.
He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with unusual
vivacity. "Pray, Doctor Manette," said Mr. Darnay, as they sat under
the plane-tree- and he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic
in hand, which happened to be the old buildings of London- "have you
seen much of the Tower?"
"Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen enough
of it, to know that it teems with interest; little more."
"I have been there, as you remember," said Darnay, with a smile,
though reddening a little angrily, "in another character, and not in a
character that gives facilities for seeing much of it. They told me
a curious thing when I was there."
"What was that?" Lucie asked.
"In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old dungeon,
which had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone of
its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which had been carved by
prisoners- dates, names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner
stone in an angle of the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone
to execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They were
done with some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady
hand. At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more
carefully examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no
record or legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many
fruitless guesses were made what the name could have been. At
length, it was suggested that the letters were not initials, but the
complete word, DIG. The floor was examined very carefully under the
inscription, and, in the earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some
fragment of paving, were found the ashes of a paper, mingled with
the ashes of a small leathern case or bag. What the unknown prisoner
had written will never be read, but he had written something, and
hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler."
"My father," exclaimed Lucie, "you are ill!"
He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His manner
and his look quite terrified them all.
"No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and
they made me start. We had better go in."
He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in
large drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops on it.
But, he said not a single word in reference to the discovery that had
been told of, and, as they went into the house, the business eye of
Mr. Lorry either detected, or fancied it detected, on his face, as it
turned towards Charles Darnay, the same singular look that had been
upon it when it turned towards him in the passages of the Court House.
He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had
doubts of his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall
was not more steady than he was, when he stopped under it to remark to
them that he was not yet proof against slight surprises (if he ever
would be), and that the rain had startled him.
Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks
upon her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had lounged in,
but he made only Two.
The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors
and windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table
was done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and looked out
into the heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside
her; Carton leaned against a window. The curtains were long and white,
and some of the thunder-gusts that whirled into the corner, caught
them up to the ceiling, and waved them like spectral wings.
"The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few," said
Doctor Manette. "It comes slowly."
"It comes surely," said Carton.
They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as
people in a dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.
There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to
get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes
resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a
footstep was there.
"A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!" said Darnay, when
they had listened for a while.
"Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?" asked Lucie. "Sometimes, I
have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied- but even the
shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so
black and solemn--"
"Let us shudder too. We may know what it is."
"It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we
originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have
sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made
the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming
by-and-bye into our lives."
"There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be
so," Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more
and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of
feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in
the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping
altogether; all in the distant streets, and not one within sight.
"Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss
Manette, or are we to divide them among us?"
"I don't know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but
you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone,
and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to
come into my life, and my father's."
"I take them into mine!" said Carton. "I ask no questions and make
no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss
Manette, and I see them-- by the Lightning." He added the last
words, after there had been a vivid flash which had shown him lounging
in the window.
"And I hear them!" he added again, after a peal of thunder. "Here
they come, fast, fierce, and furious!"
It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped
him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder
and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a
moment's interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon
rose at midnight.
The great bell of Saint Paul's was striking One in the cleared
air, when Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a
lantern, set forth on his return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were
solitary patches of road on the way between Soho and Clerkenwell,
and Mr. Lorry, mindful of foot-pads, always retained Jerry for this
service: though it was usually performed a good two hours earlier.
"What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry," said Mr. Lorry,
"to bring the dead out of their graves."
"I never see the night myself, master- nor yet I don't expect to-
what would do that," answered Jerry.
"Good night, Mr. Carton," said the man of business. "Good night, Mr.
Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!"
Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and
roar, bearing down upon them, too.
VII MONSEIGNEUR IN TOWN
MONSEIGNEUR, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held
his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was
in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of
Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without.
Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow
a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds
supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's
chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur,
without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and
the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches
in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by
Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One
lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a
second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he
bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a
fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It
was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these
attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring
Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his
chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have
died of two.
Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the
Comedy and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur
was out at a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So
polite and so impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the
Grand Opera had far more influence with him in the tiresome articles
of state affairs and state secrets, than the needs of all France. A
happy circumstance for France, as the like always is for all countries
similarly favoured!- always was for England (by way of example), in
the regretted days of the merry Stuart who sold it.
Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business,
which was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular
public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it
must all go his way- tend to his own power and pocket. Of his
pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly
noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text of his order
(altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is not much)
ran: "The earth and the fulness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur."
Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept
into his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both
classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General.
As to finances public, because Monseigneur could not make anything
at all of them, and must consequently let them out to somebody who
could; as to finances private, because Farmer-Generals were rich,
and Monseigneur, after generations of great luxury and expense, was
growing poor. Hence Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent,
while there was yet time to ward off the impending veil, the
cheapest garment she could wear, and had bestowed her as a prize
upon a very rich Farmer-General, poor in family. Which Farmer-General,
carrying an appropriate cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was
now among the company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by
mankind- always excepting superior mankind of the blood of
Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him with the
loftiest contempt.
A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and
forage where he could, the Farmer-General- howsoever his matrimonial
relations conduced to social morality- was at least the greatest
reality among the personages who attended at the hotel of
Monseigneur that day.
For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned
with every device of decoration that the taste and skin of the time
could achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with
any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere
(and not so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre
Dame, almost equidistant from the two extremes, could see them
both), they would have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business-
if that could have been anybody's business, at the house of
Monseigneur. Military officers destitute of military knowledge;
naval officers with no idea of a ship; civil officers without a notion
of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the worst world worldly, with
sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives; all totally unfit for
their several callings all lying horribly in pretending to belong to
them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and
therefore foisted on all public employments from which anything was to
be got; these were to be told off by the score and the score. People
not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally
unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in
travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no
less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty
remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their
courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who
had discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which
the State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest
to root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any
ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur.
Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words,
and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with
Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at
this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite
gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time-
and has been since- to be known by its fruits of indifference to every
natural subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these
various notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that
the spies among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur- forming a
goodly half of the polite company- would have found it hard to
discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in
her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except
for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world-
which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother-
there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the
unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming
grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty.
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in
attendance upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen
exceptional people who had had, for a few years, some vague
misgiving in them that things in general were going rather wrong. As a
promising way of setting them right, half of the half-dozen had become
members of a fantastic sect of Convulsionists, and were even then
considering within themselves whether they should foam, rage, roar,
and turn cataleptic on the spot- thereby setting up a highly
intelligible finger-post to the Future, for Monseigneur's guidance.
Besides these Dervishes, were other three who had rushed into
another sect, which mended matters with a jargon about "the Centre
of Truth:" holding that Man had got out of the Centre of Truth-
which did not need much demonstration- but had not got out of the
Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of the
Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre, by
fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much
discoursing with spirits went on- and it did a world of good which
never became manifest.
But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of
Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only
been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been
eternally correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of
hair, such delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended,
such gallant swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the
sense of smell, would surely keep anything going, for ever and ever.
The exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding wore little pendent
trinkets that chinked as they languidly moved; these golden fetters
rang like precious little bells; and what with that ringing, and
with the rustle of silk and brocade and fine linen, there was a
flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and his devouring
hunger far away.
Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping
all things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball
that was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through
Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals
of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball
descended to the Common Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm,
was required to officiate "frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat,
pumps, and white silk stockings." At the gallows and the wheel-the axe
was a rarity- Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his
brother Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans, and the rest,
to call him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among the
company at Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and
eightieth year of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted
in a frizzled hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk
stockinged, would see the very stars out!
Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown
open, and issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and
fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in
body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven- which may
have been one among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur
never troubled it.
Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one
happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably
passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference
of Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in
due course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the
chocolate sprites, and was seen no more.
The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little
storm, and the precious little bells went ringing down-stairs. There
was soon but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat
under his arm and his snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the
mirrors on his way out.
"I devote you," said this person, stoppin | |
