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
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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 tomorrow
morning’s interest of gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and
branding-iron, should re-people 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
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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 acknowledgement 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 daresay.”
“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.
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“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 as with 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 Ludgatehill 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
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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 has 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
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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
to 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
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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
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down upon him.
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Chapter XI
THE JACKAL
T hose 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 gardenful
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
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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
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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 tonight I think. I have been dining with the day’s client;
