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
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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 tonight, 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 paperbestrewn 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 head-gear 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,
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and the jackal assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed,
the lion put his hands in his waistband again, and lay down to
meditate. 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
clock 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 today. 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 exercise 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
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furnace in which sustained endeavour was forged, and 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 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 pressing, 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
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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 today and tonight: 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
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had risen far away, and the fine 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 of
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.
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Chapter XII
HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE
T he quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a 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 the 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 he 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
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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
upstairs, 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
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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
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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 worktable, 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
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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.
