one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements; which lights, as
the casements darkened, and more stars came out, seemed to have
shot up into the sky instead of having been extinguished.
The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many
overhanging trees, was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time;
and the shadow was exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his
carriage stopped, and the great door of his chateau was opened to
him.
“Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from
England?”
“Monseigneur, not yet.”
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Chapter XV
THE GORGON’S HEAD
It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the
Marquis, with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone
sweeps of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the
principal door. A stony business altogether, with heavy stone
balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of
men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon’s
head had surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago.
Upon the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis,
flambeau preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing
the darkness to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of
the great pile of stable building away among the trees. All else was
so quiet, that the flambeau carried up the steps, and the other
flambeau held at the great door, burnt as if they were in a close
room of state, instead of being in the open night air. Other sound
than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of the
fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights
that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long
low sigh, and hold their breath again.
The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis
crossed a hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and
knives of the chase; grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and
riding-whips, of which many a peasant, gone to his benefactor
Death, had felt the weight when his lord was angry.
Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for
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the night, Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going
on before, went up the staircase to a door in a corridor. This
thrown open, admitted him to his own private apartment of three
rooms: his bedchamber and two others. High vaulted rooms with
cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon the hearths for the
burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries befitting the state
of a marquis in a luxurious age and country. The fashion of the last
Louis but one, of the line that was never to break—the fourteenth
Louis—was conspicuous in their rich furniture; but, it was
diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old pages in
the history of France.
A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a
round room, in one of the chateau’s four extinguisher-topped
towers. A small lofty room, with its window wide open, and the
wooden jalousie-blinds closed, so that the dark night only showed
in slight horizontal lines of black, alternating with their broad
lines of stone colour.
“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper
preparation; “they said he was not arrived.”
Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.
“Ah! It is not probable he will arrive tonight; nevertheless, leave
the table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.”
In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down
alone to his sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite
to the window, and he had taken his soup, and was raising his
glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when he put it down.
“What is that?” he calmly asked, looking with attention at the
horizontal lines of black and stone colour.
“Monseigneur! That?”
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“Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.”
It was done.
“Well?”
“Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that
are here.”
The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked
out into the vacant darkness, and stood, with that blank behind
him, looking round for instructions.
“Good,” said the imperturbable master. “Close them again.”
That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper.
He was halfway through it, when he again stopped with his glass
in his hand, hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and
came up to the front of the chateau.
“Ask who is arrived.”
It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few
leagues behind Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had
diminished the distance rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up
with Monseigneur on the road. He had heard of Monseigneur, at
the posting-houses, as being before him.
He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him
then and there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little
while he came. He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.
Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did
not shake hands.
“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he
took his seat at table.
“Yesterday. And you?”
“I come direct.”
“From London?”
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“Yes.”
“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a
smile.
“On the contrary; I come direct.”
“Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time
intending the journey.”
“I have been detained by”—the nephew stopped a moment in
his answer—“various business.”
“Without doubt,” said the polished uncle.
So long as a servant was present, no other words passed
between them. When coffee had been served and they were alone
together, the nephew, looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of
the face that was like a fine mask, opened a conversation.
“I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object
that took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril;
but it is a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it
would have sustained me.”
“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, to
death.”
“I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “whether, if it had carried
me to the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me
there.”
The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the
fine straight lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the
uncle made a graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a
slight form of good breeding that it was not reassuring.
“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know, you
may have expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance
to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me.”
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“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly.
“But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at
him with deep distrust, “I know that your diplomacy would stop
me by any means, and would know no scruple as to means.”
“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation
in the two marks. “Do me the favour to recall that I told you so,
long ago.”
“I recall it.”
“Thank you,” said the Marquis—very sweetly in deed.
His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical
instrument.
“In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once
your bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a
prison in France here.”
“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his
coffee. “Dare I ask you to explain?”
“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and
had not been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter
de cachet would have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.”
“It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the
honour of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to
that extent. Pray excuse me!”
“I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before
yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew.
“I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with
refined politeness; “I would not be sure of that. A good
opportunity for consideration, surrounded by the advantages of
solitude, might influence your destiny to far greater advantage
than you influence it for yourself. But it is useless to discuss the
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question. I am, as you say, at a disadvantage. These little
instruments of correction, these gentle aids to the power and
honour of families, these slight favours that might so incommode
you, are only to be obtained now by interest and importunity.
They are sought by so many, and they are granted (comparatively)
to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such things is
changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right of
life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many
such dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my
bedroom), one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the
spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his
daughter—his daughter? We have lost many privileges; a new
philosophy has become the mode; and the assertion of our station,
in these days, might (I do not go as far as to say would, but might)
cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very bad!”
The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his
head; as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a
country still containing himself, that great means of regeneration.
“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in
the modern time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe
our name to be more detested than any name in France.”
“Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “Detestation of the high is the
involuntary homage of the low.”
“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face
I can look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me
with any deference on it but the dark deference of fear and
slavery.”
“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the
family, merited by the manner in which the family has sustained
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its grandeur. Hah!” And he took another gentle little pinch of
snuff, and lightly crossed his legs.
But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered
his eyes thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask
looked at him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness,
closeness, and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer’s
assumption of indifference.
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference
of fear and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep
the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to
it, “shuts out the sky.”
That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture
of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty
like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have
been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to
claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked
ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found that
shutting out the sky in a new way—to wit, for ever, from the eyes
of the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a
hundred thousand muskets.
“Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “I will preserve the honour and
repose of the family if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall
we terminate our conference for the night?”
“A moment more.”
“An hour, if you please.”
“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping
the fruits of wrong.”
“We have done wrong?” repeated the Marquis, with an
inquiring smile, and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then
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to himself.
“Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so
much account to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my
father’s time, we did a world of wrong, injuring every human
creature who came between us and our pleasure, whatever it was.
Why need I speak of my father’s time, when it is equally yours?
Can I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint inheritor, and next
successor, from himself?”
“Death has done that!” said the Marquis.
“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “bound to a system
that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it;
seeking to execute the last request of my dear mother’s lips, and
obey the last look of my dear mother’s eyes, which implored me to
have mercy and to redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and
power in vain.”
“Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis,
touching him on the breast with his forefinger—they were now
standing by the hearth—“you will for ever seek them in vain, be
assured.”
Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was
cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking
quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again
he touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine
point of a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him
through the body, and said, “My friend, I will die, perpetuating the
system under which I have lived.”
When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and
put his box in his pocket.
“Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing a
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small bell on the table, “and accept your natural destiny. But you
are lost, Monsieur Charles, I see.”
“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew,
sadly; “I renounce them.”
“Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the
property? It is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?”
“I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it
passed to me from you, tomorrow—”
“Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.”
“—or twenty years hence—”
“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I prefer
that supposition.”
“—I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is
little to relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!”
“Hah!” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.
“To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity,
under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of
waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression,
hunger, nakedness, and suffering.”
“Hah!” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.
“If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better
qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the
weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who
cannot leave it and who have been long wrung to the last point of
