lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its
habitual aspect.
In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine
turned himself inside out, and sat on doorsteps and window-
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ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a
breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was
accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to group: a
Missionary—there were many like her—such as the world will do
well never to breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted
worthless things, but, the mechanical work was a mechanical
substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws
and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still, the
stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.
But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And
as Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went
quicker and fiercer among every little knot of women that she had
spoken with, and left behind.
Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with
admiration. “A great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand
woman, a frightfully grand woman!”
Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church
bells and the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace
Courtyard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness
encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely,
when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy
steeple over France, should be melted into thundering cannon;
when the military drums should be beating to drown a wretched
voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty,
Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who
sat knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in
around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting,
knitting, counting dropping heads.
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Chapter XXIII
ONE NIGHT
N ever did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the
quiet corner in Soho, than one memorable evening when
the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree
together. Never did the moon rise with a milder radiance over
great London, than on that night when it found them still seated
under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.
Lucie was to be married tomorrow. She had reserved this last
evening for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.
“You are happy, my dear father?”
“Quite, my child.”
They had said little, though they had been there a long time.
When it was yet light enough to work and read, she had neither
engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She
had employed herself in both ways, at his side under the tree,
many and many a time; but, this time was not quite like any other,
and nothing could make it so.
“And I am very happy tonight, dear father. I am deeply happy
in the love that Heaven has so blessed—my love for Charles, and
Charles’s love for me. But, if my life were not to be still
consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so arranged as that it
would part us, even by the length of a few of these streets, I should
be more unhappy and self-reproachful now than I can tell you.
Even as it is—” Even as it was, she could not command her voice.
In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her
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face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the
light of the sun itself is—as the light called human life is—at its
coming and its going.
“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel
quite, quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of
mine, will ever interpose between us? I know it well, but do you
know it? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain?”
Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he
could scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling! More than
that,” he added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far
brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it could have
been—nay, than it ever was—without it.”
“If I could hope that, my father!—”
“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how
plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young,
cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should
not be wasted—” She moved her hand towards his lips, but he
took it in his, and repeated the word.
“—wasted, my child—should not be wasted, struck aside from
the natural order of things—for my sake. Your unselfishness
cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this;
but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while
yours was incomplete?”
“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been
quite happy with you.”
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have
been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been
Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I
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should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life
would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen
on you.”
It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him
refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new
sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it
long afterwards.
“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards
the moon. “I have looked at her, from my prison-window, when I
could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been
such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost,
that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked
at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of
nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her
at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I
could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering
manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I
remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that
time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to
shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to
contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire
endurance that was over.
“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the
unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive.
Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had
killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his
father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for
vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would
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never know his father’s story; who might even live to weigh the
possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will and
act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”
She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.
“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful
of me—rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I
have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her
married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether
perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next
generation my place was a blank.”
“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a
daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been
that child.”
“You, Lucie? It is out of the consolation and restoration you
have brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass
between us and the moon on this last night.—What did I say just
now?”
“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”
“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the
silence have touched me in a different way—have affected me with
something as like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that
had pain for its foundations could—I have imagined her as coming
to me in my cell, and leading me out into the freedom beyond the
fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight often, as I now see
you; except that I never held her in my arms; it stood between the
little grated window and the door. But, you understand that that
was not the child I am speaking of?”
“The figure was not; the—the—image; the fancy?”
“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed
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sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind
pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward
appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother.
The other had that likeness too—as you have—but was not the
same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you
must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed
distinctions.”
His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood
from running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.
“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the
moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to show me that the
home of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of her
lost father. My picture was in her room, and I was in her prayers.
Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded
it all.”
“I was that child, my father. I was not half so good, but in my
love that was I.”
“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of
Beauvais, “and they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity
me. When they passed a prison of the State, they kept far from its
frowning walls, and looked up at its bars, and spoke in whispers.
She could never deliver me; I imagined that she always brought
me back after showing me such things. But then, blessed with the
relief of tears, I fell upon my knees and blessed her.”
“I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you
bless me as fervently tomorrow?”
“Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have
tonight for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking
God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest,
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never rose near the happiness that I have known with you, and
that we have before us.”
He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and
humbly thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-andby, they went into the house.
There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry; there
was even to be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The
marriage was to make no change in their place of residence; they
had been able to extend it, by taking to themselves the upper
rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible lodger, and
they desired nothing more.
Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They
were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He
regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed
to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and drank to
him affectionately.
So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they
separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning,
Lucie came downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free
from unshaped fears, beforehand.
All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he
lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow,
and his hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless
candle in the shadow at a distance, crept up to his bed, and put
her lips to his; then, leaned over him, and looked at him.
Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn;
but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong,
that he held the mastery of them even in his sleep. A more
remarkable face in its quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with
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an unseen assailant, was not to be beheld in all the wide
dominions of sleep, that night.
She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a
prayer that she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to
be, and as his sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand,
and kissed his lips once more, and went away. So, the sunrise
came, and the shadows of the leaves of the plane-tree moved upon
his face, as softly as her lips had moved in praying for him.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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Chapter XXIV
NINE DAYS
T he marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were
ready outside the closed door of the Doctor’s room, where
he was speaking with Charles Darnay. They were ready to
go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr. Lorry, and Miss Pross—to
whom the event, through a gradual process of reconcilement to
the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss, but for the
yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon should have
been the bridegroom.
“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the
bride, and who had been moving round her to take in every point
of her quiet, pretty dress; “and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie,
that I brought you across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless
me! How little I thought what I was doing! How lightly I valued the
obligation I was conferring on my friend Mr. Charles!”
“You didn’t mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross,
“and therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”
“Really? Well; but don’t cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry.
“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; “you are.”
“I, my Pross?” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant
with her, on occasion.)
“You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at it.
Such a present of plate as you have made ’em, is enough to bring
tears into anybody’s eyes. There’s not a fork or a spoon in the
collection,” said Miss Pross, “that I didn’t cry over, last night after
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the box came, till I couldn’t see it.”
“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my
honour, I had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of
remembrance invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion
that makes a man speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To
think that there might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty
years almost!”
“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.
“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked
the gentleman of that name.
“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your
cradle.”
“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig,
“that seems probable, too.”
“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross,
“before you were put in your cradle.”
“Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was very unhandsomely
dealt with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of
my pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm
soothingly round her waist, “I hear them moving in the next room,
and Miss Pross and I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious
not to lose the final opportunity of saying something to you that
you wish to hear. You leave your good father, my dear, in hands as
earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be taken every
conceivable care of; during the next fortnight, while you are in
Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson’s shall go to the wall
(comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at the fortnight’s
end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on your
other fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him
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to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear
Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with
an old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to
claim his own.”
For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the well-
remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright
golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness
and delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as
