“That is what you are not to ask me! But I think—I know—he
does.”
“If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my
Life?”
“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always,
and very lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to
believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that
there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.”
“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite
astounded, “that I should have done him any wrong. I never
thought this of him.”
“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is
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scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is
reparable now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things,
gentle things, even magnanimous things.”
She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost
man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was for
hours.
“And, O my dearest Love!” she urged, clinging nearer to him,
laying her head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his,
“remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he
is in his misery!”
The supplication touched him home. “I will always remember
it, dear Heart. I will remember it as long as I live.”
He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and
folded her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the
dark streets, could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could
have seen the drops of pity kissed away by her husband from the
soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he might have cried to the
night—and the words would not have parted from his lips for the
first time—“God bless her for her sweet compassion!”
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Chapter XXVII
ECHOING FOOTSTEPS
Awonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that
corner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the
golden thread which bound her husband, and her father,
and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of
quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house on the tranquilly resounding
corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.
At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy
young wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and
her eyes would be dimmed. For, there was something coming in
the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that
stirred her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts—hopes,
of a love as yet unknown to her: doubts, of her remaining upon
earth, to enjoy that new delight—divided her breast. Among the
echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own
early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would be left so
desolate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her
eyes, and broke like waves.
That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then,
among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet
and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound
as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always
hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny
with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom in
her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in His
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arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all
together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the
tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie
heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing
sounds. Her husband’s step was strong and prosperous among
them; her father’s firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of
string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-
corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in
the garden!
Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they
were not harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay
in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he
said, with a radiant smile, “Dear papa and mamma, I am very
sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am
called, and I must go!” those were not tears all of agony that
wetted his young mother’s cheek as the spirit departed from her
embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid
them not. They see my Father’s face. O Father, blessed words!
Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the
other echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them
that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little
garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible
to Lucie, in a hushed murmur—like the breathing of a summer sea
asleep upon a sandy shore—as the little Lucie, comically studious
at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s
footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were
blended in her life.
The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney
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Carton. Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his
privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them
through the evening, as he had once done often. He never came
there heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was
whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true
echoes for ages and ages.
No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with
a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and
a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him—an
instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities
are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so
here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out
her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The
little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss
him for me!”
Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some
great engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his
useful friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so
favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so,
Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom,
unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any
stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to
lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion’s
jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to
be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with
property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining
about them but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.
These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage
of the most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before
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him like three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered
as pupils to Lucie’s husband: delicately saying, “Halloa! here are
three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic,
Darnay!” The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread-andcheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation, which he
afterwards turned to account in the training of the young
gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride of Beggars,
like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming to
Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay
had once put in practice to ‘catch’ him, and on the diamond-cutdiamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to
be caught.’ Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were
occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine, and the lie, excused
him for the latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he
believed it himself—which is surely such an incorrigible
aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to justify any such
offender’s being carried off to some suitably retired spot, and
there hanged out of the way.
These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes
pensive, sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing
corner, until her little daughter was six years old. How near to her
heart the echoes of her child’s tread came, and those of her own
dear father’s, always active and self-possessed, and those of her
dear husband’s, need not be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of
their united home, directed by herself with such a wise and
elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any waste, was
music to her. Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet in
her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found
her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and
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of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and
duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and
asked her “What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being
everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never
seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?”
But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled
menacingly in the corner all through this space of time. And it was
now, about little Lucie’s sixth birthday, that they began to have an
awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea
rising.
On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-nine, Mr. Lorry came in late, from Tellson’s, and sat himself
down by Lucie and her husband in the dark window. It was a hot,
wild night, and they were all three reminded of the old Sunday
night when they had looked at the lightning from the same place.
“I began to think,” said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back,
“that I should have to pass the night at Tellson’s. We have been so
full of business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or
which way to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we
have actually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over
there, seem not to be able to confide their property to us fast
enough. There is positively a mania among some of them for
sending it to England.”
“That has a bad look,” said Darnay.
“A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don’t know
what reason there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us
at Tellson’s are getting old, and we really can’t be troubled out of
the ordinary course without due occasion.”
“Still,” said Darnay, “you know how gloomy and threatening
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the sky is.”
“I know that, to be sure,” assented Mr. Lorry, trying to
persuade himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he
grumbled, “but I am determined to be peevish after my long day’s
botheration. Where is Manette?”
“Here he is,” said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the
moment.
“I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and
forebodings by which I have been surrounded all day long, have
made me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I hope?”
“No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,” said
the Doctor.
“I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to
be pitted against you tonight. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie? I
can’t see.”
“Of course, it has been kept for you.”
“Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?”
“And sleeping soundly.”
“That’s right; all safe and well! I don’t know why anything
should be otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have
been so put out all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my
dear! Thank ye. Now, come and take your place in the circle, and
let us sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your
theory.”
“Not a theory; it was a fancy.”
“A fancy, then, my wise pet,” said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand.
“They are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not?
Only hear them!”
Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into
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anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once
stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the
little circle sat in the dark London window.
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of
scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above
the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the
sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine,
and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled
branches of trees in a winter wind; all the fingers convulsively
clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was
thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began,
through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores
at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no
eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being
distributed—so were cartridges, powder and ball, bars of iron and
wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity
could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing
else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks
out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine
was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living
creature there held life as of no account, and was demented with a
passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this
raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop
in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex
where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and
sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged
this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and
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strove in the thickest of the uproar.
“Keep near to me, Jacques Three,” cried Defarge; “and do you,
Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of
as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?”
“Eh, well! Here you see me!” said madame, composed as ever,
but not knitting today. Madame’s resolute right hand was
occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and
in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.
“Where do you go, my wife?”
“I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You shall see me at
the head of women, by-and-by.”
“Come then!” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. “Patriots
and friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been
shaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave,
depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells
ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new
beach, the attack begun.
Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight
great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire
and through the smoke—in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea
cast him up and against a cannon, and on the instant he became a
cannonier—Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful
soldier, two fierce hours.
Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down!
“Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two,
Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-
and Twenty Thousand; in the name of all the Angels or the
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Devils—which you prefer—work!” Thus Defarge of the wine-shop,
still at his gun, which had long grown hot.
“To me, women!” cried madame his wife, “What! We can kill as
well as the men when the place is taken!” And to her, with a shrill
thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike
in hunger and revenge.
Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but still the deep ditch, the
single drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great
towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling
wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggon-
loads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all
directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint,
boom smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea;
but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the
massive stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge
of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of
four fierce hours.
A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley—this dimly
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it—
suddenly the sea rose immeasurably, wider and higher, and swept
Defarge of the wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the
massive stone outer walls, in among the eight great towers
surrendered!
So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that
even to draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if
he had been struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was
landed in the outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an
angle of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques
