Marquis, burning at the stake and contending with the fire.
The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke.
Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain;
the water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished
like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells
of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, like
crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into
the furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North,
and South, along the night-enshrouded roads, guided by the
beacon they had lighted, towards their next destination. The
illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing
the lawful ringer, rang for joy.
Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire,
and bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had
to do with the collection of rent and taxes—though it was but a
small instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got
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in those latter days—became impatient for an interview with him,
and, surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for
personal conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily
bar his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of
that conference was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his
house-top behind his stack of chimneys; this time resolved, if his
door were broken in (he was a small Southern man of retaliative
temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the parapet,
and crush a man or two below.
Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there with
the distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
combined with the joy-ringing for music; not to mention his
having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his
posting-house gate, which the village showed a lively inclination to
displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole
summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that
plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the
friendly dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village
guttering out, the people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle
came down bringing his life with him for that while.
Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there
were other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other
nights, whom the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful
streets, where they had been born and bred; also, there were other
villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads
and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery turned
with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But, the
fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South,
be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude
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of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no
functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate
successfully.
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Chapter XXX
DRAWN TO THE LOADSTONE ROCK
In such risings of fire and risings of sea—the firm earth shaken
by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but
was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and
wonder of the beholders on the shore—three years of tempest
were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been
woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of
her home.
Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the
echoes in the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard
the thronging feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as
the footsteps of a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with
their country declared in danger, changed into wild beasts, by
terrible enchantment long persisted in.
Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the
phenomenon of his not being appreciated: of his being so little
wanted in France, as to incur considerable danger of receiving his
dismissal from it, and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who
raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the
sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but
immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s
Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing
many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner
beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.
The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have
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been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never
been a good eye to see with—had long had the mote in it of
Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a mole’s blindness—
but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that
exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue,
corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was
gone; had been besieged in its Palace and ‘suspended,’ when the
last tidings came over.
The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and
ninety-two was come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered
far and wide.
As was natural, the headquarters and great gathering-place of
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are
supposed to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted,
and Monseigneur without a guinea haunted the spot where his
guineas used to be. Moreover, it was the spot to which such
French intelligence as was most to be relied upon, came quickest.
Again: Tellson’s was a munificent house, and extended great
liberality to old customers who had fallen from their high estate.
Again: those nobles who had seen the coming storm in time, and
anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made provident
remittances to Tellson’s, were always to be heard of there by their
needy brethren. To which it must be added that every newcomer
from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson’s, almost
as a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson’s was at
that time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange; and
this was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there
were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson’s sometimes wrote
the latest news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank
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windows, for all who ran through Temple Bar to read.
On a steamy, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and
Charles Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low
voice. The penitential den once set apart for interviews with the
House, was now the news Exchange, and was filled to overflowing.
It was within half an hour or so of the time of closing.
“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” said
Charles Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to you—”
“I understand. That I am too old?” said Mr. Lorry.
“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of
travelling, a disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe
for you.”
“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence,
“you touch some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying
away. It is safe enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with
an old fellow of hard upon fourscore when there are so many
people there much better worth interfering with. As to its being a
disorganised city, if it were not a disorganised city there would be
no occasion to send somebody from our House here to our House
there, who knows the city and the business, of old, and is in
Tellson’s confidence. As to the uncertain travelling, the long
journey, and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit
myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson’s, after all
these years, who ought to be?”
“I wish I were going myself,” said Charles Darnay, somewhat
restlessly, and like one thinking aloud.
“Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!”
exclaimed Mr. Lorry. “You wish you were going yourself? And you
a Frenchman born? You are a wise counsellor.”
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“My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that
the thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has
passed through my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having
had some sympathy for the miserable people, and having
abandoned something to them,” he spoke here in his former
thoughtful manner, “that one might be listened to, and might have
the power to persuade to some restraint. Only last night, after you
had left us, when I was talking to Lucie—”
“When you were talking to Lucie,” Mr. Lorry repeated. “Yes. I
wonder you are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie!
Wishing you were going to France at this time of day!”
“However, I am not going,” said Charles Darnay, with a smile.
“It is more to the purpose that you say you are.”
“And I am in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,” Mr.
Lorry glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, “you
can have no conception of the difficulty with which our business is
transacted, and of the peril in which our books and papers over
yonder are involved. The Lord above knows what the
compromising consequences would be to numbers of people, if
some of our documents were seized or destroyed; and they might
be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set afire today or sacked tomorrow! Now, a judicious selection from
these, with the least possible delay, and the burying of them, or
otherwise getting of them out of harm’s way is within the power
(without loss of precious time) of scarcely any one but myself, if
any one. And shall I hang back, when Tellson’s knows this and
says this—Tellson’s, whose bread I have eaten these sixty years—
because I am a little stiff about the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to
half a dozen old codgers here!”
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“How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. Lorry.”
“Tut! Nonsense, sir!—And my dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry,
glancing at the House again, “you are to remember, that getting
things out of Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is
next to an impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this
very day brought to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not
business-like to whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers
you can imagine, every one of whom had his head hanging on by a
single hair as he passed the Barriers. At another time, our parcels
would come and go, as easily as in business-like Old England; but
now, everything is stopped.”
“And do you really go tonight?”
“I really go tonight, for the case has become too pressing to
admit of delay.”
“And do you take no one with you?”
“All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have
nothing to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has
been my bodyguard on Sunday nights for a long time past, and I
am used to him. No body will suspect Jerry of being anything but
an English bulldog, or of having any design in his head but to fly at
anybody who touches his master.”
“I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and
youthfulness.”
“I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed
this little commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson’s proposal to
retire and live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about
growing old.”
This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry’s usual desk, with
Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what
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he would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It
was too much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a
refugee, and it was much too much the way of native British
orthodoxy, to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the one
only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown—
as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had
led to it—as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of
the misused and perverted resources that should have made them
prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and
had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such vapouring,
combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be
endured without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew
the truth. And it was such vapouring all about his ears, like a
troublesome confusion of blood in his own head, added to a latent
uneasiness in his mind, which had already made Charles Darnay
restless, and which still kept him so.
Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King’s Bench Bar, far on
his way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme:
broaching to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up
and exterminating them from the face of the earth, and doing
without them: and for accomplishing many similar objects akin in
their nature to the abolition of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails
of the race. Him, Darnay heard, with a particular feeling of
objection; and Darnay stood divided between going away that he
might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his word, when
the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out.
The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and
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unopened letter before him, asked if he had yet discovered any
traces of the person to whom it was addressed? The House laid
the letter down so close to Darnay that he saw the direction—the
more quickly because it was his own right name. The address,
turned into English, ran:
“Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St.
Evremonde, of France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson
and Co., Bankers, London, England.”
On the marriage morning, Dr. Manette had made it his one
urgent and express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of
his name should be—unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the
obligation—kept inviolate between them. Nobody else knew it to
be his name; his own wife had no suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry
could have none.
“No,” said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; “I have referred it, I
think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
gentleman is to be found.”
The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the
Bank, there was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr.
Lorry’s desk. He held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur
looked at it, in the person of this plotting and indignant refugee;
and This, That, and The Other, all had something disparaging to
say, in French or in English, concerning the Marquis who was not
to be found.
“Nephew, I believe—but in any case degenerate successor—of
the polished Marquis who was murdered,” said one. “Happy to say
I never knew him.”
“A craven who abandoned his post,” said another—this
Monseigneur had been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half
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suffocated, in a load of hay—“some years ago.”
“Infected with the new doctrines,” said a third, eyeing the
direction through his glass in passing; “set himself in opposition to
the last Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them,
and left them to the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I
hope, as he deserves.”
“Hey?” cried the blatant Stryver. “Did he though? Is that the
sort of fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D—n the fellow!”
Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr.
Stryver on the shoulder, and said:
“I know the fellow.”
“Do you, by Jupiter?” said Stryver. “I am sorry for it.”
“Why?”
“Why, Mr. Darnay? D’ye hear what he did? Don’t ask why, in
these times.”
“But I do ask why?”
“Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry
to hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a
fellow who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code
of devilry that ever was known, abandoned his property to the
vilest scum of the earth that ever did murder by wholesale, and
you ask me why I am sorry that a man who instructs youth knows
him? Well, but I’ll answer you. I am sorry because I believe there
is contamination in such a scoundrel. That’s why.”
Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked
himself, and said: “You may not understand the gentleman.”
“I understand how to put you in a corner, Mr. Darnay,” said
Bully Stryver, “and I’ll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I don’t
understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. You
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may also tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly
goods and position to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the
head of them. But, no, gentlemen,” said Stryver, looking all round,
and snapping his fingers, “I know something of human nature,
and I tell you that you’ll never find a fellow like this fellow,
trusting himself to the mercies of such precious proteges. No,
gentlemen; he’ll always show ’em a clean pair of heels very early in
the scuffle, and sneak away.”
