discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:
“As I was saying: if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had
suddenly and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if
it had not been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no
art could trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who
could exercise a privilege that I in my own time have known the
boldest people afraid to speak of in a whisper, across the water
there; for instance, the privilege of filling up blank forms of the
consignment of any one to the oblivion of a prison for any length of
time; if his wife had implored the king, the queen, the court, the
clergy, for any tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then the
history of your father would have been the history of this
unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.”
“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”
“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”
“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this
moment.”
“You speak collectedly, and you—are collected. That’s good!”
(Though his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matter
of business. Regard it as a matter of business—business that must
be done. Now if this doctor’s wife, though a lady of great courage
and spirit, had suffered so intensely from this cause before her
little child was born—”
“The little child was a daughter, sir.”
“A daughter. A—a—matter of business—don’t be distressed.
Miss, if the poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little
child was born, that she came to the determination of sparing the
poor child the inheritance of any part of the agony she had known
the pains of, by rearing her in the belief that her father was dead—
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No, don’t kneel! In Heaven’s name why should you kneel to me!”
“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”
“A—a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I
transact business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you
could kindly mention now, for instance, what nine times
ninepence are, or how many shillings in twenty guineas, it would
be so encouraging. I should be so much more at my ease about
your state of mind.”
Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when
he had very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased
to clasp his wrists were so much more steady than they had been,
that she communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.
“That’s right, that’s right. Courage! Business! You have
business before you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother
took this course with you. And when she died—I believe brokenhearted—having never slackened her unavailing search for your
father, she left you, at two years old, to grow to be blooming,
beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud upon you of living in
uncertainty whether your father soon wore his heart out in prison,
or wasted there through many lingering years.”
As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on
the flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might
have been already tinged with grey.
“You know that your parents had no great possession, and that
what they had was secured to your mother and to you. There has
been no new discovery, of money, or of any other property; but—”
He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the
forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which
was now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.
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“But he has been—been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it
is too probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope
for the best. Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of
an old servant in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if
I can: you, to restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”
A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She
said, in a low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it
in a dream, “I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost—not
him!”
Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There,
there, there! See now, see now! The best and the worst are known
to you, now. You are well on your way to the poor wronged
gentleman, and, with a fair sea voyage, and a fair land journey, you
will be soon at his dear side.”
She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have been
free, I have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”
“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a
wholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been found
under another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. It
would be worse than useless now to inquire which; worse than
useless to seek to know whether he has been for years overlooked,
or always designedly held prisoner. It would be worse than useless
now to make any inquiries, because it would be dangerous. Better
not to mention the subject, anywhere or in any way, and to remove
him—for a while at all events—out of France. Even I, safe as an
Englishman, and even Tellson’s, important as they are to French
credit, avoid all naming of the matter. I carry about me, not a
scrap of writing openly referring to it. This is a secret service
altogether. My credentials, entries, and memoranda, are all
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comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life’; which may mean
anything. But what is the matter! She doesn’t notice a word! Miss
Manette!”
Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair,
she sat under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open and
fixed upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it were
carved or branded into her forehead. So close was her hold upon
his arm, that he feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her;
therefore he called out loudly for assistance without moving.
A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry
observed to be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be
dressed in some extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on
her head a most wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden
measure, and good measure too, or a great Stilton cheese, came
running into the room in advance of the inn servants, and soon
settled the question of his detachment from the poor young lady,
by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him flying
back against the nearest wall.
(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry’s breathless
reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)
“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn
servants. “Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standing
there staring at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don’t
you go and fetch things? I’ll let you know, if you don’t bring
smelling-salts, cold water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”
There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and
she softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill
and gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and
spreading her golden hair aside over her shoulders with great
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pride and care.
“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;
“couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening
her to death? Look at her, with her pale face and her cold hands.
Do you call that being a Banker?”
Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so
hard to answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with
much feebler sympathy and humility, while the strong woman,
having banished the inn servants under the mysterious penalty of
“letting them know” something not mentioned if they stayed
there, staring, recovered her charge by a regular series of
gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head upon her
shoulder.
“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.
“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”
“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble
sympathy and humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to
France?”
“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever
intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose
Providence would have cast my lot in an island?”
This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry
withdrew to consider it.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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Chapter V
THE WINE SHOP
Alarge cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the
street. The accident had happened in getting it out of a
cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had
burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine-
shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had suspended their business, or
their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough,
irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed,
one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that
approached them, had damned it into little pools; these were
surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to
its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands
joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their
shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their
fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little
mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from
women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths;
others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;
others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here
and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new
directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-
rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry
off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud
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got taken up along with it that there might have been a scavenger
in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in
such a miraculous presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices—voices of men,
women, and children—resounded in the street while this wine
game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much
playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, and
observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other
one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to
frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking of hands, and
even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen together. When the
wine was gone, and the places where it had been most abundant
were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The
man who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting,
set it in motion again; the woman who had left on a door-step the
little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the
pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,
returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous
faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved
away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that
appeared more natural to it than sunshine.
The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the
narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it
was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and
many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man
who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the
forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the
stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who
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had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a
tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched,
his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it,
scrawled upon a wall with his fingers dipped in muddy wine-lees—
BLOOD.
The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on
the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many
there.
And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a
momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the
darkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and
want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence—nobles of
great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a
people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in
the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old
people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every
doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a
garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them
down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had
ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the
grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up
afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.
Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched
clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into
them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that
the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,
among its refuse, or anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription
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on the baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty
stock of bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog
preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones
among the roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was
shred into atomies in every farthing porringer of husky chips of
potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil.
Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding
streets diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all
smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all visible things with a
brooding look upon them that looked ill. In the hunted air of the
people there was yet some wild-beast thought of the possibility of
turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of
fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white
with what they suppressed; or foreheads knitted into the likeness
of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The
trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were, all,
grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted
up only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of
meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the
wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and
beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was
represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons;
but, the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the
smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was
murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many
little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off
abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the
middle of the street—when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
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rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.
Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung
by a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these
down, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim
wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea.
Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of
tempest.
For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that
region should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and
hunger, so long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his
method, and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare
upon the darkness of their condition. But, the time was not come
yet; and every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the
scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of song and feather, took no
warning.
The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had
stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking
on at the struggle for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he,
with a final shrug of the shoulders. “The people from the market
did it. Let them bring another.”
There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his
joke, he called to him across the way:
“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”
The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is
often the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely
failed, as is often the way with his tribe too.
“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the
wine-shop keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with
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a handful of mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it.
“Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is
there no other place to write such words in?”
In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps
accidentally, perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker
rapped it with his own, took a nimble spring upward, and came
down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with one of his stained shoes
jerked off his foot into his hand, and held out. A joker of an
extremely, not to say wolfishly practical character, he looked,
under those circumstances.
“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish
there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s
dress, such as it was—quite deliberately, as having dirtied the
hand on his account; and then re-crossed the road and entered the
wine-shop.
