“I forgot it,” he said.
Mr. Lorry’s eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of
the wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features,
and having the expression of prisoners’ faces fresh in his mind, he
was strongly reminded of that expression.
“And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?” said Carton,
turning to him.
“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so
unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped
to have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I
have my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.”
They were both silent.
“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton,
wistfully.
“I am in my seventy-eighth year.”
“You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly
occupied; trusted, respected, and looked up to?”
“I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man.
Indeed, I may say that I was a man of business when a boy.”
“See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people
will miss you when you leave it empty!”
“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his
head. “There is nobody to weep for me.”
“How can you say that! Wouldn’t She weep for you? Wouldn’t
her child?”
“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said.”
“It is a thing to thank God for; is it not?”
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“Surely, surely.”
“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, tonight,
‘I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in
no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be
remembered by!’ your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight
heavy curses; would they not?”
“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.”
Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence
of a few moments, said:
“I should like to ask you:—Does your childhood seem far off?
Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very
long ago?”
Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:
“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I
draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings
and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many
remembrances that have long fallen asleep, of my pretty young
mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when
what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults
were not confirmed in me.”
“I understand the feeling!” exclaimed Carton, with a bright
flush. “And you are the better for it?”
“I hope so.”
Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him
on with his outer coat. “But you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the
theme, “you are young.”
“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was never
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the way to age. Enough of me.”
“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going out?”
“I’ll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and
restless habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time,
don’t be uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the
Court tomorrow?”
“Yes, unhappily.”
“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find
a place for me. Take my arm, sir.”
Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the
streets. A few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry’s destination.
Carton left him there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned
back to the gate again when it was shut, and touched it. He had
heard of her going to the prison every day. “She came out here,”
he said, looking about him, “turned this way, must have trod on
these stones often. Let me follow in her steps.”
It was ten o’clock at night when he stood before the prison of La
Force, where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-
sawyer, having closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-
door.
“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by;
for the man eyed him inquisitively.
“Good night, citizen.”
“How goes the Republic?”
“You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three today. We shall
mount to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain
sometimes, of being exhausted. Ha, ha, ha! He is so droll, that
Samson. Such a barber!”
“Do you often go to see him—” “Shave? Always. Every day.
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What a barber! You have seen him at work?”
“Never.”
“Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to
yourself, citizen; he shaved the sixty-three today, in less than two
pipes. Less than two pipes. Word of honour!”
As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking to
explain how he timed the execution, Carton was so sensible of a
rising desire to strike the life out of him, that he turned away.
“But you are not English,” said the wood-sawyer, “though you
wear English dress?”
“Yes,” said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his
shoulder.
“You speak like a Frenchman.”
“I am an old student here.”
“Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.”
“Good night, citizen.”
“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling
after him. “And take a pipe with you!”
Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the
middle of the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his
pencil on a scrap of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step
of one who remembered the way well, several dark and dirty
streets—much dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares
remained uncleansed in those times of terror—he stopped at a
chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands.
A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill
thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.
Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his
counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “Whew”; the
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chemist whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi! hi, hi!”
Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:
“For you, citizen?”
“For me.”
“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen. You know
the consequences of mixing them?”
“Perfectly.”
Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put
them, one by one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the
money for them, and deliberately left the shop. “There is nothing
more to do,” said he, glancing upward at the moon, “until
tomorrow. I can’t sleep.”
It was a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these
words aloud under the fast-sailing clouds. nor was it more
expressive of negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner
of a tired man, who had wandered and struggled and got lost, but
who at length struck into his road and saw its end.
Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest
competitors as a youth of great promise, he had followed his father
to the grave. His mother had died, years before. These solemn
words, which had been read at his father’s grave, arose in his mind
as he went down the dark streets, among the heavy shadows, with
the moon and the clouds sailing on high above him. “I am the
resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me, shall never die.”
In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural
sorrow rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put
to death, and for tomorrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in
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the prisons, and still of tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s, the chain of
association that brought the words home, like a rusty old ship’s
anchor from the deep, might have been easily found. He did not
seek it, but repeated them and went on.
With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people
were going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the
horrors surrounding them; in the towers of the churches, where
no prayers were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled
that length of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors,
plunderers, and profligates; in the distant burial-places reserved,
as they wrote upon the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding
gaols; and in the streets along which the sixties rolled to a death
which had become so common and material, that no sorrowful
story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among the people out of all
the working of the Guillotine; with a solemn interest in the whole
life and death of the city settling down to its short nightly pause in
fury; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for the lighter streets.
Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to
be suspected, and gentility hid his head in red nightcaps, and put
on heavy shoes, and trudged. But. the theatres were all well filled,
and the people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went
chatting home. At one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl
with a mother, looking for a way across the street through the
mud. He carried the child over, and before the timid arm was
loosed from his neck asked her for a kiss.
“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that
believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
Now, that the streets were quiet and the night wore on, the
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words were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly
calm and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he
walked; but, he heard them always.
The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening
to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris,
where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone
bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a
dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the
stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if
Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.
But the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that
burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long
bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes,
a bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the
sun, while the river sparkled under it.
The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a
congenial friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the
stream, far from the houses, and in the light and warmth of the
sun fell asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was afoot again,
he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned
and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried
it on to the sea.—“Like me!”
A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf,
then glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its
silent track in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken
up out of his heart for a merciful consideration of all his poor
blindness and errors, ended in the words, “I am the resurrection
and the life.”
Mr. Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to
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surmise where the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank
nothing but a little coffee, ate some bread, and, having washed and
changed to refresh himself, went out to the place of trial.
The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep—
whom many fell away from in dread—pressed him into an obscure
corner among the crowd. Mr. Lorry was there, and Doctor
Manette was there. She was there, sitting beside her father.
When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him,
so sustaining, so encouraging, so full of admiring love, and pitying
tenderness, yet so courageous for his sake, that it called the
healthy blood into his face, brightened his glance, and animated
his heart. If there had been any eyes to notice the influence of her
look, on Sydney Carton, it would have been seen to be the same
influence exactly.
Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of
procedure, ensuring to any accused person any reasonable
hearing. There could have been no such Revolution, if all laws,
forms, and ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused,
that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them
all to the winds.
Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patriots
and good republicans as yesterday and the day before, and
tomorrow and the day after. Eager and prominent among them,
one man with a craving face, and his fingers perpetually hovering
about his lips, whose appearance gave great satisfaction to the
spectators. A life-thirsting, cannibal-looking, bloody-minded
juryman, the Jacques Three of Saint Antoine. The whole jury, as a
jury of dogs empanelled to try the deer.
Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public
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prosecutor. No favourable leaning in that quarter today. A fell,
uncompromising, murderous business-meaning there. Every eye
then sought some other eye in the crowd, and gleamed at it
approvingly; and heads nodded at one another before bending
forward with a strained attention.
Charles Evremonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday.
Reaccused and retaken yesterday. Indictment delivered to him
last night. Suspected and Denounced enemy of the Republic,
Aristocrat, one of a family of tyrants, one of a race proscribed, for
that they had used their abolished privileges to the infamous
oppression of the people. Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, in
right of such proscription, absolutely Dead in Law.
To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor.
The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or
secretly?
“Openly, President.”
“By whom?”
“Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine vendor of Saint Antoine.”
“Good.”
“Therese Defarge, his wife.”
“Good.”
“Alexandre Manette, physician.”
A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it,
Doctor Manette was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he
had been seated.
“President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery
and a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my
daughter. My daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me
than my life. Who and where is the false conspirator who says that
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I denounce the husband of my child?”
“Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission of the
authority of the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As
to what is dearer to you than life. nothing can be so dear to a good
