had looked up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a
dull mechanical perception, beforehand, that the spot where the
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A Tale of Two Cities
only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.
“I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the
shoemaker, “to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little
more?”
The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of
listening, at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor
on the other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.
“What did you say?”
“You can bear a little more light?”
“I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a
stress upon the second word.) The opened half-door was opened a
little further, and secured at that angle for the time. A broad ray of
light fell into the garret, and showed the workman with an
unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labour. His few
common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on
his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long, a
hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and
thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under
his yet dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they
had been really otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and
looked unnaturally so. His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the
throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn. He, and his
old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of
clothes, had, in a long seclusion from direct light and air, faded
down to such a dull uniformity of parchment-yellow, that it would
have been hard to say which was which.
He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the
very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly
vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure
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before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then
on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound;
he never spoke, without first wandering in this manner, and
forgetting to speak.
“Are you going to finish that pair of shoes today?” asked
Defarge, motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.
“What did you say?”
“Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes today?”
“I can’t say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don’t know.”
But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it
again.
Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the
door. When he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of
Defarge, the shoemaker looked up. He showed no surprise at
seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands
strayed to his lips as he looked at it (his lips and his nails were of
the same pale lead-colour), and then the hand dropped to his
work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The look and the
action had occupied but an instant.
“You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge.
“What did you say?”
“Here is a visitor.”
The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a
hand from his work.
“Come!” said Defarge. “Here is monsieur, who knows a well-
made shoe when he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working
at. Take it, monsieur.”
Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.
“Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker’s name.”
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There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker
replied: “I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?”
“I said, couldn’t you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur’s
information?”
“It is a lady’s shoe. It is a young lady’s walking-shoe. It is in the
present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my
hand.” He glanced at the shoe with some little passing touch of
pride.
“And the maker’s name?” said Defarge.
Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the
right hand in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the
left hand in the hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across
his bearded chin, and so on in regular changes, without a
moment’s intermission. The task of recalling him from the vacancy
into which he always sank when he had spoken, was like recalling
some very weak person from a swoon, or endeavouring, in the
hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man.
“Did you ask me for my name?”
“Assuredly I did.”
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
“Is that all?”
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”
With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to
work again, until the silence was again broken.
“You are not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking
steadfastly at him.
His haggard eyes turned to Defarge, as if he would have
transferred the question to him: but as no help came from that
quarter, they turned back on the questioner when they had sought
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A Tale of Two Cities
the ground.
“I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by
trade. I—I learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to—” He
lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on
his hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the
face from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he
started, and resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment
awake, reverting to a subject of last night.
“I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty
after a long while, and I have made shoes ever since.”
As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from
him, Mr. Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in his face:
“Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?”
The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at
the questioner.
“Monsieur Manette”; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge’s
arm; “do you remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at
me. Is there no old banker, no old business, no old servant, no old
time, rising in your mind, Monsieur Manette?”
As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr.
Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively
intent intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced
themselves through the black mist that had fallen on him. They
were overclouded again, they were fainter, they were gone; but
they had been there. And so exactly was the expression repeated
on the fair young face of her who had crept along the wall to a
point where she could see him, and where she now stood looking
at him, with hands which at first had been only raised in
frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and shut out
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the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him,
trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm
young breast, and love it back to life and hope—so exactly was the
expression repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair
young face, that it looked as though it had passed like a moving
light, from him to her.
Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two,
less and less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought
the ground and looked about him in the old way. Finally with a
deep long sigh, he took the shoe up, and resumed his work.
“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a
whisper.
“Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I
have unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I
once knew so well. Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!”
She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the
bench on which he sat. There was something awful in his
unconsciousness of the figure that could have put out its hand and
touched him as he stooped over his labour.
Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood like a
spirit, beside him, and he bent over his work.
It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the
instrument in his hand, for his shoemaker’s knife. It lay on that
side of him which was not the side on which she stood. He had
taken it up, and was stooping to work again, when his eyes caught
the skirt of her dress. He raised them, and saw her face. The two
spectators started forward, but she stayed them with a motion of
her hand. She had no fear of his striking at her with the knife,
though they had.
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He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips
began to form some words, though no sound proceeded from
them. By degrees, in the pauses of his quick and laboured
breathing, he was heard to say:
“What is this?”
With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands
to her lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her
breast, as if she laid his ruined head there.
“You are not the gaoler’s daughter?”
She sighed “No.”
“Who are you?”
Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the
bench beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his
arm. A strange thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly
passed over his frame; he laid the knife down softly, as he sat
staring at her.
Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been
hurriedly pushed aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing
his hand by little and little, he took it up and looked at it. In the
midst of the action he went astray, and, with another deep sigh,
fell to work at his shoemaking.
But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his
shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to
be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his
hand to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of
folded rag attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee,
and it contained a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or
two long golden hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off
upon his finger.
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He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. “It
is the same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!”
As the concentrating expression returned to his forehead, he
seemed to become conscious that it was in her too. He turned her
full to the light, and looked at her.
“She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I
was summoned out—she had a fear of my going, though I had
none—and when I was brought to the North Tower they found
these upon my sleeve. ‘You will leave me them? They can never
help me to escape in the body, though they may in the spirit.’
Those were the words I said. I remember them very well.”
He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could
utter it. But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to
him coherently, though slowly.
“How was this?—Was it you?”
Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her
with a frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his grasp,
and only said, in a low voice, “I entreat you, good gentlemen, do
not come near us, do not speak, do not move!”
“Hark” he exclaimed. “Whose voice was that?”
His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to
his white hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as
everything but his shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded
his little packet and tried to secure it in his breast; but he still
looked at her, and gloomily shook his head.
“No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can’t be. See
what the prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not
the face she knew, this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She
was—and He was—before the slow years of the North Tower—
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A Tale of Two Cities
ages ago. What is your name, my gentle angel?”
Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon
her knees before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.
“O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my
mother was, and who my father, and how I never knew their hard,
hard history. But I cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell
you here. All that I may tell you, here and now, is, that I pray to
you to touch me and to bless me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my dear, my
dear!”
His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which
warmed and lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom
shining on him.
“If you hear in my voice—I don’t know that it is so, but I hope it
is—if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once
was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch,
in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay
on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep
for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I
will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service,
I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your
poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!”
She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her
breast like a child.
“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and
that I have come here to take you from it, and that we go to
England to be at peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your
useful life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you,
weep for it, weep for it! And if, when I shall tell you of my name,
and of my father who is living, and of my mother who is dead, you
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
A Tale of Two Cities
learn that I have to kneel to my honoured father, and implore his
pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake
and wept all night, because the love of my poor mother hid his
torture from me, weep for it, weep for it! Weep for her, then, and
for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his sacred tears upon
my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank God
for us, thank God!”
He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a
sight so touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and
suffering which had gone before it, that the two beholders covered
their faces.
When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and
his heaving breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm
that must follow all storms—emblem to humanity, of the rest and
silence into which the storm called Life must hush at last—they
came forward to raise the father and daughter from the ground.
He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy,
worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his head might lie
upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained him from
the light.
“If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr.
Lorry as he stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his
nose, “all could be arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that,
from the very door, he could be taken away—”
“But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?” asked Mr. Lorry.
“More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so
dreadful to him.”
“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear.
“More than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of
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France. Say, shall I hire a carriage and post-horses?”
“That’s business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest
notice his methodical manners; “and if business is to be done, I
had better do it.”
