A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (27 page)

‘Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.’

Madame complied with a polite air.

‘Marvellous cognac this, madame!’

It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said, however, that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity of observing the place in general.

‘You knit with great skill, madame.’

‘I am accustomed to it.’

‘A pretty pattern too!’

‘
You
think so?’ said madame, looking at him with a smile.

‘Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?’

‘Pastime,’ said madame, still looking at him with a smile, while her fingers moved nimbly.

‘Not for use?’

‘That depends. I may find a use for it, one day. If I do—well,’ said madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of coquetry, ‘I’ll use it!’

It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be decidedly opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two men had entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when, catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of looking about as if for some friend who was not there, and went away. Nor, of those who had been there when this visitor entered, was there one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open, but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and unimpeachable.

‘JOHN,’ thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted, and her eyes looked at the stranger. ‘Stay long enough, and I shall knit “BARSAD” before you go.’

‘You have a husband madame?’

‘I have.’

‘Children?’

‘No children.’

‘Business seems bad?’

‘Business is very bad; the people are so poor.’

‘Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed too – as you say.’

‘As
you
say,’ madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an extra something into his name that boded him no good.

‘Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so. Of course.’

‘
I
think?’ returned madame, in a high voice. ‘I and my husband have enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we think, here, is, how to live. That is the subject
we
think of, and it gives us, from morning to night, enough to think about, without embarrassing our heads concerning others.
I
think for others? No, no.’

The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but, stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame Defarge’s little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.

‘A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard’s execution. Ah! the poor Gaspard!’ With a sigh of great compassion.

‘My faith!’ returned madame, coolly and lightly, ‘if people use knives for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the price of his luxury was; he has paid the price.’

‘I believe,’ said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone that invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary susceptibility in every muscle of his wicked face: ‘I believe there is much compassion and anger in this neighbourhood, touching the poor fellow? Between ourselves.’

‘Is there?’ asked madame, vacantly.

‘Is there not?’

‘ – Here is my husband!’ said Madame Defarge.

As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted him by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, ‘Good day, Jacques!’ Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.

‘Good day, Jacques!’ the spy repeated; with not quite so much confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.

‘You deceive yourself, monsieur,’ returned the keeper of the wine-shop. ‘You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.’

‘It is all the same,’ said the spy, airily, but discomfited too; ‘good day!’

‘Good day!’ answered Defarge, dryly.

‘I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is – and no wonder! – much sympathy and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.’

‘No one has told me so,’ said Defarge, shaking his head; ‘I know nothing of it.’

Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair, looking over that barrier at the person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with the greatest satisfaction.

The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.

‘You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?’ observed Defarge.

‘Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested in its miserable inhabitants.’

‘Hah!’ muttered Defarge.

‘The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recals to me,’ pursued the spy, ‘that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting associations with your name.’

‘Indeed?’ said Defarge, with much indifference.

‘Yes indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you his old domestic had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am informed of the circumstances?’

‘Such is the fact, certainly,’ said Defarge. He had had it conveyed to him, in an accidental touch of his wife’s elbow as she knitted and warbled, that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.

‘It was to you,’ said the spy, ‘that his daughter came; and it was from your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown monsieur; how is he called? – in a little wig – Lorry – of the bank of Tellson and Company – over to England.’

‘Such is the fact,’ repeated Defarge.

‘Very interesting remembrances!’ said the spy. ‘I have known Doctor Manette and his daughter, in England.’

‘Yes?’ said Defarge.

‘You don’t hear much about them now,’ said the spy.

‘No,’ said Defarge.

‘In effect,’ madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little song, ‘we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe arrival, and perhaps another letter or perhaps two; but since then, they have gradually taken their road in life – we, ours – and we have held no correspondence.’

‘Perfectly so, madame,’ replied the spy. ‘She is going to be married.’

‘Going?’ echoed madame. ‘She was pretty enough to have been married long ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.’

‘Oh! You know I am English?’

‘I perceive your tongue is,’ returned madame; ‘and what the tongue is, I suppose the man is.’

He did not take the identification as a compliment; but, he made the best of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the end, he added:

‘Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr Charles Darnay. D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s family.’

Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.

Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr Barsad paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say, in a genteel manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes after he had emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the husband and wife remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should come back.

‘Can it be true,’ said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: ‘what he has said of Ma’amselle Manette?’

‘As he has said it,’ returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, ‘it is probably false. But it may be true.’

‘If it is—’ Defarge began; and stopped.

‘If it is?’ repeated his wife.

‘ – And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph – I hope, for her sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.’

‘Her husband’s destiny,’ said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure, ‘will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is to end him. That is all I know.’

‘But it is very strange – now, at least is it not very strange’ – said Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it, ‘that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father and herself, her husband’s name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by the side of that infernal dog’s who has just left us?’

‘Stranger things than that, will happen when it does come,’ answered madame. ‘I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here for their merits; that is enough.’

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head. Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in, very shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others, Saint Antoine turned himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place to place and from group to group: a Missionary – there were many like her – such as the world will do well never to breed again. All the women knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the jaws and the digestive apparatus; if the bony fingers had been still, the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. ‘A great woman,’ said he, ‘a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully grand woman!’

Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and the distant beating of the drums of the Royal Guard, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into thundering cannon; when the drums should be beating to drown a wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty, Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads.

 

 

[END OF INSTALMENT 15]

Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise with a milder radiance over great London, than on that night when it found them still seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.

Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.

‘You are happy, my dear father?’

‘Quite, my child.’

They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it was yet light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in both ways, at his side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this time was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.

‘And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the love that Heaven has so blessed – my love for Charles, and Charles’s love for me. But, if my life were not to be, still consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so arranged as that it would part us, even by the length of a few of these streets, I should be more unhappy and self-reproachful now, than I can tell you. Even as it is—’

Even as it was, she could not command her voice.

In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is – as the light called human life is – at its coming and its going.

‘Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite, quite sure no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will ever interpose between us?
I
know it well, but do you know it? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain?’

Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could scarcely have assumed, ‘Quite sure, my darling! More than that,’ he added, as he tenderly kissed her: ‘my future is far brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it could have been – nay, than it ever was – without it.’