A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (31 page)

What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!

‘I think, Charles, poor Mr Carton deserves more consideration and respect than you expressed for him to-night.’

‘Indeed, my own? Why so?’

‘That is what you are not to ask me. But I think – I know – he does.’

‘If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?’

‘I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very, seldom reveals, and that there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.’

‘It is a painful reflection to me,’ said Charles Darnay, quite astounded, ‘that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this of him.’

‘My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things, even magnanimous things.’

She looked so beautiful, in the purity of her faith in this lost man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was, for hours.

‘And, O my dearest Love!’ she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, ‘remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!’

The supplication touched him home. ‘I will always remember it, dear Heart! I will remember it as long as I live.’

He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets, could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he might have cried to the night – and the words would not have parted from his lips for the first time –

‘God bless her for her sweet compassion!’

 

 

[END OF INSTALMENT 17]

A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts – hopes, of a love as yet unknown to her; doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight – divided her breast. Among the echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her eyes and broke like waves.

That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband’s step was strong and prosperous among them; her father’s, firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant smile, ‘Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!’ those were not tears all of agony that wetted his young mother’s cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my Father’s face. O Father, blessed words!

Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the other echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed murmur – like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore – as the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were blended in her life.

The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening as he had once done often. He never came there, heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true echoes for ages and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and mother, but her children had a strange sympathy with him – an instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but, it is so, and it was so here. Carton was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. ‘Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!’

Mr Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually in a rough plight and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion’s jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr Stryver, exuding patronage of the most offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie’s husband: delicately saying, ‘Halloa! here are three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!’ The polite rejection of the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr Stryver with indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaiming to Mrs Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs Darnay had once put in practice to ‘catch’ him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to be caught’. Some of his King’s Bench familiars, who were occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he believed it himself – which is surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender’s being carried off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her child’s tread came, and those of her own dear father’s, always active and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband’s, need not be told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself with such a wise and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her ‘What is the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to have too much to do?’

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about little Lucie’s sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.

On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr Lorry came in late, from Tellson’s, and sat himself down by Lucie and her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had looked at the lightning from the same place.

‘I began to think,’ said Mr Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, ‘that I should have to pass the night at Tellson’s. We have been so full of business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or which way to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be able to confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania among some of them for sending it to England.’

‘That has a bad look,’ said Darnay.

‘A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don’t know what reason there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson’s are getting old, and we really can’t be troubled out of the ordinary course without due occasion.’

‘Still,’ said Darnay, ‘you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.’

‘I know that, to be sure,’ assented Mr Lorry, trying to persuade himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, ‘but I am determined to be peevish after my long day’s botheration. Where is Manette?’

‘Here he is!’ said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.

‘I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I hope?’

‘No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,’ said the Doctor.

‘I don’t think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted against you to-night. Is the tea-board still there, Lucie? I can’t see.’

‘Of course, it has been kept for you.’

‘Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?’

‘And sleeping soundly.’

‘That’s right; all safe and well! I don’t know why anything should be otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear? Thank ye. Now, come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory.’

‘Not a theory; it was a fancy.’

‘A fancy, then, my wise pet,’ said Mr Lorry, patting her hand. ‘They are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!’

 

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody’s life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, and footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being distributed – so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there, held life as of no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round Defarge’s wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.

‘Keep near to me, Jacques Three,’ cried Defarge; ‘and do you, Jacques One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?’

‘Eh, well! Here you see me!’ said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-day. Madame’s resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.

‘Where do you go, my wife?’