I
Memory is the soul's best minister. Sydney Carton found it so. On the
greatest night of his life--the night on which he resolved to lay down
his life for his friend--a text swept suddenly into his mind, and, from
that moment, it seemed to be written everywhere. He was in Paris; the
French Revolution was at its height; sixty-three shuddering victims had
been borne that very day to the guillotine; each day's toll was heavier
than that of the day before; no man's life was safe. Among the prisoners
awaiting death in the Conciergerie was Charles Darnay, the husband of
her whom Sydney himself had loved with so much devotion but so little
hope.
'O Miss Manette,' he had said, on the only occasion on which he had
revealed his passion, 'when, in the days to come, you see your own
bright beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that
there is a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside
you!'
And now that hour had come. It happened that Charles Darnay and Sydney
Carton were, in form and feature, extraordinarily alike. Darnay was
doomed to die on the guillotine: Carton was free. For the first time in
his wayward life, Sydney saw his course clearly before him. His years
had been spent aimlessly, but now he set his face like a flint towards a
definite goal. He stepped out into the moonlight, not recklessly or
negligently, but 'with 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.' He would find some way of taking Darnay's place
in the gloomy prison; he would, by his substitution, restore her husband
to Lucy's side; he would make his life sublime at its close. His career
should resemble a day that, fitful and overcast, ends at length in a
glorious sunset. He would save his life by losing it!
It was at that great moment that memory exercised its sacred ministry
upon the soul of Sydney Carton. As he paced the silent streets, dark
with heavy shadows, the moon and the clouds sailing high above him, he
suddenly recalled the solemn and beautiful words which he had heard read
at his father's grave: '_I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that
believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever
liveth and believeth in Me shall never die._' Sydney did not ask himself
why the words had rushed upon him at that hour, although, as Dickens
says, the reason was not far to seek. But he kept repeating them. And,
when he stopped, the air seemed full of them. The great words were
written across the houses on either side of him; he looked up, and they
were inscribed across the dark clouds and the clear sky; the very echoes
of his footsteps reiterated them. When the sun rose, it seemed to strike
those words--the burden of the night--straight and warm to his heart in
its long bright rays. Night and day were both saying the same thing. He
heard it everywhere: he saw it in everything--
'_I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me, though he
were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me
shall never die._'
That was Sydney Carton's text.