CHAPTER I.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens

CONTENTS

Book the First--Recalled to Life

CHAPTER I The Period

CHAPTER II The Mail

CHAPTER III The Night Shadows

CHAPTER IV The Preparation

CHAPTER V The Wine-shop

CHAPTER VI The Shoemaker

Book the Second--the Golden Thread

CHAPTER I Five Years Later

CHAPTER II A Sight

CHAPTER III A Disappointment

CHAPTER IV Congratulatory

CHAPTER V The Jackal

CHAPTER VI Hundreds of People

CHAPTER VII Monseigneur in Town

CHAPTER VIII Monseigneur in the Country

CHAPTER IX The Gorgon’s Head

CHAPTER X Two Promises

CHAPTER XI A Companion Picture

CHAPTER XII The Fellow of Delicacy

CHAPTER XIII The Fellow of no Delicacy

CHAPTER XIV The Honest Tradesman

CHAPTER XV Knitting

CHAPTER XVI Still Knitting

CHAPTER XVII One Night

CHAPTER XVIII Nine Days

CHAPTER XIX An Opinion

CHAPTER XX A Plea

CHAPTER XXI Echoing Footsteps

CHAPTER XXII The Sea Still Rises

CHAPTER XXIII Fire Rises

CHAPTER XXIV Drawn to the Loadstone Rock

Book the Third--the Track of a Storm

CHAPTER I In Secret

CHAPTER II The Grindstone

CHAPTER III The Shadow

CHAPTER IV Calm in Storm

CHAPTER V The Wood-sawyer

CHAPTER VI Triumph

CHAPTER VII A Knock at the Door

CHAPTER VIII A Hand at Cards

CHAPTER IX The Game Made

CHAPTER X The Substance of the Shadow

CHAPTER XI Dusk

CHAPTER XII Darkness

CHAPTER XIII Fifty-two

CHAPTER XIV The Knitting Done

CHAPTER XV The Footsteps Die Out For Ever

Book the First--Recalled to Life

CHAPTER I.

The Period

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of

wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it

was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the

season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of

despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were

all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in

short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its

noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for

evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the

throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with

a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer

than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,

that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period,

as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth

blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had

heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were

made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane

ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its

messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally

deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the

earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,

from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange

to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any

communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane

brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her

sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down

hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her

Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane

achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue

torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not

kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks

which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty

yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and

Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,

already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into

boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in

it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses

of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were

sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with

rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which

the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of

the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work

unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about

with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion

that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to

justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and

highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;

families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing

their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman

in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and

challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of

“the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the

mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and

then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the

failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail was robbed in peace;

that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand

and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the

illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London

gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law

fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;

thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at

Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles’s, to search

for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the

musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences

much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy

and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing

up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on

Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the

hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of

Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,

and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of

sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close

upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,

those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the

fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights

with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred

and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small

creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the

roads that lay before them.

CHAPTER II.

The Mail

It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,

before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.

The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up

Shooter’s Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail,

as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish

for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill,

and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the

horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the

coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back

to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in

combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose

otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals

are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to

their duty.

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through

the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were

falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested

them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the

near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an

unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the

hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a

nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its

forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding

none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the

air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the

waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out

everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings,

and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed

into it, as if they had made it all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the

side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the

ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from

anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was

hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from

the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers

were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on

the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter,

when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in

“the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable

non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard

of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one

thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as

he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet,

and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a

loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,

deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected

the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they

all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but

the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have

taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the

journey.

“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you’re at the

top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to

it!--Joe!”

“Halloa!” the guard replied.

“What o’clock do you make it, Joe?”

“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”

“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter’s

yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,

made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed

suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its

passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach

stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three

had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead

into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of

getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses

stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for

the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.

“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his

box.

“What do you say, Tom?”

They both listened.

“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”

“_I_ say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold

of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king’s

name, all of you!”

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on

the offensive.

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;

the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He

remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained

in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard,

and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked

back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up

his ears and looked back, without contradicting.

The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring

of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet

indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to

the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the

passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the

quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding

the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.

The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.

“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand!

I shall fire!”

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering,

a man’s voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”

“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”

“_Is_ that the Dover mail?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want a passenger, if it is.”

“What passenger?”

“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”

Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard,

the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.

“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist,

“because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in

your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.”

“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering

speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?”

(“I don’t like Jerry’s voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard to

himself. “He’s hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”)

“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”

“What is the matter?”

“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”

“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the

road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two

passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and

pulled up the window. “He may come close; there’s nothing wrong.”

“I hope there ain’t, but I can’t make so ‘Nation sure of that,” said the

guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”

“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.

“Come on at a footpace! d’ye mind me? And if you’ve got holsters to that

saddle o’ yourn, don’t let me see your hand go nigh ’em. For I’m a devil

at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So

now let’s look at you.”

The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist,

and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider

stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger

a small folded paper. The rider’s horse was blown, and both horse and

rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of

the man.

“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.

The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised

blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman,

answered curtly, “Sir.”

“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson’s Bank. You must

know Tellson’s Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown

to drink. I may read this?”

“If so be as you’re quick, sir.”

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and

read--first to himself and then aloud: “‘Wait at Dover for Mam’selle.’

It’s not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED

TO LIFE.”

Jerry started in his saddle. “That’s a Blazing strange answer, too,”

said he, at his hoarsest.

“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as

well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”

With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at

all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted

their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general

pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape

the hazard of originating any other kind of action.

The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round

it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss

in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and

having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt,

looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which there were a

few smith’s tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was

furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown

and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut

himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw,

and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in

five minutes.

“Tom!” softly over the coach roof.

“Hallo, Joe.”

“Did you hear the message?”

“I did, Joe.”

“What did you make of it, Tom?”

“Nothing at all, Joe.”

“That’s a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it

myself.”

Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not

only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and

shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of

holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over his

heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within

hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to walk down the

hill.

“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust your

fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger,

glancing at his mare. “‘Recalled to life.’ That’s a Blazing strange

message. Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You’d

be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion,

Jerry!”

CHAPTER III.

The Night Shadows

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is

constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A

solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every

one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every

room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating

heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of

its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the

awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I

turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time

to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable

water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses

of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the

book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read

but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an

eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood

in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead,

my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable

consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that

individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In

any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there

a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their

innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the

messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the

first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the

three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail

coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had

been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the

breadth of a county between him and the next.

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at

ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his

own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that

assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with

no depth in the colour or form, and much too near together--as if they

were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too

far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like

a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin and

throat, which descended nearly to the wearer’s knees. When he stopped

for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he

poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he

muffled again.

“No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode.

“It wouldn’t do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn’t

suit _your_ line of business! Recalled--! Bust me if I don’t think he’d

been a drinking!”

His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several

times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown,

which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all

over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was

so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked

wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might

have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.

While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night

watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who

was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the

night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such

shapes to the mare as arose out of _her_ private topics of uneasiness.

They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.

What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon

its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom,

likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms

their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.

Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank

passenger--with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what

lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger,

and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special

jolt--nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little

coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the

bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great

stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money,

and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with

all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then

the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable

stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a

little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among

them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them

safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach

(in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was

always with him, there was another current of impression that never

ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one

out of a grave.

Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him

was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did

not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by

years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed,

and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt,

defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another;

so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands

and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was

prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this

spectre:

“Buried how long?”

The answer was always the same: “Almost eighteen years.”

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”

“Long ago.”

“You know that you are recalled to life?”

“They tell me so.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can’t say.”

“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”

The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes

the broken reply was, “Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.”

Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was,

“Take me to her.” Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it

was, “I don’t know her. I don’t understand.”

After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig,

and dig, dig--now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his

hands--to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth

hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The

passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the

reality of mist and rain on his cheek.

Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving

patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating

by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train

of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the

real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express

sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out

of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost

it again.

“Buried how long?”

“Almost eighteen years.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can’t say.”

Dig--dig--dig--until an impatient movement from one of the two

passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm

securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two

slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again

slid away into the bank and the grave.

“Buried how long?”

“Almost eighteen years.”

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”

“Long ago.”

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in

his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary

passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the

shadows of the night were gone.

He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a

ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left

last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,

in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained

upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear,

and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.

“Eighteen years!” said the passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious

Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!”

CHAPTER IV.

The Preparation

When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,

the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as his

custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey

from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous

traveller upon.

By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be

congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective

roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp

and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather

like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out

of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and

muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.

“There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”

“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The

tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed,

sir?”

“I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”

“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please.

Show Concord! Gentleman’s valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off

gentleman’s boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.)

Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!”

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the

mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from

head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the

Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it,

all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another

drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all

loitering by accident at various points of the road between the Concord

and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a

brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large

square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to

his breakfast.

The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman

in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat,

with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still,

that he might have been sitting for his portrait.

Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a

loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat,

as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and

evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain

of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a

fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He

wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his

head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which

looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass.

His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings,

was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring

beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A

face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the

quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost

their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and

reserved expression of Tellson’s Bank. He had a healthy colour in his

cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety.

But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson’s Bank were

principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps

second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.

Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,

Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him,

and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:

“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any

time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a

gentleman from Tellson’s Bank. Please to let me know.”

“Yes, sir. Tellson’s Bank in London, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in

their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A

vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company’s House.”

“Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.”

“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think,

sir?”

“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we--since I--came last

from France.”

“Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people’s

time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.”

“I believe so.”

“But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and

Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen

years ago?”

“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from

the truth.”

“Indeed, sir!”

Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the

table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left,

dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while

he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the

immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.

When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on

the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away

from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine

ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling

wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was

destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and

brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong

a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be

dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little

fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by

night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide

made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever,

sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable

that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.

As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been

at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became

again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry’s thoughts seemed to cloud

too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting

his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,

digging, digging, in the live red coals.

A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no

harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work.

Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last

glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is

ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has

got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow

street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

He set down his glass untouched. “This is Mam’selle!” said he.

In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette

had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from

Tellson’s.

“So soon?”

Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none

then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson’s

immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.

The gentleman from Tellson’s had nothing left for it but to empty his

glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen

wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette’s apartment.

It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black

horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and

oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room

were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if _they_ were buried, in deep

graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected

from them until they were dug out.

The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his

way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for

the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall

candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and

the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak,

and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As

his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden

hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and

a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth

it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was

not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright

fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions--as his

eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him,

of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very

Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran

high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of

the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital

procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were

offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the

feminine gender--and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.

“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a

little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.

“I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier

date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.

“I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that

some intelligence--or discovery--”

“The word is not material, miss; either word will do.”

“--respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw--so

long dead--”

Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the

hospital procession of negro cupids. As if _they_ had any help for

anybody in their absurd baskets!

“--rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to communicate

with a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for

the purpose.”

“Myself.”

“As I was prepared to hear, sir.”

She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a

pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he

was than she. He made her another bow.

“I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by

those who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to

France, and that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with

me, I should esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself,

during the journey, under that worthy gentleman’s protection. The

gentleman had left London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to

beg the favour of his waiting for me here.”

“I was happy,” said Mr. Lorry, “to be entrusted with the charge. I shall

be more happy to execute it.”

“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me

by the Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the

business, and that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising

nature. I have done my best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a

strong and eager interest to know what they are.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry. “Yes--I--”

After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the

ears, “It is very difficult to begin.”

He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The young

forehead lifted itself into that singular expression--but it was pretty

and characteristic, besides being singular--and she raised her hand,

as if with an involuntary action she caught at, or stayed some passing

shadow.

“Are you quite a stranger to me, sir?”

“Am I not?” Mr. Lorry opened his hands, and extended them outwards with

an argumentative smile.

Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line of

which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the expression

deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which

she had hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and the

moment she raised her eyes again, went on:

“In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than address you

as a young English lady, Miss Manette?”

“If you please, sir.”

“Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business charge to

acquit myself of. In your reception of it, don’t heed me any more than

if I was a speaking machine--truly, I am not much else. I will, with

your leave, relate to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.”

“Story!”

He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when he added,

in a hurry, “Yes, customers; in the banking business we usually call

our connection our customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific

gentleman; a man of great acquirements--a Doctor.”

“Not of Beauvais?”

“Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the

gentleman was of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the

gentleman was of repute in Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there.

Our relations were business relations, but confidential. I was at that

time in our French House, and had been--oh! twenty years.”

“At that time--I may ask, at what time, sir?”

“I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married--an English lady--and

I was one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs of many other

French gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson’s hands.

In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for

scores of our customers. These are mere business relations, miss;

there is no friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like

sentiment. I have passed from one to another, in the course of my

business life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in

the course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a mere

machine. To go on--”

“But this is my father’s story, sir; and I begin to think”--the

curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him--“that when I was

left an orphan through my mother’s surviving my father only two years,

it was you who brought me to England. I am almost sure it was you.”

Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced

to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. He then

conducted the young lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding

the chair-back with his left hand, and using his right by turns to rub

his chin, pull his wig at the ears, or point what he said, stood looking

down into her face while she sat looking up into his.

“Miss Manette, it _was_ I. And you will see how truly I spoke of myself

just now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the relations I hold

with my fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect

that I have never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of

Tellson’s House since, and I have been busy with the other business of

Tellson’s House since. Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance

of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary

Mangle.”

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr. Lorry

flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which was most

unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was

before), and resumed his former attitude.

“So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your

regretted father. Now comes the difference. If your father had not died

when he did--Don’t be frightened! How you start!”

She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her hands.

“Pray,” said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand from

the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped

him in so violent a tremble: “pray control your agitation--a matter of

business. As I was saying--”

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

“As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had suddenly

and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if it had not

been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no art could

trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a

privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest people afraid

to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the

privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one

to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time; if his wife had

implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of

him, and all quite in vain;--then the history of your father would have

been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.”

“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”

“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”

“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this

moment.”

“You speak collectedly, and you--_are_ collected. That’s good!” (Though

his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matter of business.

Regard it as a matter of business--business that must be done. Now

if this doctor’s wife, though a lady of great courage and spirit,

had suffered so intensely from this cause before her little child was

born--”

“The little child was a daughter, sir.”

“A daughter. A-a-matter of business--don’t be distressed. Miss, if the

poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little child was born,

that she came to the determination of sparing the poor child the

inheritance of any part of the agony she had known the pains of, by

rearing her in the belief that her father was dead--No, don’t kneel! In

Heaven’s name why should you kneel to me!”

“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”

“A--a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I transact

business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you could kindly

mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are, or how many

shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so

much more at my ease about your state of mind.”

Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when he had

very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased to clasp

his wrists were so much more steady than they had been, that she

communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.

“That’s right, that’s right. Courage! Business! You have business before

you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother took this course with

you. And when she died--I believe broken-hearted--having never slackened

her unavailing search for your father, she left you, at two years old,

to grow to be blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud

upon you of living in uncertainty whether your father soon wore his

heart out in prison, or wasted there through many lingering years.”

As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on the

flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might have

been already tinged with grey.

“You know that your parents had no great possession, and that what

they had was secured to your mother and to you. There has been no new

discovery, of money, or of any other property; but--”

He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the

forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which was

now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.

“But he has been--been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too

probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best.

Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant

in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to

restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”

A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She said, in a

low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,

“I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost--not him!”

Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There, there,

there! See now, see now! The best and the worst are known to you, now.

You are well on your way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair

sea voyage, and a fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.”

She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have been free, I

have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”

“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a

wholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been found under

another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. It would be

worse than useless now to inquire which; worse than useless to seek to

know whether he has been for years overlooked, or always designedly

held prisoner. It would be worse than useless now to make any inquiries,

because it would be dangerous. Better not to mention the subject,

anywhere or in any way, and to remove him--for a while at all

events--out of France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even

Tellson’s, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of

the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring

to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries,

and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, ‘Recalled to Life;’

which may mean anything. But what is the matter! She doesn’t notice a

word! Miss Manette!”

Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, she

sat under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open and fixed

upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it were carved or

branded into her forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he

feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her; therefore he called

out loudly for assistance without moving.

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed to

be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in some

extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most

wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too,

or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in advance of the

inn servants, and soon settled the question of his detachment from the

poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him

flying back against the nearest wall.

(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry’s breathless

reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)

“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn servants.

“Why don’t you go and fetch things, instead of standing there staring

at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don’t you go and fetch

things? I’ll let you know, if you don’t bring smelling-salts, cold

water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”

There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she

softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and

gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and spreading her

golden hair aside over her shoulders with great pride and care.

“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;

“couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her

to death? Look at her, with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do

you call _that_ being a Banker?”

Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to

answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler

sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having banished the inn

servants under the mysterious penalty of “letting them know” something

not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, recovered her charge by a

regular series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head

upon her shoulder.

“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.

“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”

“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy and

humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to France?”

“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever

intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence

would have cast my lot in an island?”

This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry withdrew to

consider it.

CHAPTER V.

The Wine-shop

A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The

accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled

out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just

outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their

idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular

stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have

thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them,

had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own

jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down,

made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help

women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all

run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in

the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with

handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’

mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;

others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and

there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new

directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed

pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted

fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the

wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up

along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street,

if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous

presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women,

and children--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There

was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a

special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part

of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the

luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths,

shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen

together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been

most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these

demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who

had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in

motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of

hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own

starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men

with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into

the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom

gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street

in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had

stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many

wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks

on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was

stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again.

Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a

tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his

head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled

upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the

street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary

gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was

heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in

waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;

but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a

terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the

fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner,

passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered

in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which

had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the

children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the

grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh,

was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out

of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and

lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and

paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of

firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless

chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,

among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the

baker’s shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of

bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that

was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting

chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every

farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant

drops of oil.

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding

street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets

diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags

and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them

that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some

wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and

slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor

compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted

into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or

inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops)

were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman

painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of

meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops,

croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were

gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a

flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler’s knives

and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the

gunmaker’s stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement,

with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but

broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down

the middle of the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy

rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across

the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and

pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted,

and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly

manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and

the ship and crew were in peril of tempest.

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region

should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so

long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling

up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their

condition. But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over

France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of

song and feather, took no warning.

The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its

appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside

it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle

for the lost wine. “It’s not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug

of the shoulders. “The people from the market did it. Let them bring

another.”

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke,

he called to him across the way:

“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often

the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is

often the way with his tribe too.

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the wine-shop

keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of

mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. “Why do you write

in the public streets? Is there--tell me thou--is there no other place

to write such words in?”

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,

perhaps not) upon the joker’s heart. The joker rapped it with his

own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing

attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his

hand, and held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly

practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.

“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish

there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker’s

dress, such as it was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on

his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty,

and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a

bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder.

His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to

the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own

crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good

eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on

the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong

resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing

down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn

the man.

Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he

came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with

a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand

heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of

manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might

have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself

in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being

sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright

shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large

earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick

her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported

by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but

coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting

of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a

line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the

shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while

he stepped over the way.

The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they

rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in

a corner. Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing

dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply

of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he took notice that the

elderly gentleman said in a look to the young lady, “This is our man.”

“What the devil do _you_ do in that galley there?” said Monsieur Defarge

to himself; “I don’t know you.”

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse

with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is

all the spilt wine swallowed?”

“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge.

When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,

picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough,

and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur

Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or

of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?”

“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned.

At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still

using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of

cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty

drinking vessel and smacked his lips.

“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle

always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I

right, Jacques?”

“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge.

This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the moment

when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and

slightly rustled in her seat.

“Hold then! True!” muttered her husband. “Gentlemen--my wife!”

The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three

flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and

giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the

wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose

of spirit, and became absorbed in it.

“Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly

upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you

wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the

fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard

close to the left here,” pointing with his hand, “near to the window of

my establishment. But, now that I remember, one of you has already been

there, and can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!”

They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur

Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly

gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.

“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to

the door.

Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first

word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had

not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then

beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge

knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus,

joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his own

company just before. It opened from a stinking little black courtyard,

and was the general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited

by a great number of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the

gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee

to the child of his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was

a gentle action, but not at all gently done; a very remarkable

transformation had come over him in a few seconds. He had no good-humour

in his face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had become a secret,

angry, dangerous man.

“It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.”

Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began

ascending the stairs.

“Is he alone?” the latter whispered.

“Alone! God help him, who should be with him!” said the other, in the

same low voice.

“Is he always alone, then?”

“Yes.”

“Of his own desire?”

“Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they

found me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril be

discreet--as he was then, so he is now.”

“He is greatly changed?”

“Changed!”

The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand,

and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so

forcible. Mr. Lorry’s spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his

two companions ascended higher and higher.

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded

parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile

indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation

within the great foul nest of one high building--that is to say,

the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general

staircase--left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides

flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and

hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted

the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their

intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost

insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt

and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to

his young companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr.

Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made

at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that were left

uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed

to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were

caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer

or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any

promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the

third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination

and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story

was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in

advance, and always going on the side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he

dreaded to be asked any question by the young lady, turned himself about

here, and, carefully feeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over

his shoulder, took out a key.

“The door is locked then, my friend?” said Mr. Lorry, surprised.

“Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.

“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?”

“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge whispered it

closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.

“Why?”

“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be

frightened--rave--tear himself to pieces--die--come to I know not what

harm--if his door was left open.”

“Is it possible!” exclaimed Mr. Lorry.

“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a beautiful

world we live in, when it _is_ possible, and when many other such things

are possible, and not only possible, but done--done, see you!--under

that sky there, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.”

This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word

of it had reached the young lady’s ears. But, by this time she trembled

under such strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety,

and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it incumbent

on him to speak a word or two of reassurance.

“Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a

moment; it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is over. Then,

all the good you bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you

bring to him, begin. Let our good friend here, assist you on that side.

That’s well, friend Defarge. Come, now. Business, business!”

They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were

soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at

once in sight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at

the side of a door, and who were intently looking into the room to which

the door belonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing

footsteps close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed

themselves to be the three of one name who had been drinking in the

wine-shop.

“I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur

Defarge. “Leave us, good boys; we have business here.”

The three glided by, and went silently down.

There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of

the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr.

Lorry asked him in a whisper, with a little anger:

“Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?”

“I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.”

“Is that well?”

“_I_ think it is well.”

“Who are the few? How do you choose them?”

“I choose them as real men, of my name--Jacques is my name--to whom the

sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are English; that is another

thing. Stay there, if you please, a little moment.”

With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in

through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck

twice or thrice upon the door--evidently with no other object than to

make a noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it,

three or four times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned

it as heavily as he could.

The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the

room and said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more

than a single syllable could have been spoken on either side.

He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr. Lorry

got his arm securely round the daughter’s waist, and held her; for he

felt that she was sinking.

“A-a-a-business, business!” he urged, with a moisture that was not of

business shining on his cheek. “Come in, come in!”

“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.

“Of it? What?”

“I mean of him. Of my father.”

Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of

their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his

shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. He sat her

down just within the door, and held her, clinging to him.

Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside,

took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did,

methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he

could make. Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to

where the window was. He stopped there, and faced round.

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim

and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the

roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from

the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any

other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this

door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way.

Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it

was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit

alone could have slowly formed in any one, the ability to do any work

requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being

done in the garret; for, with his back towards the door, and his face

towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at

him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very

busy, making shoes.

CHAPTER VI.

The Shoemaker

“Good day!” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that

bent low over the shoemaking.

It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the

salutation, as if it were at a distance:

“Good day!”

“You are still hard at work, I see?”

After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the

voice replied, “Yes--I am working.” This time, a pair of haggard eyes

had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the

faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no

doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was

the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo

of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and

resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once

beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and

suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive

it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller,

wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered

home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked

up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical

perception, beforehand, that the spot where the 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 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 to-day?” asked Defarge,

motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.

“What did you say?”

“Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?”

“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.”

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 vagrancy 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 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 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.

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.

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 concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to

become conscious that it was in hers 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--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 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 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.”

“Then be so kind,” urged Miss Manette, “as to leave us here. You see how

composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me

now. Why should you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from

interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back,

as quiet as you leave him. In any case, I will take care of him until

you return, and then we will remove him straight.”

Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course, and

in favour of one of them remaining. But, as there were not only carriage

and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed,

for the day was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily

dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away

to do it.

Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the

hard ground close at the father’s side, and watched him. The darkness

deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed

through the chinks in the wall.

Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and

had brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and

meat, wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the

lamp he carried, on the shoemaker’s bench (there was nothing else in the

garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and

assisted him to his feet.

No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in

the scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened,

whether he recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that

he was free, were questions which no sagacity could have solved. They

tried speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to

answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for

the time to tamper with him no more. He had a wild, lost manner of

occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not been seen

in him before; yet, he had some pleasure in the mere sound of his

daughter’s voice, and invariably turned to it when she spoke.

In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he

ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak

and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to

his daughter’s drawing her arm through his, and took--and kept--her hand

in both his own.

They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr.

Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps

of the long main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and

round at the walls.

“You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?”

“What did you say?”

But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if

she had repeated it.

“Remember? No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.”

That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his

prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter,

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when he looked about him, it

evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed

him. On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his

tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was

no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he

dropped his daughter’s hand and clasped his head again.

No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the

many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural

silence and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and

that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and

saw nothing.

The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed

him, when Mr. Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his asking,

miserably, for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame

Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and

went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly

brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned

against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.

Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “To the Barrier!” The

postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble

over-swinging lamps.

Under the over-swinging lamps--swinging ever brighter in the better

streets, and ever dimmer in the worse--and by lighted shops, gay crowds,

illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city

gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. “Your papers,

travellers!” “See here then, Monsieur the Officer,” said Defarge,

getting down, and taking him gravely apart, “these are the papers of

monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with

him, at the--” He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the

military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm

in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day

or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. “It is well.

Forward!” from the uniform. “Adieu!” from Defarge. And so, under a short

grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great

grove of stars.

Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote from

this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their

rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything

is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.

All through the cold and restless interval, until dawn, they once more

whispered in the ears of Mr. Jarvis Lorry--sitting opposite the buried

man who had been dug out, and wondering what subtle powers were for ever

lost to him, and what were capable of restoration--the old inquiry:

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”

And the old answer:

“I can’t say.”

The end of the first book.

Book the Second--the Golden Thread

CHAPTER I.

Five Years Later

Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the

year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very

dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,

moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were

proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,

proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence

in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if

it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was

no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more

convenient places of business. Tellson’s (they said) wanted

no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light, Tellson’s wanted no

embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but

Tellson’s, thank Heaven--!

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the

question of rebuilding Tellson’s. In this respect the House was much

on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for

suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly

objectionable, but were only the more respectable.

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection

of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with

a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps,

and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little

counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the

wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of

windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street,

and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the

heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing

“the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back,

where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its

hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal

twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden

drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when

they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they

were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among

the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good

polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms

made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their

parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of family

papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great

dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year

one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you

by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released

from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads

exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of

Abyssinia or Ashantee.

But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue

with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson’s.

Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s?

Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note

was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the

purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder

of a horse at Tellson’s door, who made off with it, was put to

Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of

three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to

Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it

might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the

reverse--but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each

particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked

after. Thus, Tellson’s, in its day, like greater places of business,

its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid

low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately

disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the

ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s, the

oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young

man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was

old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full

Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to

be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches

and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

Outside Tellson’s--never by any means in it, unless called in--was an

odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live

sign of the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless

upon an errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin

of twelve, who was his express image. People understood that Tellson’s,

in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job-man. The house had always

tolerated some person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted

this person to the post. His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful

occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the

easterly parish church of Hounsditch, he had received the added

appellation of Jerry.

The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,

Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March

morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself

always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under

the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a

popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)

Mr. Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were

but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it

might be counted as one. But they were very decently kept. Early as

it was, on the windy March morning, the room in which he lay abed was

already scrubbed throughout; and between the cups and saucers arranged

for breakfast, and the lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth

was spread.

Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin

at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll

and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair

looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he

exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation:

“Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!”

A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a

corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the

person referred to.

“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. “You’re at it

agin, are you?”

After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at

the woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the

odd circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher’s domestic economy, that,

whereas he often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he

often got up next morning to find the same boots covered with clay.

“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his

mark--“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”

“I was only saying my prayers.”

“Saying your prayers! You’re a nice woman! What do you mean by flopping

yourself down and praying agin me?”

“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”

“You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty with. Here!

your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your

father’s prosperity. You’ve got a dutiful mother, you have, my son.

You’ve got a religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping

herself down, and praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out

of the mouth of her only child.”

Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning

to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal

board.

“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. Cruncher, with

unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of _your_ prayers may be?

Name the price that you put _your_ prayers at!”

“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than

that.”

“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain’t worth

much, then. Whether or no, I won’t be prayed agin, I tell you. I can’t

afford it. I’m not a going to be made unlucky by _your_ sneaking. If

you must go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and

child, and not in opposition to ’em. If I had had any but a unnat’ral

wife, and this poor boy had had any but a unnat’ral mother, I might

have made some money last week instead of being counter-prayed and

countermined and religiously circumwented into the worst of luck.

B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been putting

on his clothes, “if I ain’t, what with piety and one blowed thing and

another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor

devil of a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my

boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and

then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I

tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won’t be gone agin,

in this manner. I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I’m as sleepy as

laudanum, my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn’t know, if

it wasn’t for the pain in ’em, which was me and which somebody else, yet

I’m none the better for it in pocket; and it’s my suspicion that you’ve

been at it from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for

it in pocket, and I won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you

say now!”

Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You’re religious, too.

You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband

and child, would you? Not you!” and throwing off other sarcastic sparks

from the whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook

himself to his boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business.

In the meantime, his son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes,

and whose young eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did,

kept the required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor

woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he made

his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, mother.

--Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm, darting in

again with an undutiful grin.

Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came to his

breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s saying grace with particular

animosity.

“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it again?”

His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”

“Don’t do it!” said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he rather expected

to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s petitions. “I

ain’t a going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t have my wittles

blest off my table. Keep still!”

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party

which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried

his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed

inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o’clock he smoothed his ruffled

aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as

he could overlay his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation

of the day.

It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite

description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock consisted of

a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool,

young Jerry, walking at his father’s side, carried every morning to

beneath the banking-house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where,

with the addition of the first handful of straw that could be gleaned

from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s

feet, it formed the encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr.

Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar

itself,--and was almost as in-looking.

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his

three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson’s,

Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry

standing by him, when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to

inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description on passing

boys who were small enough for his amiable purpose. Father and son,

extremely like each other, looking silently on at the morning traffic

in Fleet-street, with their two heads as near to one another as the two

eyes of each were, bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys.

The resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance, that

the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the

youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything else

in Fleet-street.

The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson’s

establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:

“Porter wanted!”

“Hooray, father! Here’s an early job to begin with!”

Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on

the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father

had been chewing, and cogitated.

“Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!” muttered young Jerry.

“Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don’t get no iron

rust here!”