victim of this disorder, and she called it, in familiar conversation,
“a fit of the jerks.”
The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially
young. The resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong
at such times, and as they sat side by side, she leaning on his
shoulder, and he resting his arm on the back of her chair, it was
very agreeable to trace the likeness.
He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with
unusual vivacity. “Pray, Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Darnay, as they
sat under the plane-tree—and he said it in the natural pursuit of
the topic in hand, which happened to be the old buildings of
London—”have you seen much of the Tower?”
“Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen
enough of it, to know that it teems with interest; little more.”
“I have been there, as you remember,” said Darnay, with a
smile, though reddening a little angrily, “in another character, and
not in a character that gives facilities for seeing much of it. They
told me a curious thing when I was there.”
“What was that?” Lucie asked.
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“In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old
dungeon, which had been, for many years, built up and forgotten.
Every stone of its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which
had been carved by prisoners—dates, names, complaints, and
prayers. Upon a corner stone in an angle of the wall, one prisoner,
who seemed to have gone to execution, had cut as his last work,
three letters. They were done with some very poor instrument,
and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand. At first, they were read as
D.I.C.; but, on being more carefully examined, the last letter was
found to be G. There was no record or legend of any prisoner with
those initials, and many fruitless guesses were made what the
name could have been. At length, it was suggested that the letters
were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The floor was
examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the earth
beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found
the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern
case or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be
read, but he had written something, and hidden it away to keep it
from the gaoler.”
“My father,” exclaimed Lucie, “you are ill!”
He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His
manner and his look quite terrified them all.
“No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and
they made me start. We had better go in.”
He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in
large drops, and he showed the back of his hand with raindrops on
it. But, he said not a single word in reference to the discovery that
had been told of, and, as they went into the house, the business
eye of Mr. Lorry either detected, or fancied it detected, on his face,
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as it turned towards Charles Darnay, the same singular look that
had been upon it when it turned towards him in the passages of
the Court House.
He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had
doubts of his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall
was not more steady than he was, when he stopped under it to
remark to them that he was not yet proof against slight surprises
(if he ever would be), and that the rain had startled him.
Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the
jerks upon her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had
lounged in, but he made only Two.
The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors
and windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-
table was done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and
looked out into the heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay
sat beside her; Carton leaned against a window. The curtains were
long and white, and some of the thunder-gusts that whirled into
the corner, caught them up to the ceiling, and waved them like
spectral wings.
“The raindrops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,” said
Doctor Manette. “It comes slowly.”
“It comes surely,” said Carton.
They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as
people in a dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always
do.
There was a great hurry in the streets, of people speeding away
to get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for
echoes resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going,
yet not a footstep was there.
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“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude,” said Darnay, when
they had listened for a while.
“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Sometimes, I
have sat here of an evening, until I have fancied—but even the
shade of a foolish fancy makes me shudder tonight, when all is so
black and solemn—”
“Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.”
“It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as
we originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I
have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I
have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that
are coming by-and-by into our lives.”
“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be
so,” Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.
The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became
more and more rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the
tread of feet; some, as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it
seemed, in the room; some coming, some going, some breaking off,
some stopping altogether; all in the distant streets, and not one
within sight.
“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss
Manette, or are we to divide them among us?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but
you asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been
alone, and then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people
who are to come into my life, and my father’s.”
“I take them into mine!” said Carton. “I ask no questions and
make no stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon
us, Miss Manette, and I see them—by the Lightning.” He added
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the last words, after there had been a vivid flash which had shown
him lounging in the window.
“And I hear them!” he added again, after a peal of thunder.
“Here they come, fast, fierce, and furious!”
It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped
him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of
thunder and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there
was not a moment’s interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after
the moon rose at midnight.
The great bell of Saint Paul’s was striking One in the cleared
air, when Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a
lantern, set forth on his return passage to Clerkenwell. There were
solitary patches of road on the way between Soho and
Clerkenwell, and Mr. Lorry, mindful of footpads, always retained
Jerry for this service: though it was usually performed a good two
hours earlier.
“What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr.
Lorry, “to bring the dead out of their graves.”
“I never see the night myself, master—nor yet I don’t expect
to—what would do that,” answered Jerry.
“Good night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “Good
night, Mr. Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!”
Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush
and roar, bearing down upon them, too.
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Chapter XIII
MONSEIGNEUR IN TOWN
Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court,
held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in
Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his
sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of
worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about
to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many
things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to
be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate
could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without
the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes, it took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration,
and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold
watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion
set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to
Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the
sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with
the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented
the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured
the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense
with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high
place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot
upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on
by only three men; he must have died of two.
Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where
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the Comedy and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented.
Monseigneur was out at a little supper most nights, with
fascinating company. So polite and so impressible was
Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far more
influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and state
secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance for
France, as the like always is for all countries similarly favoured!—
always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted days
of the merry Stuart who sold it.
Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public
business, which was, to let everything go on its own way; of
particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble
idea that it must all go his way—tend to his own power and pocket.
Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the
other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text
of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is
not much) ran: “The earth and the fullness thereof are mine, saith
Monseigneur.”
Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar
embarrassments crept into his affairs, both private and public; and
he had, as to both classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a
Farmer-General. As to finances public, because Monseigneur
could not make anything at all of them, and must consequently let
them out to somebody who could; as to finances private, because
Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after generations of
great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence Monseigneur
had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time to
ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear,
and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,
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poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate
cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the
company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by
mankind—always excepting superior mankind of the blood of
Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him
with the loftiest contempt.
A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood
in his stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-
women waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing
but plunder and forage where he could, the Farmer-General—
howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to social morality
was at least the greatest reality among the personages who
attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.
For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and
adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of
the time could achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business;
considered with any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and
nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either, but that the
watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two
extremes, could see them both), they would have been an
exceedingly uncomfortable business—if that could have been
anybody’s business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a
ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics,
of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and
looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying
horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or
remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all
public employments from which anything was to be got; these
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were to be told off by the score and the score. People not
immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State, yet equally
unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives passed in
travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were no
less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty
remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon
their courtly patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur.
Projectors who had discovered every kind of remedy for the little
evils with which the State was touched, except the remedy of
setting to work in earnest to root out a single sin, poured their
distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the
reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were
remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of
