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
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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?”
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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 coachstep,
getting in; the other two passengers were close behind him, and
about to follow. He remained on the step, half in the coach and
half out of it; 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
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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 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.
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“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 hands 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 stopped, 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
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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
tinderbox. 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,
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he turned to walk down the hill.
“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won’t trust
your forelegs 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!”
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Chapter III
THE NIGHT SHADOWS
Awonderful 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 breathing 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 mind 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
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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
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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
connexion, 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
