“Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!”
His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles
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Darnay’s ears long after he had ceased. He motioned with the
hand he had extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to
pause. The latter so received it, and remained silent.
“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, and
after some moments. “I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may
be satisfied of it.”
He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or
raise his eyes. His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair
overshadowed his face:
“Have you spoken to Lucie?”
“No.”
“Nor written?”
“Never.”
“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-
denial is to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her
father thanks you.”
He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.
“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know,
Doctor Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day,
that between you and Miss Manette there is an affection so
unusual, so touching, so belonging to the circumstances in which
it has been nurtured, that it can have few parallels, even in the
tenderness between a father and child. I know, Doctor Manette—
how can I fail to know—that, mingled with the affection and duty
of a daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her heart,
towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy itself. I know that,
as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted to
you with all the constancy and fervour of her present years and
character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the early
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days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if you
had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you
could hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred
character than that in which you are always with her. I know that
when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all
in one, are round your neck. I know that in loving you she sees and
loves her mother at her own age, sees and loves you at my age,
loves her mother broken-hearted, loves you through your dreadful
trial and in your blessed restoration. I have known this, night and
day, since I have known you in your home.”
Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing
was a little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.
“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her
and you with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and
forborne, as long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt,
and do even now feel, that to bring my love—even mine—between
you, is to touch your history with something not quite so good as
itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness that I love her!”
“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought
so before now. I believe it.”
“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the
mournful voice struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my
fortune were so cast as that, being one day so happy as to make
her my wife, I must at any time put any separation between her
and you, I could or would breathe a word of what I now say.
Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I should know it to be
a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at a remote distance
of years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my heart—if it
ever had been there—if it ever could be there—I could not now
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touch this honoured hand.”
He laid his own upon it as he spoke.
“No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from
France; like you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions,
and miseries; like you, striving to live away from it by my own
exertions, and trusting in a happier future; I look only to sharing
your fortunes, sharing your life and home, and being faithful to
you to the death, Not to divide with Lucie her privilege as your
child, companion, and friend; but to come in aid of it, and bind her
closer to you, if such a thing can be.”
His touch still lingered on her father’s hand. Answering the
touch for a moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands
upon the arms of his chair, and looked up for the first time since
the beginning of the conference. A struggle was evident in his face;
a struggle with that occasional look which had a tendency in it to
dark doubt and dread.
“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I
thank you with all my heart, and will open all my heart—or nearly
so. Have you any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?”
“None. As yet none.”
“Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at
once ascertain that, with my knowledge?”
“Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for
weeks; I might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness
tomorrow.”
“Do you seek any promise from me?”
“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might
have it in your power, if you should deem it right, to give me
some.”
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“Do you seek any promise from me!”
“I do seek that.”
“What is it?”
“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I
well understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this
moment in her innocent heart—do not think I have the
presumption to assume so much—I could retain no place in it
against her love for her father.”
“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in
it?”
“I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any
suitor’s favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For
which reason, Doctor Manette.” said Darnay, modestly but firmly,
“I would not ask that word, to save my life.”
“I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close
love, as well as out of wide division; in the former case, they are
subtle and delicate, and difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie
is, in this one respect, such a mystery to me; I can make no guess
at the state of her heart.”
“May I ask, sir, if you think she is—” As he hesitated, her father
supplied the rest.
“Is sought by any other suitor?”
“It is what I meant to say.”
Her father considered a little before he answered:
“You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is here
too, occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these.”
“Or both,” said Darnay.
“I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely, You
want a promise from me. Tell me what it is.”
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“It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on
her own part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before
you, you will bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief
in it. I hope you may be able to think so well of me, as to urge no
influence against me, I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is
what I ask. The condition on which I ask it, and which you have an
undoubted right to require, I will observe immediately.”
“I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “without any condition. I
believe your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated
it. I believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the
ties between me and my other and far dearer self. If she should
ever tell me that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will
give her to you. If there were—Charles Darnay—if there were—”
The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were
joined as the Doctor spoke:
“—any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything
whatsoever, new or old, against the man she really loved—the
direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head—they should all
be obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me; more to me
than suffering, more to me than wrong, more to me—Well! This is
idle talk.”
So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so
strange his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay
felt his own hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and
dropped it.
“You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking
into a smile. “What was it you said to me?”
He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having
spoken of a condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he
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answered:
“Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full
confidence on my part. My present name, though but slightly
changed from my mother’s, is not, as you will remember, my own.
I wish to tell you what that is, and why I am in England.”
“Stop!” said the Doctor of Beauvais.
“I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and
have no secret from you.”
“Stop.”
For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears;
for another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay’s lips.
“Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if
Lucie should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage
morning. Do you promise?”
“Willingly.”
“Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better
she should not see us together tonight, Go! God bless you!”
It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour
later and darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the
room alone—for Miss Pross had gone straight upstairs—and was
surprised to find his reading-chair empty.
“My father!” she called to him. “Father dear!”
Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering
sound in the bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate
room, she looked in at his door and came running back frightened,
crying to herself, with her blood all chilled, “What shall I do! What
shall I do!”
Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back and
tapped at his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at
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the sound of her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they
walked up and down together for a long time.
She came down from her bed to look at him in his sleep that
night. He slept, heavily, and his tray of shoe-making tools, and his
old unfinished work, were all as usual.
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Chapter XVII
A COMPANION PICTURE
S ydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that selfsame night, or
morning, to his jackal; “mix another bowl of punch; I have
something to say to you,” Sydney had been working double
tides that night, and the night before, and the night before that,
and a good many nights in succession, making a grand clearance
among Mr. Stryver’s papers before the setting in of the long
vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver arrears
were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until
November should come with its fogs atmospheric and fogs legal,
and bring grist to the mill again.
Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much
application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him
through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had
preceded the towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition,
as he now pulled his turban off and threw it into the basin in
which he had steeped it at intervals for the last six hours.
“Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?” said Stryver the
portly, with his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the
sofa where he lay on his back.
“I am.”
“Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will
rather surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not
quite as shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.”
“Do you?”
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“Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?”
“I don’t feel disposed to say much. Who is she?”
“Guess.”
“Do I know her?”
“Guess.”
“I am not going to guess, at five o’clock in the morning, with my
brains frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess,
you must ask me to dinner.”
“Well then, I’ll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a
sitting posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself
intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog.”
“And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are
such a sensitive and poetical spirit.”
“Come!” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “though I don’t
prefer any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know
better), still I am a tenderer sort of fellow than you.”
“You are a luckier, if you mean that.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean I am a man of more—more—”
“Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton.
“Well! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” said
Stryver, inflating himself at his friend, as he made the punch,
“who cares more to be agreeable, who takes more pains to be
agreeable, who knows better how to be agreeable, in a woman’s
society, than you do.”
“Go on,” said Sydney Carton.
“No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his
bullying way, “I’ll have this out with you. You’ve been at Dr.
Manette’s house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I
have been ashamed of your moroseness there! Your manners have
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been of that silent and sullen and hang-dog kind, that, upon my
life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney!”
“It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the
bar, to be ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to
