he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among
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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.
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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 fall 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.
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“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!”
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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Chapter IV
THE PREPARATION
W hen 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 to 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!”
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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 waistcoat, 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
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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 today. 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
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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, dropping 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 into 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.
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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!” he said.
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.
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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 lifting 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
