of business who only deals with such material objects as guineas,
shillings, and banknotes—may not the retention of the thing
involve the retention of the idea? If the thing were gone, my dear
Manette, might not the fear go with it? In short, is it not a
concession to the misgiving, to keep the forge?”
There was another silence.
“You see, too,” said the Doctor, tremulously, “it is such an old
companion.”
“I would not keep it,” said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he
gained in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. “I would
recommend him to sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am
sure it does no good. Come! Give me your authority, like a dear
good man. For his daughter’s sake, my dear Manette!”
Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!
“In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not
take it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is
not there; let him miss his old companion after an absence.”
Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was
ended. They passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was
quite restored. On the three following days he remained perfectly
well, and on the fourteenth day he went away to join Lucie and
her husband. The precaution that had been taken to account for
his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously explained to him, and he had
written to Lucie in accordance with it, and she had no suspicions.
On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry
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went into his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer,
attended by Miss Pross carrying a light. There, with closed doors,
and in a mysterious and guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the
shoemaker’s bench to pieces, while Miss Pross held the candle as
if she were assisting at a murder—for which, indeed, in her
grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The burning of the body
(previously reduced to pieces convenient for the purpose) was
commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools, shoes,
and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction
and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss
Pross, while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the
removal of its traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like
accomplices in a horrible crime.
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Chapter XXVI
A PLEA
W hen the newly-married pair came home, the first person
who appeared, to offer his congratulations, was Sydney
Carton. They had not been at home many hours, when
he presented himself. He was not improved in habits, or in looks,
or in manner; but there was a certain rugged air of fidelity about
him, which was new to the observation of Charles Darnay.
He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a
window, and of speaking to him when no one overheard.
“Mr. Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish we might be friends.”
“We are already friends, I hope.”
“You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I
don’t mean any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we
might be friends, I scarcely mean quite that, either.”
Charles Darnay—as was natural—asked him, in all good
humour and good-fellowship, what he did mean?
“Upon my life,” said Carton, smiling, “I find that easier to
comprehend in my own mind, than to convey to yours. However,
let me try. You remember a certain famous occasion when I was
more drunk than—than usual?”
“I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to
confess that you had been drinking.”
“I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon
me, for I always remember them. I hope it may be taken into
account one day, when all days are at an end for me! Don’t be
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alarmed; I am not going to preach.”
“I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but
alarming to me.”
“Ah!” said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he
waved that away. “On the drunken occasion in question (one of a
large number, as you know), I was insufferable about liking you,
and not liking you. I wish you would forget it.”
“I forgot it long ago.”
“Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Darnay, oblivion is not so
easy to me, as you represent it to be to you. I have by no means
forgotten it, and a light answer does not help me to forget it.”
“If it was a light answer,” returned Darnay, “I beg your
forgiveness for it. I had no other object than to turn a slight thing,
which, to my surprise, seems to trouble you too much, aside. I
declare to you, on the faith of a gentleman, that I have long
dismissed it from my mind. Good Heaven, what was there to
dismiss! Have I had nothing more important to remember, in the
great service you rendered me that day?”
“As to the great service,” said Carton, “I am bound to avow to
you, when you speak of it in that way, that it was mere
professional claptrap. I don’t know that I cared what became of
you, when I rendered it.—Mind! I say when I rendered it; I am
speaking of the past.”
“You make light of the obligation,” returned Darnay, “but I will
not quarrel with your light answer.”
“Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from
my purpose; I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you
know me; you know I am incapable of all the higher and better
flights of men. If you doubt it, ask Stryver, and he’ll tell you so.”
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“I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.”
“Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has
never done any good, and never will.”
“I don’t know that you ‘never will.’”
“But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could
endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such
indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask
that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person
here; that I might be regarded as a useless (and I would add, if it
were not for the resemblance I detected between you and me), an
unornamental, piece of furniture, tolerated for its old service, and
taken no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a
hundred to one if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It
would satisfy me, I daresay, to know that I had it.”
“Will you try?”
“That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I
have indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with
your name?”
“I think so, Carton, by this time.”
They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a
minute afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as
unsubstantial as ever.
When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with
Miss Pross, the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some
mention of this conversation in general terms, and spoke of
Sydney Carton as a problem of carelessness and recklessness. He
spoke of him, in short, not bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon
him, but as anybody might who saw him as he showed himself.
He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair
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young wife; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own
rooms, he found her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of
the forehead strongly marked.
“We are thoughtful tonight!” said Darnay, drawing his arm
about her.
“Yes, dearest Charles,” with her hands on his breast, and the
inquiring and attentive expression fixed upon him; “we are rather
thoughtful tonight, for we have something on our mind tonight.”
“What is it, my Lucie?”
“Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you
not to ask it?”
“Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?”
What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from
the cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!
“I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration
and respect than you expressed for him tonight.”
“Indeed, my own? Why so?”
“That is what you are not to ask me! But I think—I know—he
does.”
“If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my
Life?”
“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always,
and very lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to
believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that
there are deep wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.”
“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite
astounded, “that I should have done him any wrong. I never
thought this of him.”
“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is
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scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is
reparable now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things,
gentle things, even magnanimous things.”
She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost
man, that her husband could have looked at her as she was for
hours.
“And, O my dearest Love!” she urged, clinging nearer to him,
laying her head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his,
“remember how strong we are in our happiness, and how weak he
is in his misery!”
The supplication touched him home. “I will always remember
it, dear Heart. I will remember it as long as I live.”
He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and
folded her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the
dark streets, could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could
have seen the drops of pity kissed away by her husband from the
soft blue eyes so loving of that husband, he might have cried to the
night—and the words would not have parted from his lips for the
first time—“God bless her for her sweet compassion!”
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Chapter XXVII
ECHOING FOOTSTEPS
Awonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that
corner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the
golden thread which bound her husband, and her father,
and herself, and her old directress and companion, in a life of
quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house on the tranquilly resounding
corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.
At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy
young wife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and
her eyes would be dimmed. For, there was something coming in
the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that
stirred her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts—hopes,
of a love as yet unknown to her: doubts, of her remaining upon
earth, to enjoy that new delight—divided her breast. Among the
echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own
early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would be left so
desolate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her
eyes, and broke like waves.
That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then,
among the advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet
and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound
as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always
hear those coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny
with a child’s laugh, and the Divine friend of children, to whom in
her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child in His
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arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all
together, weaving the service of her happy influence through the
tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie
heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing
sounds. Her husband’s step was strong and prosperous among
them; her father’s firm and equal. Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of
string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger, whip-
corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in
the garden!
Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they
were not harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay
in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he
said, with a radiant smile, “Dear papa and mamma, I am very
sorry to leave you both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am
called, and I must go!” those were not tears all of agony that
wetted his young mother’s cheek as the spirit departed from her
embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid
them not. They see my Father’s face. O Father, blessed words!
Thus, the rustling of an Angel’s wings got blended with the
other echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them
that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little
garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible
to Lucie, in a hushed murmur—like the breathing of a summer sea
asleep upon a sandy shore—as the little Lucie, comically studious
at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her mother’s
footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were
blended in her life.
The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney
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Carton. Some half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his
privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them
through the evening, as he had once done often. He never came
there heated with wine. And one other thing regarding him was
whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all true
echoes for ages and ages.
No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with
a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and
