another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one
direction only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place,
became uneasy; went out on his house-top alone, and looked in
that direction too; glanced down from behind his chimneys at the
darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to the
sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that there might be
need to ring the tocsin by-and-by.
The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau,
keeping its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though
they threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the
gloom. Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and
beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;
uneasy rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old
spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook
the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East,
West, North, and South, through the woods, four heavy-treading,
unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the branches,
striding on cautiously to come together in the courtyard. Four
lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and
all was black again.
But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself
strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it were
growing luminous. Then, a flickering streak played behind the
architecture of the front, picking out transparent places, and
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showing where balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it
soared higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon, from a score
of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces
awakened, stared out of fire.
A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who
were left there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding
away. There was spurring and splashing through the darkness,
and bridle was drawn in the space by the village fountain, and the
horse in a foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle’s door. “Help, Gabelle!
Help, every one!” The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if
that were any) there was none. The mender of roads, and two
hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the
fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. “It must be forty
feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.
The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered
away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the
prison on the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at
the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentleman
officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved
from the flames by timely aid! Help, help!” The officers looked
towards the soldiers who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and
answered with shrugs and biting of lips, “It must burn.”
As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street,
the village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two
hundred and fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and
woman by the idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses,
and were putting candles in every dull little pane of glass. The
general scarcity of everything, occasioned candles to be borrowed
in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a
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moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary’s part,
the mender of roads, once so submissive to authority, had
remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with, and
that post-horses would roast.
The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring
and raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight
from the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away.
With the rising and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as
if they were in torment. When great masses of stone and timber
fell, the face with the two dints in the nose became obscured: anon
struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel
Marquis, burning at the stake and contending with the fire.
The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke.
Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain;
the water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished
like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells
of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls, like
crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into
the furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North,
and South, along the night-enshrouded roads, guided by the
beacon they had lighted, towards their next destination. The
illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing
the lawful ringer, rang for joy.
Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire,
and bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had
to do with the collection of rent and taxes—though it was but a
small instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got
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in those latter days—became impatient for an interview with him,
and, surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for
personal conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did heavily
bar his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of
that conference was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his
house-top behind his stack of chimneys; this time resolved, if his
door were broken in (he was a small Southern man of retaliative
temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the parapet,
and crush a man or two below.
Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there with
the distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
combined with the joy-ringing for music; not to mention his
having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his
posting-house gate, which the village showed a lively inclination to
displace in his favour. A trying suspense, to be passing a whole
summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that
plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But, the
friendly dawn appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village
guttering out, the people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle
came down bringing his life with him for that while.
Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there
were other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other
nights, whom the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful
streets, where they had been born and bred; also, there were other
villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads
and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery turned
with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But, the
fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South,
be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude
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of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no
functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate
successfully.
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
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Chapter XXX
DRAWN TO THE LOADSTONE ROCK
In such risings of fire and risings of sea—the firm earth shaken
by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but
was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and
wonder of the beholders on the shore—three years of tempest
were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been
woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of
her home.
Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the
echoes in the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard
the thronging feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as
the footsteps of a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with
their country declared in danger, changed into wild beasts, by
terrible enchantment long persisted in.
Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the
phenomenon of his not being appreciated: of his being so little
wanted in France, as to incur considerable danger of receiving his
dismissal from it, and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who
raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the
sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but
immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s
Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing
many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner
beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.
The shining Bull’s Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have
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been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never
been a good eye to see with—had long had the mote in it of
Lucifer’s pride, Sardanapalus’s luxury, and a mole’s blindness—
but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that
exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue,
corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was
gone; had been besieged in its Palace and ‘suspended,’ when the
last tidings came over.
The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and
ninety-two was come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered
far and wide.
As was natural, the headquarters and great gathering-place of
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson’s Bank. Spirits are
supposed to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted,
and Monseigneur without a guinea haunted the spot where his
guineas used to be. Moreover, it was the spot to which such
French intelligence as was most to be relied upon, came quickest.
Again: Tellson’s was a munificent house, and extended great
liberality to old customers who had fallen from their high estate.
Again: those nobles who had seen the coming storm in time, and
anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made provident
remittances to Tellson’s, were always to be heard of there by their
needy brethren. To which it must be added that every newcomer
from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson’s, almost
as a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson’s was at
that time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange; and
this was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there
were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson’s sometimes wrote
the latest news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank
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windows, for all who ran through Temple Bar to read.
On a steamy, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and
Charles Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low
voice. The penitential den once set apart for interviews with the
House, was now the news Exchange, and was filled to overflowing.
It was within half an hour or so of the time of closing.
“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” said
Charles Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to you—”
“I understand. That I am too old?” said Mr. Lorry.
“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of
travelling, a disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe
for you.”
“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence,
“you touch some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying
away. It is safe enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with
an old fellow of hard upon fourscore when there are so many
people there much better worth interfering with. As to its being a
disorganised city, if it were not a disorganised city there would be
no occasion to send somebody from our House here to our House
there, who knows the city and the business, of old, and is in
Tellson’s confidence. As to the uncertain travelling, the long
journey, and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit
myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson’s, after all
these years, who ought to be?”
“I wish I were going myself,” said Charles Darnay, somewhat
restlessly, and like one thinking aloud.
“Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!”
exclaimed Mr. Lorry. “You wish you were going yourself? And you
a Frenchman born? You are a wise counsellor.”
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“My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that
the thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has
passed through my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having
had some sympathy for the miserable people, and having
abandoned something to them,” he spoke here in his former
thoughtful manner, “that one might be listened to, and might have
the power to persuade to some restraint. Only last night, after you
had left us, when I was talking to Lucie—”
“When you were talking to Lucie,” Mr. Lorry repeated. “Yes. I
wonder you are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie!
Wishing you were going to France at this time of day!”
“However, I am not going,” said Charles Darnay, with a smile.
“It is more to the purpose that you say you are.”
“And I am in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,” Mr.
Lorry glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, “you
can have no conception of the difficulty with which our business is
transacted, and of the peril in which our books and papers over
yonder are involved. The Lord above knows what the
compromising consequences would be to numbers of people, if
some of our documents were seized or destroyed; and they might
be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set afire today or sacked tomorrow! Now, a judicious selection from
