several members of our society have been in secret, at first, and it
has lasted but a short time.” Then he added, raising his voice, “I
grieve to inform the society—in secret.”
There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay
crossed the room to a grated door where the gaoler awaited him,
and many voices—among which, the soft and compassionate
voices of women were conspicuous—gave him good wishes and
encouragement. He turned at the grated door, to render the
thanks of his heart; it closed under the gaoler’s hand; and the
apparitions vanished from his sight for ever.
The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When
they had ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already
counted them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they
passed into a solitary cell. It struck cold and damp, but was not
dark.
“Yours,” said the gaoler.
“Why am I confined alone?”
“How do I know!”
“I can buy pen, ink, and paper?”
“Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then.
At present, you may buy your food, and nothing more.”
There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress. As
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the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of the
four walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered through
the mind of the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him,
that this gaoler was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and
person, as to look like a man who had been drowned and filled
with water. When the gaoler was gone, he thought in the same
wandering way, “Now am I left, as if I were dead.” Stopping then,
to look down at the mattress, he turned from it with a sick feeling,
and thought, “And here in these crawling creatures is the first
condition of the body after death.”
“Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five
paces by four and a half.” The prisoner walked to and fro in his
cell, counting its measurements, and the roar of the city arose like
muffled drums with a wild swell of voices added to them. “He
made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes.” The prisoner
counted the measurement again, and paced faster, to draw his
mind with him from that latter repetition. “The ghosts that
vanished when the wicket closed. There was one among them, the
appearance of a lady dressed in black, who was leaning in the
embrasure of a window, and she had a light shining upon her
golden hair, and she looked like... Let us ride on again, for God’s
sake, through the illuminated villages with the people all awake!...
He made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes.... Five paces by
four and a half.” With such scraps tossing and rolling upward from
the depths of his mind, the prisoner walked faster and faster,
obstinately counting and counting; and the roar of the city
changed to this extent—that it still rolled in like muffled drums,
but with the wail of voices that he knew, in the swell that rose
above them.
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Chapter XXXII
THE GRINDSTONE
Tellson’s Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of
Paris, was in a wing of a large house, approached by a
court-yard and shut off from the street by a high wall and
a strong gate. The house belonged to a great nobleman who had
lived in it until he made a flight from the troubles, in his own
cook’s dress, and got across the borders. A mere beast of the chase
flying from hunters, he was still in his metempsychosis no other
than the same Monseigneur, the preparation of whose chocolate
for whose lips had once occupied three strong men besides the
cook in question.
Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving
themselves from the sin of having drawn his high wages, by being
more than ready and willing to cut his throat on the altar of the
drawing Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur’s house had been first
sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all things move so fast,
and decree following decree with that fierce precipitation, that
now upon the third night of the autumn month of September,
patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of Monseigneur’s
house, and had marked it with the tricolour, and were drinking
brandy in its state apartments.
A place of business in London like Tellson’s place of business in
Paris, would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into
the Gazette. For, what would staid British responsibility and
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respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard, and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were.
Tellson’s had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen
on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does)
at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have
come of this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of
a curtained alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a
looking-glass let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who
danced in public on the slightest provocation. Yet, a French
Tellson’s could get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as
long as the times held together, no man had taken fright at them,
and drawn out his money.
What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s henceforth, and
what would lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels
would tarnish in Tellson’s hiding-places, while the depositors
rusted in prisons, and when they should have violently perished;
how many accounts with Tellson’s never to be balanced in this
world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have said,
that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he
thought heavily of these questions. He sat by a newly-lighted wood
fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was prematurely cold), and
on his honest and courageous face there was a deeper shade than
the pendent lamp could throw, or any object in the room
distortedly reflect—a shade of horror.
He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of
which he had grown to be a part, like strong root-ivy. It chanced
that they derived a kind of security from the patriotic occupation
of the main building, but the true-hearted old gentleman never
calculated about that. All such circumstances were indifferent to
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him, so that he did his duty. On the opposite side of the courtyard,
under a colonnade, was extensive standing for carriages—where,
indeed, some carriages of Monseigneur yet stood. Against two of
the pillars were fastened two great flaring flambeaux, and in the
light of these, standing to in the open air, was a large grindstone: a
roughly mounted thing which appeared to have hurriedly been
brought there from some neighbouring smithy, or other workshop.
Rising and looking out of the window at these harmless objects,
Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat by the fire. He had
opened, not only the glass window, but the lattice blind outside it,
and he had closed both again, and he shivered through his frame.
From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate,
there came the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an
indescribable ring in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted
sounds of a terrible nature were going up to Heaven.
“Thank God,” said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, “that no one
near and dear to me is in this dreadful town tonight. May He have
mercy on all who are in danger!”
Soon afterwards the bell at the great gate sounded, and he
thought, “They have come back!” and sat listening. But, there was
no loud irruption into the courtyard, as he had expected, and he
heard the gate clash again, and all was quiet.
The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that
vague uneasiness respecting the Bank, which a great change
would naturally awaken, with such feelings roused. It was well
guarded, and he got up to go among the trusty people watching it,
when his door suddenly opened, and two figures rushed in, at
sight of which he fell back in amazement.
Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him,
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and with that old look of earnestness so concentrated and
intensified, that it seemed as though it had been stamped upon her
face expressly to give force and power to it in this one passage of
her life.
“What is this?” cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused.
“What is the matter? Lucie! Manette! What has happened? What
has brought you here? What is it?”
With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness, she
panted out in his arms, imploringly, “O my dear friend! My
husband!”
“Your husband, Lucie?”
“Charles.”
“What of Charles?”
“Here.”
“Here, in Paris?”
“Has been here some days—three or four—I don’t know how
many—I can’t collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity
brought him here unknown to us; he was stopped at the barrier,
and sent to prison.”
The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same
moment, the bell of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of
feet and voices came pouring into the court-yard.
“What is that noise?” said the Doctor, turning towards the
window.
“Don’t look!” cried Mr. Lorry. “Don’t look out! Manette, for
your life, don’t touch the blind!”
The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the
window, and said, with a cool, bold smile:
“My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been a
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Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris—in Paris? In
France—who, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the Bastille,
would touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, or carry
me in triumph. My old pain has given me a power that has brought
us through the barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and
brought us here. I knew it would be so; I knew I could help
Charles out of all danger; I told Lucie so.—What is that noise?”
His hand was again upon the window.
“Don’t look!” cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate. “No, Lucie,
my dear, nor you!” He got his arm around her, and held her.
“Don’t be so terrified, my love. I solemnly swear to you that I know
of no harm having happened to Charles; that I had no suspicion
even of his being in this fatal place. What prison is he in?”
“La Force!”
“La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and
serviceable in your life—and you were always both—you will
compose yourself now, to do exactly as I bid you; for more
depends upon it than you can think, or I can say. There is no help
for you in any action on your part tonight; you cannot possibly stir
out. I say this, because what I must bid you to do for Charles’s
sake, is the hardest thing to do of all. You must instantly be
obedient, still and quiet. You must let me put you in a room at the
back here. You must leave your father and me alone for two
minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the world you must
not delay.”
“I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you know I
can do nothing else than this. I know you are true.”
The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and
turned the key; then came hurrying back to the Doctor, and
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opened the window and partly opened the blind, and put his hand
upon the Doctor’s arm, and looked out with him into the courtyard.
Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not enough in
number, or near enough, to fill the courtyard: not more than forty
or fifty in all. The people in possession of the house had let them in
at the gate, and they rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had
evidently been set up there for their purpose, as in a convenient
and retired spot.
But such awful workers, and such awful work!
The grindstone had a double handle, and turning at it madly
were two men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when
the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more
horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their
most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches
were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all
bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and
glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these
ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward
over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some
women held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what
with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with
the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their wicked
atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one
creature in the group free from the smear of blood. Shouldering
one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, the men stripped
to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in
all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set
off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain
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dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives,
bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it.
Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrist of those who
carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures
various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic
wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of
sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
their frenzied eyes;—eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would
