have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well directed gun.
All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man,
or of any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world
if it were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor
looked for explanation in his friend’s ashy face.
“They are,” Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully
around at the locked room, “murdering the prisoners. If you are
sure of what you say; if you really have the power you think you
have—as I believe you have—make yourself known to these devils,
and get taken to La Force. It may be too late, I don’t know, but let
it not be a minute later!”
Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of
the room, and was in the court-yard when Mr. Lorry regained the
blind.
His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the
impetuous confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside
like water, carried him in an instant to the heart of the concourse
at the stone. For a few minutes there was a pause, and a hurry,
and a murmur, and the unintelligible sound of his voice; and then
Mr. Lorry saw him, surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line of
twenty men long, all linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand to
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shoulder, hurried out with cries—“Live the Bastille prisoner! Help
for the Bastille prisoner’s kindred in La Force! Room for the
Bastille prisoner in front there! Save the prisoner Evremonde at
La Force!” and a thousand answering shouts.
He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the
window and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her
father was assisted by the people, and gone in search of her
husband. He found her child and Miss Pross with her; but, it never
occurred to him to be surprised by their appearance until a long
time afterwards, when he sat watching them in such quiet as the
night knew.
Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his
feet, clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on
his own bed, and her head had gradually fallen on the pillow
beside her pretty charge. O the long, long night, with the moans of
the poor wife! And O the long, long night, with no return of her
father and no tidings!
Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded,
and the irruption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and
spluttered. “What is it?” cried Lucie, affrighted. “Hush! The
soldiers’ swords are sharpened there,” said Mr. Lorry. “The place
is national property now, and used as a kind of armoury, my love.”
Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble and
fitful. Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly
detached himself from the clasping hand, and cautiously looked
out again. A man, so besmeared that he might have been a sorely
wounded soldier creeping back to consciousness on a field of slain,
was rising from the pavement by the side of the grindstone, and
looking about him with a vacant air. Shortly, this worn-out
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murderer descried in the imperfect light one of the carriages of
Monseigneur, and, staggering to that gorgeous vehicle, climbed in
at the door, and shut himself up to take his rest on its dainty
cushions.
The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked
out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser
grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red
upon it that the sun had never given, and would never take away.
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Chapter XXXIII
THE SHADOW
O ne of the first considerations which arose in the business
mind of Mr. Lorry when business hours came round, was
this:—that he had no right to imperil Tellson’s by
sheltering the wife of an emigrant prisoner under the Bank roof.
His own possessions, safety, life, he would have hazarded for Lucie
and her child, without a moment’s demur; but the great trust he
held was not his own, and as to that business charge he was a
strict man of business.
At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding
out the wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in
reference to the safest dwelling-place in the distracted state of the
city. But, the same consideration that suggested him, repudiated
him; he lived in the most violent Quarter, and doubtless was
influential there, and deep in its dangerous workings.
Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute’s
delay tending to compromise Tellson’s, Mr. Lorry advised with
Lucie. She said that her father had spoken of hiring a lodging for a
short term, in that Quarter, near the Banking-house. As there was
no business objection to this, and as he foresaw that even if it were
all well with Charles, and he were to be released, he could not
hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry went out in quest of such a
lodging, and found a suitable one, high up in a removed by-street
where the closed blinds in all the other windows of a high
melancholy square of buildings marked deserted homes.
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To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and
Miss Pross; giving them what comfort he could, and much more
than he had himself. He left Jerry with them, as a figure to fill a
doorway that would bear considerable knocking on the head, and
returned to his own occupations. A disturbed and doleful mind he
brought to bear upon them; and slowly and heavily, the day lagged
on with him.
It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank
closed. He was again alone in his room of the previous night,
considering what to do next, when he heard a foot upon the stair.
In a few moments a man stood in his presence, who, with a keenly
observant look at him, addressed him by his name.
“Your servant,” said Mr. Lorry. “Do you know me?”
He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty-
five to fifty years of age. For answer he repeated without any
change of emphasis, the words:
“Do you know me?”
“I have seen you somewhere.”
“Perhaps at my wine-shop?”
Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said: “You come from
Doctor Manette?”
“Yes, I come from Doctor Manette.”
“And what says he? What does he send me?”
Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It
bore the words in the Doctor’s writing:
Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet. I have
obtained the favour that the bearer has a short note from Charles
to his wife. Let the bearer see his wife.
It was dated from La Force, within an hour.
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“Will you accompany me,” said Mr. Lorry, joyfully relieved after
reading this note aloud, “to where his wife resides?”
“Yes,” returned Defarge.
Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved and
mechanical way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his hat and they
went down into the court-yard. There they found two women; one
knitting.
“Madame Defarge, surely!” said Mr. Lorry, who had left her in
exactly the same attitude some seventeen years ago.
“It is she,” observed her husband.
“Does Madame go with us?” inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing that
she moved as they moved.
“Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know the
persons. It is for their safety.”
Beginning to be struck by Defarge’s manner, Mr. Lorry looked
dubiously at him, and led the way. Both the women followed; the
second woman being The Vengeance.
They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they
might, ascended the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted
by Jerry, and found Lucie weeping, alone. She was thrown into a
transport by the tidings Mr. Lorry gave her of her husband, and
clasped the hand that delivered his note—little thinking what it
had been doing near him in the night, and might, but for a chance,
have done for him.
DEAREST—Take courage. I am well, and your father has
influence around me. You cannot answer this. Kiss our child for
me.
That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her who
received it, that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and kissed
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one of the hands that knitted. It was a passionate, loving, thankful,
womanly action, but the hand made no response—dropped cold
and heavy, and took to its knitting again.
There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check. She
stopped in the act of putting the note in her bosom, and, with her
hands yet at her neck, looked terrified at Madame Defarge.
Madame Defarge met the lifted eyebrows and forehead with a
cold, impassive stare.
“My dear,” said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; “there are
frequent risings in the streets; and, although it is not likely they
will ever trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom
she has the power to protect at such times, to the end that she may
know them—that she may identify them. I believe,” said Mr.
Lorry, rather halting in his reassuring words, as the stony manner
of all the three impressed itself upon him more and more, “I state
the case, Citizen Defarge?”
Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer
than a gruff sound of acquiescence.
“You had better, Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to
propitiate, by tone and manner, “have the dear child here, and our
good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and
knows no French.”
The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was
more than a match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by
distress and danger, appeared with folded arms, and observed in
English to The Vengeance, whom her eyes first encountered,
“Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope you are pretty well!” She also
bestowed a British cough on Madame Defarge; but, neither of the
two took much heed of her.
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“Is that his child?” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work
for the first time and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as
if it were the finger of Fate.
“Yes, Madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor
prisoner’s darling daughter, and only child.”
The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party
seemed to fall so threatening and dark on the child, that her
mother instinctively kneeled on the ground beside her, and held
her to her breast. The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and
her party seemed then to fall, threatening and dark, on both the
mother and the child.
“It is enough, my husband,” said Madame Defarge. “I have seen
them. We may go.”
But the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it—not
visible and presented, but indistinct and withheld—to alarm Lucie
into saying, as she laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge’s
dress:
“You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no
harm. You will help me to see him if you can?”
“Your husband is not my business here,” returned Madame
Defarge, looking down at her with perfect composure. “It is the
daughter of your father who is my business here.”
“For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child’s
sake! She will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful.
We are more afraid of you than of these others.”
Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her
husband. Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail
and looking at her, collected his face into a sterner expression.
“What is that your husband says in that little letter?” asked
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Madame Defarge, with a lowering smile. “Influence; he says
something touching influence?”
“That my father,” said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from
her breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not
on it, “has much influence around him.”
“Surely it will release him!” said Madame Defarge. “Let it do
so.”
“As a wife and mother,” cried Lucie most earnestly, “I implore
you to have pity on me and not exercise any power that you
possess, against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O
sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!”
Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and
said, turning to her friend The Vengeance:
“The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we
were as little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly
considered? We have known their husbands and fathers laid in
prison and kept from them, often enough? All our lives, we have
seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children,
poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression,
and neglect of all kinds?”
“We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance.
“We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge,
turning her eyes again upon Lucie. “Judge you! Is it likely that the
trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?”
She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance
followed. Defarge went last, and closed the door.
“Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her.
“Courage, courage! So far all goes well with us—much, much
better than it has of late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and
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have a thankful heart.”
“I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to
throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes.”
“Tut, tut!” said Mr. Lorry; “what is this despondency in the
brave little beast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.”
But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon
himself, for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.
