Doctor Manette’s imprisonment, release, and history, as should
serve him for an introduction to familiar conversation with the
Defarges; and tried them on Madame Defarge, and had broken
down with them signally. He always remembered with fear and
trembling, that that terrible woman had knitted when he talked
with her, and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved.
He had since seen her, in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and
over again produce her knitted registers, and denounce people
whose lives the guillotine then surely swallowed up. He knew, as
every one employed as he was did, that he was never safe; that
flight was impossible; that he was tied fast under the shadow of
the axe; and that in spite of his utmost tergiversation and
treachery in furtherance of the reigning terror, a word might bring
it down upon him. Once denounced, and on such grave grounds as
had just now been suggested to his mind, he foresaw that the
dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had seen many
proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and would
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quash his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are men
soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to
justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.
“You scarcely seem to like your hand,” said Sydney, with the
greatest composure. “Do you play?”
“I think, sir,” said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned
to Mr. Lorry, “I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and
benevolence, to put it to this other gentleman, so much your
junior, whether he can under any circumstances reconcile it to his
station to play that Ace of which he has spoken. I admit that I am a
spy, and that it is considered a discreditable station—though it
must be filled by somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why
should he so demean himself as to make himself one?”
“I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton, taking the answer on
himself, and looking at his watch, “without any scruple, in a very
few minutes.”
“I should have hoped, gentlemen both,” said the spy, always
striving to hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, “that your respect
for my sister—” “I could not better testify my respect for your
sister than by finally relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney
Carton.
“You think not, sir?”
“I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.”
The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his
ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual
demeanour, received such a check from the inscrutability of
Carton,—who was a mystery to wiser and honester men than he,—
that it faltered here and failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton
said, resuming his former air of contemplating cards:
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“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that
I have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend
and fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the
country prisons; who was he?”
“French. You don’t know him,” said the spy. quickly.
“French, eh?” replied Carton, musing, and not appearing to
notice him at all, though he echoed his word. “Well, he may be.”
“Is, I assure you,” said the spy; “though it’s not important.”
“Though it’s not important,” repeated Carton, in the same
mechanical way—“though it’s not important—No, it’s not
important. No. Yet I know the face.”
“I think not. I am sure not. It can’t be,” said the spy.
“It—can’t—be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and
filling his glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. “Can’t—
be. Spoke good French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought.”
“Provincial,” said the spy.
“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the
table, as a light broke clearly on his mind. “Cly! Disguised, but the
same man. We had that man before us at the Old Bailey.”
“Now, there you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that
gave his aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; “there you
really give me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly
admit, at this distance of time, was a partner of mine) has been
dead several years. I attended him in his last illness. He was
buried in London, at the church of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields.
His unpopularity with the blackguard multitude at the moment
prevented my following his remains, but I helped to lay him in his
coffin.”
Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most
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remarkable goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he
discovered it to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and
stiffening of all the risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher’s head.
“Let us be reasonable,” said the spy, “and let us be fair. To
show you how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded
assumption yours is, I will lay before you a certificate of Cly’s
burial, which I happen to have carried in my pocket-book,” with a
hurried hand he produced and opened it, “ever since. There it is.
Oh, look at it, look at it! You may take it in your hand; it’s no
forgery.”
Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate,
and Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not
have been more violently on end, if it had been that moment
dressed by the Cow with the crumpled horn in the house that Jack
built.
Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched
him on the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.
“That there Roger Cly, master,” said Mr. Cruncher, with a
taciturn and iron-bound visage. “So you put him in his coffin?”
“I did.”
“Who took him out of it?”
Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered. “What do you
mean?”
“I mean,” said Mr. Cruncher, “that he warn’t never in it. No!
Not he! I’ll have my head took off, if he was ever in it.”
The spy looked around at the two gentlemen; they both looked
in unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.
“I tell you,” said Jerry, “that you buried paving-stones and
earth in that there coffin. Don’t go and tell me that you buried Cly.
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It was a take-in. Me and two more knows it.”
“How do you know it?”
“What’s that to you? Ecod!” growled Mr. Cruncher, “it’s you I
have got an old grudge agin, is it, with your shameful impositions
upon tradesmen! I’d catch hold of your throat and choke you for
half a guinea.”
Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in
amazement at this turn of the business, here requested Mr.
Cruncher to moderate and explain himself.
“At another time, sir,” he returned, evasively, “the present time
is ill-conwenient for explainin’. What I stand to, is that he knows
well wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say
he was, in so much as a word of one syllable, and I’ll either catch
hold of his throat and choke him for half a guinea”; Mr. Cruncher
dwelt upon this as quite a liberal offer; “or I’ll out and announce
him.”
“Humph! I see one thing,” said Carton. “I hold another card,
Mr. Barsad. Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling
the air, for you to outlive denunciation, when you are in
communication with another aristocratic spy of the same
antecedents as yourself, who, moreover, has the mystery about
him of having feigned death and come to life again! A plot in the
prisons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong card—a
certain Guillotine card! Do you play?”
“No!” returned the spy. “I throw up. I confess that we were so
unpopular with the outrageous mob, that I only got away from
England at the risk of being ducked to death, and that Cly was so
ferreted up and down, that he never would have got away at all
but for that sham. Though how this man knows it was a sham, is a
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wonder of wonders to me.”
“Never you trouble your head about this man,” retorted the
contentious Mr. Cruncher; “you’ll have trouble enough with giving
your attention to that gentleman. And look here! Once more!”—
Mr. Cruncher could not be restrained from making rather an
ostentatious parade of his liberality—“I’d catch hold of your throat
and choke you for half a guinea.”
The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton,
and said, with more decision, “It has come to a point. I go on duty
soon, and can’t overstay my time. You told me you had a proposal;
what is it? Now, it is of no use asking too much of me. Ask me to
do anything in my office, putting my head in great extra danger,
and I had better trust my life to the chances of a refusal than the
chances of consent. In short, I should make that choice. You talk of
desperation. We are all desperate here. Remember! I may
denounce you if I think proper, and I can swear my way through
stone walls, and so can others. Now, what do you want with me?”
“Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?”
“I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape
possible,” said the spy firmly.
“Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a
turnkey at the Conciergerie?”
“I am sometimes.”
“You can be when you choose?”
“I can pass in and out when I choose.”
Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it
slowly out upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being
all spent, he said, rising:
“So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well
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that the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and
me. Come into the dark room here, and let us have one final word
alone.”
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Chapter XXXIX
THE GAME MADE
W hile Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were
in the adjoining dark room, speaking so low that not a
sound was heard, Mr. Lorry looked at Jerry in
considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman’s
manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he
changed the leg on which he rested, as often as if he had fifty of
those limbs, and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails
with a very questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr.
Lorry’s eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of
short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which is
seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect
openness of character.
“Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry. “Come here.”
Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders
in advance of him.
“What have you been, besides a messenger?”
After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his
patron, Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying,
“Agricultooral character.”
“My mind misgives me much,” said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking
a forefinger at him, “that you have used the respectable and great
house of Tellson’s as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful
occupation of an infamous description. If you have, don’t expect
me to befriend you when you get back to England. If you have,
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don’t expect me to keep your secret. Tellson’s shall not be imposed
upon.”
“I hope, sir,” pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, “that a
gentleman like yourself wot I’ve had the honour of odd jobbing till
I’m grey at it, would think twice about harming of me, even if it
wos so—I don’t say it is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be
took into account that if it wos, it wouldn’t, even then, be all o’ one
side. There’d be two sides to it. There might be medical doctors at
the present hour, a picking up their guineas where a honest
tradesman don’t pick up his fardens—fardens! no, nor yet his half
fardens—half fardens! no, nor yet his quarter—a banking away
like smoke at Tellson’s, and a cocking their medical eyes at that
tradesman on the sly, going in and out to their own carriages—ah!
equally like smoke, if not more so. Well, that ’ud be imposing too,
on Tellson’s. For you cannot sarse the goose and not the gander.
And here’s Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways wos in the Old England
times, and would be tomorrow, if cause given, a floppin agin the
business to that degree as is ruinating—stark ruinating! Whereas
them medical doctors’ wives don’t flop—catch ’em at it! Or, if they
flop, their floppin goes in favour of more patients, and how can
you rightly have one without the t’other? Then, wot with
undertakers, and wot with parish clerks, and wot with sextons,
and wot with private watchmen (all awaricious and all in it), a man
wouldn’t get much by it, even if it wos so. And wot little man did
get, would never prosper with him, Mr. Lorry. He’d never have no
good of it; he’d want all along to be out of the line, if he could see
his way out, being once in—even if it wos so.”
“Ugh!” cried Mr. Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless. “I am
shocked at the sight of you.”
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“Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir,” pursued Mr.
Cruncher, “even if it wos so, which I don’t say it is—” “Don’t
prevaricate,” said Mr. Lorry.
“No, I will not, sir,” returned Mr. Cruncher, as if nothing were
further from his thoughts or practice—“which I don’t say it is—
wot I would humbly offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that
there stool, at that there Bar, sets that there boy of mine, brought
up and growed up to be a man, wot will errand you, message you,
general-light-job you, till your heels is where your head is, if such
should be your wishes. If it was so, which I still don’t say it is (for I
will not prewaricate to you, sir) let that there boy keep his father’s
