place, and take care of his mother; don’t blow upon that boy’s
father—do not do it, sir—and let that father go into the line of the
reg’lar diggin’, and make amends for what he would have undug—
if it wos so—by diggin’ of ’em in with a will, and with conwictions
respectin’ the futur’ keepin’ of ’em safe. That, Mr. Lorry,” said Mr.
Cruncher, wiping his forehead with his arm, as an announcement
that he had arrived at the peroration of his discourse, “is wot I
would respectfully offer to you, sir. A man don’t see all this here a
goin’ on dreadful round him, in the way of Subjects without heads,
dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the price down to porterage
and hardly that, without havin’ his serious thoughts of things. And
these here would be mine, if it wos so, entreatin’ of you fur to bear
in mind that wot I said just now, I up and said in the good cause
when I might have kep’ it back.”
“That at least is true,” said Mr. Lorry. “Say no more now. It
may be that I shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and
repent in action—not in words. I want no more words.”
Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the
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spy returned from the dark room. “Adieu, Mr. Barsad,” said the
former; “our arrangement thus made, you have nothing to fear
from me.”
He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr. Lorry.
When they were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done?
“Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have ensured
access to him, once.”
Mr. Lorry’s countenance fell.
“It is all I could do,” said Carton. “To propose too much would
be to put this man’s head under the axe, and, as he himself said,
nothing worse could happen to him if he were denounced. It was
obviously the weakness of the position. There is no help for it.”
“But access to him,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it should go ill before
the Tribunal, will not save him.”
“I never said it would.”
Mr. Lorry’s eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy with
his darling, and the heavy disappointment of this second arrest,
gradually weakened them; he was an old man now, overborne
with anxiety of late, and his tears fell.
“You are a good man and a true friend,” said Carton, in an
altered voice. “Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I could
not see my father weep, and sit by, careless. And I could not
respect your sorrow more, if you were my father. You are free
from that misfortune, however.”
Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual
manner, there was a true feeling and respect both in his tone and
in his touch, that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of
him, was wholly unprepared for. He gave him his hand, and
Carton gently pressed it.
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“To return to poor Darnay,” said Carton. “Don’t tell Her of this
interview, or this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to
see him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the worst, to
convey to him the means of anticipating the sentence.”
Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at
Carton to see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned
the look, and evidently understood it.
“She might think a thousand things,” Carton said, “and any of
them would only add to her trouble. Don’t speak of me to her. As I
said to you when I first came, I had better not see her. I can put
my hand out, to do any little helpful work for her that my hand can
find to do, without that. You are going to her, I hope? She must be
very desolate tonight.”
“I am going now, directly.”
“I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you and
reliance on you. How does she look?”
“Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful.”
“Ah!”
It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh—almost like a sob. It
attracted Mr. Lorry’s eyes to Carton’s face, which was turned to
the fire. A light, or a shade (the old gentleman could not have said
which), passed from it as swiftly as a change will sweep over a
hillside on a wild bright day, and he lifted his foot to put back one
of the little flaming logs, which was tumbling forward. He wore the
white riding-coat and top-boots, then in vogue, and the light of the
fire touching their light surfaces made him look very pale, with his
long brown hair, all untrimmed, hanging loose about him. His
indifference to fire was sufficiently remarkable to elicit a word of
remonstrance from Mr. Lorry: his boot was still upon the hot
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embers of the flaming log, when it had broken under the weight of
his foot.
“I forgot it,” he said.
Mr. Lorry’s eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of
the wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features,
and having the expression of prisoners’ faces fresh in his mind, he
was strongly reminded of that expression.
“And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?” said Carton,
turning to him.
“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so
unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped
to have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I
have my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.”
They were both silent.
“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton,
wistfully.
“I am in my seventy-eighth year.”
“You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly
occupied; trusted, respected, and looked up to?”
“I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man.
Indeed, I may say that I was a man of business when a boy.”
“See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people
will miss you when you leave it empty!”
“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his
head. “There is nobody to weep for me.”
“How can you say that! Wouldn’t She weep for you? Wouldn’t
her child?”
“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said.”
“It is a thing to thank God for; is it not?”
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“Surely, surely.”
“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, tonight,
‘I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in
no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be
remembered by!’ your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight
heavy curses; would they not?”
“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.”
Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence
of a few moments, said:
“I should like to ask you:—Does your childhood seem far off?
Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee, seem days of very
long ago?”
Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:
“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I
draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings
and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many
remembrances that have long fallen asleep, of my pretty young
mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when
what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults
were not confirmed in me.”
“I understand the feeling!” exclaimed Carton, with a bright
flush. “And you are the better for it?”
“I hope so.”
Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him
on with his outer coat. “But you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the
theme, “you are young.”
“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was never
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the way to age. Enough of me.”
“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going out?”
“I’ll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and
restless habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time,
don’t be uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the
Court tomorrow?”
“Yes, unhappily.”
“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find
a place for me. Take my arm, sir.”
Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the
streets. A few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry’s destination.
Carton left him there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned
back to the gate again when it was shut, and touched it. He had
heard of her going to the prison every day. “She came out here,”
he said, looking about him, “turned this way, must have trod on
these stones often. Let me follow in her steps.”
It was ten o’clock at night when he stood before the prison of La
Force, where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-
sawyer, having closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-
door.
“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by;
for the man eyed him inquisitively.
“Good night, citizen.”
“How goes the Republic?”
“You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three today. We shall
mount to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain
sometimes, of being exhausted. Ha, ha, ha! He is so droll, that
Samson. Such a barber!”
“Do you often go to see him—” “Shave? Always. Every day.
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What a barber! You have seen him at work?”
“Never.”
“Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to
yourself, citizen; he shaved the sixty-three today, in less than two
pipes. Less than two pipes. Word of honour!”
As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking to
explain how he timed the execution, Carton was so sensible of a
rising desire to strike the life out of him, that he turned away.
“But you are not English,” said the wood-sawyer, “though you
wear English dress?”
“Yes,” said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his
shoulder.
“You speak like a Frenchman.”
“I am an old student here.”
“Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.”
“Good night, citizen.”
“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling
after him. “And take a pipe with you!”
Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the
middle of the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his
pencil on a scrap of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step
of one who remembered the way well, several dark and dirty
streets—much dirtier than usual, for the best public thoroughfares
remained uncleansed in those times of terror—he stopped at a
chemist’s shop, which the owner was closing with his own hands.
A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill
thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.
Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his
counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “Whew”; the
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chemist whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi! hi, hi!”
Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:
“For you, citizen?”
“For me.”
“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen. You know
the consequences of mixing them?”
“Perfectly.”
Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put
them, one by one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the
money for them, and deliberately left the shop. “There is nothing
more to do,” said he, glancing upward at the moon, “until
tomorrow. I can’t sleep.”
It was a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these
words aloud under the fast-sailing clouds. nor was it more
expressive of negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner
of a tired man, who had wandered and struggled and got lost, but
who at length struck into his road and saw its end.
Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest
competitors as a youth of great promise, he had followed his father
to the grave. His mother had died, years before. These solemn
words, which had been read at his father’s grave, arose in his mind
as he went down the dark streets, among the heavy shadows, with
the moon and the clouds sailing on high above him. “I am the
resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me,
though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me, shall never die.”
In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural
sorrow rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put
to death, and for tomorrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in
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the prisons, and still of tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s, the chain of
association that brought the words home, like a rusty old ship’s
anchor from the deep, might have been easily found. He did not
seek it, but repeated them and went on.
With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people
were going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the
horrors surrounding them; in the towers of the churches, where
no prayers were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled
that length of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors,
plunderers, and profligates; in the distant burial-places reserved,
as they wrote upon the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding
gaols; and in the streets along which the sixties rolled to a death
which had become so common and material, that no sorrowful
story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among the people out of all
the working of the Guillotine; with a solemn interest in the whole
life and death of the city settling down to its short nightly pause in
fury; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for the lighter streets.
Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to
be suspected, and gentility hid his head in red nightcaps, and put
on heavy shoes, and trudged. But. the theatres were all well filled,
