A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (18 page)

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far behind, and the Marquis, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and his château.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled in little casements; which lights, as the casements darkened, and more stars came out, seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many overhanging trees, was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door of his château was opened to him.

‘Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?’

‘Monseigneur, not yet.’

 

 

[END OF INSTALMENT 9]

It was a heavy mass of building, that château of Monsieur the Marquis, with a large stone court-yard before it, and two stone sweeps of staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in all directions. As if the Gorgon’s head had surveyed it, when it was finished, two centuries ago.

Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile of stable-building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state, instead of being in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a hall, grim with certain old boar spears, swords, and knives of the chase; grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord was angry.

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night, Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him to his own private apartment of three rooms: his bedchamber and two others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country. The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to break – the fourteenth Louis – was conspicuous in their rich furniture; but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old pages in the history of France.

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round room, in one of the château’s four extinguisher-topped towers; a small lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds closed, so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of black, alternating with their broad lines of stone colour.

‘My nephew,’ said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; ‘they said he was not arrived.’

Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.

‘Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.’

In a quarter of an hour, Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his lips, when he put it down.

‘What is that?’ he calmly asked, looking with attention at the horizontal lines of black and stone colour.

‘Monseigneur? That?’

‘Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.’

It was done.

‘Well?’

‘Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are here.’

The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into the vacant darkness, and stood, with that blank behind him, looking round for instructions.

‘Good,’ said the imperturbable master. ‘Close them again.’

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was half way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand, hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the front of the château.

‘Ask who is arrived.’

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road. He had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while, he came. He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake hands.

‘You left Paris yesterday, sir?’ he said to Monseigneur, as he took his seat at table.

‘Yesterday. And you?’

‘I come direct.’

‘From London?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have been a long time coming,’ said the Marquis, with a smile.

‘On the contrary; I come direct.’

‘Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time intending the journey.’

‘I have been detained by’ – the nephew stopped a moment in his answer – ‘various business.’

‘Without doubt,’ said the polished uncle.

So long as a servant was present, no other word passed between them. When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew, looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a fine mask, opened a conversation.

‘I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have sustained me.’

‘Not to death,’ said the uncle; ‘it is not necessary to say, to death.’

‘I doubt, sir,’ returned the nephew, ‘whether, if it had carried me to the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.’

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good breeding that it was not reassuring.

‘Indeed, sir,’ pursued the nephew, ‘for anything I know, you may have expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me.’

‘No, no, no,’ said the uncle, pleasantly.

‘But, however that may be,’ resumed the nephew, glancing at him with deep distrust, ‘I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means, and would know no scruple as to means.’

‘My friend, I told you so,’ said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the two marks. ‘Do me the favour to recal that I told you so, long ago.’

‘I recal it.’

‘Thank you,’ said the Marquis – very sweetly indeed.

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical instrument.

‘In effect, sir,’ pursued the nephew, ‘I believe it to be at once your bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in France here.’

‘I do not quite understand,’ returned the uncle, sipping his coffee. ‘Dare I ask you to explain?’

‘I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the court, and had not been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter
de cachet
would have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.’

‘It is possible,’ said the uncle, with great calmness. ‘For the honour of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent. Pray excuse me!’

‘I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,’ observed the nephew.

‘I would not say happily, my friend,’ returned the uncle, with refined politeness; ‘I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say, at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these gentle aids to the power and honour of families, these slight favours that might so incommode you, are only to be obtained now by interest and importunity. They are sought by so many, and they are granted (comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom), one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter –
his
daughter! We have lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as to say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very bad!’

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head; as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be, of a country still containing himself, that great means of regeneration.

‘We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern time also,’ said the nephew, gloomily, ‘that I believe our name to be more detested than any name in France.’

‘Let us hope so,’ said the uncle. ‘Detestation of the high, is the involuntary homage of the low.’

‘There is not,’ pursued the nephew in his former tone, ‘a face I can look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery.’

‘A compliment,’ said the Marquis, ‘to the grandeur of the family, merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur. Hah!’ And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly crossed his legs.

But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at him sideways, with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness, and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer’s assumption of indifference.

‘Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend,’ observed the Marquis, ‘will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,’ looking up to it, ‘shuts out the sky.’

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the château as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found
that
shutting out the sky in a new way – to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.

‘Meanwhile,’ said the Marquis, ‘I will preserve the honour and repose of the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we terminate our conference for the night?’

‘A moment more.’

‘An hour, if you please.’

‘Sir,’ said the nephew, ‘we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits of wrong.’

‘
We
have done wrong?’ repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile, and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

‘Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father’s time, we did a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father’s time, when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint inheritor, and next successor, from himself?’

‘Death has done that,’ said the Marquis.

‘And has left me,’ answered the nephew, ‘bound to a system that is frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to execute the last request of my dear mother’s lips, and obey the last look of my dear mother’s eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain.’

‘Seeking them from me, my nephew,’ said the Marquis, touching him on the breast with his forefinger – they were now standing by the hearth – ‘you will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.’

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the body, and said,

‘My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived.’

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his box in his pocket.

‘Better to be a rational creature,’ he added then, after ringing a small bell on the table, ‘and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost, Monsieur Charles, I see.’