A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (22 page)

‘Now understand me,’ pursued Mr Lorry. ‘As a man of business, I am not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and of her father too, and who has a great affection for them both, I have spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I may not be right?’

‘Not I!’ said Stryver, whistling. ‘I can’t undertake to find third parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It’s new to me, but you are right, I dare say.’

‘What I suppose, Mr Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself. And understand me, sir,’ said Mr Lorry, quickly flushing again. ‘I will not – not even at Tellson’s – have it characterised for me by any gentleman breathing.’

‘There! I beg your pardon!’ said Stryver.

‘Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr Stryver, I was about to say: – it might be painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You know the terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with the family. If you please, committing you in no way, representing you in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon it. If you should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is best spared. What do you say?’

‘How long would you keep me in town?’

‘Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho this evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.’

‘Then I say yes,’ said Stryver: ‘I won’t go up there now, I am not so hot upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look in to-night. Good morning.’

Then Mr Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly believed, when they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in the empty office until they bowed another customer in.

The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to swallow, he got it down. ‘And now,’ said Mr Stryver, shaking his forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, when it was down, ‘my way out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong.’

It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found great relief. ‘You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,’ said Mr Stryver; ‘I’ll do that for you.’

Accordingly, when Mr Lorry called that night as late as ten o’clock, Mr Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr Lorry, and was altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.

‘Well!’ said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless attempts to bring him round to the question, ‘I have been to Soho.’

‘To Soho?’ repeated Mr Stryver, coldly. ‘Oh, to be sure! What am I thinking of!’

‘And I have no doubt,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘that I was right in the conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my advice.’

‘I assure you,’ returned Mr Stryver, in the friendliest way, ‘that I am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father’s account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let us say no more about it.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Mr Lorry.

‘I dare say not,’ rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and final way; ‘no matter, no matter.’

‘But it does matter,’ Mr Lorry urged.

‘No it doesn’t; I assure you it doesn’t. Having supposed that there was sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is done. Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish aspect, I am sorry that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a good thing for others in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am glad that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view – it is hardly necessary to say I could have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to that extent. Mr Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you, I regret it on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account. And I am really very much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you, and for giving me your advice; you know the young lady better than I do; you were right, it never would have done.’

Mr Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of showering generosity, forbearance, and good-will, on his erring head. ‘Make the best of it, my dear sir,’ said Stryver; ‘say no more about it; thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!’

Mr Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr Stryver was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.

If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year, and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.

And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house, and for the senseless stones that made their pavements. Many a night he vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams of the sun brought into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture in spires of churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable, into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple court had known him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and haunted that neighbourhood.

On a day in August, when Mr Stryver (after notifying to his jackal that ‘he had thought better of that marrying matter’) had carried his delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the City streets had some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health for the sickliest, and of youth for the oldest, Sydney’s feet still trod those stones. From being irresolute and purposeless his feet became animated by an intention, and, in the working out of that intention, they took him to the Doctor’s door.

He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with some little embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at his face in the interchange of the first few commonplaces, she observed a change in it.

‘I fear you are not well, Mr Carton!’

‘No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What is to be expected of, or by, such profligates?’

‘Is it not – forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips – a pity to live no better life?’

‘God knows it is a shame!’

‘Then why not change it?’

Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice too, as he answered:

‘It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse.’

He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The table trembled in the silence that followed.

She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He knew her to be so, without looking at her, and said:

‘Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of what I want to say to you. Will you hear me?’

‘If it will do you any good. Mr Carton, if it would make you happier, it would make me very glad!’

‘God bless you for your sweet compassion!’

He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily.

‘Don’t be afraid to hear me. Don’t shrink from anything I say. I am like one who died young. All my life might have been.’

‘No, Mr Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am sure that you might be much, much, worthier of yourself.’

‘Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I know better – although in the mystery of my own wretched heart I know better – I shall never forget it!’

She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed despair of himself which made the interview unlike any other that could have been holden.

‘If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the love of the man you see before you – self-flung away, wasted, drunken, poor creature of misuse as you know him to be – he would have been conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you, disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can have no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot be.’

‘Without it, can I not save you, Mr Carton? Can I not recal you – forgive me again! – to a better course? Can I in no way repay your confidence? I know this is a confidence,’ she modestly said, after a little hesitation, and in earnest tears, ‘I know you would say this to no one else. Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr Carton?’

He shook his head.

‘To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation, I have not been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.’

‘Will nothing of it remain? O Mr Carton, think again! Try again!’

‘No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire – a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.’

‘Since it is my misfortune, Mr Carton, to have made you more unhappy than you were before you knew me—’

‘Don’t say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if anything could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse.’

‘Since the state of your mind that you describe is, at all events, attributable to some influence of mine – this is what I mean, if I can make it plain – can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for good, with you, at all?’

‘The utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come here to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life, the remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world; and that there was something left in me at this time which you could deplore and pity.’

‘Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with all my heart, was capable of better things, Mr Carton!’

‘Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself, and I know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let me believe, when I recal this day, that the last confidence of my life was reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there alone, and will be shared by no one?’

‘If that will be a consolation to you, yes.’

‘Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?’

‘Mr Carton,’ she answered, after an agitated pause, ‘the secret is yours, not mine; and I promise to respect it.’

‘Thank you. And again, God bless you!’

He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.

‘Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this conversation by so much as a passing word. I will never refer to it again. If I were dead, that could not be surer than it is henceforth. In the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred the one good remembrance – and shall thank and bless you for it – that my last avowal of myself was made to you, and that my name, and faults, and miseries, were gently carried in your heart. May it otherwise be light and happy!’

He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and it was so sad to think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every day kept down and perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he stood looking back at her.