A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (28 page)

‘If I could hope
that
, my father!—’

‘Believe it, love! Indeed, it is so. Consider how natural and how plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot freely appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be wasted—’

She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated the word.

‘ – wasted, my child – should not be wasted, struck aside from the natural order of things, for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?’

‘If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy with you.’

He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy without Charles, having seen him, and replied:

‘My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen on you.’

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long afterwards.

‘See!’ said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. ‘I have looked at her, from my prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her, when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dulled and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them.’ He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, ‘It was twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.’

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.

‘I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had been born alive, or the poor mother’s shock had killed it. Whether it was a son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it was a son who would never know his father’s story; who might even live to weigh the possibility of his father’s having disappeared of his own will and act. Whether it was a daughter, who would grow to be a woman.’

She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.

‘I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of me – rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a blank.’

‘My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.’

‘You, Lucie? It is out of the consolation and restoration you have brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and the moon on this last night. – What did I say, just now?’

‘She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.’

‘So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence have touched me in a different way – have affected me with something as like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its foundations could – I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her image in the moonlight, often, as I now see you; except that I never held her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door. But, you understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?’

‘The figure was not; the – the – image; the fancy?’

‘No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than that she was like her mother. The other had that likeness too – as you have – but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think? I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these perplexed distinctions.’

His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.

‘In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight, coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active, cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all.’

‘I was that child, my father. I was not half so good, but in my love that was I.’

‘And she showed me her children,’ said the Doctor of Beauvais, ‘and they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed a prison of the State, they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I imagined that she always brought me back after showing me such things. But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and blessed her.’

‘I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless me as fervently to-morrow?’

‘Lucie, I recal these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before us.’

He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-by, they went into the house.

There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr Lorry; there was even to be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it, by taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more.

Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.

So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated. But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came down stairs again, and stole into his room: not free from unshaped fears, beforehand.

All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the shadow at a distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his; then, leaned over him and looked at him.

Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the mastery of them, even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.

She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once more, and went away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves of the plane-tree moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved in praying for him.

The marriage day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside the closed door of the Doctor’s room, where he was speaking with Charles Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr Lorry, and Miss Pross – to whom the event, through a gradual process of reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss, but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon should have been the bridegroom.

‘And so,’ said Mr Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride, and who had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet, pretty dress; ‘and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought you across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought what I was doing. How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring on my friend Mr Charles!’

‘You didn’t mean it,’ remarked the matter of fact Miss Pross, ‘and therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!’

‘Really? Well; but don’t cry,’ said the gentle Mr Lorry.

‘I am not crying,’ said Miss Pross; ‘
you
are.’

‘I, my Pross?’ (By this time, Mr Lorry dared to be pleasant with her, on occasion.)

‘You were just now; I saw you do it, and I don’t wonder at it. Such a present of plate as you have made ’em, is enough to bring tears into anybody’s eyes. There’s not a fork or a spoon in the collection, ’ said Miss Pross, ‘that I didn’t cry over, last night after the box came, till I couldn’t see it.’

‘I am highly gratified,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘though, upon my honour, I had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance, invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there might have been a Mrs Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!’

‘Not at all!’ From Miss Pross.

‘You think there never might have been a Mrs Lorry?’ asked the gentleman of that name.

‘Pooh!’ rejoined Miss Pross; ‘you were a bachelor in your cradle.’

‘Well!’ observed Mr Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, ‘that seems probable, too.’

‘And you were cut out for a bachelor,’ pursued Miss Pross, ‘before you were put in your cradle.’

‘Then, I think,’ said Mr Lorry, ‘that I was very unhandsomely dealt with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,’ drawing his arm soothingly round her waist, ‘I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the final opportunity of saying something to you that you wish to hear. You leave your good father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your own; he shall be taken every conceivable care of; during the next fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson’s shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at the fortnight’s end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on your other fortnight’s trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear Somebody’s step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to claim his own.’

For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and delicacy, which, if such things be old fashioned, were as old as Adam.

The door of the Doctor’s room opened, and he came out with Charles Darnay. He was so deadly pale – which had not been the case when they went in together – that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face. But, in the composure of his manner he was unaltered, except that to the shrewd glance of Mr Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication that the old air of avoidance and dread had lately passed over him, like a cold wind.

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down stairs to the chariot which Mr Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church where no strange eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.

Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling, glanced on the bride’s hand, which were newly released from the dark obscurity of one of Mr Lorry’s pockets. They returned home to breakfast, and all went well, and in due course the golden hair that had mingled with the poor shoemaker’s white locks in the Paris garret, were mingling with them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the door at parting.

It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But, her father cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her enfolding arms, ‘Take her, Charles! She is yours!’ And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was gone.

 

The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr Lorry, and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they turned into the welcome shade of the cool old hall, that Mr Lorry observed a great change to have come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted there, had struck him a poisoned blow.

He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was the old scared lost look that troubled Mr Lorry; and through his absent manner of clasping his head and drearily wandering away into his own room when they got up-stairs, Mr Lorry was reminded of Defarge the wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride.

‘I think,’ he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, ‘I think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him. I must look in at Tellson’s; so I will go there at once and come back presently. Then, we will take him a ride into the country, and dine there, and all will be well.’