A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (44 page)

‘Not to understand your play,’ returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.

‘I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr Barsad to the nearest Section Committee. Look over your hand, Mr Barsad, and see what you have. Don’t hurry.’

He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy, and drank it off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking himself into a fit state for the immediate denunciation of him. Seeing it, he poured out and drank another glassful.

‘Look over your hand carefully, Mr Barsad. Take time.’

It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr Barsad saw losing cards in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Thrown out of his honourable employment in England, through too much unsuccessful hard swearing there – not because he was not wanted there; our English reasons for vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very modern date – he knew that he had crossed the Channel, and accepted service in France: first, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among his own countrymen there: gradually, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among the natives. He knew that under the overthrown government he had been a spy upon Saint Antoine and Defarge’s wine-shop; had received from the watchful police such heads of information concerning Doctor Manette’s imprisonment, release, and history, as should serve him for an introduction to familiar conversation with the Defarges; had 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 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 circumstance 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:

‘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?’ repeated 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 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 reflexion 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 round 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. 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 a old grudge again, 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 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 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 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.’

 

[END OF INSTALMENT 25]

While 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, 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, a going in and going 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 to-morrow, if cause given, a floppin’ agen 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 floppings 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 was so. And wot little a 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.’

‘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, generallight-job you, till your heels is where your head is, if such should be your wishes. If it wos 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 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 un-dug – if it wos so – by diggin’ of ’em in with a will, and with conwictions respectin’ the future 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.’