A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (45 page)

‘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 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.

‘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,’ he 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 to-night.’

‘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 hill-side 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 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?’

‘Surely, surely.’

‘If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, “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 had 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 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 to-morrow?’

‘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 to-day. 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. 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 to-day, 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 executioner, 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 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 to-morrow. I can’t sleep.’

It was not 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 to-morrow’s victims then awaiting their doom in the prisons, and still of to-morrow’s and to-morrow’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 its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy shoes, and trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled, and the people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went chatting home. At one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl with a mother, looking for a way across the street through the mud. He carried the child over, and before the timid arm was loosed from his neck asked her for a kiss.

‘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.’

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but, he heard them always.

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge, of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river sparkled under it.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from the houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea. – ‘Like me!’