I. The Period
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of
foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of
incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of
Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of
despair,
we had everything before us, we
had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were
all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far
like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities
insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the
superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large
jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there
were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the
throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to
the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things
in general were settled for ever.
It was the year of Our Lord one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were
conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs.
Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed
birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements
were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the
Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after
rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last
past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs.
Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the
English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in
America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to
the human race than any communications yet received through any of
the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.
France, less favoured on the
whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and
trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper
money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors,
she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as
sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out
with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled
down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which
passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.
It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway,
there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife
in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough
outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris,
there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts,
bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in
by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be
his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer,
though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them
as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to
entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical
and traitorous.
In England, there was scarcely an
amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting.
Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place
in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned
not to go out of town without removing their furniture to
upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark
was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character
of “the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode
away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot
three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in
consequence of the failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail
was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of
London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one
highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all
his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their
turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among
them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off
diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court
drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for
contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these
occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the
hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant
requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous
criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on Saturday who had been
taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the hand at Newgate by the
dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall;
to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of
a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of
sixpence.
All these things, and a thousand
like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while
the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large
jaws, and those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod
with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand.
Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five
conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures—the
creatures of this chronicle among the rest—along the roads that lay
before them.
II. The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay,
on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons
with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him,
beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter's Hill. He walked
up hill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of the
passengers did; not because they had the least relish for walking
exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the
harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the
horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing
the coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it
back to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however,
in combination, had read that article of war which forbade a
purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some
brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated
and returned to their duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous
tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and
stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the
larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them
to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the near leader
violently shook his head and everything upon it—like an unusually
emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill.
Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a
nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all
the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like
an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and
intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in
ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut
out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own
workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring
horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the
one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three
were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore
jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he
saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden
under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from
the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days,
travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice,
for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with
robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house
could produce somebody in “the Captain's” pay, ranging from the
landlord to the lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest
thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to
himself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred
and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his
own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping
an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded
blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,
deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual
genial position that the guard suspected the passengers, the
passengers suspected one another and the guard, they all suspected
everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but the
horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have
taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the
journey.
“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So,
then! One more pull and you're at the top and be damned to you, for
I have had trouble enough to get you to it!—Joe!”
“Halloa!” the guard
replied.
“What o'clock do you make it,
Joe?”
“Ten minutes, good, past
eleven.”
“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed
coachman, “and not atop of Shooter's yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with
you!”
The emphatic horse, cut short by
the whip in a most decided negative, made a decided scramble for
it, and the three other horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover
mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its passengers squashing
along by its side. They had stopped when the coach stopped, and
they kept close company with it. If any one of the three had had
the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead into
the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of
getting shot instantly as a highwayman.
The last burst carried the mail
to the summit of the hill. The horses stopped to breathe again, and
the guard got down to skid the wheel for the descent, and open the
coach-door to let the passengers in.
“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in
a warning voice, looking down from his box.
“What do you say, Tom?”
They both listened.
“I say a horse at a canter coming
up, Joe.”
“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,”
returned the guard, leaving his hold of the door, and mounting
nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king's name, all of
you!”
With this hurried adjuration, he
cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on the offensive.
The passenger booked by this
history, was on the coach-step, getting in; the two other
passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He remained
on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained in
the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard,
and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman
looked back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader
pricked up his ears and looked back, without contradicting.
The stillness consequent on the
cessation of the rumbling and labouring of the coach, added to the
stillness of the night, made it very quiet indeed. The panting of
the horses communicated a tremulous motion to the coach, as if it
were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the passengers beat
loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the quiet pause
was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding the
breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.
The sound of a horse at a gallop
came fast and furiously up the hill.
“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as
loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand! I shall fire!”
The pace was suddenly checked,
and, with much splashing and floundering, a man's voice called from
the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”
“Never you mind what it is!” the
guard retorted. “What are you?”
“Is that the Dover mail?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I want a passenger, if it
is.”
“What passenger?”
“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”
Our booked passenger showed in a
moment that it was his name. The guard, the coachman, and the two
other passengers eyed him distrustfully.
“Keep where you are,” the guard
called to the voice in the mist, “because, if I should make a
mistake, it could never be set right in your lifetime. Gentleman of
the name of Lorry answer straight.”
“What is the matter?” asked the
passenger, then, with mildly quavering speech. “Who wants me? Is it
Jerry?”
(“I don't like Jerry's voice, if
it is Jerry,” growled the guard to himself. “He's hoarser than
suits me, is Jerry.”)
“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”
“What is the matter?”
“A despatch sent after you from
over yonder. T. and Co.”
“I know this messenger, guard,”
said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the road—assisted from behind
more swiftly than politely by the other two passengers, who
immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and pulled up
the window. “He may come close; there's nothing wrong.”
“I hope there ain't, but I can't
make so 'Nation sure of that,” said the guard, in gruff soliloquy.
“Hallo you!”
“Well! And hallo you!” said
Jerry, more hoarsely than before.
0414m
Original
“Come on at a footpace! d'ye mind
me? And if you've got holsters to that saddle o' yourn, don't let
me see your hand go nigh 'em. For I'm a devil at a quick mistake,
and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So now let's look at
you.”
The figures of a horse and rider
came slowly through the eddying mist, and came to the side of the
mail, where the passenger stood. The rider stooped, and, casting up
his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger a small folded paper.
The rider's horse was blown, and both horse and rider were covered
with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of the man.
“Guard!” said the passenger, in a
tone of quiet business confidence.
The watchful guard, with his
right hand at the stock of his raised blunderbuss, his left at the
barrel, and his eye on the horseman, answered curtly, “Sir.”
“There is nothing to apprehend. I
belong to Tellson's Bank. You must know Tellson's Bank in London. I
am going to Paris on business. A crown to drink. I may read
this?”
“If so be as you're quick,
sir.”
He opened it in the light of the
coach-lamp on that side, and read—first to himself and then aloud:
“'Wait at Dover for Mam'selle.' It's not long, you see, guard.
Jerry, say that my answer was, Recalled to life.”
Jerry started in his saddle.
“That's a Blazing strange answer, too,” said he, at his
hoarsest.
“Take that message back, and they
will know that I received this, as well as if I wrote. Make the
best of your way. Good night.”
With those words the passenger
opened the coach-door and got in; not at all assisted by his
fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their watches and
purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of
being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape the
hazard of originating any other kind of action.
The coach lumbered on again, with
heavier wreaths of mist closing round it as it began the descent.
The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss in his arm-chest, and,
having looked to the rest of its contents, and having looked to the
supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt, looked to a smaller
chest beneath his seat, in which there were a few smith's tools, a
couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was furnished with that
completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown and stormed
out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut himself up
inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw, and get
a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in five
minutes.
“Tom!” softly over the coach
roof.
“Hallo, Joe.”
“Did you hear the message?”
“I did, Joe.”
“What did you make of it,
Tom?”
“Nothing at all, Joe.”
“That's a coincidence, too,” the
guard mused, “for I made the same of it myself.”
Jerry, left alone in the mist and
darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not only to ease his spent horse,
but to wipe the mud from his face, and shake the wet out of his
hat-brim, which might be capable of holding about half a gallon.
After standing with the bridle over his heavily-splashed arm, until
the wheels of the mail were no longer within hearing and the night
was quite still again, he turned to walk down the hill.
“After that there gallop from
Temple Bar, old lady, I won't trust your fore-legs till I get you
on the level,” said this hoarse messenger, glancing at his mare.
“'Recalled to life.' That's a Blazing strange message. Much of that
wouldn't do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You'd be in a Blazing bad
way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry!”
III. The Night Shadows
Awonderful fact to reflect upon,
that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret
and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a
great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered
houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of
them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the
hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its
imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the
awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can
I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope
in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this
unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I
have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It
was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and
for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the
water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was
playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My
friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my
soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation
of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I
shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places
of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more
inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost
personality, to me, or than I am to them?
As to this, his natural and not
to be alienated inheritance, the messenger on horseback had exactly
the same possessions as the King, the first Minister of State, or
the richest merchant in London. So with the three passengers shut
up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail coach; they were
mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had been in his
own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the breadth of
a county between him and the next.
The messenger rode back at an
easy trot, stopping pretty often at ale-houses by the way to drink,
but evincing a tendency to keep his own counsel, and to keep his
hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that assorted very well with
that decoration, being of a surface black, with no depth in the
colour or form, and much too near together—as if they were afraid
of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too far
apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like
a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin
and throat, which descended nearly to the wearer's knees. When he
stopped for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only
while he poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was
done, he muffled again.
“No, Jerry, no!” said the
messenger, harping on one theme as he rode. “It wouldn't do for
you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn't suit your line
of business! Recalled—! Bust me if I don't think he'd been a
drinking!”
His message perplexed his mind to
that degree that he was fain, several times, to take off his hat to
scratch his head. Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he
had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing
down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith's
work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a
head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have
declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go
over.
While he trotted back with the
message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the
door of Tellson's Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to
greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such
shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to
the mare as arose out of her private topics of uneasiness. They
seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the
road.
What time, the mail-coach
lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with
its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the
shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing
eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
Tellson's Bank had a run upon it
in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the
leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding
against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner,
whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with
half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly
gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger,
became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of
the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured
in five minutes than even Tellson's, with all its foreign and home
connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms
underground, at Tellson's, with such of their valuable stores and
secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little
that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among
them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found
them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last
seen them.
But, though the bank was almost
always with him, and though the coach (in a confused way, like the
presence of pain under an opiate) was always with him, there was
another current of impression that never ceased to run, all through
the night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.
Now, which of the multitude of
faces that showed themselves before him was the true face of the
buried person, the shadows of the night did not indicate; but they
were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by years, and they
differed principally in the passions they expressed, and in the
ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt,
defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one
another; so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour,
emaciated hands and figures. But the face was in the main one face,
and every head was prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing
passenger inquired of this spectre:
“Buried how long?”
The answer was always the same:
“Almost eighteen years.”
“You had abandoned all hope of
being dug out?”
“Long ago.”
“You know that you are recalled
to life?”
“They tell me so.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can't say.”
“Shall I show her to you? Will
you come and see her?”
The answers to this question were
various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, “Wait!
It would kill me if I saw her too soon.” Sometimes, it was given in
a tender rain of tears, and then it was, “Take me to her.”
Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, “I don't
know her. I don't understand.”
After such imaginary discourse,
the passenger in his fancy would dig, and dig, dig—now with a
spade, now with a great key, now with his hands—to dig this
wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about
his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The
passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get
the reality of mist and rain on his cheek.
Yet even when his eyes were
opened on the mist and rain, on the moving patch of light from the
lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating by jerks, the night
shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of the night
shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the real
business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express
sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there.
Out of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would
accost it again.
“Buried how long?”
“Almost eighteen years.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I can't say.”
Dig—dig—dig—until an impatient
movement from one of the two passengers would admonish him to pull
up the window, draw his arm securely through the leathern strap,
and speculate upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind lost
its hold of them, and they again slid away into the bank and the
grave.
“Buried how long?”
“Almost eighteen years.”
“You had abandoned all hope of
being dug out?”
“Long ago.”
The words were still in his
hearing as just spoken—distinctly in his hearing as ever spoken
words had been in his life—when the weary passenger started to the
consciousness of daylight, and found that the shadows of the night
were gone.
He lowered the window, and looked
out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a
plough upon it where it had been left last night when the horses
were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of
burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though
the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose
bright, placid, and beautiful.
“Eighteen years!” said the
passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious Creator of day! To be
buried alive for eighteen years!”
IV. The Preparation
When the mail got successfully to
Dover, in the course of the forenoon, the head drawer at the Royal
George Hotel opened the coach-door as his custom was. He did it
with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey from London in
winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous traveller
upon.
By that time, there was only one
adventurous traveller left be congratulated: for the two others had
been set down at their respective roadside destinations. The
mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp and dirty straw, its
disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather like a larger
dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out of it in
chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and
muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.
“There will be a packet to
Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”
“Yes, sir, if the weather holds
and the wind sets tolerable fair. The tide will serve pretty nicely
at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed, sir?”
“I shall not go to bed till
night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”
“And then breakfast, sir? Yes,
sir. That way, sir, if you please. Show Concord! Gentleman's valise
and hot water to Concord. Pull off gentleman's boots in Concord.
(You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.) Fetch barber to Concord.
Stir about there, now, for Concord!”
The Concord bed-chamber being
always assigned to a passenger by the mail, and passengers by the
mail being always heavily wrapped up from head to foot, the room
had the odd interest for the establishment of the Royal George,
that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it, all kinds
and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another drawer,
and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all
loitering by accident at various points of the road between the
Concord and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally
dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well
kept, with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets,
passed along on his way to his breakfast.
The coffee-room had no other
occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman in brown. His
breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat, with its
light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still, that
he might have been sitting for his portrait.
Very orderly and methodical he
looked, with a hand on each knee, and a loud watch ticking a
sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat, as though it pitted
its gravity and longevity against the levity and evanescence of the
brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain of it, for his
brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a fine texture;
his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He wore an odd
little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his head:
which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which looked
far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass.
His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his
stockings, was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon
the neighbouring beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the
sunlight far at sea. A face habitually suppressed and quieted, was
still lighted up under the quaint wig by a pair of moist bright
eyes that it must have cost their owner, in years gone by, some
pains to drill to the composed and reserved expression of Tellson's
Bank. He had a healthy colour in his cheeks, and his face, though
lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential
bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with
the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like
second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
Completing his resemblance to a
man who was sitting for his portrait, Mr. Lorry dropped off to
sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him, and he said to the
drawer, as he moved his chair to it:
“I wish accommodation prepared
for a young lady who may come here at any time to-day. She may ask
for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a gentleman from
Tellson's Bank. Please to let me know.”
“Yes, sir. Tellson's Bank in
London, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the
honour to entertain your gentlemen in their travelling backwards
and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A vast deal of
travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company's House.”
“Yes. We are quite a French
House, as well as an English one.”
“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit
of such travelling yourself, I think, sir?”
“Not of late years. It is fifteen
years since we—since I—came last from France.”
“Indeed, sir? That was before my
time here, sir. Before our people's time here, sir. The George was
in other hands at that time, sir.”
“I believe so.”
“But I would hold a pretty wager,
sir, that a House like Tellson and Company was flourishing, a
matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen years ago?”
“You might treble that, and say a
hundred and fifty, yet not be far from the truth.”
“Indeed, sir!”
Rounding his mouth and both his
eyes, as he stepped backward from the table, the waiter shifted his
napkin from his right arm to his left, dropped into a comfortable
attitude, and stood surveying the guest while he ate and drank, as
from an observatory or watchtower. According to the immemorial
usage of waiters in all ages.
When Mr. Lorry had finished his
breakfast, he went out for a stroll on the beach. The little
narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away from the beach, and
ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine ostrich. The
beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly
about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs,
and brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of
so strong a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick
fish went up to be dipped in it, as sick people went down to be
dipped in the sea. A little fishing was done in the port, and a
quantity of strolling about by night, and looking seaward:
particularly at those times when the tide made, and was near flood.
Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever, sometimes
unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable that
nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.
As the day declined into the
afternoon, and the air, which had been at intervals clear enough to
allow the French coast to be seen, became again charged with mist
and vapour, Mr. Lorry's thoughts seemed to cloud too. When it was
dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting his dinner
as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,
digging, digging, in the live red coals.
A bottle of good claret after
dinner does a digger in the red coals no harm, otherwise than as it
has a tendency to throw him out of work. Mr. Lorry had been idle a
long time, and had just poured out his last glassful of wine with
as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is ever to be found in
an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has got to the end
of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow street,
and rumbled into the inn-yard.
He set down his glass untouched.
“This is Mam'selle!” said he.
In a very few minutes the waiter
came in to announce that Miss Manette had arrived from London, and
would be happy to see the gentleman from Tellson's.
“So soon?”
Miss Manette had taken some
refreshment on the road, and required none then, and was extremely
anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson's immediately, if it
suited his pleasure and convenience.
The gentleman from Tellson's had
nothing left for it but to empty his glass with an air of stolid
desperation, settle his odd little flaxen wig at the ears, and
follow the waiter to Miss Manette's apartment. It was a large, dark
room, furnished in a funereal manner with black horsehair, and
loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and oiled,
until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room
were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if they were buried, in
deep graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be
expected from them until they were dug out.
The obscurity was so difficult to
penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his way over the well-worn Turkey
carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for the moment, in some
adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall candles, he saw
standing to receive him by the table between them and the fire, a
young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak, and still
holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As his
eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden
hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look,
and a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and
smooth it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression
that was not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or
merely of a bright fixed attention, though it included all the four
expressions—as his eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid
likeness passed before him, of a child whom he had held in his arms
on the passage across that very Channel, one cold time, when the
hail drifted heavily and the sea ran high. The likeness passed
away, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass
behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro
cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black
baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine
gender—and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.
“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a
very clear and pleasant young voice; a little foreign in its
accent, but a very little indeed.
“I kiss your hand, miss,” said
Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier date, as he made his
formal bow again, and took his seat.
“I received a letter from the
Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that some intelligence—or
discovery—”
“The word is not material, miss;
either word will do.”
“—respecting the small property
of my poor father, whom I never saw—so long dead—”
Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and
cast a troubled look towards the hospital procession of negro
cupids. As if they had any help for anybody in their absurd
baskets!
“—rendered it necessary that I
should go to Paris, there to communicate with a gentleman of the
Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for the purpose.”
“Myself.”
“As I was prepared to hear,
sir.”
She curtseyed to him (young
ladies made curtseys in those days), with a pretty desire to convey
to him that she felt how much older and wiser he was than she. He
made her another bow.
“I replied to the Bank, sir, that
as it was considered necessary, by those who know, and who are so
kind as to advise me, that I should go to France, and that as I am
an orphan and have no friend who could go with me, I should esteem
it highly if I might be permitted to place myself, during the
journey, under that worthy gentleman's protection. The gentleman
had left London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to beg
the favour of his waiting for me here.”
“I was happy,” said Mr. Lorry,
“to be entrusted with the charge. I shall be more happy to execute
it.”
“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank
you very gratefully. It was told me by the Bank that the gentleman
would explain to me the details of the business, and that I must
prepare myself to find them of a surprising nature. I have done my
best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a strong and eager
interest to know what they are.”
“Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry.
“Yes—I—”
After a pause, he added, again
settling the crisp flaxen wig at the ears, “It is very difficult to
begin.”
He did not begin, but, in his
indecision, met her glance. The young forehead lifted itself into
that singular expression—but it was pretty and characteristic,
besides being singular—and she raised her hand, as if with an
involuntary action she caught at, or stayed some passing
shadow.
“Are you quite a stranger to me,
sir?”
“Am I not?” Mr. Lorry opened his
hands, and extended them outwards with an argumentative
smile.
Between the eyebrows and just
over the little feminine nose, the line of which was as delicate
and fine as it was possible to be, the expression deepened itself
as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which she had
hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and the
moment she raised her eyes again, went on:
“In your adopted country, I
presume, I cannot do better than address you as a young English
lady, Miss Manette?”
“If you please, sir.”
“Miss Manette, I am a man of
business. I have a business charge to acquit myself of. In your
reception of it, don't heed me any more than if I was a speaking
machine—truly, I am not much else. I will, with your leave, relate
to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.”
“Story!”
He seemed wilfully to mistake the
word she had repeated, when he added, in a hurry, “Yes, customers;
in the banking business we usually call our connection our
customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific gentleman; a man
of great acquirements—a Doctor.”
“Not of Beauvais?”
“Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like
Monsieur Manette, your father, the gentleman was of Beauvais. Like
Monsieur Manette, your father, the gentleman was of repute in
Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there. Our relations were
business relations, but confidential. I was at that time in our
French House, and had been—oh! twenty years.”
“At that time—I may ask, at what
time, sir?”
“I speak, miss, of twenty years
ago. He married—an English lady—and I was one of the trustees. His
affairs, like the affairs of many other French gentlemen and French
families, were entirely in Tellson's hands. In a similar way I am,
or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for scores of our
customers. These are mere business relations, miss; there is no
friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like sentiment.
I have passed from one to another, in the course of my business
life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in the
course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a
mere machine. To go on—”
“But this is my father's story,
sir; and I begin to think”—the curiously roughened forehead was
very intent upon him—“that when I was left an orphan through my
mother's surviving my father only two years, it was you who brought
me to England. I am almost sure it was you.”
Mr. Lorry took the hesitating
little hand that confidingly advanced to take his, and he put it
with some ceremony to his lips. He then conducted the young lady
straightway to her chair again, and, holding the chair-back with
his left hand, and using his right by turns to rub his chin, pull
his wig at the ears, or point what he said, stood looking down into
her face while she sat looking up into his.
“Miss Manette, it was I. And you
will see how truly I spoke of myself just now, in saying I had no
feelings, and that all the relations I hold with my
fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect that
I have never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of
Tellson's House since, and I have been busy with the other business
of Tellson's House since. Feelings! I have no time for them, no
chance of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense
pecuniary Mangle.”
After this odd description of his
daily routine of employment, Mr. Lorry flattened his flaxen wig
upon his head with both hands (which was most unnecessary, for
nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was before), and
resumed his former attitude.
“So far, miss (as you have
remarked), this is the story of your regretted father. Now comes
the difference. If your father had not died when he did—Don't be
frightened! How you start!”
She did, indeed, start. And she
caught his wrist with both her hands.
“Pray,” said Mr. Lorry, in a
soothing tone, bringing his left hand from the back of the chair to
lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped him in so violent a
tremble: “pray control your agitation—a matter of business. As I
was saying—”
Her look so discomposed him that
he stopped, wandered, and began anew:
“As I was saying; if Monsieur
Manette had not died; if he had suddenly and silently disappeared;
if he had been spirited away; if it had not been difficult to guess
to what dreadful place, though no art could trace him; if he had an
enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a privilege that I in
my own time have known the boldest people afraid to speak of in a
whisper, across the water there; for instance, the privilege of
filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one to the
oblivion of a prison for any length of time; if his wife had
implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any
tidings of him, and all quite in vain;—then the history of your
father would have been the history of this unfortunate gentleman,
the Doctor of Beauvais.”
“I entreat you to tell me more,
sir.”
“I will. I am going to. You can
bear it?”
“I can bear anything but the
uncertainty you leave me in at this moment.”
“You speak collectedly, and
you—are collected. That's good!” (Though his manner was less
satisfied than his words.) “A matter of business. Regard it as a
matter of business—business that must be done. Now if this doctor's
wife, though a lady of great courage and spirit, had suffered so
intensely from this cause before her little child was born—”
“The little child was a daughter,
sir.”
“A daughter. A-a-matter of
business—don't be distressed. Miss, if the poor lady had suffered
so intensely before her little child was born, that she came to the
determination of sparing the poor child the inheritance of any part
of the agony she had known the pains of, by rearing her in the
belief that her father was dead—No, don't kneel! In Heaven's name
why should you kneel to me!”
“For the truth. O dear, good,
compassionate sir, for the truth!”
“A—a matter of business. You
confuse me, and how can I transact business if I am confused? Let
us be clear-headed. If you could kindly mention now, for instance,
what nine times ninepence are, or how many shillings in twenty
guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so much more at my
ease about your state of mind.”
Without directly answering to
this appeal, she sat so still when he had very gently raised her,
and the hands that had not ceased to clasp his wrists were so much
more steady than they had been, that she communicated some
reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.
“That's right, that's right.
Courage! Business! You have business before you; useful business.
Miss Manette, your mother took this course with you. And when she
died—I believe broken-hearted—having never slackened her unavailing
search for your father, she left you, at two years old, to grow to
be blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud upon you
of living in uncertainty whether your father soon wore his heart
out in prison, or wasted there through many lingering years.”
As he said the words he looked
down, with an admiring pity, on the flowing golden hair; as if he
pictured to himself that it might have been already tinged with
grey.
“You know that your parents had
no great possession, and that what they had was secured to your
mother and to you. There has been no new discovery, of money, or of
any other property; but—”
He felt his wrist held closer,
and he stopped. The expression in the forehead, which had so
particularly attracted his notice, and which was now immovable, had
deepened into one of pain and horror.
“But he has been—been found. He
is alive. Greatly changed, it is too probable; almost a wreck, it
is possible; though we will hope the best. Still, alive. Your
father has been taken to the house of an old servant in Paris, and
we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to restore
him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”
A shiver ran through her frame,
and from it through his. She said, in a low, distinct, awe-stricken
voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,
“I am going to see his Ghost! It
will be his Ghost—not him!”
Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the
hands that held his arm. “There, there, there! See now, see now!
The best and the worst are known to you, now. You are well on your
way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair sea voyage, and
a fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.”
She repeated in the same tone,
sunk to a whisper, “I have been free, I have been happy, yet his
Ghost has never haunted me!”
“Only one thing more,” said Mr.
Lorry, laying stress upon it as a wholesome means of enforcing her
attention: “he has been found under another name; his own, long
forgotten or long concealed. It would be worse than useless now to
inquire which; worse than useless to seek to know whether he has
been for years overlooked, or always designedly held prisoner. It
would be worse than useless now to make any inquiries, because it
would be dangerous. Better not to mention the subject, anywhere or
in any way, and to remove him—for a while at all events—out of
France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even Tellson's,
important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of the
matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring
to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials,
entries, and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line,
'Recalled to Life;' which may mean anything. But what is the
matter! She doesn't notice a word! Miss Manette!”
Perfectly still and silent, and
not even fallen back in her chair, she sat under his hand, utterly
insensible; with her eyes open and fixed upon him, and with that
last expression looking as if it were carved or branded into her
forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he feared to
detach himself lest he should hurt her; therefore he called out
loudly for assistance without moving.
A wild-looking woman, whom even
in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed to be all of a red colour, and
to have red hair, and to be dressed in some extraordinary
tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most wonderful
bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too, or a
great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in advance of the
inn servants, and soon settled the question of his detachment from
the poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and
sending him flying back against the nearest wall.
(“I really think this must be a
man!” was Mr. Lorry's breathless reflection, simultaneously with
his coming against the wall.)
“Why, look at you all!” bawled
this figure, addressing the inn servants. “Why don't you go and
fetch things, instead of standing there staring at me? I am not so
much to look at, am I? Why don't you go and fetch things? I'll let
you know, if you don't bring smelling-salts, cold water, and
vinegar, quick, I will.”
There was an immediate dispersal
for these restoratives, and she softly laid the patient on a sofa,
and tended her with great skill and gentleness: calling her “my
precious!” and “my bird!” and spreading her golden hair aside over
her shoulders with great pride and care.
“And you in brown!” she said,
indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry; “couldn't you tell her what you
had to tell her, without frightening her to death? Look at her,
with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do you call that
being a Banker?”
Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly
disconcerted by a question so hard to answer, that he could only
look on, at a distance, with much feebler sympathy and humility,
while the strong woman, having banished the inn servants under the
mysterious penalty of “letting them know” something not mentioned
if they stayed there, staring, recovered her charge by a regular
series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head upon
her shoulder.
“I hope she will do well now,”
said Mr. Lorry.
“No thanks to you in brown, if
she does. My darling pretty!”
“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after
another pause of feeble sympathy and humility, “that you accompany
Miss Manette to France?”
“A likely thing, too!” replied
the strong woman. “If it was ever intended that I should go across
salt water, do you suppose Providence would have cast my lot in an
island?”
This being another question hard
to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry withdrew to consider it.
V. The Wine-shop
Alarge cask of wine had been
dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in
getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the
hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of
the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.
All the people within reach had
suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and
drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing
every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame
all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into
little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group
or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops
of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who
bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out
between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles
with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with
handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into
infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the
wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows,
darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that
started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the
sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing
the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no
drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken
up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might
have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it
could have believed in such a miraculous presence.
A shrill sound of laughter and of
amused voices—voices of men, women, and children—resounded in the
street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in
the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship
in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join
some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or
lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths,
shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen
together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been
most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man
who had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set
it in motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the
little pot of hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the
pain in her own starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child,
returned to it; men with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous
faces, who had emerged into the winter light from cellars, moved
away, to descend again; and a gloom gathered on the scene that
appeared more natural to it than sunshine.
The wine was red wine, and had
stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint
Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands,
too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.
The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the
billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was
stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head
again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had
acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so
besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap
than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy
wine-lees—blood.
The time was to come, when that
wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain
of it would be red upon many there.
And now that the cloud settled on
Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred
countenance, the darkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt, sickness,
ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly
presence—nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially
the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible
grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the
fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every
corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every
window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind
shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that
grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave
voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into
every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It
was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses,
in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was
patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was
repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that
the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys,
and started up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its
refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the
baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of
bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that
was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the
roasting chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into
atomics in every farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried
with some reluctant drops of oil.
Its abiding place was in all
things fitted to it. A narrow winding street, full of offence and
stench, with other narrow winding streets diverging, all peopled by
rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags and nightcaps, and all
visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill. In
the hunted air of the people there was yet some wild-beast thought
of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though
they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed
lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into
the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or
inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the
shops) were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the
porkman painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the
coarsest of meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking
in the wine-shops, croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine
and beer, and were gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was
represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons;
but, the cutler's knives and axes were sharp and bright, the
smith's hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker's stock was murderous.
The crippling stones of the pavement, with their many little
reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but broke off
abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down the
middle of the street—when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses.
Across the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by
a rope and pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these
down, and lighted, and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim
wicks swung in a sickly manner overhead, as if they were at sea.
Indeed they were at sea, and the ship and crew were in peril of
tempest.
For, the time was to come, when
the gaunt scarecrows of that region should have watched the
lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so long, as to conceive
the idea of improving on his method, and hauling up men by those
ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their condition.
But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over
France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds,
fine of song and feather, took no warning.
The wine-shop was a corner shop,
better than most others in its appearance and degree, and the
master of the wine-shop had stood outside it, in a yellow waistcoat
and green breeches, looking on at the struggle for the lost wine.
“It's not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug of the shoulders.
“The people from the market did it. Let them bring another.”
There, his eyes happening to
catch the tall joker writing up his joke, he called to him across
the way:
“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do
you do there?”
The fellow pointed to his joke
with immense significance, as is often the way with his tribe. It
missed its mark, and completely failed, as is often the way with
his tribe too.
“What now? Are you a subject for
the mad hospital?” said the wine-shop keeper, crossing the road,
and obliterating the jest with a handful of mud, picked up for the
purpose, and smeared over it. “Why do you write in the public
streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there no other place to write
such words in?”
In his expostulation he dropped
his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) upon the
joker's heart. The joker rapped it with his own, took a nimble
spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing attitude, with
one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his hand, and
held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly practical
character, he looked, under those circumstances.
“Put it on, put it on,” said the
other. “Call wine, wine; and finish there.” With that advice, he
wiped his soiled hand upon the joker's dress, such as it was—quite
deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on his account; and then
recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.
This wine-shop keeper was a
bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, and he should have been
of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter day, he wore no
coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves
were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows.
Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own
crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with
good eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured
looking on the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man
of a strong resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be
met, rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for
nothing would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in
the shop behind the counter as he came in. Madame Defarge was a
stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom
seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady
face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a
character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have
predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in
any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being
sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright
shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her
large earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it
down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her
right elbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing
when her lord came in, but coughed just one grain of cough. This,
in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over
her toothpick by the breadth of a line, suggested to her husband
that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers,
for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the
way.
The wine-shop keeper accordingly
rolled his eyes about, until they rested upon an elderly gentleman
and a young lady, who were seated in a corner. Other company were
there: two playing cards, two playing dominoes, three standing by
the counter lengthening out a short supply of wine. As he passed
behind the counter, he took notice that the elderly gentleman said
in a look to the young lady, “This is our man.”
“What the devil do you do in that
galley there?” said Monsieur Defarge to himself; “I don't know
you.”
But, he feigned not to notice the
two strangers, and fell into discourse with the triumvirate of
customers who were drinking at the counter.
“How goes it, Jacques?” said one
of these three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is all the spilt wine
swallowed?”
“Every drop, Jacques,” answered
Monsieur Defarge.
When this interchange of
Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge, picking her teeth with
her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough, and raised her
eyebrows by the breadth of another line.