Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake hands.
“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he took his seat at table.
“Yesterday. And you?”
“I come direct.”
“From London?”
“Yes.”
“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a smile.
“On the contrary; I come direct.”
“Pardon me!I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time intending the journey.”
“I have been detained by”--the nephew stopped a moment in his answer--“various business.”
“Without doubt,” said the polished uncle.
So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a fine mask, opened a conversation.
“I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that took me away.It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is a sacred object,and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have sustained me.”
“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, to death.”
“I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “whether, if it had carried me to the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.”
The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight lines in the cruel face,looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a graceful gesture of protest,which was so clearly a slight form of good breeding that it was not reassuring.
“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know,you may have expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious circumstances that surrounded me. ”
“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly.
“But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at him with deep distrust,“I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means, and would know no scruple as to means.”
“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the two marks.“Do me the favour to recall that I told you so, long ago.”
“I recall it.”
“Thank you,” said the Marquis--very sweetly indeed.
His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical instrument.
“In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once your bad fortune,and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in France here.”
“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his coffee. “Dare I ask you to explain?”
“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court,and had not been overshadowed by that cloud for years past,a letter de cachet would have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.”
“It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the honour of the family,I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent. Pray excuse me!”
“I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew.
“I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with refined politeness;“I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for consideration,surrounded by the advantages of solitude,might influence your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself.But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say, at a disadvantage.These little instruments of correction, these gentle aids to the power and honour of families,these slight favours that might so incommode you,are only to be obtained now by interest and importunity. They are sought by so many,and they are granted (comparatively) to so few!It used not to be so, but France in all such things is changed for the worse.Our not remote ancestors held the right of life and death over the surrounding vulgar.From this room, many such dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom),one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter--_his_ daughter?We have lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode;and the assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as to say would,but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very bad!”
The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head;as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a country still containing himself, that great means of regeneration.
“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe our name to be more detested than any name in France.”
“Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.”
“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face I can look at,in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery. ”
“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the family,merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur. Hah!” And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly crossed his legs.
But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table,covered his eyes thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand,the fine mask looked at him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness,and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer’s assumption of indifference.
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to it, “shuts out the sky.”
That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed.If a picture of the chateau as it was to be a very few years hence,and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence,could have been shown to him that night,he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred,plunder-wrecked rains. As for the roof he vaunted,he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new way--to wit, for ever,from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired,out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.
“Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “I will preserve the honour and repose of the family,if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we terminate our conference for the night?”
“A moment more.”
“An hour, if you please.”
“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits of wrong.”
“_We_ have done wrong?” repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile, and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.
“Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account to both of us,in such different ways. Even in my father’s time, we did a world of wrong,injuring every human creature who came between us and our pleasure, whatever it was.Why need I speak of my father’s time, when it is equally yours?Can I separate my father’s twin-brother, joint inheritor, and next successor, from himself?”
“Death has done that!” said the Marquis.
“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “bound to a system that is frightful to me,responsible for it, but powerless in it;seeking to execute the last request of my dear mother’s lips,and obey the last look of my dear mother’s eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to redress;and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain.”
“Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis,touching him on the breast with his forefinger--they were now standing by the hearth--“you will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.”
Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was cruelly, craftily,and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly at his nephew,with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the breast,as though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the body, and said,
“My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived.”
When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his box in his pocket.
“Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing a small bell on the table,“and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost, Monsieur Charles, I see.”
“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew, sadly; “I renounce them.”
“Are they both yours to renounce?France may be, but is the property?It is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?”
“I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed to me from you, to-morrow--”
“Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.”
“--or twenty years hence--”
“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I prefer that supposition.”
“--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to relinquish.What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!”
“Hah!” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.
“To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight,it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.”
“Hah!” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.
“If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the weight that drags it down,so that the miserable people who cannot leave it and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance,may, in another generation, suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse on it, and on all this land.”
“And you?” said the uncle. “Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new philosophy, graciously intend to live?”
“I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at their backs, may have to do some day--work.”
“In England, for example?”
“Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country.The family name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other.”
The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bed-chamber to be lighted. It now shone brightly,through the door of communication. The Marquis looked that way,and listened for the retreating step of his valet.
“England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have prospered there,” he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew with a smile.
“I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.”
“They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many.You know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there?A Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“With a daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” said the Marquis. “You are fatigued. Good night!”
As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy in his smiling face,and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same time,the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin straight lips,and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that looked handsomely diabolic.
“Yes,” repeated the Marquis. “A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So commences the new philosophy!You are fatigued. Good night!”
It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his.The nephew looked at him, in vain, in passing on to the door.
“Good night!” said the uncle. “I look to the pleasure of seeing you again in the morning. Good repose!Light Monsieur my nephew to his chamber there!--And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,” he added to himself,before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his valet to his own bedroom.
The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his loose chamber-robe,to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still night. Rustling about the room,his softly-slippered feet making no noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:--looked like some enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story,whose periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just coming on.
He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom,looking again at the scraps of the day’s journey that came unbidden into his mind;the slow toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill,the prison on the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at the fountain,and the mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the chain under the carriage.That fountain suggested the Paris fountain, the little bundle lying on the step,the women bending over it, and the tall man with his arms up, crying, “Dead!”
“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to bed.”
So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth,he let his thin gauze curtains fall around him,and heard the night break its silence with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.
The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three heavy hours;for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked,and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets.But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for them.
For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human, stared blindly at the night.Dead darkness lay on all the landscape,dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads.The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another;the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could be seen of it.In the village, taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets,as the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox may,its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed.
The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard,and the fountain at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard--both melting away,like the minutes that were falling from the spring of Time--through three dark hours. Then,the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light,and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.
Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still trees,and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow,the water of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned.The carol of the birds was loud and high, and,on the weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur the Marquis,one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might. At this,the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and, with open mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.
Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement windows opened,crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth shivering--chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air.Then began the rarely lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some,to the fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men and women there,to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows out,to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church and at the Cross,a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter prayers, the led cow,trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its foot.
The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and surely. First,the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been reddened as of old; then,had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine; now, doors and windows were thrown open,horses in their stables looked round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways,leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.
All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of morning. Surely,not so the ringing of the great bell of the chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs;nor the hurried figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and everywhere,nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?
What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads,already at work on the hill-top beyond the village,with his day’s dinner (not much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow’s while to peck at, on a heap of stones?Had the birds, carrying some grains of it to a distance,dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds?Whether or no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life, down the hill,knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the fountain.
All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about in their depressed manner,and whispering low, but showing no other emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows,hastily brought in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly on,or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their trouble,which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of the people of the chateau,and some of those of the posting-house, and all the taxing authorities, were armed more or less,and were crowded on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way,that was highly fraught with nothing. Already,the mender of roads had penetrated into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends,and was smiting himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend,and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback,and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop,like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora?
It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.
The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added the one stone face wanting;the stone face for which it had waited through about two hundred years.
It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine mask, suddenly startled,made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached to it,was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:
“Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.”
CHAPTER X. Two Promises
More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr.Charles Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of the French language who was conversant with French literature.In this age, he would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor.He read with young men who could find any leisure and interest for the study of a living tongue spoken all over the world,and he cultivated a taste for its stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them, besides,in sound English, and render them into sound English.Such masters were not at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were to be,were not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had dropped out of Tellson’s ledgers,to turn cooks and carpenters. As a tutor,whose attainments made the student’s way unusually pleasant and profitable,and as an elegant translator who brought something to his work besides mere dictionary knowledge,young Mr. Darnay soon became known and encouraged. He was well acquainted, more-over,with the circumstances of his country, and those were of ever-growing interest. So,with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.
In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor to lie on beds of roses;if he had had any such exalted expectation, he would not have prospered. He had expected labour,and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.
A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge,where he read with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a contraband trade in European languages,instead of conveying Greek and Latin through the Custom-house.The rest of his time he passed in London.
Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden,to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes,the world of a man has invariably gone one way--Charles Darnay’s way--the way of the love of a woman.
He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger.He had never heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice;he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful,as hers when it was confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for him.But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject;the assassination at the deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long, long,dusty roads--the solid stone chateau which had itself become the mere mist of a dream--had been done a year,and he had never yet, by so much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his heart.
That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a summer day when,lately arrived in London from his college occupation, he turned into the quiet corner in Soho,bent on seeking an opportunity of opening his mind to Doctor Manette.It was the close of the summer day, and he knew Lucie to be out with Miss Pross.
He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window.The energy which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated their sharpness,had been gradually restored to him. He was now a very energetic man indeed,with great firmness of purpose, strength of resolution, and vigour of action.In his recovered energy he was sometimes a little fitful and sudden,as he had at first been in the exercise of his other recovered faculties; but,this had never been frequently observable, and had grown more and more rare.
He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with ease,and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay,at sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.
“Charles Darnay!I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your return these three or four days past. Mr.Stryver and Sydney Carton were both here yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due.”
“I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,” he answered, a little coldly as to them,though very warmly as to the Doctor. “Miss Manette--”
“Is well,” said the Doctor, as he stopped short, “and your return will delight us all.She has gone out on some household matters, but will soon be home.”
“Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her being from home, to beg to speak to you.”
There was a blank silence.
“Yes?” said the Doctor, with evident constraint. “Bring your chair here, and speak on.”
He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less easy.
“I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,” so he at length began,“for some year and a half, that I hope the topic on which I am about to touch may not--”
He was stayed by the Doctor’s putting out his hand to stop him.When he had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:
“Is Lucie the topic?”
“She is.”
“It is hard for me to speak of her at any time.It is very hard for me to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.”
“It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor Manette!” he said deferentially.
There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:
“I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it.”
His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too,that it originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles Darnay hesitated.
“Shall I go on, sir?”
Another blank.
“Yes, go on.”
“You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly I say it,how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart,and the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been laden. Dear Doctor Manette,I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly.If ever there were love in the world, I love her. You have loved yourself; let your old love speak for me!”
The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the ground. At the last words,he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly, and cried:
“Not that, sir!Let that be!I adjure you, do not recall that!”
His cry was so like a cry of actual pain,that it rang in Charles Darnay’s ears long after he had ceased.He motioned with the hand he had extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to pause.The latter so received it, and remained silent.
“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some moments.“I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it.”
He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or raise his eyes.His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair overshadowed his face:
“Have you spoken to Lucie?”
“No.”
“Nor written?”
“Never.”
“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks you.”
He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.
“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know, Doctor Manette,I who have seen you together from day to day,that between you and Miss Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching,so belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it can have few parallels,even in the tenderness between a father and child. I know,Doctor Manette--how can I fail to know--that,mingled with the affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there is, in her heart,towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy itself. I know that,as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present years and character,united to the trustfulness and attachment of the early days in which you were lost to her.I know perfectly well that if you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life,you could hardly be invested, in her sight,with a more sacred character than that in which you are always with her.I know that when she is clinging to you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one,are round your neck. I know that in loving you she sees and loves her mother at her own age,sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted,loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I have known this,night and day, since I have known you in your home.”
Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a little quickened;but he repressed all other signs of agitation.
“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this,always seeing her and you with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne,as long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even now feel,that to bring my love--even mine--between you,is to touch your history with something not quite so good as itself. But I love her. Heaven is my witness that I love her!”
“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought so before now. I believe it.”
“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice struck with a reproachful sound,“that if my fortune were so cast as that, being one day so happy as to make her my wife,I must at any time put any separation between her and you,I could or would breathe a word of what I now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless,I should know it to be a baseness. If I had any such possibility,even at a remote distance of years, harboured in my thoughts,and hidden in my heart--if it ever had been there--if it ever could be there--I could not now touch this honoured hand. ”
He laid his own upon it as he spoke.
“No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like you,driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like you,striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting in a happier future;I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your life and home,and being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide with Lucie her privilege as your child,companion, and friend; but to come in aid of it, and bind her closer to you, if such a thing can be.”
His touch still lingered on her father’s hand. Answering the touch for a moment, but not coldly,her father rested his hands upon the arms of his chair,and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the conference.A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle with that occasional look which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.
“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank you with all my heart,and will open all my heart--or nearly so. Have you any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?”
“None. As yet, none.”
“Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once ascertain that, with my knowledge?”
“Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks;I might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow.”
“Do you seek any guidance from me?”
“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it in your power,if you should deem it right, to give me some.”
“Do you seek any promise from me?”
“I do seek that.”
“What is it?”
“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well understand that,even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her innocent heart--do not think I have the presumption to assume so much--I could retain no place in it against her love for her father.”
“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?”