“If you hear in my voice--I don’t know that it is so,but I hope it is--if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it!If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it!If, when I hint to you of a Home that is before us,where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service,I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!”
She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a child.
“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over,and that I have come here to take you from it,and that we go to England to be at peace and at rest,I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste, and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it!And if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father who is living,and of my mother who is dead, you learn that I have to kneel to my honoured father,and implore his pardon for having never for his sake striven all day and lain awake and wept all night,because the love of my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for it, weep for it!Weep for her, then, and for me!Good gentlemen, thank God!I feel his sacred tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see!Thank God for us, thank God!”
He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a sight so touching,yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suffering which had gone before it,that the two beholders covered their faces.
When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed,and his heaving breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all storms--emblem to humanity,of the rest and silence into which the storm called Life must hush at last--they came forward to raise the father and daughter from the ground.He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay there in a lethargy, worn out.She had nestled down with him, that his head might lie upon her arm;and her hair drooping over him curtained him from the light.
“If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr. Lorry as he stooped over them,after repeated blowings of his nose, “all could be arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that,from the very door, he could be taken away--”
“But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?” asked Mr. Lorry.
“More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dreadful to him.”
“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear. “More than that;Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France. Say,shall I hire a carriage and post-horses?”
“That’s business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his methodical manners;“and if business is to be done, I had better do it.”
“Then be so kind,” urged Miss Manette, “as to leave us here. You see how composed he has become,and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me now. Why should you be?If you will lock the door to secure us from interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him,when you come back, as quiet as you leave him. In any case,I will take care of him until you return, and then we will remove him straight.”
Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course,and in favour of one of them remaining. But,as there were not only carriage and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers;and as time pressed, for the day was drawing to an end,it came at last to their hastily dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away to do it.
Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the hard ground close at the father’s side,and watched him. The darkness deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet,until a light gleamed through the chinks in the wall.
Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and had brought with them,besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and meat, wine, and hot coffee.Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the lamp he carried,on the shoemaker’s bench (there was nothing else in the garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr.Lorry roused the captive, and assisted him to his feet.
No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind,in the scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened,whether he recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that he was free,were questions which no sagacity could have solved. They tried speaking to him; but,he was so confused, and so very slow to answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment,and agreed for the time to tamper with him no more. He had a wild,lost manner of occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not been seen in him before;yet, he had some pleasure in the mere sound of his daughter’s voice,and invariably turned to it when she spoke.
In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion,he ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak and other wrappings,that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to his daughter’s drawing her arm through his,and took--and kept--her hand in both his own.
They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr.Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps of the long main staircase when he stopped,and stared at the roof and round at the walls.
“You remember the place, my father?You remember coming up here?”
“What did you say?”
But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if she had repeated it.
“Remember?No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.”
That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his prison to that house,was apparent to them. They heard him mutter, “One Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when he looked about him, it evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed him.On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his tread,as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge,and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street,he dropped his daughter’s hand and clasped his head again.
No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the many windows;not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural silence and desertion reigned there.Only one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed him, when Mr.Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his asking, miserably,for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes.Madame Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and went, knitting,out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “To the Barrier!” The postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble over-swinging lamps.
Under the over-swinging lamps--swinging ever brighter in the better streets,and ever dimmer in the worse--and by lighted shops, gay crowds, illuminated coffee-houses,and theatre-doors, to one of the city gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. “Your papers, travellers!” “See here then, Monsieur the Officer,” said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart,“these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with him,at the--” He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the military lanterns,and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm in uniform,the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day or an every night look,at monsieur with the white head. “It is well. Forward!” from the uniform. “Adieu!” from Defarge. And so, under a short grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great grove of stars.
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some,so remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have even yet discovered it,as a point in space where anything is suffered or done:the shadows of the night were broad and black. All through the cold and restless interval,until dawn, they once more whispered in the ears of Mr.Jarvis Lorry--sitting opposite the buried man who had been dug out,and wondering what subtle powers were for ever lost to him,and what were capable of restoration--the old inquiry:
“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”
And the old answer:
“I can’t say.”
The end of the first book.
Book the Second--the Golden Thread
CHAPTER I. Five Years Later
Tellson’s Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place,even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very dark, very ugly,very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place, moreover,in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were proud of its smallness,proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness, proud of its incommodiousness.They were even boastful of its eminence in those particulars,and were fired by an express conviction that, if it were less objectionable,it would be less respectable. This was no passive belief,but an active weapon which they flashed at more convenient places of business.Tellson’s (they said) wanted no elbow-room, Tellson’s wanted no light,Tellson’s wanted no embellishment. Noakes and Co.’s might, or Snooks Brothers’ might; but Tellson’s, thank Heaven--!
Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s.In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country;which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.
Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience.After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat,you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop,with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it,while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows,which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street,and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar.If your business necessitated your seeing “the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back, where you meditated on a misspent life,until the House came with its hands in its pockets,and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into,wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when they were opened and shut.Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing into rags again.Your plate was stowed away among the neighbouring cesspools,and evil communications corrupted its good polish in a day or two.Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries,and fretted all the fat out of their parchments into the banking-house air.Your lighter boxes of family papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room,that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where,even in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty,the first letters written to you by your old love, or by your little children,were but newly released from the horror of being ogled through the windows,by the heads exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.
But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue with all trades and professions,and not least of all with Tellson’s. Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s?Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note was put to Death;the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death;the purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death;the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door, who made off with it, was put to Death;the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death;the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death.Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the reverse--but,it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case,and left nothing else connected with it to be looked after. Thus, Tellson’s, in its day,like greater places of business, its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that,if the heads laid low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of,they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.
Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson’s,the oldest of men carried on the business gravely.When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old.They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese,until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him.Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books,and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.
Outside Tellson’s--never by any means in it, unless called in--was an odd-job-man,an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live sign of the house.He was never absent during business hours, unless upon an errand,and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin of twelve, who was his express image.People understood that Tellson’s, in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job-man.The house had always tolerated some person in that capacity,and time and tide had drifted this person to the post. His surname was Cruncher,and on the youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness,in the easterly parish church of Hounsditch, he had received the added appellation of Jerry.
The scene was Mr. Cruncher’s private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley, Whitefriars: the time,half-past seven of the clock on a windy March morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty.(Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes:apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game,by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)
Mr. Cruncher’s apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were but two in number,even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it might be counted as one.But they were very decently kept. Early as it was, on the windy March morning,the room in which he lay abed was already scrubbed throughout;and between the cups and saucers arranged for breakfast, and the lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth was spread.
Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin at home. At first,he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface,with his spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture,he exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation:
“Bust me, if she ain’t at it agin!”
A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a corner,with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the person referred to.
“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. “You’re at it agin, are you?”
After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at the woman as a third.It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the odd circumstance connected with Mr.Cruncher’s domestic economy, that, whereas he often came home after banking hours with clean boots,he often got up next morning to find the same boots covered with clay.
“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his mark--“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”
“I was only saying my prayers.”
“Saying your prayers!You’re a nice woman!What do you mean by flopping yourself down and praying agin me?”
“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”
“You weren’t. And if you were, I won’t be took the liberty with. Here!your mother’s a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your father’s prosperity.You’ve got a dutiful mother, you have, my son. You’ve got a religious mother, you have, my boy:going and flopping herself down, and praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out of the mouth of her only child. ”
Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning to his mother,strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal board.
“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. Cruncher, with unconscious inconsistency,“that the worth of _your_ prayers may be?Name the price that you put _your_ prayers at!”
“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than that.”
“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain’t worth much, then. Whether or no,I won’t be prayed agin, I tell you. I can’t afford it.I’m not a going to be made unlucky by _your_ sneaking. If you must go flopping yourself down,flop in favour of your husband and child, and not in opposition to ’em.If I had had any but a unnat’ral wife, and this poor boy had had any but a unnat’ral mother,I might have made some money last week instead of being counter-prayed and countermined and religiously circumwented into the worst of luck. B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been putting on his clothes, “if I ain’t,what with piety and one blowed thing and another,been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor devil of a honest tradesman met with!Young Jerry, dress yourself, my boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and then,and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won’t be gone agin, in this manner.I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I’m as sleepy as laudanum,my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn’t know, if it wasn’t for the pain in ’em,which was me and which somebody else, yet I’m none the better for it in pocket;and it’s my suspicion that you’ve been at it from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for it in pocket,and I won’t put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you say now!”
Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah!yes!You’re religious, too. You wouldn’t put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband and child, would you?Not you!” and throwing off other sarcastic sparks from the whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr.Cruncher betook himself to his boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business.In the meantime, his son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes,and whose young eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did,kept the required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor woman at intervals,by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he made his toilet,with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, mother. --Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm, darting in again with an undutiful grin.
Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came to his breakfast. He resented Mrs.Cruncher’s saying grace with particular animosity.
“Now, Aggerawayter!What are you up to?At it again?”
His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”
“Don’t do it!” said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he rather expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s petitions.“I ain’t a going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t have my wittles blest off my table. Keep still!”
Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party which had taken anything but a convivial turn,Jerry Cruncher worried his breakfast rather than ate it,growling over it like any four-footed inmate of a menagerie.Towards nine o’clock he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and,presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as he could overlay his natural self with,issued forth to the occupation of the day.
It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock consisted of a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool,young Jerry, walking at his father’s side,carried every morning to beneath the banking-house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where,with the addition of the first handful of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet,it formed the encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr.Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar itself, --and was almost as in-looking.
Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson’s,Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry standing by him,when not engaged in making forays through the Bar,to inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description on passing boys who were small enough for his amiable purpose.Father and son, extremely like each other,looking silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet-street,with their two heads as near to one another as the two eyes of each were,bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys.The resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance,that the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw,while the twinkling eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything else in Fleet-street.
The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson’s establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:
“Porter wanted!”
“Hooray, father!Here’s an early job to begin with!”
Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on the stool,entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father had been chewing, and cogitated.
“Al-ways rusty!His fingers is al-ways rusty!” muttered young Jerry. “Where does my father get all that iron rust from?He don’t get no iron rust here!”
CHAPTER II. A Sight
“You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of clerks to Jerry the messenger.
“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. “I _do_ know the Bailey.”
“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”
“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much better,” said Jerry,not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.”
“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”
“Into the court, sir?”
“Into the court.”
Mr. Cruncher’s eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”
“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that conference.
“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr. Lorry,and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry’s attention, and show him where you stand.Then what you have to do, is, to remain there until he wants you.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“That’s all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell him you are there.”
As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note, Mr. Cruncher,after surveying him in silence until he came to the blotting-paper stage, remarked:
“I suppose they’ll be trying Forgeries this morning?”
“Treason!”
“That’s quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”
“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”
“It’s hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It’s hard enough to kill him, but it’s wery hard to spile him, sir.”
“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take care of your chest and voice,my good friend, and leave the law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.”
“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jerry.“I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”
“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of gaining a livelihood.Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”
Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal deference than he made an outward show of,“You are a lean old one, too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination, and went his way.
They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and villainy were practised,and where dire diseases were bred, that came into court with the prisoners,and sometimes rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself,and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened,that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the prisoner’s,and even died before him. For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard,from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches,on a violent passage into the other world:traversing some two miles and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens,if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous, too,for the pillory, a wise old institution,that inflicted a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post,another dear old institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action; also,for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom,systematically leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven.Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of the precept,that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy,did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this hideous scene of action,with the skill of a man accustomed to make his way quietly,the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in his letter through a trap in it. For,people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey,just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam--only the former entertainment was much the dearer.Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well guarded--except, indeed,the social doors by which the criminals got there, and those were always left wide open.
After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a very little way,and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into court.
“What’s on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next to.
“Nothing yet.”
“What’s coming on?”
“The Treason case.”
“The quartering one, eh?”
“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he’ll be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged,and then he’ll be taken down and sliced before his own face,and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on,and then his head will be chopped off, and he’ll be cut into quarters. That’s the sentence.”
“If he’s found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of proviso.
“Oh!they’ll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don’t you be afraid of that.”
Mr. Cruncher’s attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he saw making his way to Mr.Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs:not far from a wigged gentleman, the prisoner’s counsel,who had a great bundle of papers before him:and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose whole attention,when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards,seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the court.After some gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing with his hand,Jerry attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look for him,and who quietly nodded and sat down again.
“What’s _he_ got to do with the case?” asked the man he had spoken with.
“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.
“What have _you_ got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?”
“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.
The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling down in the court,stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the central point of interest. Two gaolers,who had been standing there, went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.