《A Tale of Two Cities》 Book2 CHAPTER
XXIII Fire Rises
by Charles Dickens
THERE was a change on
the village where the fountain fell, and where the mender of roads went forth daily to
hammer out of the stones on the highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches
to hold his poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on the crag
was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it, but not many; there were
officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men would do--beyond
this: that it would probably not be what he was ordered.
Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation. Every green leaf,
every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shrivelled and poor as the miserable
people. Everything was bowed down, dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences,
domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them--all worn out.
Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national blessing, gave a
chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of luxurious and shining life, and a great
deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other,
brought things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for Monseigneur, should
be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must be something short-sighted in the
eternal arrangements, surely Thus it was, however; and the last drop of blood having been
extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that
its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur
began to run away from a phenomenon so low and unaccountable.
But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like it. For scores of
years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung it, and had seldom graced it with his
presence except for the pleasures of the chase--now, found in hunting the people; now,
found in hunting the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces of
barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of strange
faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high-caste, chiseled, and
otherwise beatified and beatifying features of Monseigneur.
For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the dust, not often
troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to dust he must return, being for the
most part too much occupied in thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he
would eat if he had it--in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour, and
viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which
was once a rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it advanced, the
mender of roads would discern without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost
barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of
roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the
marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and
moss of many byways through woods.
Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather, as he sat on his heap
of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he could get from a shower of hail.
The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill, and at the prison
on the crag. When he had identified these objects in what benighted mind he had, he said,
in a dialect that was just intelligible:
`How goes it, Jacques?'
`All well, Jacques.'
`Touch then!'
They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.
`No dinner?'
`Nothing but supper now,' said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.
`It is the fashion,' growled the man. `I meet no dinner anywhere.'
He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel, pulled at it
until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him and dropped something into
it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.
`Touch then.' It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this time, after observing
these operations. They again joined hands.
`To-night?' said the mender of roads.
`To-night,' said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.
`Where?'
`Here.'
He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with
the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to
clear over the village.
`Show me!' said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.
`See.' returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. `You go down here, and straight
through the street, and past the fountain---
`To the Devil with all that!' interrupted the other, rolling his eye over the landscape.
`I go through no streets and past no fountains. Well?'
`Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the village.'
`Good. When do you cease to work?'
`At sunset.'
`Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without resting. Let me
finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will you wake me?'
`Surely.'
The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his great wooden
shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He was fast asleep directly.
As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling away, revealed
bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to by silver gleams upon the
landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap now, in place of his blue one) seemed
fascinated by the figure on the heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned towards it,
that he used his tools mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor account. The
bronze face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen red cap, the rough medley
dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare
living, and the sullen and desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender
of roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were footsore, and his
ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy
to drag over the many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself
was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at secret
weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept with his arms crossed upon
him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns with their stockades,
guard-houses, gates, trenches, and drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so
much air as against this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and
looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending
to centres all over France.
The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of brightness, to sunshine
on his face and shadow, to the pattering lumps of dull ice on his body and the diamonds
into which the sun changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was
glowing. Then, the mender of roads having got his tools together and all things ready to
go down into the village, roused him.
`Good!' said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. `Two leagues beyond the summit of the
hill?'
`About.'
`About. Good!'
The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him according to the set of
the wind, and was soon at the fountain, squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought
there to drink, and appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the
village. When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not creep to bed, as it
usually did, but came out of doors again, and remained there. A curious contagion of
whispering was upon it, and also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark,
another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only.
Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on his house-top
alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced down from behind his chimneys at the
darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to the sacristan who kept the keys of
the
church, that there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-by.
The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its solitary state
apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened the pile of building massive and
dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at
the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went
through the hall, among the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and
shook the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and
South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and
cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come together in the courtyard. Four
lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and all was black again.
But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself strangely visible by some
light of its own, as though it were growing luminous. Then, a flickering streak played
behind the architecture of the front, picking out transparent places, and showing where
balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and
brighter. Soon, from a score of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the stone faces
awakened, stared out of fire.
A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left there, and there
was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was spurring and splashing through the
darkness, and bridle was drawn in the space by the village fountain, and the horse in a
foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle's door. `Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!' The tocsin rang
impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The mender of roads, and
two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking
at the pillar of fire in the sky. `It must be forty feet high,' said they, grimly; and
never moved.
The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away through the village,
and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on the crag. At the gate, a group of
officers were looking at the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. `Help,
gentlemen-officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames
by timely aid! Help, help!' The officers looked towards the soldiers who looked at the
fire; gave no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting of lips, `It must burn.'
As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the village was
illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and fifty particular friends,
inspired as one man and woman by the idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses,
and were putting candles in every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of
everything, occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur
Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary's part, the
mender of roads, once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages were good to
make bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast.
The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and raging of the
conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the infernal regions, seemed to be
blowing the edifice away. With the rising and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed
as if they were in torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell, the face with the
two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke again, as if it
were the face of the cruel Marquis, burning at the stake and contending with the fire.
The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, scorched and shrivelled;
trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a
new forest of smoke. Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the
water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice before the heat, and
trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the
solid walls, like crystallisation; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into the
furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the
night-enshrouded
roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their next destination. The
illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang
for joy.
Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and bell-ringing, and
bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with the collection of rent and
taxes--though it was but a small instalment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had
got in those latter days--became impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his
house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon, Monsieur Gabelle did
heavily bar his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself The result of that
conference was, that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his house-top behind his stack of
chimneys; this time resolved, if his door was broken in (he was a small Southern man of
retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the parapet, and crush a man
or two below.
Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the distant chateau for fire
and candle, and the beating at his door, combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to
mention his having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour. A trying
suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to
take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved But, the friendly dawn
appearing at last, and the rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people happily
dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that while.
Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were other functionaries
less fortunate, that night and other nights,whom the rising sun found hanging across
once-peaceful streets, where they had been born and bred; also, there were other
villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon
whom the functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up in their
turn. But, the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be that
as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that would turn
to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to
calculate successfully. |
