《A Tale of Two Cities》 Book2 CHAPTER
XXI Echoing Footsteps
by Charles Dickens
A WONDERFUL corner for
echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the
golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress
and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly
resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.
At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife, when her work
would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be dimmed. For, there was something
coming in the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred
her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts--hope, of a love as yet unknown to her:
doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight--divided her breast. Among
the echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and
thoughts of the husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so
much, swelled to her eyes, and broke like waves.
That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes,
there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater
echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the Divine
friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child
in His arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.
Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving the service of
her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate
nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds.
Her husband's step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal. Lo,
Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an unruly charger,
whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!
Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not harsh nor cruel. Even
when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little
boy, and he said, with a radiant smile, `Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you
both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!' those were not tears
all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace
that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my Father's face.
O Father, blessed words!
Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got blended with the other echoes, and they were
not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew
over a little garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in
a hushed murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore--as the
little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her
mother's footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were blended in her
life.
The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some half-dozen times a
year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them
through the evening, as he had once done often. He never came there heated with wine. And
one other thing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all
true echoes for ages and ages.
No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an
unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy
with him--an instinctive delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are
touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton was the
first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with
her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. `Poor Carton! Kiss
him for me!'
Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine forcing itself
through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern.
As the boat so favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney
had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and
stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was
to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion's jackal, than any real
jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a
florid widow
with property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them but the
straight hair of their dumpling heads.
These three young gentleman, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most offensive quality
from every pore, had walked before him like three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and
had offered as pupils to Lucie's husband: delicately saying, `Halloa! here are three lumps
of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!' The polite rejection of the
three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation, which he
afterwards turned to account in the training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to
beware of the pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of
declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once
put in practice to `catch' him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam,
which had rendered him `not to be caught.' Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were
occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by
saying that he had told it so often, that he believed it himself--which is surely such an
incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender's
being carried off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.
These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes amused and
laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little daughter was six years old. How
near to her heart the echoes of her child's tread came, and those of her own dear
father's, always active and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband's, need not be
told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself with such a
wise and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor,
how there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had
told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and
of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide
her love for him or her help to him, and asked her `What is the magic secret, my darling,
of
your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to
be hurried, or to have too much to do?'
But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the corner all
through this space of time. And it was now, about little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they
began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.
On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr. Lorry came in
late, from Tellson's, and sat himself down by Lucie and her husband in the dark window. It
was a hot, wild night, and they were all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they
had looked at the lightning from the same place.
`I began to think,' said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, `that I should have to
pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so full of business all day, that we have not
known what to do first, or which way to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that
we have actually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be
able to confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania among some
of them for sending it to England.'
`That has a bad look,' said Darnay.
`A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don't know what reason there is in it.
People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson's are getting old, and we really can't
be troubled out of the ordinary course without due occasion.'
`Still,' said Darnay, `you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.'
`I know that, to be sure,' assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade himself that his sweet
temper was soured, and that he grumbled, `but I am determined to be peevish after my long
day's botheration. Where is Manette?'
`Here he is,' said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.
`I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by which I have been
surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I
hope?'
`No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,' said the Doctor.
`I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted against you
to-night. Is the tea-board still there, Lucie? I can't see.'
`Of course, it has been kept for you.'
`Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?'
`And sleeping soundly.
`That's right; all safe and well! I don't know why anything should be otherwise than safe
and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out all day, and I am not as young as I
was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now, come and take your place in the circle, and let us
sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory.'
`Not a theory; it was a fancy.'
`A fancy, then, my wise pet,' said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. `They are very numerous
and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!'
Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's life, footsteps
not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine
afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.
Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro,
with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets
shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine,
and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a
winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a
weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.
Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what agency they
crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind
of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being
distributed--so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes,
pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could
lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks
out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever
strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account, and
was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.
As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round
Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked
towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and
sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward,
disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.
`Keep near to me, Jacques Three,' cried Defarge; `and do you, Jacques One and Two,
separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is
my wife?'
`Eh, well! Here you see me!' said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-day.
Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer
implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.
`Where do you go, my wife?'
`I go,' said madame, `with you at present. You shall see me at the head of women,
by-and-by.'
`Come, then!' cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. `Patriots and friends, we are ready!
The Bastille!'
With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested
word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that
point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering
on its new beach, the attack `begun.
Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets,
fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for
the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a
cannonier--Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.
Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight at towers, cannon, muskets, fire
and smoke. One drawbridge down! `Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques , Jacques Two,
Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name
of all the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!' Thus Defarge of the wine-shop,
still at his gun, which had long grown hot.
`To me, women!' cried madame his wife. `What! We can kill as well as the men when the
place is taken!' And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed,
but all armed alike in hunger and revenge.
Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the
massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea,
made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggon-loads of
wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,
execrations, bravery without stint, boom, smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of
the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive
stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun,
grown
doubly hot by the service of Four fierce hours.
A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimly perceptible through the
raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenly the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher,
and swept Defarge of the wine-shop over the lowered draw-bridge, past the massive stone
outer walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!
So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to draw his breath or
turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been struggling in the surf at the South
Sea, until he was landed in the outer court-yard of the Bastille. There, against an angle
of a wall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side;
Madame Defarge, still-heading some of her women, was visible in the inner distance, and
her knife was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal
bewilderment, astounding noise, yet furious dumb-show.
`The Prisoners!'
`The Records!'
`The secret cells!'
`The instruments of torture!'
`The Prisoners!'
Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherencies, `The Prisoners!' was the Cry most
taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an eternity of people, as well as of
time and space. When the foremost billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with
them, and threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook remained undisclosed,
Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of one of these men--a man with a grey head,
who had a lighted torch in his hand--separated him from the rest, and got him between
himself and the wall.
`Show me the North Tower!' said Defarge. `Quick!'
`I will faithfully,' replied the man, `if you will come with me.
But there is no one there.'
`What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?' asked Defarge. `Quick!'
`The meaning, monsieur?'
`Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that I shall strike you
dead?'
`Kill him!' croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.
`Monsieur, it is a cell.'
`Show it me!'
`Pass this way, then.'
Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently disappointed by the dialogue
taking a turn that did not seem to promise bloodshed, held by Defarge's arm as he held by
the turnkey's. Their three heads had been close together during this brief discourse, and
it had been as much as they could do to hear one another, even then: so tremendous was the
noise of the living ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and its inundation of the
courts and passages and staircases. All around outside, too, it beat the walls with a
deep, hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult broke and
leaped into the air like spray.
Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past hideous doors of dark
dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps, and again up steep rugged ascents of
stone and brick, more like dry waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and
Jacques Three, linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and
there, especially at first, the inundation started on them and swept by; but when they had
done descending, and were winding and climbing up a tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here
by the massive thickness of walls and arches, the storm within the fortress and without
was only audible to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of which they had
come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.
The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, swung the door slowly
open, and said, as they all bent their heads and passed in:
`One hundred and five, North Tower!'
There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall, with a stone screen
before it, so that the sky could be only seen by stooping low and looking up. There was a
small chimney, heavily barred across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery
wood-ashes on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were the
four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.
`Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,' said Defarge to the
turnkey.
The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.
`Stop--Look here, Jacques!'
`A. M.!' croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.
`Alexandre Manette,' said Defarge in his ear, following the letters with his swart
forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. `And here he wrote ``a poor physician.'' And
it was he, without doubt, who scratched a calendar on this stone. What is that in your
hand? A crowbar? Give it me!'
He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a sudden exchange of the two
instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten stool and table, beat them to pieces in a few
blows.
`Hold the light higher!' he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey. `Look among those fragments
with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,' throwing it to him; `rip open that bed,
and search the straw. Hold the light higher, you!'
With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and, peering up the
chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar, and worked at the iron grating
across it. In a few minutes, some mortar and dust came dropping down, which he averted his
face to avoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney into
which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped with a cautious touch.
`Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?'
`Nothing.'
`Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light them, you!'
The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping again to come out
at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and retraced their way to the court-yard;
seeming to recover their sense of hearing as they came down, until they were in the raging
flood once more.
They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. Saint Antoine was
clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in the guard upon the governor who had
defended the Bastille and shot the people. Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to
the Hotel de Ville for judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the people's
blood (suddenly of some value, after many years of worthlessness) be unavenged.
In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to encompass this grim old
officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red decoration, there was but one quite steady
figure, and that was a woman's. `See, there is my husband!' she cried, pointing him out.
`See Defarge!' She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and remained immovable
close to him; remained immovable close to him through the streets, as Defarge and the rest
bore him along; remained immovable close to him when he was got near his destination, and
began to be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when the long-gathering
rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him when he dropped dead under it,
that, suddenly animated, she put her foot upon his neck, and with her cruel knife-long
`ready-hewed off his head.
The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea of hoisting up men
for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint Antoine's blood was up, and the blood of
tyranny and domination by the iron hand was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville
where the governor's body lay--down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge where she
had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. `Lower the lamp yonder!' cried Saint
Antoine, after glaring round for a new means of death; `here is one of his soldiers to be
left on guard!' The swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.
The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving of wave against
wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces were yet unknown. The remorseless
sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces
of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.
But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life,
there were two groups of faces--each seven in number--so fixedly contrasting with the
rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of
prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high
overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come,
and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were,
carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the
Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended--not an abolished--expression on them;
faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes,
and bear witness with the bloodless lips, `THOU DIDST IT!'
Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the accursed fortress of
the eight strong towers, some discovered letters and other memorials of prisoners of old
time, long dead of broken hearts,--such, and such-like, the loudly echoing footsteps of
Saint Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of
her life! For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long after the
breaking of the cask at Defarge's wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once
stained red. |
