Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0067/00679.txt

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$Title{(A) Tale Of Two Cities
Chapter XXI}
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$Author{Dickens, Charles}
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$Subject{defarge
echoes
jacques
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three
little
lucie
old
walls}
$Date{}
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Title:       (A) Tale Of Two Cities
Book:        Book The Second: The Golden Thread
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter XXI

Echoing Footsteps

     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 foot-stool, 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 gentlemen, 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 great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke.  One drawbridge down!  "Work, comrades all,
work!  Work, Jacques One, 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 drawbridge, 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.