Book II - Chapter XXI. Echoing Footsteps

by Charles Dickens

　　A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner wherethe Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which boundher husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress andcompanion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in thetranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.

　　At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy youngwife, when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyeswould be dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes,something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirredher heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts--hopes, of a love asyet unknown to her: doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy thatnew delight--divided her breast. Among the echoes then, there wouldarise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts ofthe husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn forher 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 andthe sound of her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as theywould, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear thosecoming. 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 hadconfided hers, seemed to take her child in his arms, as He took thechild 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 alltheir lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in theechoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband'sstep was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal.Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as anunruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth underthe plane-tree in the garden!

　　Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were notharsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a haloon a pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with aradiant 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 otherechoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breathof Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb weremingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushedmurmur--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 thetongues 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 comingin uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening, as he hadonce done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one otherthing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has beenwhispered by all true echoes for ages and ages.

　　No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with ablameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother,but her children had a strange sympathy with him--an instinctivedelicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touchedin 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 chubbyarms, and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy hadspoken of him, almost at the last. "Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!"

　　Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engineforcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend inhis wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usuallyin a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped lifeof it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier andstronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, madeit the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from hisstate of lion's jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to thinkof rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widowwith property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining aboutthem but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

　　These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the mostoffensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like threesheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to Lucie'shusband: delicately saying "Halloa! here are three lumps of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!" The polite rejectionof the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryverwith indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the trainingof the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the pride ofBeggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of declaimingto Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay hadonce put in practice to "catch" him, and on the diamond-cut-diamondarts in himself, madam, which had rendered him "not to be caught."Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were occasionally partiesto the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by sayingthat he had told it so often, that he believed it himself--which issurely such an incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence,as to justify any such offender's being carried off to some suitablyretired 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, untilher little daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoesof her child's tread came, and those of her own dear father's, alwaysactive and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband's, need notbe told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directedby herself with such a wise and elegant thrift that it was moreabundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoesall about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father hadtold 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 nocares 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 beingeverything 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 menacinglyin the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, aboutlittle 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 Lucieand her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, andthey were all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they hadlooked at the lightning from the same place.

　　"I began to think," said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, "thatI should have to pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so full ofbusiness all day, that we have not known what to do first, or whichway to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we haveactually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seemnot to be able to confide their property to us fast enough. There ispositively 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 whatreason there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us atTellson's are getting old, and we really can't be troubled out ofthe 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 persuadehimself 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 bywhich I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervouswithout 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 tobe pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard 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 shouldbe otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been soput 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 ussit 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. "Theyare very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!"

　　Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody'slife, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, thefootsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle satin the dark London window.

　　Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrowsheaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowyheads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendousroar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked armsstruggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind:all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance ofa 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, throughwhat agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, overthe heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throngcould have told; but, muskets were being distributed--so werecartridges, 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 bleedinghands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Everypulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and athigh-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 ragingcircled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldronhad 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 armanother, 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 ofas many of these patriots as you can. Where is my wife?"

　　"Eh, well! Here you see me!" said madame, composed as ever, but notknitting 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 pistoland a cruel knife.

　　"Where do you go, my wife?"

　　"I go," said madame, "with you at present. You shall see me at thehead of women, by-and-bye."

　　"Come, then!" cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. "Patriots andfriends, we are ready! The Bastille!"

　　With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had beenshaped into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave,depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bellsringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach,the attack began.

　　Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight greattowers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and throughthe smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up againsta cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier--Defarge of thewine-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, comradesall, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand,Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name ofall the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!" Thus Defargeof 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 asthe 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 singledrawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slightdisplacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashingweapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard workat neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and thefurious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and thesingle drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight greattowers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doublyhot by the service of Four fierce hours.

　　A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimlyperceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenlythe sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of thewine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outerwalls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!

　　So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that evento draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he hadbeen struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed inthe outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of awall, he made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearlyat his side; Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, wasvisible in the inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywherewas tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astoundingnoise, yet furious dumb-show.

　　"The Prisoners!"

　　"The Records!"

　　"The secret cells!"

　　"The instruments of torture!"

　　"The Prisoners!"

　　Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, "The Prisoners!"was the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there werean eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When the foremostbillows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with them, andthreatening them all with instant death if any secret nook remainedundisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of one ofthese 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. Butthere 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 thatI 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 evidentlydisappointed by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promisebloodshed, held by Defarge's arm as he held by the turnkey's. Theirthree heads had been close together during this brief discourse, andit 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 intothe Fortress, and its inundation of the courts and passages andstaircases. All around outside, too, it beat the walls with a deep,hoarse roar, from which, occasionally, some partial shouts of tumultbroke and leaped into the air like spray.

　　Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, pasthideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like drywaterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three,linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Hereand there, especially at first, the inundation started on them andswept by; but when they had done descending, and were winding andclimbing up a tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massivethickness of walls and arches, the storm within the fortress and withoutwas only audible to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out ofwhich 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 headsand 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 bystooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barredacross, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-asheson the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. Therewere 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 letterswith his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. "And herehe wrote `a poor physician.' And it was he, without doubt, who scratcheda 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 asudden exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eatenstool 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 thecrowbar, and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes,some mortar and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face toavoid; and in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in thechimney into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he gropedwith 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. Stoopingagain to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, andretraced their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover their sense ofhearing 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 inthe guard upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot thepeople. Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel deVille for judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and thepeople's blood (suddenly of some value, after many years ofworthlessness) be unavenged.

　　In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed toencompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and reddecoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was awoman'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 himthrough the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remainedimmovable close to him when he was got near his destination, and beganto be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when thelong-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to himwhen he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her footupon 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 ideaof hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. SaintAntoine's blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination bythe iron hand was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville wherethe governor's body lay--down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defargewhere she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation."Lower the lamp yonder!" cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for anew 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 upheavingof wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whoseforces were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swayingshapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces ofsuffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

　　But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expressionwas in vivid life, there were two groups of faces--each seven in number--so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll whichbore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenlyreleased by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried highoverhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if theLast Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits.Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whosedrooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassivefaces, yet with a suspended--not an abolished--expression on them; faces,rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids ofthe eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, "Thou didst it!"

　　Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of theaccursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered lettersand other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of brokenhearts,--such, and such--like, the loudly echoing footsteps of SaintAntoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand sevenhundred 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 caskat Defarge's wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when oncestained red.