Barnaby Rudge & A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ upon him more and more, “I state the case, Citizen Defarge?”

      Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer than a gruff sound of acquiescence.

      “You had better, Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to propitiate, by tone and manner, “have the dear child here, and our good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and knows no French.”

      The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more than a match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and, danger, appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to The Vengeance, whom her eyes first encountered, “Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope you are pretty well!” She also bestowed a British cough on Madame Defarge; but, neither of the two took much heed of her.

      “Is that his child?” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it were the finger of Fate.

      “Yes, madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor prisoner’s darling daughter, and only child.”

      The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall, threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child.

      “It is enough, my husband,” said Madame Defarge. “I have seen them. We may go.”

      But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it—not visible and presented, but indistinct and withheld—to alarm Lucie into saying, as she laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge’s dress:

      “You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no harm. You will help me to see him if you can?”

      “Your husband is not my business here,” returned Madame Defarge, looking down at her with perfect composure. “It is the daughter of your father who is my business here.”

      “For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child’s sake! She will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We are more afraid of you than of these others.”

      Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her husband. Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking at her, collected his face into a sterner expression.

      “What is it that your husband says in that little letter?” asked Madame Defarge, with a lowering smile. “Influence; he says something touching influence?”

      “That my father,” said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from her breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it, “has much influence around him.”

      “Surely it will release him!” said Madame Defarge. “Let it do so.”

      “As a wife and mother,” cried Lucie, most earnestly, “I implore you to have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think of me. As a wife and mother!”

      Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said, turning to her friend The Vengeance:

      “The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as little as this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have known their husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them, often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst, sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds?”

      “We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance.

      “We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge, turning her eyes again upon Lucie. “Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife and mother would be much to us now?”

      She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance followed. Defarge went last, and closed the door.

      “Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her. “Courage, courage! So far all goes well with us—much, much better than it has of late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and have a thankful heart.”

      “I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to throw a shadow on me and on all my hopes.”

      “Tut, tut!” said Mr. Lorry; “what is this despondency in the brave little breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.”

      But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself, for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.

      IV. Calm in Storm

       Table of Contents

      Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of his absence. So much of what had happened in that dreadful time as could be kept from the knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that not until long afterwards, when France and she were far apart, did she know that eleven hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes and all ages had been killed by the populace; that four days and nights had been darkened by this deed of horror; and that the air around her had been tainted by the slain. She only knew that there had been an attack upon the prisons, that all political prisoners had been in danger, and that some had been dragged out by the crowd and murdered.

      To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of secrecy on which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken him through a scene of carnage to the prison of La Force. That, in the prison he had found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before which the prisoners were brought singly, and by which they were rapidly ordered to be put forth to be massacred, or to be released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back to their cells. That, presented by his conductors to this Tribunal, he had announced himself by name and profession as having been for eighteen years a secret and unaccused prisoner in the Bastille; that, one of the body so sitting in judgment had risen and identified him, and that this man was Defarge.

      That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the table, that his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had pleaded hard to the Tribunal—of whom some members were asleep and some awake, some dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some not—for his life and liberty. That, in the first frantic greetings lavished on himself as a notable sufferer under the overthrown system, it had been accorded to him to have Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and examined. That, he seemed on the point of being at once released, when the tide in his favour met with some unexplained check (not intelligible to the Doctor), which led to a few words of secret conference. That, the man sitting as President had then informed Doctor Manette that the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for his sake, be held inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately, on a signal, the prisoner was removed to the interior of the prison again; but, that he, the Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for permission to remain and assure himself that his son-in-law was, through no malice or mischance, delivered to the concourse whose murderous yells outside the gate had often drowned the proceedings, that he had obtained the permission, and had remained in that Hall of Blood until the danger was over.

      The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep by intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners who were saved, had astounded him scarcely less СКАЧАТЬ