A Tale of Two Cities by Dave Mckay, Charles Dickens (easy readers .txt) 📖

hands. The stranger would not be doing the job he was sent there for if he did not see this, and remember it later.

Having hit a sore nerve with this one piece of information, and with no one else coming in for him to question, Mr. Barsad paid for his drink and left, taking time to say very nicely that he looked forward to talking with Mr. and Madam Defarge again sometime. For some minutes after he left, the husband and wife stayed as they were, thinking that he could return.

"Can it be true," said Defarge in a low voice and looking down at his wife as he stood smoking, with his hand on the back of her chair: "what he said of Miss Manette?"

"Coming from him," said Madam Defarge, with the confidence she always had, "it is probably false. But it could be true."

"If it is...” Defarge started, and then stopped.

"If it is?” repeated his wife.

"...And if it happens, as we hope, that we live to win our war, I hope, for her, that God will keep her husband out of France."

"God will lead her husband," said Madam Defarge, with the same confidence, "and take him where he needs to go. God will lead him to the end that is right for him. That is all I know."

"But it is very strange -- at least for now, is it not very strange," said Defarge, almost begging his wife to see the truth in what he was saying, "that, after all of our love and care for her father, and for her, that her husband's name should now be written under your hand now, next to the name of that dog who has just left us?"

"Stranger things than that will happen when the time comes," answered Madam. "I have both names here, to be sure, and they are both here for a good reason. That is enough."

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and then she took the flower out of her head scarf. Either Saint Antoine knew by magic that it was gone, or he had been watching secretly to see it go. Either way, the Saint now had confidence to walk in, and very soon after that, the wine shop was back in business.

In the evening, when Saint Antoine would turn its in side out, sitting on the steps, leaning out the windows, or standing on the corners of the dirty streets and yards, to breathe the night air, Madam Defarge, with her work in her hand, would often move from place to place and from council to council. She was a kind of missionary -- and there were many like her -- that the world would be better off never to have. All of the women knitted. They knitted things that were of no worth, but the work they were doing was something to make them forget about eating and drinking. Their hands moved in place of their mouths and stomachs. If they stopped, then the pain in their stomachs was too much.

But, as their fingers moved, their eyes moved too, and their thoughts. And as Madam Defarge moved from group to group, all three moved more quickly and with more anger in every little knot of women that she talked to and left behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with love. "A wonderful woman," he said to himself, "a strong woman, a great woman, a woman great enough to scare anyone!"

Darkness closed around Saint Antoine, and with it came the ringing of church bells, and the far off sound of the army drums in the buildings where the King and all of his men lived, as the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness swallowed them up. But another darkness was closing in as surely, and with it, the bells that were now making such a nice sound all over France, would soon be melted into cannons. The sound of the drums would be trying to drown out the shouting of angry voices, on a night as strong as power and wealth, freedom and life. So much was closing in around these knitting women that they too were closing in around something else -- a machine, not yet made, where they would be sitting, knitting, and counting the heads as they dropped.

Midpoint

17. One Night

Never did the sun go down more beautifully on the quiet corner in Soho than it did one very special evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat under the big tree together. Never did the moon come up with a nicer smile over London than it did on that same night when it looked down on their faces through the leaves of the big tree in the yard behind their rooms.

Lucie was to be married the next day. She had saved this evening for her father, and they sat alone under the tree.

"Are you happy, father?"

"Yes, very happy, my child."

They had been there for a long time, but they had said little. When there was enough light to work or read, she had not worked and she had not read to him as she did most nights. This night was too special for either work or reading.

"I too am very happy tonight, father. I am deeply happy in the love that heaven has blessed me with -- both my love for Charles and his love for me. But if my life were not to still be used for you, and if our being married were to take me even the length of a few streets away from you, I would be sadder now than I could tell you. Even as it is..."

Even as it was, she could not control her voice enough to finish what she had started.

In the sad light of the moon, she hugged him by the neck, and put her face on his chest. The light of the moon -- like the light of the sun, and the light of life -- is always sad as it comes and as it goes.

"Father, my love, can you tell me this one last time, that you are very very sure that no new love of mine and no new service that I must do will ever come between us? For myself I am sure, but I want to know that you are too. In your heart, do you have this confidence?

Her father answered with such confidence and trust that he could never have been doing it falsely, "Quite sure, my love! And more than that," he added, as he kissed her softly, "my future is even better because of you marrying Charles, than what it could have been... no, than it has ever been, without it."

"If I could hope for that, father..."

"Believe it, my love, for it is true. Think about how clear this truth is. As young and loving as you are, you could not know how much I have worried about you wasting your life."

She reached her hand toward his lips, but he took it away and repeated the word.

 

"Yes, wasted, my child... pulled away from the life that others of your age would live, all because you wanted to care for me. Your love for me could not see how much I have worried about that. But just ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect when I knew that you were missing out on an important part of life?"

"If I had never seen Charles, father, I would have been quite happy with you."

He smiled at how she had said, by accident, that without Charles, her happiness now would not be full, and he answered:

"But, my child, you did see him. And if it had not been Charles, it would have been someone else. Or if it had not been another, I would have been the reason for you not seeing, and then the dark part of my life would have moved from me to you."

Apart from when they were in the court, this was the first time that he had ever talked to her about the pain of his past. It was a strange feeling for her to hear this, and she remembered the words for a long time after that.

"See!" said the Doctor from Beauvais, with his hand reaching up toward the moon. "I have looked at her through the prison window when her light only gave me sadness. I have looked at her when it was such torture to think of her light touching all that I had lost, that I would hit my head against the prison walls, trying to kill myself. I have watched her at times when I had no feeling and almost no life, and the best I could think of was how many horizontal lines I could draw across her, and how many vertical lines I could cross them with.” He added in a voice like he was back there now, "It was twenty each way, I remember. And the last one was difficult to squeeze in."

The strange feeling she had about hearing him talk of his past grew stronger as he talked on. But there was nothing to make her afraid in the way he was doing it now. He was only using it to say how happy he was now that it was over.

"I have looked at her a thousand times, thinking about the child who was not yet born when I was taken away. Had it been born alive? Or did it die from what its poor mother went through? Was it a son who would one day fight for his father? (There was a time when all I wanted was to hurt those who had hurt me.) Was it a son who would never know his father's story, who might even grow to believe that his father had chosen to leave him. Or would it be a daughter, who would one day grow into a woman?"

She moved closer, and kissed his cheek and his hand.

"I had pictured my daughter, to myself, as knowing nothing about me, and never thinking of me. I thought ahead, through the years of her life, as she grew into a woman, until she one day married a man who would know nothing of me. It would be like I had never lived, and their children would be without any thought of me."

"My father! Even to hear that you thought about such a daughter who never was real makes me feel like I am that child."

"You, Lucie? It is because of all you have done to bring me back that I even think such thoughts under the moon here tonight. Now, what was I just saying?"

"That this daughter knew nothing of you, and she thought nothing of you."

"Yes. But on other nights when the moon was out and I was feeling more of a sad peace, as any emotion growing out of pain can do, I had thoughts of her coming to me in the prison, and leading me into the liberty that was on the other side of the walls. I would see her often in the light of the moon, just as I see you now, but I could never hold her in my arms. She stood in the space between the door and the little window. But do you understand that this person was not the child that I was just talking about?"

"You mean that person was not... was not the one you thought about?"

"No. What I saw was something else. It stood before my confused look, but it never moved. The child that was in my mind was the more real one. I had no way of knowing what she would look like, apart from knowing that she would look like her mother. That other shape looked like her mother too, as you do right now, but it wasn't the same. Do you follow me, Lucie? I don't think you could. I think you would need to have lived as a prisoner alone for many years to understand a thing like this."

The peace he had in talking about the past at this time made Lucie's blood run cold.

"At those times when I was at peace, I would think of her coming to lead me to the home where she lived with her husband. It