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

another iron door that would stand between him and England on his way home. So many people were watching him now that if he had been taken in a net or were being carried forward in a cage, he would be no more without freedom than he felt now.

All these watching people would not only stop him as many as twenty times between towns, but they made his progress slower twenty times in a day by riding after him and taking him back, riding up to him from in front and stopping him before he arrived, and by riding with him to keep close watch on him. His trip in France alone had gone on for days before he went to bed one night in a little town on the road, still a long way from Paris.

Only the letter from Gabelle in the Abbey Prison had helped him to get this far; but the problems he had at the guard house in this little place made him think that his trip had come to an end.

Because of this, he was not surprised when guards came to wake him in the middle of the night at the hotel where he was staying.

A shy local leader with three of the new soldiers in rough red hats and with pipes in their mouths sat down on his bed.

"I am going to send people to go with you to Paris," said the local leader.

"Friend, I want nothing more than to get to Paris; but I do not need anyone to go with me."

"Be quiet!" shouted a red-hat, hitting the covers with the timber end of his gun. "Shut up, rich one!"

"It is as the good freedom fighter says," the shy leader said. "You are from the rich class, so someone must go with you... and you must pay for it."

"I have no choice then," said Charles Darnay.

"Choice? Listen to him!" cried the angry red-hat. "As if he's not lucky to have us protect him from being hanged as a lantern!"

"It is always as the good freedom fighter says," the leader put in. "Get up and dress yourself, traveller."

Darnay did as he was told and was taken back to the guard house, where other freedom fighters in rough red hats were smoking, drinking, and sleeping by a watch fire. Here he paid a heavy price for his helpers, and then started out on the wet, wet roads at three o'clock in the morning.

The men taking him to Paris were freedom fighters on horses, wearing red hats with special markings on them in three colours, and carrying government guns and swords. One horse walked on each side of him.

Darnay was able to ride his own horse, but a loose line was tied from his saddle to the wrist of one of the guards. Travelling like this, they started out, with the sharp rain driving in their faces, moving like soldiers quickly across the rough stones of the town streets, and more slowly on the deep muddy roads of the country.

They did not change this pattern when they changed horses or when they changed from a run to a walk, over all the deep muddy miles that lay between them and Paris.

They travelled through the night, stopping an hour or two after the sun came up, and resting until the sun was going down. The men travelling with him were so poorly dressed that they put straw around their legs to keep warm, and leaves on their shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart from the pain of travelling in this way and such dangers as came from one of them being drunk at all times and carrying his gun in a dangerous way, Charles Darnay did not let what was happening put any fear into his heart; for he believed that being tied like this said nothing about how good or bad he was until he had been able to tell his story, which would be backed up by the prisoner in the Abbey, when he reached Paris.

But when they came to the town of Beauvais, which they did in the evening, when the streets were still full of people, he could not help but think that things were not right at all. An angry crowd came to see him get off his horse at the horse station, and many voices called out loudly, "Down with the runaway!"

He stopped in the act of leaving his saddle, returning to his seat because it was safer there, and said: "Run away, my friends? Do you not see me here in France of my own free will?"

"You are a cursed runaway," cried a horseshoe maker, pushing toward him through the crowd with a hammer in his hand. "And you are a cursed member of the rich class!"

The station master put himself between this man and Darnay's horse (which seemed to be the angry man's target) and said quietly, "Let him be; let him be! He will be judged in Paris."

"Judged!" repeated the horseshoer, waving his hammer. "Yes! And killed for treason.” At this the crowd shouted in agreement.

Looking toward the station master, who wanted to turn the horses into the yard, Darnay said, when he could make himself heard:

"Friends, you have tricked yourselves, or you are being tricked. I am not guilty of acting against my country."

"He's lying!" cried the angry horseshoe maker. "The new law says he's guilty of treason. He owes his life to the people. His cursed life is not his own!"

Just when Darnay could see in the eyes of the crowd that they were going to take him, the station master turned his horse into the yard, with the guards moving close to either side of it. He shut and barred the gate behind them. The angry man's hammer hit the gate a few times, and the crowd shouted a little, but nothing more than that happened.

"What is this law the man spoke of?” Darnay asked the station master, after thanking him and getting down off his horse.

"It's a new rule, that lets us sell everything owned by people who have left the country."

"When was it made?"

"On the fourteenth."

"That's the day I left England."

"Everybody says there'll be more... if there are not already... stopping all runaways from returning, and killing all who do. That's what he was talking about when he said your life is not your own."

"But there are no such laws yet?"

"How can I know?” asked the station master, lifting his shoulders. "There may be or there will be. It's all the same."

They rested on straw in the top of the barn until the middle of the night, when everyone else was sleeping. Then they would start riding forward again. The country had changed in many strange ways, as Charles Darnay had seen as he travelled, and it made this wild ride feel like a dream. One of the bigger changes was how people did not sleep much now. After a long ride over open roads, they would come to a group of rough houses in the middle of the night, and far from finding them in darkness, there would be lights everywhere, and people, like ghosts in the night, dancing in a circle around a freedom tree or all joined close together singing a freedom song. But Darnay and his guards were happy to find people sleeping in Beauvais when they quietly moved out into the empty night. They moved with little noise through the cold and wet that was too early this year, on roads between poor fields that had nothing growing in them, and that were marked now by the black timbers from houses that had been burned, and by the freedom fighters who would surprise the riders at secret points on the way, in their day and night watch on all of the roads.

By morning they were in front of the wall around Paris. The gate was closed and strongly guarded when they reached it.

"Where are the papers for this prisoner?” asked a leader who had been called out by the guard, and who looked like he would not change for anyone.

Surprised and hurt by that awful word, Charles Darnay asked the man to look and see that he was a free traveller and a man of France, travelling with two guards whom the government had forced him to pay for because of the problems in the country.

"Where," repeated the same man, taking no interest in him at all, "are the papers for this prisoner?"

The drunk guard had them in his hat, and so he pulled them out. Looking quickly at Gabelle's letter, the same leader showed some confusion and surprise, and he looked at Darnay more closely now.

He left the guard and the one being guarded without saying a word and went into the guard room. When he was doing this, the others stayed on their horses at the gate. Charles Darnay used the time to look and think. He saw that the gate was guarded by both soldiers and freedom fighters, there being more fighters than there were soldiers. While it was easy for farmers and their wagons and other people and the things they were selling to get into the city, leaving the city was very difficult for even the simplest people. A crowd of people, animals, and vehicles of many different kinds were waiting to leave; but movement out through the gate was very slow. Some of them knew they would be there so long that they would lay on the ground to sleep or smoke, while others talked together. Men and women everywhere were wearing the little red hat with three-coloured markings.

After sitting in his saddle for half an hour, looking at these things, Darnay saw the government man return and tell the guard to open the gate. He gave a paper to the two men travelling with Darnay, and then asked him to get down off his horse. He did, and the two men who had been travelling with him turned without going into the city, and left, leading his horse as they went.

He went with the man into the guard room, which smelled of cheap wine and tobacco, where soldiers and freedom fighters, asleep and awake, drunk and not drunk, some awake, some asleep, and some in between, were standing and lying about. The light in the guard house, half from the weak oil lantern, and half from the clouded sun coming up, was also in confusion. Some lists were lying open on a desk, and an officer who looked both rough and dark, was in control of these.

"Countryman Defarge," said the officer to the man leading Darnay, as he took a piece of paper to write on, "Is this the runaway Evremonde?"

"This is the man."

"Your age, Evremonde?” "Thirty-seven."

"Married, Evremonde?"

Yes."

"Where married?"

"In England."

"Not surprising. Where is your wife, Evremonde?"

"In England."

"As I thought. You will go, Evremonde, to La Force Prison."

"My heavens!" shouted Darnay. "Under what law, and for what wrong?"

"The officer looked up from his piece of paper for a second."

"We have new laws, Evremonde, and new crimes, since you were here.” He said it with a hard smile, and went on writing.

"I beg you to see that I have come here freely, in answer to that letter there in front of you, from another countryman. I ask nothing more than a way to do that as quickly as possible. Don't I have a right to do that?"

"Runaways have no rights, Evremonde," was the hard answer. The officer wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what he had written, used sand to dry the ink, and handed it to Defarge with the words "in secret".

Defarge made a movement with the paper to show the prisoner that he should come with him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed freedom fighters went with them.

"Are you the one," said Defarge in a low voice as they went down the steps of the guardhouse and turned into Paris, "who married the daughter of Doctor Manette, who once was a prisoner in the prison that has been destroyed?"

"Yes," answered Darnay, looking at him with surprise.

"My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine shop in the Saint Antoine part of Paris. Maybe you have heard of me."

"My wife came to your house to meet her father! Yes!"

The word "wife" seemed to bring a cloud over Defarge, making him say angrily, "In the name of that sharp female baby they call Guillotine, why did you come to France?"

"You heard me say why just a minute ago. Do you not believe it is the truth?"

"A bad truth for you," said Defarge, knitting his forehead and looking straight ahead.

"I am really lost here. Everything is so different, so changed, so quickly and so cruelly, that I am fully lost. Will you give me a little help?"

"None.” Defarge spoke, still looking straight before him.

"Will you answer me just one question?"

"Maybe. If it is not about the wrong things. Go ahead and ask."

"In this prison that I am going to so wrongly, will I have some freedom to talk to people outside of it?"

"You will see."

"I am not to be buried there, judged without any way to argue my case?"

"You will see.