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

be before the court again tomorrow, didn't you, Mr. Barsad?"

"Yes, I believe he will."

"...as it saved him today. But it may not happen. I must say that I am surprised and worried, Mr. Lorry, that Doctor Manette did not have the power to stop this arrest."

"He may not have known about it before it happened," said Mr. Lorry.

"And the surprise would be awful for him, when we remember how close he is to his daughter's husband."

"That's true," agreed Mr. Lorry, with his worried hand at his chin and his worried eyes on Carton.

"In short," said Sydney, "this is a serious time, when serious games must be played with serious effects. The Doctor may play a winning game, but I am working on a losing one. You can't buy a life here. Anyone carried home by the people today may be returned tomorrow. So the reward that I hope to play for is a friend in the court prison, and the friend I plan to win is Mr. Barsad."

"You would need good cards for that, sir," said the spy.

"Let's look at them. Let's look at mine first... Mr. Lorry, you know what an animal I am; could I have a little drink?"

It was put before him, and he finished it quickly... that one and another, before he pushed the bottle away.

"Mr. Barsad," he went on, in the voice of one who really was looking over a hand of cards. "Prison sheep, working for the Freedom Fighters, one day holding the keys to the prison, the next acting as one of the prisoners, always a spy, giving secret information. So much better for being English, because the French would not think that an Englishman would lie to hurt another Englishman. But he has used a false name in getting his job with the French government. That is a very good card. Mr. Barsad, today working for the French government, but in the past working for the rich English government, the enemy of France and the enemy of freedom. That's a really good card. What they will think is that Mr. Barsad, still working for the rich English government, is a spy for the head of government over there, the enemy of the new France hiding in his heart, the secret English enemy that everyone talks about, but that no one can find. Now that is the best card of all. Have you followed my hand, Mr. Barsad?"

"Not well enough to understand how you are going to use them," returned the spy with a worried look on his face.

"I play my best card, by telling the nearest local court about you. And what do you do? Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't hurry."

He pulled the bottle closer, poured another glass and finished it off. He could see that the spy was afraid he would drink too much and run off to tell the local leaders. Seeing that, he poured himself another glass and finished that off too.

"Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take your time."

It was a worse hand than he had believed. Mr. Barsad could see losing cards that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. He had been forced out of England because his lies had not worked there... not that he was not wanted there, because it was only later that we started acting like we do not have secrets and do not use spies. He knew that he had crossed the Channel and started working for France: first to test and listen in to people from his own country, and then to do the same with the French. He knew that under the old government he had spied on Saint Antoine and on Defarge's wine shop. He had received enough information from the police about Doctor Manette's life, that he was able to talk to the Defarges like an old friend. He had tried them on Madam Defarge, but they did not work at all. He always remembered with fear and shaking that the awful woman had knitted when he talked with her, and had looked dangerously at him as her fingers moved.

He had seen her in Saint Antoine, over and over, bring out her knitted squares and use them against people whose lives were then taken from them by the guillotine. Like anyone doing his kind of work, he knew that he was never safe, that there was nowhere to run, that he was locked under the shadow of the axe, and that no measure of help for the government that was paying him could stop that axe from falling if someone pointed a finger at him, and on the serious grounds that Sydney Carton had just listed, he knew that awful woman that he had seen hurt so many other people, would bring out the knitting square that would take away his life. Apart from the truth that all who have secrets have reason to fear, here were enough cards of one black shape as to make the one holding them turn them over on the table.

"You don't seem to like your hand," said Sydney, fully relaxed. "Will you play?"

"I think, sir," said the spy in the humblest way, as he turned to Mr. Lorry, "I can ask a man of your years and kindness, to ask this other man, so much younger than you, how he could ever play that top card that he talks of. It's true that I am a spy, and people think poorly of me because of it... but someone has to do it. Yet this man is not a spy, so why should he bring himself so low as to do this to me?"

"I will be playing my card, Mr. Barsad," said Carton, taking it on himself to answer for Mr. Lorry, and looking at his watch, "without any fear, in a very few minutes."

"I should have hoped, with you both being good men," said the spy, still trying to pull Mr. Lorry into the talk, "that your kind feelings for my sister..."

"I could not think of a better way to help your sister than to take her brother out of the way," said Sydney Carton.

"You think there is no better way, sir?”

"I have made up my mind about it."

The smooth way of the spy, strangely opposite to his very rough way of dressing, and probably with the way he did much of his business, was so well covered by Carton's ability to hide his true thoughts... for he was a secret to men who were much smarter and more honest than Barsad... that it fell apart at this point. Seeing that Barsad was losing, Carton said, returning to his earlier game of looking at cards:

"Now that I think about it, I believe I have another good card here, one I haven't yet talked about. That other Sheep, who talked of making a living for himself in the prisons. Who was he?"

"He's French. You wouldn't know him," said the spy quickly.

"French, eh?” repeated Carton, thinking to himself, and not showing any interest in Barsad at all, even as he repeated the same word. "Well, he may be."

"He is. I promise you," said the spy. "But it's not important."

"But it's not important," repeated Carton in the same empty way. "But it's not important... No, it's not important. No. Yet I know the face."

"I don't think so. I am sure you do not. It can't be," said the spy.

"It... can't... be," Sydney Carton said to himself as he played with his glass (which, luckily, was a small one) again. "Can't... be. He spoke good French. But I still thought it sounded like his second language."

"He's from another part of France," said the spy.

"No, from another country!" cried Carton, hitting his open hand on the table, as a light broke through to his mind. "Cly! Changed a little, but the same man. We had that man before us at the Old Bailey."

"Now you have jumped too soon, sir," said Barsad with a smile that made his eagle-like nose move a little to one side. "You have really helped me by accident. You see, Cly (who, at this distance in time, I can freely say had been working with me) has been dead now for a few years. I was with him just before he died. He was buried in London at the church of Saint Pancras in the Fields. The dirty-talking crowds at the time did not like him, and they stopped me from going with him to the burying; but I helped to put him in the box."

Here, Mr. Lorry could see, from where he was sitting, a strange movement in a shadow on the wall. Looking around the room, he could see that it was a movement in the wild hair on Mr. Cruncher's head.

"Let us talk about this," said the spy, "and let us be fair. To show you how wrong you are, I will show you a paper showing that Cly was buried, which I just happen to have carried here in my pocket-book ever since that day.” He quickly found it and opened it. "There! Look at it, look at it! You can pick it up. It's real."

Here, Mr. Lorry saw the shadow on the wall grow taller as Mr. Cruncher stood up and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more wildly on end if it had, at that time, been put in place by the cow with a broken horn in the house that Jack built.

Without the spy seeing him, Mr. Cruncher moved to his side and touched him on the shoulder like a ghost calling him to court.

"That there Roger Cly, master," said Mr. Cruncher, with a hard look that needed few words, "so you put him in his box?"

"I did."

"And who took him out of it?"

Barsad leaned back in his chair and said in stops and starts, "What do you mean?"

"I mean," said Mr. Cruncher, "that he weren't never in it. No! Not he! I'll have my head took off if he was ever in it."

The spy looked around at the other two men, and they looked at Jerry with such surprise that they could not speak.

"I tell you," said Jerry, "that you buried stones and dirt in that there box. Don't go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was a take in. Me and two more knows it."

"How do you know it?"

"What's that to you?” Mr. Cruncher said angrily. "So it's you I should of been angry against all this time, with your awful way of hurting honest workers! I'd catch hold of your throat and squeeze it to death for half a pound."

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in surprise at this turn in their business, here asked Mr. Cruncher to back up and tell them what he was on about.

"At another time, sir," he returned, trying to get away from it. "The present time is not the best for talking. What I stand to is that we knows well enough that there Cly was never in that there box. Let him say he was, in so much as a word, and I'll either catch hold of his throat and squeeze him to death for half a pound...” Mr. Cruncher waited for a second, clearly believing that the next line was the kinder of two choices. "... or I'll out and tell what he did."

"Hmm! I see that I have another card, Mr. Barsad," said Carton. "It would be impossible, with fear filling the air here in Paris, for you to live if I tell, when they find you are working with another spy for the rich who comes from the same country as yourself, who, himself, has a secret past in which he made people believe he was dead, and then came to life again! A plan in the prisons by two English men against the new government. A strong card... a clear Guillotine card! Do you still want to play against me?"

"No!" returned the spy. "I give up. It's true that the crowds were against us in London. I was almost drowned, and Cly was so hunted that he would have never been able to get away at all without that burying trick. But I have no way of knowing how this man knows about it."

"Never you trouble your head about this man," argued Mr. Cruncher. "You'll have trouble enough with listening to that man. And look here! Again!" Mr. Cruncher could not be stopped from showing them all how kind he was. "I'd catch hold of your throat and squeeze it to death for half a pound."

The prison Sheep turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said more seriously this time, "It has come to a point. I should be starting work soon, and cannot stay here much longer. You said you had a plan you wanted me to help with. What is it? There is no good in asking too much from me. If you ask me to do something in my job that could get me killed, then I'll be happier to face the danger of saying