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

no than the danger of saying yes. Remember that I can say things against you too, and I have ways to get through stone walls, and so can others who are my friends. So what do you want from me?"

"Not very much. You hold the keys at the court prison?"

"I'm telling you this once for all, it is not possible to run away from there," said the spy strongly.

"I don't need answers to questions I have not asked. Do you hold the keys?"

"I do, at times."

"You can choose when that will be?”

"I can come and go as I choose."

Sydney Carton filled another glass with wine, but poured it slowly on the fire, when no one was looking. When it was all gone, he said, standing:

"So far we have been talking in front of these other two, because it was good for the strength of the cards to be measured by others apart from you and me. But come into this dark room here, and we can say the last things alone."

9. The Game Made

While Sydney Carton and the prison Sheep were in the next room, speaking so softly in the darkness that not a sound was heard, Mr. Lorry was looking at Jerry in a way that showed he did not trust him; and the way Jerry acted on seeing the look made him seem more guilty than ever. He moved from one leg to the other as often as if he had fifty legs and was trying each one of them. He looked at his fingernails too closely. And whenever Mr. Lorry's eyes crossed with his, he would do that strange little cough of his and put his hand over his mouth, which is not an action that makes one think a person is being perfectly open.

"Jerry," said Mr. Lorry. "Come here."

Mr. Cruncher moved forward, but did it with one side of his body leading the other side.

"What work have you been doing, apart from your work for Tellson's?"

After some thinking, that came with a serious look at his boss, Mr. Cruncher came up with the smart answer, "Farm work, sir. Digging."

"Something tells me," said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a finger at him, "that you have used the great name of Tellson's as a cover, and that you have been doing work that is against the law. If you have, then know that I will not help you when you get back to England. If you have, don't count on me keeping your secret. Tellson's will not be used in this way."

"I hope, sir," begged the worried Mr. Cruncher, "that a good man like yourself who I have been happy to work for until I am now grey at it, would think twice about hurting me, even if it was true... and I don't say it is, but even if it was. And it is to be took into your thinking that if it was, it wouldn't, even then, be all on one side. There'd be two sides to it. There might be a doctor even now, picking up their pounds where an honest worker don't pick up cents... cents? No, not even his half cents. But they goes banking away like smoke at Tellson's, and a pointing their doctor eyes at that worker on the street, while they's going in and going out of their own coaches, and equally doing that like smoke too, if not more so. Now that'd be using Tellson's too, for you cannot put sauce on the female goose and not put it on the male goose too. And here's Mrs. Crunch, at least she was back when we was in England, and would be again tomorrow, if she had reason to, prayin' against the business so much that she was destroying it... fully destroying it! But the doctor wives, they don't pray... you won't never catch them at it! Or, if they do, their prayers go to getting more sick people for their husbands. So how can you rightly turn on one without the other? Then what with giving something to the men who bury the body, and the man who watches over the church, and all of them greedy, a man wouldn't get much by it, even if it was so. And what little a man did get, would not make him rich, Mr. Lorry. He'd never have no good of it, and he'd want all along to be out of it if he could see his way to, but being once in... even if it was so."

"Stop it!" cried Mr. Lorry, giving in some, all the same. "I am surprised just to look at you."

"Now what I would like to humbly give you, sir," went on Mr. Cruncher, "even if it was so, which I don't say it is..."

"Don't kick around the bush," said Mr. Lorry.

"No, I will not, sir," returned Mr. Cruncher, as if nothing was farther from his thoughts or actions. "I'm not saying that it is... but what I would humbly want to give you, sir, if it was, would be this. On that chair there at the bank, sits that boy of mine, growed up to be a good worker for you, taking letters here and there and doing every little job for you until your heels are where your head is, if you would like him to do that. If it was so, which I still don't say it is (for I will not kick around the bush to you, sir), then, if it was, let that there boy keep his father's place, so he can take care of his mother; don't blow on that boy's father... do not do it, sir... but let that father go into the line of honest digging, and make up for what he should not have been digging... if it was so... by digging for them with a will and in a faith that would keep them safe for the future. That, Mr. Lorry," said Mr. Cruncher, rubbing his forehead with his arm to show that he had come to the finishing point of what he was trying to say, "is what I would humbly want to give to you, sir. A man don't see all the awful happenings that are going on round him here, in the way of people without heads, and happening to so many that the price of a life is no more than the cost of carrying it away, without having his serious thoughts of such things. And these here would be my thoughts if it was so kind of you to think that what I said just now, I up and said for a good reason when I might have kept it back."

"At least that much is true," said Mr. Lorry. "Say no more now. It may be that I will yet be your friend, if I think you have repented... in action, and not just in words. I want no more words."

Mr. Cruncher rubbed his fist on his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the spy returned from the dark room.

"Goodbye, Mr. Barsad," said Carton. "If you stick to this agreement, you have nothing to fear from me."

He sat down in a chair by the fireplace, next to Mr. Lorry. When they were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done.

"Not much. If it goes wrong with the prisoner, I will be able to have one visit with him."

The look on Mr. Lorry's face fell.

"It's all I could do," said Carton. "To ask too much would put this man's head under the axe, and, as he said himself, nothing worse could happen if I turned him in. It was the weakest part of our game. There is nothing we can do about that."

"But visiting him," said Mr. Lorry, "if it goes wrong before the court, will not save him."

"I never said it would."

Mr. Lorry's eyes slowly turned to the fire. His deep feeling for the one he loved, and the great sadness he felt on learning of his second arrest, slowly reached his eyes. He was an old man now, carrying too many worries at this time, and so his tears fell.

"You are a good man and a true friend," said Carton in a changed voice. "Forgive me for seeing the effect this is having on you. I could not see my father cry and sit by without doing anything. And I could not feel your sadness more if you were my father. At least you are lucky that you are not."

With those last words, he returned to his old way; but there was true feeling and love both in his voice and his touch that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of him, was not at all prepared for. He gave him his hand, and Carton squeezed it softly.

"To get back to poor Darnay," said Carton. "Don't tell her of this meeting, or of this agreement. It will not be possible for her to go see him. She might think that it is just a last minute plan to see him before he dies, and it will destroy her hope."

Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to see if that may have been what he was thinking. It seemed to be. Carton returned the look, showing that he understood what Mr. Lorry was thinking.

"She might think a thousand things," Carton said, "and any of them would only add to her trouble. Don't say anything to her about me. As I said when I first came, I had better not see her. I can reach my hand out to help in any little way that I can find, without her needing to know. You are going to her, I hope? She must be very sad tonight."

"I am going now, when we finish."

"I am glad of that. She has such a strong love for you, and faith in you. How does she look?"

"Worried and sad, but very beautiful."

"Ah!"

It was a long, sad sound, like a slow breathing out... almost like he was crying. It pulled Mr. Lorry's eyes to Carton's face, which was turned to the fire. A light, or a shadow (the old man could not have said which), came away from it as quickly as a change will move over the side of a hill on a clear windy day, and he lifted his foot to put back one of the little burning pieces of timber, which was falling forward. He was wearing the white riding coat and tall heavy boots that people often liked to wear then, and the light of the fire touching the light colour of his clothes made him look very white, with his long brown hair, not cut at all, hanging loose around him. He seemed to show so little interest in the fire that Mr. Lorry had to shout out to him. His foot was still on the burning piece of timber when it had broken under the weight of it.

"I had forgotten it," he said.

Mr. Lorry's eyes were again pulled to Sydney's face. He saw a finished empty look in what had always been a good-looking face, and it made him think of the look on the faces of prisoners that he had been seeing so much of at that time.

"And your work here is almost finished?” said Carton, turning to him.

"Yes, as I was telling you last night when Lucie came in by surprise, I have at last done all I can do here. I had been hoping that they would be perfectly safe before I left Paris. I have my papers to take me through the gates. I was ready to go."

They both said nothing.

"Yours is a long life to look back on, sir?” Carton said sadly.

"I am seventy-eight."

"You have used your whole life well; always busy; trusted; loved; and looked up to?"

"I have been a man of business for as long as I have been a man. In truth, I may say that I was a man of business when I was a boy."

"See what a place you fill at seventy eight. So many people will miss you when you leave it empty!"

"One man without a family," answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his head. "There is nobody to cry for me."

"How can you say that? Wouldn't she cry for you? Wouldn't her child?"

"Yes, yes, thank God. I didn't quite mean what I said.”

"It is something to thank God for, is it not?"

"Yes, surely."

"If you could say, with truth, to yourself alone tonight, 'I have not been able to win the love and trust of even one person; there is no one who has a soft place in their heart for me; I have done nothing good to be remembered by!' your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses, would they not?"

"You are right, Mr. Carton. I think they would be."

Sydney turned his eyes again on the fire, and after another quiet wait, he said:

"I would like to ask you: Does it seem a long time ago that you were a child? Do the days when you sat at your mother's knee seem to be very