A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (best fiction books to read .txt) 📖

treachery in furtherance of the reigning terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once denounced, and on such grave grounds as had just now been suggested to his mind, he foresaw that the dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had seen many proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and would quash his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

“You scarcely seem to like your hand,” said Sydney, with the greatest composure. “Do you play?”

“I think, sir,” said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned to Mr. Lorry, “I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and benevolence, to put it to this other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he can under any circumstances reconcile it to his station to play that Ace of which he has spoken. I admit that I am a spy, and that it is considered a discreditable station—though it must be filled by somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean himself as to make himself one?”

“I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton, taking the answer on himself, and looking at his watch, “without any scruple, in a very few minutes.”

“I should have hoped, gentlemen both,” said the spy, always striving to hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, “that your respect for my sister—”

“I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by finally relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney Carton.

“You think not, sir?”

“I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.”

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour, received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,—who was a mystery to wiser and honester men than he,—that it faltered here and failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton said, resuming his former air of contemplating cards:

“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the country prisons; who was he?”

“French. You don’t know him,” said the spy, quickly.

“French, eh?” repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to notice him at all, though he echoed his word. “Well; he may be.”

“Is, I assure you,” said the spy; “though it’s not important.”

“Though it’s not important,” repeated Carton, in the same mechanical way—“though it’s not important—No, it’s not important. No. Yet I know the face.”

“I think not. I am sure not. It can’t be,” said the spy.

“It-can’t-be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and idling his glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. “Can’t-be. Spoke good French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?”

“Provincial,” said the spy.

“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table, as a light broke clearly on his mind. “Cly! Disguised, but the same man. We had that man before us at the Old Bailey.”

“Now, there you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that gave his aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; “there you really give me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit, at this distance of time, was a partner of mine) has been dead several years. I attended him in his last illness. He was buried in London, at the church of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. His unpopularity with the blackguard multitude at the moment prevented my following his remains, but I helped to lay him in his coffin.”

Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered it to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and stiffening of all the risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher’s head.

“Let us be reasonable,” said the spy, “and let us be fair. To show you how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assumption yours is, I will lay before you a certificate of Cly’s burial, which I happened to have carried in my pocket-book,” with a hurried hand he produced and opened it, “ever since. There it is. Oh, look at it, look at it! You may take it in your hand; it’s no forgery.”

Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, and Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow with the crumpled horn in the house that Jack built.

Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.

“That there Roger Cly, master,” said Mr. Cruncher, with a taciturn and iron-bound visage. “So YOU put him in his coffin?”

“I did.”

“Who took him out of it?”

Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Mr. Cruncher, “that he warn’t never in it. No! Not he! I’ll have my head took off, if he was ever in it.”

The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.

“I tell you,” said Jerry, “that you buried paving-stones and earth in that there coffin. 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? Ecod!” growled Mr. Cruncher, “it’s you I have got a old grudge again, is it, with your shameful impositions upon tradesmen! I’d catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.”

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in amazement at this turn of the business, here requested Mr. Cruncher to moderate and explain himself.

“At another time, sir,” he returned, evasively, “the present time is ill-conwenient for explainin’. What I stand to, is, that he knows well wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say he was, in so much as a word of one syllable, and I’ll either catch hold of his throat and choke him for half a guinea;” Mr. Cruncher dwelt upon this as quite a liberal offer; “or I’ll out and announce him.”

“Humph! I see one thing,” said Carton. “I hold another card, Mr. Barsad. Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling the air, for you to outlive denunciation, when you are in communication with another aristocratic spy of the same antecedents as yourself, who, moreover, has the mystery about him of having feigned death and come to life again! A plot in the prisons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong card—a certain Guillotine card! Do you play?”

“No!” returned the spy. “I throw up. I confess that we were so unpopular with the outrageous mob, that I only got away from England at the risk of being ducked to death, and that Cly was so ferreted up and down, that he never would have got away at all but for that sham. Though how this man knows it was a sham, is a wonder of wonders to me.”

“Never you trouble your head about this man,” retorted the contentious Mr. Cruncher; “you’ll have trouble enough with giving your attention to that gentleman. And look here! Once more!”— Mr. Cruncher could not be restrained from making rather an ostentatious parade of his liberality—“I’d catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.”

The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said, with more decision, “It has come to a point. I go on duty soon, and can’t overstay my time. You told me you had a proposal; what is it? Now, it is of no use asking too much of me. Ask me to do anything in my office, putting my head in great extra danger, and I had better trust my life to the chances of a refusal than the chances of consent. In short, I should make that choice. You talk of desperation. We are all desperate here. Remember! I may denounce you if I think proper, and I can swear my way through stone walls, and so can others. Now, what do you want with me?”

“Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?”

“I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape possible,” said the spy, firmly.

“Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?”

“I am sometimes.”

“You can be when you choose?”

“I can pass in and out when I choose.”

Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly out upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all spent, he said, rising:

“So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well that the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me. Come into the dark room here, and let us have one final word alone.”

IX

The Game Made

 

While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the adjoining dark room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard, Mr. Lorry looked at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman’s manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the leg on which he rested, as often as if he had fifty of those limbs, and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr. Lorry’s eye caught his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.

“Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry. “Come here.”

Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in advance of him.

“What have you been, besides a messenger?”

After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his patron, Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, “Agicultooral character.”

“My mind misgives me much,” said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a forefinger at him, “that you have used the respectable and great house of Tellson’s as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful occupation of an infamous description. If you have, don’t expect me to befriend you when you get back to England. If you have, don’t expect me to keep your secret. Tellson’s shall not be imposed upon.”

“I hope, sir,” pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, “that a gentleman like yourself wot I’ve had the honour of odd jobbing till I’m grey at it, would think twice about harming of me, even if it wos so—I don’t say it is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be took into account that if it wos, it wouldn’t, even then, be all o’ one side. There’d be two sides to it. There might be medical doctors at the present hour, a picking up their guineas where a honest tradesman don’t pick up his fardens—fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens— half fardens! no, nor yet his quarter—a banking away like smoke at Tellson’s, and a cocking their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a going in and going out to their own carriages—ah! equally like smoke, if not more so. Well, that ‘ud be imposing, too, on Tellson’s. For you cannot sarse the goose and not the gander. And here’s Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways wos in the Old England times, and would be tomorrow, if cause given, a floppin’ again the business to that degree as is ruinating—stark ruinating! Whereas them medical doctors’ wives don’t flop—catch ‘em at it!