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

voice, she sat down on the bench beside him. He moved back, but she put her hand softly on his arm. A strange feeling went through him when she did this, and it could be seen going through his body. He put the knife down quietly, and sat looking at her.

Her long golden hair had been pushed back, and fell down in loops over her neck. Moving his hand little by little in that direction, he at last touched the hair, lifted it, and looked at it. In the middle of that action, his mind walked off again, and he returned to his shoemaking. But not for long.

She moved her hand from his arm to his shoulder. After looking at it one or two times, as if to be sure it was really there, he put his work down, reached behind his neck, and took off a dirty old string with a small piece of folded cloth joined to it. He opened it carefully on one knee and took out one or two pieces of long golden hair that he had at some time in the past looped many times around his finger before folding it in the piece of material.

He lifted the girl's hair again and looked at it more closely. "It is the same! How can it be? When was it...? How was it...?"

As he was thinking deeply, he seemed to know that she was thinking deeply too. He turned her so that the light was on her face, and looked at her.

"She put her head on my shoulder that night, when I was asked to come. She was afraid of what it would mean, but I did not see a problem. And when I was taken to the North Tower, they found these hairs on my sleeve. 'You will leave them for me?' I had asked. 'They can never help me to break out, but they can help my spirit to be free.' Those were the words I said. I remember them very well."

He shaped each of these words many times with his lips before they were said. But when he said them, the words were clear, even if they were slow in coming.

"How was this...? Was it you?"

Again, the other two moved to help when they saw him turn to her so quickly and with such feeling. But she sat perfectly still, with him holding her, and only said in a low voice, "Please, good friends, do not come near us, do not speak, do not move!"

"Listen!" he said with surprise. "Whose voice was that?"

He dropped his hold on the girl and put his hands to his head, tearing crazily at the white hair. His emotions soon died down, as everything died down apart from his shoemaking. He folded the hairs back into the cloth, and tried to hide them back over his heart. But he still looked at her, sadly shaking his head.

"No, no, no. You're too young. It can't be. Look at this prisoner. These are not the hands she knew. This is not the face she knew. This is not the voice she ever heard. No, no. She was, and he was -- before the slow years of the North Tower -- far in the past. But what is your name, my little angel?"

Welcoming his softer voice and actions, his daughter fell onto her knees in front of him, with her hands reaching up to his chest.

"Oh, sir, at another time you will know my name and the names of my parents, and how I never knew the history of their hard, hard life. But I cannot tell you now, and I cannot tell you here. All that I can tell you here and now is that I want you to touch me and to bless me. Kiss me. Kiss me, you kind, sweet man!"

His cold white head came together with her bright yellow hair, which warmed and lighted him as if it were the light of liberation.

"If you hear in my voice -- I don't know if you do, but I hope you do -- if you hear in my voice anything that is like a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, cry for it, cry for it! If you feel anything in touching my hair that makes you remember the head of a loved one who put her head on your chest when you were young and free, cry for it, cry for it! If my promise of a home where I will care for you makes you think of a home that was sadly empty while you were away, cry for it, cry for it!

She hugged him closer, around the neck, and moved from side to side with him against her breast, like she was holding a child.

"If I tell you that I have come here to take you to England to be at peace, and it makes you think of how our country here in France was so evil to you, then cry for it, cry for it! And if, when I tell you my name and the name of my father, who is alive, and mother, who is dead... if you learn that I have to beg my father for forgiveness for never having worried about him, because my mother did not tell me about the torture that he was put through, cry for it, cry for it! Cry first for her, and then for me! Good man, thank God! I feel his holy tears on my face, and the sadness that he feels I feel in my heart. Oh see! Thank God for us. Thank God!"

He had joined her on his knees, having given in to her hug; and he dropped his head onto her breast. It was a picture so touching, but so awful in the great wrong and the great pain which had gone before it, that the two looking on covered their faces.

After a long time with no one saying a word, when the man's heart and body had stopped shaking and were at peace, like the peace that comes after a storm, and like the peace that comes at the end of Life, the others moved forward to lift the father and daughter from the ground. He had slowly dropped off to sleep, and she had dropped to the floor with him, so that he could rest his head on her arm, with her hair protecting his face from the light.

"If you can do it without waking him," she said to Mr. Lorry as he leaned over them, "could you get tickets for us to leave Paris today, so he can go to England straight from this room?"

"Think first. Is he ready for such a long trip?” asked Mr. Lorry.

"He is ready for that more than he is ready for more of this awful city and what they have done to him."

"That's true," said Defarge, who was on his knees beside them now, so that he could hear better. "For many reasons it would be best for Mr. Manette to be out of Paris. Do you want me to send for a coach with fast horses?"

"That's business," said Mr. Lorry, who quickly returned to his job as a businessman. "If there is business to do, then I should be the one to do it."

"Then be so kind," Miss Manette asked, "as to leave us here. You see how quiet he is. Surely you cannot be afraid to leave me with him now. There is no reason to be. If you will lock the door to keep others from coming in, I am sure you will find him as quiet when you return as he is now. I will care for him until you return, and then we can take him straight out of here."

Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were against doing that, wanting at least one of them to stay with the girl. But as they needed to get the coach and horses, as well as travelling papers, and as the day was quickly coming to an end, they agreed to share the jobs between them, and to start at once.

With darkness closing in, the daughter joined her father on the floor, close to his side, and watched him. It became darker and darker, and they both lay quietly, until a light came through the holes in the wall.

Mr. Lorry and Mr. Defarge had made everything ready for the trip. They had brought coats and scarves, bread, meat, wine, and hot coffee. Mr. Defarge put these and the lantern he was carrying on the bench (There was nothing else in the room but the man's thin mattress on the floor.) and he and Mr. Lorry encouraged the old prisoner to wake up, before helping him to his feet.

No person could possibly know the secrets of the man's mind through the scared empty look of surprise on his face. Did he know what was happening? Could he remember what they had said? Did he understand that he was free? These are questions that all the education in the world could not have given an answer to. They tried speaking to him, but he was so confused and so slow with his answers, that they agreed to not push him farther at this time. He had at times, a wild, lost look when he would grab his head strongly with both hands, an action they had not seen him do earlier. But one could still see that he knew his daughter's voice, and he would turn to it each time she spoke.

In the way of one who has been forced to obey for many years, he, without a word, ate what he was given and put on the coat and scarves that they gave him to wear. He was happy for his daughter to put her arm through his, and he took her hand in both of his.

They started down the steps. Mr. Defarge was first, carrying the lantern, and Mr. Lorry was last. They were not far down through the tower of steps leading down from the fifth floor, when he stopped, looking at the roof, and around at the walls.

"Do you remember this place, father? Do you remember coming up here?"

"What did you say?"

But before she could ask her question again, he gave an answer, as if he had heard it a second time.

"Remember? No, I don't remember. It was so long ago."

It was clear to them that he did not remember coming from the prison to the house. They heard him say softly, "One hundred and five, North Tower," and when he looked around, it was clear that he was looking for the strong walls of the prison. When they came to the closed yard, he changed the way he was walking, thinking that a bridge would be lifted, as they had in the prison. Then, when he saw the coach waiting in the street, he dropped his daughter's hand and put his hands to his head again.

There was no crowd in the yard, no head looking out the windows, not even one person walking by in the street. It was strangely quiet. Only one person was there, and that was Madam Defarge, who was leaning against the door, knitting. And she saw nothing.

The prisoner was already inside the coach, followed by his daughter when Mr. Lorry was stopped on the step by Mr. Manette asking, sadly, for his tools and for the half finished shoes. Madam Defarge shouted out that she would get them, and she went, knitting, out of the light from the coach lantern, into the yard, and up the steps. She soon returned with them, handed them in, then returned to lean against the door, knitting. And she saw nothing.

Defarge jumped up on the shelf at the back of the coach and shouted, "To the border!" The driver cracked his whip, and the coach rolled down the street, under the weak lanterns hanging on ropes over their heads.

They rolled under those lanterns -- brighter in the better streets and weaker in the worse -- by lighted shops, happy crowds, busy coffee houses, and theatre doors to one of the city gates. Soldiers were standing with lanterns at the guard house.

"Your papers, travellers.”

"See here, Officer," said Defarge, jumping down and moving away from the coach. "These are the papers for the old man inside with the white head. They were given to me with him, at the...” He dropped his voice, and there was much movement around the army lanterns before one of the lanterns was pushed into the coach at the end of an arm in a uniform. The eyes at the end of the arm looked at the man with the white head in a way that was strangely different from how he looked at other people.

"It is well. Forward!" said the uniform.

"Goodbye!" from Defarge.

And so it went, under weaker and weaker hanging lanterns until they were out under the great covering of the stars.

Under those eternal lights, some so far from earth that the scientists say their