双城记 Book1-6h The Shoemaker
In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to his daughter’s drawing her arm through his, and took—and kept—her hand in both his own.
They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr. Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps of the long main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and round at the wails.
‘You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?’
‘What did you say?’
But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if she had repeated it.
‘Remember? No, I don’t remember. It was so very long ago.’
That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter, ‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower;’and when he looked about him, it evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed him. On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he dropped his daughter’s hand and clasped his head again.
No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural silence and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and that was Madame Defarge—who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed him, when Mr. Lorry’s feet were arrested on the step by his asking, miserably, for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly brought them down and handed them in;—and immediately afterwards leaned against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.
Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word ‘To the Barrier!’The postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble over-swinging lamps.
Under the over-swinging lamps—swinging ever brighter in the better streets, and ever dimmer in the worse—and by lighted shops, gay crowds, illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. ‘Your papers, travellers!’‘See here then, Monsieur the Officer,’said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart, ‘these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with him, at the—’He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. ‘It is well. Forward!’from the uniform. ‘Adieu!’from Defarge. And so, under a short grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great grove of stars.
Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote from this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black. All through the cold and restless interval, until dawn, they once more whispered in the ears of Mr. Jarvis Lorry—sitting opposite the buried man who had been dug out, and wondering what subtle powers were for ever lost to him, and what were capable of restoration—the old inquiry:
‘I hope you care to be recalled to life?’
And the old answer:
‘I can’t say.’
