A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (17 page)

‘Killed!’ shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at their length above his head, and staring at him. ‘Dead!’

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

‘It is extraordinary to me,’ said he, ‘that you people cannot take care of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give him that.’

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, ‘Dead!’

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder, sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They were as silent, however, as the men.

‘I know all, I know all,’ said the last comer. ‘Be a brave man, my Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour as happily?’

‘You are a philosopher, you there,’ said the Marquis, smiling. ‘How do they call you?’

‘They call me Defarge.’

‘Of what trade?’

‘Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.’

‘Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,’ said the Marquis, throwing him another gold coin, ‘and spend it as you will. The horses there; are they right?’

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the air of a gentleman who had accidentally broken some common thing, and had paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage and ringing on its floor.

‘Hold!’ said Monsieur the Marquis. ‘Hold the horses! Who threw that?’

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.

‘You dogs!’ said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front, except as to the spots on his nose: ‘I would ride over any of you very willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he should be crushed under the wheels.’

So cowed was their condition, and so long and so hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye, was raised. Among the men, not one. But, the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word ‘Go on!’

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball – when the one woman who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.

A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it but not abundant. Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly – a dejected disposition to give up, and wither away.

Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control – the setting sun.

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. ‘It will die out,’ said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, ‘directly.’

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed quickly; the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow left when the drag was taken off.

But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village at the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening objects as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was coming near home.

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors, shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small yieldings of the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them poor, were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women, their choice on earth was stated in the prospect – Life on the lowest terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill; or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions’ whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him. He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the meagreness of French-men an English superstition which should survive the truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before Monseigneur of the Court – only the difference was, that these faces drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate – when a grizzled mender of the roads joined the group.

‘Bring me hither that fellow!’ said the Marquis to the courier.

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.

‘I passed you on the road?’

‘Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.’

‘Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?’

‘Monseigneur, it is true.’

‘What did you look at, so fixedly?’

‘Monseigneur, I looked at the man.’

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.

‘What man, pig? And why look there?’

‘Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe – the drag.’

‘Who?’ demanded the traveller.

‘Monseigneur, the man.’

‘May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?’

‘Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of all the days of my life, I never saw him.’

‘Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?’

‘With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur. His head hanging over – like this!’

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.

‘What was he like?’

‘Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust, white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!’

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his conscience.

‘Truly, you did well,’ said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such vermin were not to ruffle him, ‘to see a thief accompanying my carriage, and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur Gabelle!’

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary, united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an official manner.

‘Bah! Go aside!’ said Monsieur Gabelle.

‘Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.’

‘Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.’

‘Did he run away, fellow? – where is that Accursed?’

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some half-dozen other particular friends promptly haled him out, and presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.

‘Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?’

‘Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as a person plunges into the river.’

‘See to it, Gabelle. Go on!’

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or they might not have been so fortunate.

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually, it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dim distance.

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground, with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had studied the figure from the life – his own life, maybe – for it was dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and presented herself at the carriage-door.

‘It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition!’

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face, the Marquis looked out.

‘How, then! What is it? Always petitions!’

‘Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester.’

‘What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He cannot pay something?’

‘He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.’

‘Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?’

‘Alas no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor grass.’

‘Well?’

‘Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass.’

‘Again, well?’

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together with wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door – tenderly, caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to feel the appealing touch.

‘Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.’

‘Again, well? Can I feed them?’

‘Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don’t ask it. My petition is, that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband’s name, may be placed over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur! Monseigneur!’