A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations (Oprah's Book Club) (52 page)

Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings, dye-works tanneries and the like, open country, avenues of leafless trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud is on either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the stones that clatter us and shake us, and sometimes we stick in ruts and sloughs there. The agony of our impatience is then so great, that in our wild alarm and hurry we are for getting out and running – hiding – doing anything but stopping.

Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary farms, dye-works, tanneries and the like, cottages in twos and threes, avenues of leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, and taken us back by another road? Is not this the same place twice over? Thank Heaven no. A village. Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued! Hush; the posting-house.

Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach stands in the little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood upon it of ever moving again; leisurely, the new horses come into visible existence, one by one; leisurely, the new postilions follow, sucking and plaiting the lashes of their whips; leisurely, the old postilions count their money, make wrong additions, and arrive at dissatisfied results. All the time, our overfraught hearts are beating at a rate that would far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest horses ever foaled.

At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are left behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down the hill, and on the low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions exchange speech with animated gesticulation, and the horses are pulled up, almost on their haunches. We are pursued!

‘Ho! Within the carriage there. Speak then!’

‘What is it?’ asks Mr Lorry, looking out at window.

‘How many did they say?’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘- At the last post. How many to the Guillotine to-day?’

‘Fifty-two.’

‘I said so! A brave number! My fellow-citizen here, would have it forty-two; ten more heads are worth having. The Guillotine goes handsomely. I love it. Hi forward. Whoop then!’

The night comes on dark. He moves more; he is beginning to revive, and to speak intelligibly; he thinks they are still together; he asks him, by his name, what he has in his hand. O pity us, kind Heaven, and help us! Look out, look out, and see if we are pursued.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.

 

[END OF INSTALMENT 29]

In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their fate, Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Vengeance and Jacques Three of the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the wine-shop did Madame Defarge confer with these ministers, but in the shed of the wood-sawyer, erst a mender of roads. The sawyer himself did not participate in the conference, but abided at a little distance, like an outer satellite who was not to speak until required, or to offer an opinion until invited.

‘But our Defarge,’ said Jacques Three, ‘is undoubtedly a good Republican? Eh?’

‘There is no better,’ the voluble Vengeance protested in her shrill notes, ‘in France.’

‘Peace, little Vengeance,’ said Madame Defarge, laying her hand with a slight frown on her lieutenant’s lips, ‘hear me speak. My husband, fellow-citizen, is a good Republican and a bold man; he has deserved well of the Republic, and possesses its confidence. But my husband has his weaknesses, and he is so weak as to relent towards this Doctor.’

‘It is a great pity,’ croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking his head, with his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth; ‘it is not quite like a good citizen; it is a thing to regret.’

‘See you,’ said madame, ‘I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He may wear his head or lose it, for any interest I have in him; it is all one to me. But, the Evrémonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and child must follow the husband and father.’

‘She has a fine head for it,’ croaked Jacques Three. ‘I have seen blue eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson held them up.’ Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.

Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little.

‘The child also,’ observed Jacques Three, with a meditative enjoyment of his words, ‘has golden hair and blue eyes. And we seldom have a child there. It is a pretty sight!’

‘In a word,’ said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short abstraction, ‘I cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only do I feel, since last night, that I dare not confide to him the details of my projects; but also I feel that if I delay, there is danger of his giving warning, and then they might escape.’

‘That must never be,’ croaked Jacques Three; ‘no one must escape. We have not half enough as it is. We ought to have six score a day.’

‘In a word,’ Madame Defarge went on, ‘my husband has not my reason for pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not his reason for regarding this Doctor with any sensibility. I must act for myself, therefore. Come hither, little citizen.’

The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the submission, of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap.

‘Touching those signals, little citizen,’ said Madame Defarge, sternly, ‘that she made to the prisoners; you are ready to bear witness to them this very day?’

‘Ay, ay, why not!’ cried the sawyer. ‘Every day, in all weathers, from two to four, always signalling, sometimes with the little one, sometimes without. I know what I know, I have seen with my eyes.’

He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in incidental imitation of some few of the great diversity of signals that he had never seen.

‘Clearly plots,’ said Jacques Three. ‘Transparently!’

‘There is no doubt of the Jury?’ inquired Madame Defarge, letting her eyes turn to him with a gloomy smile.

‘Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my fellow-Jurymen.’

‘Now, let me see,’ said Madame Defarge, pondering again. ‘Yet once more! Can I spare this Doctor to my husband? I have no feeling either way. Can I spare him?’

‘He would count as one head,’ observed Jacques Three, in a low voice. ‘We really have not heads enough; it would be a pity, I think.’

‘He was signalling with her when I saw her,’ argued Madame Defarge; ‘I cannot speak of one without the other; and I must not be silent, and trust the case wholly to him, this little citizen here. For, I am not a bad witness.’

The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their fervent protestations that she was the most admirable and marvellous of witnesses. The little citizen, not to be outdone, declared her to be a celestial witness.

‘He must take his chance,’ said Madame Defarge. ‘No; I cannot spare him! You are engaged at three o’clock; you are going to see the batch of to-day executed. – You?’

The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly replied in the affirmative: seizing the occasion to add that he was the most ardent of Republicans, and that he would be in effect the most desolate of Republicans, if anything prevented him from enjoying the pleasure of smoking his afternoon pipe in the contemplation of the droll national barber. He was so very demonstrative herein, that he might have been suspected (perhaps was, by the dark eyes that looked contemptuously at him out of Madame Defarge’s head) of having his small individual fears for his own personal safety, every hour in the day.

‘I,’ said madame, ‘am equally engaged at the same place. After it is over – say at eight to-night – come you to me, in Saint Antoine, and we will give information against these people at my Section.’

The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend the citizeness. The citizeness looking at him, he became embarrassed, evaded her glance as a small dog would have done, retreated among his wood, and hid his confusion over the handle of his saw.

Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a little nearer to the door, and there expounded her further views to them thus:

‘She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. She will be mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of mind to impeach the justice of the Republic. She will be full of sympathy with its enemies. I will go to her.’

‘What an admirable woman; what an adorable woman!’ exclaimed Jacques Three, rapturously. ‘Ah, my cherished!’ cried The Vengeance; and embraced her.

‘Take you my knitting,’ said Madame Defarge, placing it in her lieutenant’s hands, ‘and have it ready for me in my usual seat. Keep me my usual chair. Go you there, straight, for there will probably be a greater concourse than usual, to-day.’

‘I willingly obey the orders of my Chief,’ said The Vengeance, with alacrity, and kissing her cheek. ‘You will not be late?’

‘I shall be there before the commencement.’

‘And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my soul,’ said The Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already turned into the street, ‘before the tumbrils arrive!’

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she heard, and might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so went through the mud, and round the corner of the prison wall. The Vengeance and the Juryman, looking after her as she walked away, were highly appreciative of her fine figure, and her superb moral endowments.

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class, opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who sent her there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very moment waiting for the completion of its load, had been planned out last night, the difficulty of taking Miss Pross in it had much engaged Mr Lorry’s attention. It was not merely desirable to avoid overloading the coach, but it was of the highest importance that the time occupied in examining it, and its passengers, should be reduced to the utmost; since their escape might depend on the saving of only a few seconds here and there. Finally, he had proposed, after anxious consideration, that Miss Pross and Jerry, who were at liberty to leave the city, should leave it at three o’clock in the lightest-wheeled conveyance known to that period. Unencumbered with luggage, they would soon overtake the coach, and, passing it and preceding it on the road, would order horses in advance, and greatly facilitate its progress during the precious hours of the night, when delay was the most to be dreaded.

Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in that pressing emergency, Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and Jerry had beheld the coach start, had known who it was that Solomon brought, had passed some ten minutes in tortures of suspense, and were now concluding their arrangements to follow the coach, even as Madame Defarge, taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer to the else-deserted lodging in which they held their consultation.

‘Now what do you think, Mr Cruncher,’ said Miss Pross, whose agitation was so great that she could hardly speak, or stand, or move, or live; ‘what do you think of our not starting from this court-yard? Another carriage having already gone from here to-day, it might awaken suspicion.’

‘My opinion, miss,’ returned Mr Cruncher, ‘is as you’re right. Likewise wot I’ll stand by you, right or wrong.’

‘I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creatures, ’ said Miss Pross, wildly crying, ‘that I am incapable of forming any plan. Are
you
capable of forming any plan, my dear good Mr Cruncher?’

‘Respectin’ a future spear o’ life, miss,’ returned Mr Cruncher, ‘I hope so. Respectin’ any present use o’ this here blessed old head o’ mine, I think not. Would you do me the favour, miss, to take notice o’ two promises and wows wot it is my wishes fur to record in this here crisis?’

‘Oh, for gracious sake!’ cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying, ‘record them at once, and get them out of the way, like an excellent man.’