A Tale of Two Cities

which the boy had addressed the elder brother, with the initial
letter embroidered on the scarf, and had no difficulty in arriving at
the conclusion that I had seen that nobleman very lately.

"My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of our
conversation.  I suspect that I am watched more closely than I was,
and I know not at what times I may be watched.  She had in part
suspected, and in part discovered, the main facts of the cruel story,
of her husband's share in it, and my being resorted to.  She did not
know that the girl was dead.  Her hope had been, she said in great
distress, to show her, in secret, a woman's sympathy.  Her hope had
been to avert the wrath of Heaven from a House that had long been
hateful to the suffering many.

"She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister living,
and her greatest desire was, to help that sister.  I could tell her
nothing but that there was such a sister; beyond that, I knew nothing.
Her inducement to come to me, relying on my confidence, had been the
hope that I could tell her the name and place of abode.  Whereas,
to this wretched hour I am ignorant of both.

        *       *       *

"These scraps of paper fail me.  One was taken from me, with a
warning, yesterday.  I must finish my record to-day.

"She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her marriage.
How could she be!  The brother distrusted and disliked her, and his
influence was all opposed to her; she stood in dread of him, and in
dread of her husband too.  When I handed her down to the door, there
was a child, a pretty boy from two to three years old, in her carriage.

"`For his sake, Doctor,' she said, pointing to him in tears, `I would
do all I can to make what poor amends I can.  He will never prosper
in his inheritance otherwise.  I have a presentiment that if no other
innocent atonement is made for this, it will one day be required of
him.  What I have left to call my own--it is little beyond the worth
of a few jewels--I will make it the first charge of his life to
bestow, with the compassion and lamenting of his dead mother, on this
injured family, if the sister can be discovered.'

"She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, `It is for thine own
dear sake.  Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?' The child
answered her bravely, `Yes!' I kissed her hand, and she took him in
her arms, and went away caressing him.  I never saw her more.

"As she had mentioned her husband's name in the faith that I knew it,
I added no mention of it to my letter.  I sealed my letter, and, not
trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that day.

"That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o'clock, a man
in a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly
followed my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs.  When my
servant came into the room where I sat with my wife--O my wife,
beloved of my heart!  My fair young English wife!--we saw the man,
who was supposed to be at the gate, standing silent behind him.

"An urgent case in the Rue St. Honore, he said.  It would not detain
me, he had a coach in waiting.

"It brought me here, it brought me to my grave.  When I was clear of
the house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from
behind, and my arms were pinioned.  The two brothers crossed the road
from a dark corner, and identified me with a single gesture.  The
Marquis took from his pocket the letter I had written, showed it me,
burnt it in the light of a lantern that was held, and extinguished
the ashes with his foot.  Not a word was spoken.  I was brought here,
I was brought to my living grave.

"If it had pleased _God_ to put it in the hard heart of either of the
brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of my
dearest wife--so much as to let me know by a word whether alive or
dead--I might have thought that He had not quite abandoned them.
But, now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to them,
and that they have no part in His mercies.  And them and their
descendants, to the last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy
prisoner, do this last night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony,
denounce to the times when all these things shall be answered for.
I denounce them to Heaven and to earth."

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was done.  A
sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but
blood.  The narrative called up the most revengeful passions of the
time, and there was not a head in the nation but must have dropped
before it.

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to show
how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the other
captured Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had kept it,
biding their time.  Little need to show that this detested family
name had long been anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was wrought
into the fatal register.  The man never trod ground whose virtues and
services would have sustained him in that place that day, against
such denunciation.

And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was a
well-known citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife.
One of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations
of the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices
and self-immolations on the people's altar.  Therefore when the