Charles Dickens: Great Expectations & A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens

is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you may be able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against me. I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The condition on which I ask it, and which you have an undoubted right to require, I will observe immediately.”

      “I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “without any condition. I believe your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties between me and my other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you. If there were — Charles Darnay, if there were — ”

      The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as the Doctor spoke:

      “ — any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or old, against the man she really loved — the direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head — they should all be obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me than wrong, more to me — Well! This is idle talk.”

      So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.

      “You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile. “What was it you said to me?”

      He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:

      “Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother’s, is not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and why I am in England.”

      “Stop!” said the Doctor of Beauvais.

      “I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no secret from you.”

      “Stop!”

      For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay’s lips.

      “Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you promise?”

      “Willingly.

      “Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she should not see us together tonight. Go! God bless you!”

      It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone — for Miss Pross had gone straight upstairs — and was surprised to find his reading-chair empty.

      “My father!” she called to him. “Father dear!”

      Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at his door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her blood all chilled, “What shall I do! What shall I do!”

      Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down together for a long time.

She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished work, were all as usual.

      CHAPTER XI.

      A Companion Picture

      Table of Contents

      “Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that selfsame night, or morning, to his jackal; “mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you.”

      Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night before, and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession, making a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver’s papers before the setting in of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver arrears were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until November should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal, and bring grist to the mill again.

      Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded the towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled his turban off and threw it into the basin in which he had steeped it at intervals for the last six hours.

      “Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?” said Stryver the portly, with his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on his back.

      “I am.”

      “Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.”

      “Do you?”

      “Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?”

      “I don’t feel disposed to say much. Who is she?”

      “Guess.”

      “Do I know her?”

      “Guess.”

      “I am not going to guess, at five o’clock in the morning, with my brains frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask me to dinner.”

      “Well then, I’ll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog.”

      “And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are such a sensitive and poetical spirit — ”

      “Come!” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “though I don’t prefer any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still I am a tenderer sort of fellow than you.”

      “You are a luckier, if you mean that.”

      “I don’t mean that. I mean I am a man of more — more — ”

      “Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton.

      “Well! I’ll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” said Stryver, inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, “who cares more to be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how to be agreeable, in a woman’s society, than you do.”

      “Go on,” said Sydney Carton.

      “No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying way, “I’ll have this out with you. You’ve been at Doctor Manette’s house as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you, Sydney!”

      “It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to be ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to be much obliged to me.”

      “You shall not get off in that way,” rejoined Stryver, shouldering the rejoinder at him; “no, Sydney, it’s my duty to tell you — and I tell you to your face to do you good — that you are a devilish ill-conditioned fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.”

      Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.

      “Look at me!” said Stryver, squaring