《A Tale of Two Cities》　Book2　CHAPTER
XXI Echoing Footsteps
　　　　by Charles Dickens

A WONDERFUL corner for
echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the
golden thread which bound her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress
and companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in the tranquilly
resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of years.



At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife, when her work
would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be dimmed. For, there was something
coming in the echoes, something light, afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred
her heart too much. Fluttering hopes and doubts--hope, of a love as yet unknown to her:
doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight--divided her breast. Among
the echoes then, there would arise the sound of footsteps at her own early grave; and
thoughts of the husband who would be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so
much, swelled to her eyes, and broke like waves.



That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the advancing echoes,
there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of her prattling words. Let greater
echoes resound as they would, the young mother at the cradle side could always hear those
coming. They came, and the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the Divine
friend of children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take her child
in His arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred joy to her.



Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together, weaving the service of
her happy influence through the tissue of all their lives, and making it predominate
nowhere, Lucie heard in the echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds.

Her husband's step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal. Lo,
Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an unrulycharger,
whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the plane-tree in the garden!



Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not harsh nor cruel. Even
when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a pillow round the worn face of a little
boy, and he said, with a radiant smile, `Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you
both, and to leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!' those were not tears
all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek, as the spirit departed from her embrace
that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and forbid them not. They see my Father's face.
O Father, blessed words!



Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got blended with the other echoes, and they were
not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew
over a little garden-tomb were mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in
a hushed murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore--as the
little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or dressing a doll at her
mother's footstool, chattered in the tongues of the Two Cities that were blended in her
life.



The echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some half-dozen times a
year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in uninvited, and would sit among them
through the evening, as he had once done often. He never came there heated with wine. And
one other thing regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by all
true echoes for ages and ages.



No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an
unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother, but her children had a strange sympathy
with him--an instinctivedelicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are
touched in such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton was the
first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms, and he kept his place with
her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of him, almost at the last. `Poor Carton! Kiss
him for me!'



Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine forcing itself
through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in his wake, like a boat towed astern.
As the boat so favoured is usually in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney
had a swamped life of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and
stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made it the life he was
to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his state of lion's jackal, than any real
jackal may be supposed to think of rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a
florid widow

with property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them but the
straight hair of their dumpling heads.



These three young gentleman, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most offensive quality
from every pore, had walked before him like three sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and
had offered as pupils to Lucie's husband: delicatelysaying, `Halloa! here are three lumps
of bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!' The polite rejection of the
three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr. Stryver with indignation, which he
afterwards turned to account in the training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to
beware of the pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of
declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once
put in practice to `catch' him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam,
which had rendered him `not to be caught.' Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were
occasionally parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the latter by
saying that he had told it so often, that he believed it himself--which is surely such an
incorrigible aggravation of an originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender's
being carried off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.



These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes amused and
laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little daughter was six years old. How
near to her heart the echoes of her child's tread came, and those of her own dear
father's, always active and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband's, need not be
told. Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself with such a
wise and elegantthrift that it was more abundant than any waste, was music to her. Nor,
how there were echoes all about her, sweet in her ears, of the many times her father had
told her that he found her more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and
of the many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed to divide
her love for him or her help to him, and asked her `What is the magic secret, my darling,
of

your being everything to all of us, as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to
be hurried, or to have too much to do?'



But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the corner all
through this space of time. And it was now, about little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they
began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.



On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr. Lorry came in
late, from Tellson's, and sat himself down by Lucie and her husband in the dark window. It
was a hot, wild night, and they were all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they
had looked at the lightning from the same place.



`I began to think,' said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, `that I should have to
pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so full of business all day, that we have not
known what to do first, or which way to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that
we have actually a run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be
able to confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania among some
of them for sending it to England.'



`That has a bad look,' said Darnay.



`A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don't know what reason there is in it.
People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson's are getting old, and we really can't
be troubled out of the ordinary course without due occasion.'



`Still,' said Darnay, `you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.'



`I know that, to be sure,' assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade himself that his sweet
temper was soured, and that he grumbled, `but I am determined to be peevish after my long
day's botheration. Where is Manette?'



`Here he is,' said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.



`I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by which I have been
surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without reason. You are not going out, I
hope?'



`No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,' said the Doctor.



`I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be pitted against you
to-night. Is the tea-board still there, Lucie? I can't see.'



`Of course, it has been kept for you.'



`Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?'



`And sleeping soundly.



`That's right; all safe and well! I don't know why anything should be otherwise than safe
and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out all day, and I am not as young as I
was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now, come and take your place in the circle, and let us
sit quiet, and hear the echoes about which you have your theory.'



`Not a theory; it was a fancy.'



`A fancy, then, my wise pet,' said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. `They are very numerous
and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!'



Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's life, footsteps
not easily made clean again if once stained red, the footsteps raging in Saint Antoine
afar off, as the little circle sat in the dark London window.



Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro,
with frequent gleams of light above the billowy heads, where steel blades and bayonets
shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine,

and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a
winter wind: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a
weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.



Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what agency they
crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the heads of the crowd, like a kind
of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but, muskets were being
distributed--so were cartridges, powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes,
pikes, every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could
lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks
out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever
strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as of no account, and
was demented with a passionatereadiness to sacrifice it.



As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging circled round
Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron had a tendency to be sucked
towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and

sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward,
disarmed one to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.



`Keep near to me, Jacques Three,' cried Defarge; `and do you, Jacques One and Two,
separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these patriots as you can. Where is
my wife?'



`Eh, well! Here you see me!' said madame, composed as ever, but not knitting to-day.
Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe, in place of the usual softer
implements, and in her girdle were a pistol and a cruel knife.



`Where do you go, my wife?'



`I go,' said madame, `with you at present. You shall see me at the head of women,
by-and-by.'



`Come, then!' cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. `Patriots and friends, we are ready!
The Bastille!'



With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped into the detested
word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that
point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums beating, the sea raging and thundering

on its new beach, the attack `begun.



Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets,
fire and smoke. Through the fire and through the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for
the sea cast him up against a cannon, and on the instant he became a

cannonier--Defarge of the wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.



Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight at towers, cannon, muskets, fire
and smoke. One drawbridge down! `Work, comrades all, work! Work, Jacques , Jacques Two,
Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name
of all the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!' Thus Defarge of the wine-shop,
still at his gun, which had long grown hot.



`To me, women!' cried madame his wife. `What! We can kill as well as the men when the
place is taken!' And to her, with a shrill thirsty cry, trooping women variously armed,
but all armed alike in hunger and revenge.



Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the
massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea,
made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggon-loads of
wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,
execrations, bravery without stint, boom, smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of
the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive
stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun,
grown