“And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?” said Carton, turning to him.
“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped to have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I have my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.”
They were both silent.
“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton, wistfully.
“I am in my seventy-eighth year.”
“You have been useful all your life, steadily and constantly occupied; trusted, respected, and looked up to?”
“I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. Indeed, I may say that I was a man of business when a boy.”
“See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people will miss you when you leave it empty!”
“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his head. “There is nobody to weep for me.”
“How can you say that? Wouldn’t she weep for you? Wouldn’t her child?”
“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn’t quite mean what I said.”
“It is a thing to thank God for; is it not?”
“Surely, surely.”
“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night, “I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by’; your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they not?”
“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.”
Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a few moments, said:
“I should like to ask you: Does your childhood seem far off? Do the days when you sat at your mother’s knee seem days of very long ago?”
Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:
“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!), and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”
“I understand the feeling!” exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. “And you are the better for it?”
“I hope so.”
Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him on with his outer coat. “But you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the theme, “you are young.”
“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age. Enough of me.”
“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going out?”
“I’ll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, don’t be uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the Court to-morrow?”
“Yes, unhappily.”
“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My spy will find a place for me. Take my arm, sir.”
Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the streets. A few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry’s destination. Carton left him there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned back to the gate again when it was shut, and touched it. He had heard of her going to the prison every day. “She came out here,” he said, looking about him, “turned this way, must have trod on these stones often. Let me follow in her steps.”
It was ten o’clock at night when he stood before the prison of La Force, where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-sawyer, having closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-door.
“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by; for the man eyed him inquisitively.