“Good day, Jacques!” the spy repeated; with not quite so much confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.
“You deceive yourself, monsieur,” returned the keeper of the wine-shop. “You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.”
“It is all the same,” said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: “good day!”
“Good day!” answered Defarge, drily.
“I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when you entered, that they tell me there is—and no wonder!—much sympathy and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.”
“No one has told me so,” said Defarge, shaking his head. “I know nothing of it.”
Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair, looking over that barrier at the person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would have shot with the greatest satisfaction.
The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over it.
“You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?” observed Defarge.
“Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested in its miserable inhabitants.”
“Hah!” muttered Defarge.
“The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recalls to me,” pursued the spy, “that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting associations with your name.”
“Indeed!” said Defarge, with much indifference.
“Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old domestic, had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am informed of the circumstances?”
“Such is the fact, certainly,” said Defarge. He had had it conveyed to him, in an accidental touch of his wife’s elbow as she knitted and warbled, that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.
“It was to you,” said the spy, “that his daughter came; and it was from your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown monsieur; how is he called?—in a little wig—Lorry—of the bank of Tellson and Company—over to England.”
“Such is the fact,” repeated Defarge.
“Very interesting remembrances!” said the spy. “I have known Doctor Manette and his daughter, in England.”
“Yes?” said Defarge.
“You don’t hear much about them now?” said the spy.
“No,” said Defarge.
“In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little song, “we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then, they have gradually taken their road in life—we, ours—and we have held no correspondence.”
“Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be married.”
“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have been married long ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.”
“Oh! You know I am English.”
“I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame; “and what the tongue is, I suppose the man is.”
He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the end, he added:
“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah, poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is Mr. Charles Darnay. D’Aulnais is the name of his mother’s family.”
Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter, as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.