"But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I am
naturally a poor little thing, faint of heart; nor should I have been
able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might
have hope and comfort here to-day. I think you were sent to me by Heaven."
"Or you to me," says Sydney Carton. "Keep your eyes upon me, dear child,
and mind no other object."
"I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing when
I let it go, if they are rapid."
"They will be rapid. Fear not!"
The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak
as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand,
heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so
wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway,
to repair home together, and to rest in her bosom.
"Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last
question? I am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little."
"Tell me what it is."
"I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I
love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in
a farmer's house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she
knows nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how
should I tell her! It is better as it is."
"Yes, yes: better as it is."
"What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still
thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so
much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor,
and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she
may live a long time: she may even live to be old."
"What then, my gentle sister?"
"Do you think:" the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much
endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and
tremble: "that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the
better land where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?"
"It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble
there."
"You comfort me so much! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss you now?
Is the moment come?"
"Yes."
She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other.
The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than
a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next
before him--is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord:
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die."
The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces,
the pressing on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd,
so that it swells forward in a mass, like one great heave of water,
all flashes away. Twenty-Three.
* * *
They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the
peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked
sublime and prophetic.
One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe--a woman--had
asked at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be
allowed to write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he
had given any utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would
have been these:
"I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the
Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the
destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument,
before it shall cease out of its present use.
