engaged herself in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She
had employed herself in both ways, at his side under the tree,
many and many a time; but, this time was not quite like any other,
and nothing could make it so.
“And I am very happy tonight, dear father. I am deeply happy
in the love that Heaven has so blessed—my love for Charles, and
Charles’s love for me. But, if my life were not to be still
consecrated to you, or if my marriage were so arranged as that it
would part us, even by the length of a few of these streets, I should
be more unhappy and self-reproachful now than I can tell you.
Even as it is—” Even as it was, she could not command her voice.
In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her
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A Tale of Two Cities
face upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the
light of the sun itself is—as the light called human life is—at its
coming and its going.
“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel
quite, quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of
mine, will ever interpose between us? I know it well, but do you
know it? In your own heart, do you feel quite certain?”
Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he
could scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling! More than
that,” he added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far
brighter, Lucie, seen through your marriage, than it could have
been—nay, than it ever was—without it.”
“If I could hope that, my father!—”
“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how
plain it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young,
cannot fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should
not be wasted—” She moved her hand towards his lips, but he
took it in his, and repeated the word.
“—wasted, my child—should not be wasted, struck aside from
the natural order of things—for my sake. Your unselfishness
cannot entirely comprehend how much my mind has gone on this;
but, only ask yourself, how could my happiness be perfect, while
yours was incomplete?”
“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been
quite happy with you.”
He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have
been unhappy without Charles, having seen him; and replied:
“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been
Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I
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A Tale of Two Cities
should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life
would have cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen
on you.”
It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him
refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new
sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it
long afterwards.
“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards
the moon. “I have looked at her, from my prison-window, when I
could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been
such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost,
that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked
at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of
nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her
at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I
could intersect them.” He adde"};
