A Tale of Two Cities, Dave Mckay, Charles Dickens [most inspirational books of all time TXT] 📗

"God knows it is!"

"They why not change it?"

Looking kindly at him again, she was surprised and hurt to see that there were tears in his eyes. They were in his voice too, as he answered:

"It is too late for that. I will never be better than I am. I will only sink lower and grow worse."

He leaned an elbow on the table and covered his eyes with his hands. They both said nothing, but the table was shaking.

She had never seen this soft side of him, and she did not know what to do or say. He understood this, without looking at her, and so he said:

"Please forgive me, Miss Manette. I am like this because of what I want to say to you. Will you hear me out?"

"If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if it will make you happier, it would make me very glad!"

"God bless you for your sweet spirit!"

He uncovered his face after a little while and spoke clearly.

"Don't be afraid to hear me. Don't pull back from anything I say. I am like one who died young. All my life has been wasted."

"No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it is still to come. I am sure that you can be much much more than you are now."

"I hear what you are saying, Miss Manette. I know better. In the secret place of my awful heart, I know better. But I will never forget what you have just said."

"If it had been possible, Miss Manette, for you to return the love of the man who is in front of you now... a man who has wasted his life and destroyed his body through alcohol -- he would know, even now, that the happiness he would feel from that would not have stopped him from making you sad, embarrassing you, destroying you, and pulling you down with him. I know that there is no reason for you to feel that kind of love for me. I do not ask for that, and I even thank God that you cannot."

"But isn't there a way that I can help you without that, Mr. Carton? Can't I call you back -- Forgive me again! -- to a better way? Is there nothing I can do to thank you for being honest with me just now? I know that what you have said was said in confidence," she said humbly after waiting a short while before saying it, with sincere tears in her eyes. "I know you would not say this to anyone else. Can I turn it to something good for yourself, Mr. Carton?"

He shook his head.

"To nothing. No, Miss Manette, to nothing. If you will listen just for a little longer, you will have done for me all that you can do. I want you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. I have not been so far gone that I could not see in you and your father and in this home that you have built up together, something that lifted my spirit from the darkness that I had thought I was buried in. Since meeting you, I have heard old voices that I thought I would never hear again, calling on me to remember the good times, and to not give up hope for better ones to come. There have been whispers encouraging me to feel sorry about my actions, and thoughts about starting over, shaking off the lazy and selfish ways of the past, returning to the fight for all that is good. But it is all a dream, a dream that ends in nothing and leaves the sleeper where he was. But I want you to know that you are the one who put these thoughts into my head."

"Will nothing at all come of it? Oh, Mr. Carton, please try again!"

"No, Miss Manette. Through it all, I have known that I am not able to live up to those dreams. On top of that, I have selfishly wanted you to know how much effect your spirit has had on me, cold ashes that I am. You have started a fire in me, a fire which will help no one, but a fire all the same."

"Since I have made you, Mr. Carton, sadder than you were before you knew me..."

"Don't say that, Miss Manette! If anyone could have saved me, it would have been you. You're not the reason I will grow worse."

"Since the feelings you have now are in some way the effect of knowing me -- That is what I mean, if I can make myself clear. -- can I not use my power to help you in some way? Do I have no power for good with you at all?"

"The most good that I could possibly do, Miss Manette, is what I have come here to do. Let me remember through what I have left of my awful life, that I opened up to you alone of all people with the truth about myself, and that you were able to feel sorry for me."

"Remember too that I begged you again and again with all my heart, to believe you are able to do better than this, Mr. Carton!"

"Do not beg me any more, Miss Manette. I know myself better than you, and I know what I am able to do and what I am not able to do. I am sorry to have made you feel sad. I will finish quickly. Will you let me believe, when I remember this day, that the last time I opened my heart to someone it was to someone with a perfect and innocent spirit, and that she would never share it with anyone?"

"If that is what you want, I will do it. Yes."

"Not even to the one you come to love most in this world?"

"Mr. Carton," she answered, after fighting with this thought for a few seconds, "the secret is yours, not mine. I promise to keep it."

"Thank you, and again, God bless you."

He put her hand to his lips and moved toward the door.

"Do not fear, Miss Manette, that I will ever tell anyone about this meeting. I will never say one word about it again. If I were dead, I could not be quieter about it. And in the hour of my death I will remember this one thing as holy -- and I will thank you and bless you for it -- that my last act of honesty was made to you, and that you carry kindly in your heart my name with all my wrongs and sadness. Apart from this, may your heart be filled with light and happiness!"

He was so different to how he had ever seemed, and it was so sad to think of how much he had thrown away, and how much he forced out of his mind each day, that Lucie Manette cried deeply for him as he stood looking back at her.

"Do not be sad!" he said. "I am not worth such feelings, Miss Manette. An hour or two from now, and the low friends and the low actions that I hate, but give in to, will make me of less worth than any poor soul that walks the streets. Do not be sad! But, inside myself I will always be toward you what I am now, even if on the outside I go back to acting like I did before. The second last thing I ask of you is that you believe what I have just said."

"I will, Mr. Carton."

"And the very last thing I ask is this, and with it I will take a visitor away from you who is so opposite to you, and who is separated from you by a space that can never be bridged. There is no point in saying it, I know, but it comes up out of my soul. For you, and for anyone whom you love, I would do anything. If my work was of a better kind that it could be used, at any cost, to help you, I would pay any price to help you or those you love. Try to remember me, at some quiet times, as deeply sincere in this one thing. The time will come, and it will not be long in coming, when new ropes will tie you even more closely to the home that you have made so beautiful. They will be the most loving ropes, and they will fill your heart with happiness. So, Miss Manette, when the picture of a happy father's face looks up at you, and you see yourself growing again in a little child at your feet, think from time to time that there is a man who would give his life to keep a life you love beside you!"

He said "Goodbye!" and a last "God bless you!" and he left.

14. An Honest Worker

Before the eyes of Mr. Jerry Cruncher, sitting on his little chair in Fleet Street, with his ugly son beside him, there moved, every day, long lines of vehicles and people. Who could sit on anything in Fleet Street during the busy hours of the day and not lose their ability to think or hear clearly just from watching those two great lines of movement, one going east, and one going west!

With a piece of straw in his mouth, Mr. Cruncher watched the two rivers of opposite movement like some uneducated farmer watching a little river on his land, for fear that it would dry up. But for Jerry, there was no thought that the movement would ever dry up. And he would have felt bad if it did, because from those two rivers he made a little money each day. He would lead shy women (most of them fat and old) from Tellson's side of the rivers safely across to the opposite side. In the short time that he was with these women, he would always show so much interest in them and be so moved by knowing them that he would say he wanted to have a drink to their good health, and they would give him money to be used to do it.

It happened one day that there were so few people on the street and so few women running late, and his money was so low that he started to think that Mrs. Cruncher must be throwing herself down on her knees again. And just then he looked up to see a strange group of people coming down Fleet Street. It was some kind of a funeral, and it seemed that there was a crowd of people who were angry about it.

"Young Jerry," said Mr. Cruncher, turning to his son, "it's a burying."

"Hooray, father!" cried young Jerry.

For his father there was a secret meaning behind this shout, and he did not like it. So he hit the young man on the ear.

"What do you mean? What are you hooraying at? What are you trying to say to your father, you waste of a boy! This one boy is getting to be too many for me!" said Mr. Cruncher, looking young Jerry over. "Him and his hoorays! Don't let me hear no more of you, or you'll feel some more of me. You hear?"

"I weren't doing no hurt," young Jerry argued, rubbing his cheek.

"Drop it then," said Mr. Cruncher. "I won't have none of your no hurts. Get a top of that there seat and look at the crowd."

His son obeyed him, and the crowd came closer. They were shouting and making other angry noises around two dirty old coaches, one carrying the body, and one carrying only one friend of the dead person, dressed as one does when going to a funeral. The man in the second coach did not seem to be happy with what was happening, as more and more people moved around the coach, putting him down, making faces, and shouting out: "Go on! Selling secrets! Yeah, treason!" There were many other words that were too rough to print here.

Funerals were always interesting to Mr. Cruncher. He would always take special interest when one passed Tellson's. So one could understand that this one, with a wild crowd around it was of special interest. He asked the first man to reach him:

"What is it, brother? What's it about?"

"I don't know," returned the other man, putting his hands to his mouth all the same, and shouting with a surprising heat and the greatest feeling, "Treason, yeah! How awful!"

At length, another man, with more information about the case pushed into him, and from this person, he learned that the funeral was for one Roger Cly.

"Was he guilty of treason?” asked Mr. Cruncher.

"Old Bailey, treason, yes," returned the man. "How awful! Away with him! Old Bailey, treason!"

"What do you know!" Jerry said in surprise. "I've seen him before. Dead, is he?"

"Dead as meat," returned the other, "and he can't be too dead for that too. Pull him out, there! Both of them! Pull them