...esaid, Charles Darnay, stood there before him upon his trial;
that the jury were swearing in; and that Mr. Attorney-General was
making ready to speak.
The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally
hanged, beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither
flinched from the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He
was quiet and attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a
grave interest; and stood with his hands resting on the slab of
wood before him, so composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf
of the herbs with which it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn
with herbs and sprinkled with vinegar, as a precaution against
gaol air and gaol fever.
Over the prisoner’s head there was a mirror, to throw the light
down upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been
reflected in it, and had passed from its surface and this earth’s
together. Haunted in a most ghastly manner that abominable
place would have been, if the glass could ever have rendered back
its reflections, as the ocean is one day to give up its dead. Some
passing thought of the infamy and disgrace for which it had been
reserved, may have struck the prisoner’s mind. Be that as it may, a
change in his position making him conscious of a bar of light
across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his face
flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.
It happened that the action turned his face to that side of the
court which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there
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A Tale of Two Cities
sat, in that corner of the Judge’s bench, two persons upon whom
his look immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the
changing of his aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon
him, turned to them.
The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little
more than twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father;
a man of a very remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute
whiteness of his hair, and a certain indescribable intensity of face:
not of an active kind, but pondering and self-communing. When
this was upon him, he looked as if he were old; but
when it was stirred and broken up—as it was now, in a moment,
on his speaking to his daughter—he became a handsome man, not
past the prime of life.
His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as
she sat by him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn
close to him, in her dread of the scene, and in her pity for the
prisoner. Her forehead had been strikingly expressive of an
engrossing terror and compassion that saw nothing but the peril of
the accused. This had been so very noticeable, so very powerfully
and naturally shown, that starers who had had no pity for him
were touched by her; and the whisper went about, “Who are
they?”
Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in
his own manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers
in his absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The
crowd about him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the
nearest attendant, and from him it had been more slowly pressed
and passed back; at last it got to Jerry:
“Witnesses.”
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A Tale of Two Cities
“For which side?”
“Against.”
“Against what side?”
“The prisoner’s.”
The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction,
recalled them, leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the
man whose life was in his **s Mr. Attorney-General rose to
spin the rope, grind the axe, and hammer the nails into the
scaffold.
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