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PinkMonkey.com Digital Library - A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens


315

“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
hun-gry, 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 knittingwomen 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. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this
abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and
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