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


57

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 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 expression 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.”

“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
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