A Tale of Two Cities | Page 9

all be
there. Out of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he
would accost it again.
"Buried how long?"
"Almost eighteen years."
"I hope you care to live?"
"I can't say."
Dig--dig--dig--until an impatient movement from one of the two
passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm
securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two
slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again
slid away into the bank and the grave.
"Buried how long?"
"Almost eighteen years."
"You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
"Long ago."
The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in his
hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary
passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the
shadows of the night were gone.
He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last
night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in

which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear,
and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
"Eighteen years!" said the passenger, looking at the sun. "Gracious
Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!"

IV
The Preparation
When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,
the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as
his custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail
journey from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an
adventurous traveller upon.
By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be
congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective
roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp
and dirty straw, its disageeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather like
a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out of it
in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and muddy
legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.
"There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?"
"Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The tide
will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed, sir?"
"I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber."
"And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please. Show
Concord! Gentleman's valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off
gentleman's boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.)
Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!"

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up
from head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment
of the Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go
into it, all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently,
another drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady,
were all loitering by accident at various points of the road between the
Concord and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally
dressed in a brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept,
with large square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on
his way to his breakfast.
The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the
gentleman in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and
as he sat, with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so
still, that he might have been sitting for his portrait.
Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and
a loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat, as
though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and
evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain of
it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a fine
texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He wore an
odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his head: which
wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which looked far more
as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass. His linen, though
not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings, was as white as the
tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring beach, or the
specks of sail that glinted in the