A Tale of Two Cities-CHAPTER 13 FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-TWO,In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed ¹ of the day awaited their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. Fifty-two were to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless ² everlasting ³ sea. Before their cells were quit of them, new occupants were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle ⁵ with theirs tomorrow was already set apart.,Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy, whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases, engendered ⁶ in the vices ⁷ and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees; and the frightful ⁸ moral disorder ⁹, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference ¹⁰, smote ¹¹ equally without distinction.,Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no flattering delusion ¹² since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every line of the narrative ¹³ he had heard, he had heard his condemnation ¹⁴. He had fully ¹⁵ comprehended that no personal influence could possibly save him, that he was virtually sentenced by the millions, and that units could avail him nothing.,Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife fresh before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His hold on life was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen; by gradual efforts and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched ¹⁶ the tighter there; and when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it yielded, this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in all his thoughts, a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that contended against resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel resigned, then his wife and child who had to live after him, seemed to protest and to make it a selfish thing.,But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that there was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers went the same road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day, sprang up to stimulate ¹⁷ him. Next followed the thought that much of the future peace of mind enjoyable by the dear ones, depended on his quiet fortitude ¹⁸. So, by degrees he calmed into the better state, when he could raise his thoughts much higher and draw comfort down.,He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known nothing of her father’s imprisonment ¹⁹, until he had heard of it from herself, and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father’s and uncle’s responsibility for that misery ²⁰, until the paper had been read. He had already explained to her that his concealment ²¹ from herself of the name he had relinquished ²², was the one condition— fully intelligible ²³ now—that her father had attached to their betrothal ²⁴, and was the one promise he had still exacted on the morning of their marriage. He entreated ²⁶ her, for her father’s sake, never to seek to know whether her father had become oblivious ²⁷ of the existence of the paper, or had had it recalled to him (for the moment or, for good), by the story of the Tower, on that old Sunday under the dear old plane-tree in the garden. If he had preserved any definite remembrance of it, there could be no doubt that he had supposed it destroyed with the Bastille, when he had found no mention of it among the relics ²⁸ of prisoners which the populace had discovered there, and which had been described to all the world. He besought ²⁹ her—though he added that he knew it was needless—to console her father, by impressing him through every tender means she could think of , with the truth that he had done nothing for which he could justly reproach himself, but had uniformly forgotten himself for their joint ³⁰ sakes. Next to her preservation ³¹ of his own last grateful love and blessing ³², and her overcoming of her sorrow, to devote herself to their dear child, he adjured ³³ her, as they would meet in Heaven, to comfort her father.,To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he told her father that he expressly confided ³⁴ his wife and child to his care. And he told him this, very strongly, with the hope of rousing him from any despondency or dangerous retrospect ³⁵ towards which he foresaw he might be tending.,To Mr. Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs. That done, with many added sentences of grateful friendship and warm attachment ³⁶, all was done. He never thought of Carton. His mind was so full of the others, that he never once thought of him.,He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put out. When he lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done with this world.,But, it beckoned ³⁷ him back in his sleep, and showed itself in shining forms. Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho (though it had nothing in it like the real house), unaccountably released and light of heart, he was with Lucie again, and she told him it was all a dream, and he had never gone away. A pause of forgetfulness, and then he had even suffered, and had come back to her, dead and at peace, and yet there was no difference in him. Another pause of oblivion, and he awoke in the sombre morning, unconscious where he was or what had happened, until it flashed upon his mind, “this is the day of my death!”,A country ruled by an iron hand is doomed to suffer. 被铁腕人物统治的国家定会遭受不幸的。,The boundless woods were sleeping in the deep repose of nature.无边无际的森林在大自然静寂的怀抱中酣睡着 。