of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain
Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics
dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives,
bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it.
Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrist of those who
carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures
various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic
wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of
sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
their frenzied eyes;eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would
have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well directed gun.
All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man,
or of any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world
if it were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor
looked for explanation in his friend’s ashy face.
“They are,” Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully
around at the locked room, “murdering the prisoners. If you are
sure of what you say; if you really have the power you think you
haveas I believe you havemake yourself known to these devils,
and get taken to La Force. It may be too late, I don’t know, but let
it not be a minute later!”
Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of
the room, and was in the court-yard when Mr. Lorry regained the
blind.
His streaming white hair, his rem