Hunchback of Notre Dame (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (39 page)

The gipsy was not insensible to these pin-pricks. Now and then a flush of shame, a flash of anger, kindled in her eyes or on her cheeks; a scornful word seemed trembling on her lips; she made that little pout with which the reader is familiar, in token of her contempt, but she stood motionless; she fixed a sad, sweet look of resignation upon Phœbus.

This look was also full of happiness and affection. She seemed to be restraining herself, for fear she should be turned out.

Phœbus also laughed, and took the gipsy’s part with a mixture of impertinence and pity.

“Let them talk, little one,” he repeated, jingling his golden spurs; “no doubt your dress is somewhat extravagant and peculiar; but what does that matter to such a charming girl as you are?”

“Good gracious!” exclaimed the fair-haired Gaillefontaine, straightening her swan-like neck with a bitter smile, “I see that the officers of the king’s guard easily take fire at the bright eyes of a gipsy.”

“Why not?” said Phœbus.

At this answer, carelessly uttered by the captain, like a stone cast at random, which falls unnoted, Colombe began to laugh, as did Diane and Amelotte and Fleur-de-Lys, into whose eyes tears started at the same time.

The gipsy, whose eyes had drooped at the words of Colombe de Gaillefontaine, now raised them beaming with pride and pleasure, and fixed them again upon Phoebus. She was beautiful indeed at this moment.

The old lady, who was watching this scene, felt offended, though she did not know why.

“Holy Virgin!” she suddenly exclaimed, “what is this thing poking about under my feet? Oh, the ugly beast!”

It was the goat, which had entered in scarch of its mistress, and which, in its haste to reach her, had caught its horns in the mass of folds which the noble dame’s draperies formed about her feet when she was seated.

This caused a diversion. The gipsy girl, without speaking, released her pet.

“Oh, there’s the little goat with the golden feet!” cried Bérangère, jumping with joy.

The gipsy girl crouched upon her knees and pressed her cheek against the goat’s fond head. She seemed to be begging its pardon for having thus deserted it.

Diane whispered in Colombe’s ear,—

“Gracious! why didn’t I think of it before? It’s the gipsy girl with the goat, of whom I have so often heard. They say she is a witch, and that her goat performs very marvelous tricks.”

“Very well,” said Colombe, “the goat must now amuse in its turn, by performing some miracle.”

Diane and Colombe addressed the gipsy eagerly,—

“Little one, make your goat perform some miracle.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” replied the dancer.

“A miracle, a piece of magic, some witchcraft.”

“I don’t understand;” and she began to fondle the pretty creature, repeating, “Djali! Djali!”

At this instant Fleur-de-Lys noticed an embroidered leather bag hanging from the goat’s neck.

“What is that?” she asked.

The gipsy raised her large eyes to the girl’s face and replied gravely, “That is my secret.”

“I should very much like to know what your secret is,” thought Fleur-de-Lys.

Meanwhile the good lady rose angrily, saying,—

“Come, gipsy, if neither you nor your goat can dance for us, why do you loiter here?”

The gipsy, without answering, moved slowly towards the door; but the nearer she came to it, the slower grew her steps. An irresistible magnet seemed to hold her back. All at once she turned her eyes wet with tears upon Phœbus, and paused.

“Zounds!” cried the captain; “you mustn’t go in that way. Come back, and dance something for us. By the way, my beauty, what is your name?”

“Esmeralda,” said the dancer, without taking her eyes from his face.

At this strange name the young girls burst into a fit of laughter.

“A terrible name for a girl,” said Diane.

“You see now,” added Amelotte, “that she is an enchantress.”

“My dear,” solemnly exclaimed Dame Aloïse, “your parents never fished out that name for you from the baptismal font.”

Some moments previous, however, Bérangère, unheeded by the rest, had lured the goat into one corner of the room by a bit of marchpane. In an instant they were good friends. The curious child had removed the bag from the goat’s neck, had opened it, and emptied its contents upon the matting; they consisted of an alphabet, each letter being written upon a separate square of boxwood. No sooner were these playthings scattered over the floor, than the child was amazed to see the goat, one of whose “miracles” this undoubtedly was, select certain letters with her golden hoof and arrange them, by a series of gentle pushes, in a particular order. In a moment a word was spelled out which the goat seemed to have been trained to write, so little did she hesitate in the task; and Bérangère exclaimed suddenly, clasping her hands in admiration, —

“Godmother Fleur-de-Lys, do see what the goat has just done!”

Fleur-de-Lys looked, and shuddered. The letters arranged upon the floor spelled this word:—

“PHŒBUS.”
¹³

“Did the goat do that?” she asked in an altered tone.

“Yes, godmother,” answered Bérangère.

It was impossible to doubt her, for the child could not spell.

“This is her secret!” thought Fleur-de-Lys.

Meantime, at the child’s shout, the whole party hastened to her side,—the mother, the girls, the gipsy, and the officer.

The gipsy saw the folly which her goat had committed. She turned first red, then pale, and trembled like a criminal before the captain, who regarded her with a smile of mingled satisfaction and surprise.

“Phœbus,” whispered the astonished girls. “Why, that’s the captain’s name!”

“You have a marvellous memory!” said Fleur-de-Lys to the stupefied gipsy. Then bursting into sobs, she stammered out in an agony, hiding her face in her lovely hands, “Oh, she is a witch!” and she heard a voice more bitter yet, which said to her inmost heart, “She is your rival!”

She fell fainting to the floor.

“My daughter! my daughter!” screamed the terrified mother. “Begone, you devilish gipsy!”

Esmeralda picked up the unlucky letters in the twinkling of an eye, made a sign to Djali, and went out at one door as Fleur-de-Lys was borne away by another.

Captain Phœbus, left alone, hesitated a moment between the two doors; then he followed the gipsy.

T
he priest whom the girls had noticed on the top of the north tower, leaning over to look into the square and watching the gipsy’s dance so closely, was no other than Claude Frollo.

Our readers have not forgotten the mysterious cell which the archdeacon reserved to himself in that tower. (I do not know, let me observe by the way, whether or not this be the same cell, the interior of which may still be seen through a tiny grated loop-hole, opening to the eastward, at about the height of a man from the floor, upon the platform from which the towers spring; a mere hole, now bare, empty, and dilapidated, the ill-plastered walls “adorned” here and there, at the present time, with a few wretched yellow engravings, representing various cathedral fronts. I presume that this hole is conjointly inhabited by bats and spiders, and that consequently a double war of extermination is waged against flies.)

Every day, an hour before sunset, the archdeacon climbed the tower stairs and shut himself up in this cell, where he often passed whole nights. On this special day, just as, having reached the low door of his retreat, he was fitting into the lock the complicated little key, which he always carried about with him in the purse hanging at his side, the sound of tambourine and castanets struck upon his ear. The sound came from the square in front of the cathedral. The cell, as we have already said, had but one window looking upon the roof of the church. Claude Frollo hastily withdrew the key, and an instant later he was upon the top of the tower, in the gloomy and meditative attitude in which the ladies had seen him.

There he was, serious and motionless, absorbed in one sight, one thought. All Paris lay beneath his feet, with its countless spires and its circular horizon of gently sloping hills, with its river winding beneath its bridges, and its people flowing through its streets, with its cloud of smoke and its mountainous chain of roofs crowding Notre-Dame close with their double rings of tiles; but of this whole city the archdeacon saw only one corner,—the square in front of the cathedral; only one figure in all that crowd,—the gipsy.

It would have been hard to explain the nature of his gaze, and the source of the fire which flashed from his eyes. It was a fixed gaze, and yet it was full of agitation and trouble. And from the perfect repose of his whole body, scarcely shaken by an occasional involuntary shiver, like a tree stirred by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more stony than the railing upon which they rested; from the rigid smile which contracted his face, you would have said that there was nothing living about Claude Frollo but his eyes.

The gipsy danced; she twirled her tambourine upon the tip of her finger, and tossed it into the air as she danced her Provençal sarabands: light, alert, and gay, quite unconscious of the weight of that terrible gaze which fell perpendicularly upon her head.

The crowd swarmed about her. Now and then a man accoutred in a loose red and yellow coat waved the people back into a circle, then sat down again in a chair a few paces away from the dancer, and let the goat lay its head upon his knees. This man seemed to be the gipsy’s comrade. From the lofty point where he stood, Claude Frollo could not distinguish his features.

From the moment that the archdeacon observed this stranger, his attention seemed to be divided between him and the dancer, and his face grew blacker and blacker. Suddenly he straightened himself up, and trembled from head to foot. “Who is that man?” he muttered between his teeth. “I have always seen her alone till now!”

Then he plunged down the winding stairs once more. As he passed the half-open belfry door, he saw something which struck him: he saw Quasimodo, who, leaning from an opening in one of those slate pent-houses which look like huge Venetian blinds, was also gazing steadily out into the square. He was so absorbed in looking that he paid no heed to his foster father’s presence. His savage eye had a strange expression; it looked both charmed and gentle. “How strange!” murmured Claude. “Can he be looking at the gipsy?” He continued his descent. In a few moments the anxious archdeacon came out into the square through the door at the foot of the tower.

“What has become of the gipsy girl?” he said, joining the group of spectators called together by the sound of the tambourine.

“I don’t know,” answered one of his neighbors. “She has just vanished. I think she has gone to dance some sort of a fandango in the house over opposite, where they called her in.”

In the gipsy’s place, upon the same carpet whose pattern had but just now seemed to vanish beneath the capricious figures of her dance, the archdeacon saw no one but the red-and-yellow man, who, hoping to gain a few coppers in his turn, was walking round the ring, his elbows on his hips, his head thrown back, his face scarlet, his neck stretched to its utmost extent, and a chair between his teeth. Upon this chair was fastened a cat, lent by a neighboring woman, which spit and squalled in desperate alarm.

“By‘r Lady!” cried the archdeacon, as the mountebank, dripping with perspiration, passed him with his pyramid of chair and cat, “what is Master Pierre Gringoire doing here?”

The archdeacon’s stern voice so agitated the poor wretch that he lost his balance, and his entire structure, chair, cat, and all, fell pell-mell upon the heads of the spectators, amid a storm of inextinguishable shouts and laughter.

Master Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would probably have had a serious account to settle with the mistress of the cat, and the owners of all the bruised and scratched faces around him, if he had not hastily availed himself of the confusion to take refuge in the church, where Claude Frollo had beckoned him to follow.

The cathedral was dark and deserted; the side aisles were full of shadows, and the lamps in the chapels began to twinkle like stars, so black had the arched roofs grown. Only the great rose-window in the front, whose myriad hues were still bathed in a ray from the setting sun, gleamed through the darkness like a mass of diamonds, and threw a dazzling reflection to the farther end of the nave.

When they had gone a few paces, Dom Claude leaned his back against a pillar and looked steadily at Gringoire. It was not such a look as Gringoire had dreaded, in his shame at being caught by a grave and learned person in this merry-andrew attire. The priest’s glance had nothing mocking or ironical about it; it was serious, calm, and piercing. The archdeacon was first to break the silence.

“Come hither, Master Pierre. You have many matters to explain to me. And, first of all, how comes it that I have not seen you for these two months past, and that I now find you in the streets, in a pretty plight indeed,—half red and half yellow, like a Caudebec apple?”

“Sir,” said Gringoire, in piteous tones, “it is in sooth a monstrous garb, and I feel as much abashed as a cat with a calabash on her head. ‘Tis very ill done, I feel, to expose the gentlemen of the watch to the risk of cudgelling the shoulders of a Pythagorean philosopher under this loose coat. But what else could I do, my reverend master? The blame belongs entirely to my old doublet, which basely deserted me at the very beginning of winter, on the plea that it was falling to pieces, and must needs take a little rest in some rag-picker’s basket. What could I do? Civilization has not yet reached the point where a man may go naked, as Diogenes of old desired. Besides, the wind blew very cold, and the month of January is not a good time to introduce such a new measure to mankind with any hope of success. This coat offered itself; I accepted it, and left behind my old black frock, which, for a Hermetic like myself, was far from being hermetically closed. So here I am in the dress of a mountebank, like Saint Genest. How can I help it? It is an eclipse; but even Apollo kept the swine of Admetus.”