Part 33

Let us add that the church, that vast church which enveloped her on every side, which guarded her, which saved her, was itself a sovereign calm. The solemn lines of that architecture, the religious attitude of all the objects surrounding the young girl, the pious and serene thoughts which emanated, so to speak, from every pore of that stone, acted upon her without her knowing it. The edifice also had sounds of such blessing and such majesty that they lulled that sick soul. The monotonous chant of the officiating clergy, the people's responses to the priests, sometimes inarticulate, sometimes thunderous, the harmonious trembling of the stained-glass windows, the organ bursting forth like a hundred trumpets, the three bell towers humming like hives of great bees, all that orchestra over which bounded a gigantic scale ceaselessly ascending and descending from a crowd to a bell tower, deafened her memory, her imagination, her sorrow. The bells above all rocked her to sleep. It was like a powerful magnetism which those vast machines poured over her in great waves.

Thus each rising sun found her more soothed, breathing better, less pale. As her wounds closed, her grace and her beauty blossomed again upon her face, but more recollected and more restful. Her former character also returned to her, something even of her gaiety, her pretty pout, her love for her goat, her taste for singing, her modesty. She took care to dress in the morning in the corner of her little chamber, for fear lest some inhabitant of the neighboring attics should see her through the dormer window.

When the thought of Phoebus left her the time for it, the Egyptian sometimes thought of Quasimodo. He was the only link, the only connection, the only communication remaining to her with men, with the living. The unhappy girl! she was more outside the world than Quasimodo! She understood nothing of the strange friend that chance had given her. Often she reproached herself for not having a gratitude which should close her eyes, but decidedly she could not accustom herself to the poor bell-ringer. He was too ugly.

She had left upon the ground the whistle he had given her. That did not prevent Quasimodo from reappearing from time to time in the first days. She did her utmost not to turn away with too much repugnance when he came to bring her the basket of provisions or the jug of water, but he always noticed the slightest movement of that kind, and then he went away sadly.

Once, he came upon her caressing Djali. He remained for some moments pensive before that graceful group of the goat and the Egyptian. At last he said, shaking his heavy and misshapen head: "My misfortune is that I still resemble a man too much. I would wish to be altogether a beast, like this goat."

She raised upon him an astonished glance.

He answered that glance: "Oh! I know well why." And he went away.

Another time, he presented himself at the door of the cell (where he never entered) at the moment when Esmeralda was singing an old Spanish ballad, whose words she did not understand, but which had remained in her ear because the Bohemian women had rocked her with it when she was a little child. At the sight of that ugly face which suddenly appeared in the midst of her song, the young girl stopped with an involuntary gesture of fright. The unhappy bell-ringer fell upon his knees on the threshold of the door and joined his misshapen great hands with a supplicating air. "Oh!" said he painfully, "I entreat you, continue and do not drive me away." She would not afflict him, and, all trembling, resumed her song. By degrees, however, her fright dissipated, and she abandoned herself wholly to the impression of the melancholy and drawling air that she sang. He, had remained upon his knees, hands joined, as in prayer, attentive, scarcely breathing, his gaze fixed upon the bright eyes of the Bohemian. One would have said that he heard her song in her eyes.

Another time again, he came to her with an awkward and timid air. "Listen to me," said he with effort, "I have something to say to you." She made him a sign that she listened. Then he began to sigh, half opened his lips, seemed for a moment ready to speak, then he looked at her, made a negative movement of the head, and withdrew slowly, his brow in his hand, leaving the Egyptian stupefied.

Among the grotesque personages sculpted on the wall, there was one he particularly cherished, and with which he seemed often to exchange fraternal glances. Once the Egyptian heard him say to it: "Oh! why am I not of stone like thee!"

One day at last, in the morning, Esmeralda had advanced to the edge of the roof, and was looking into the square over the pointed roof of Saint-Jean-le-Rond. Quasimodo was there, behind her. He placed himself thus of his own accord, in order to spare the young girl as much as possible the displeasure of seeing him. All at once the Bohemian trembled, a tear and a flash of joy shone at once in her eyes, she knelt upon the edge of the roof and stretched her arms in anguish toward the square, crying: "Phoebus! come! come! a word, a single word, in the name of heaven! Phoebus! Phoebus!" Her voice, her face, her gesture, her whole person had the rending expression of a shipwrecked person who makes the signal of distress to the joyous vessel which passes afar off in a ray of sunlight on the horizon.

Quasimodo leaned over the square, and saw that the object of this tender and delirious prayer was a young man, a captain, a handsome horseman all resplendent with arms and ornaments, who was passing at a prance at the far end of the square, and saluting with his plume a beautiful lady smiling upon her balcony. For the rest, the officer did not hear the unhappy girl who called him. He was too far away.

But the poor deaf man heard, he. A profound sigh heaved his breast. He turned round. His heart was swollen with all the tears he devoured; his two convulsive fists struck against his head, and when he withdrew them he had in each hand a handful of red hair.

The Egyptian paid no attention to him. He said in a low voice, gnashing his teeth: "Damnation! So that is how one must be! it is only needful to be handsome on the outside!"

Meanwhile she had remained upon her knees and cried with extraordinary agitation:

"Oh! there he is dismounting from his horse!--He is going to enter that house!--Phoebus!--He does not hear me!--Phoebus!--How wicked that woman is to speak to him at the same time as I!--Phoebus! Phoebus!"

The deaf man looked at her. He understood that pantomime. The eye of the poor bell-ringer filled with tears, but he let none fall. All at once he drew her gently by the edge of her sleeve. She turned round. He had assumed a tranquil air. He said to her:

"Will you that I go fetch him for you?"

She uttered a cry of joy. "Oh! go! go! run! quick! that captain! that captain! bring him to me! I will love thee!"

She kissed his knees. He could not help shaking his head dolorously.

"I will bring him to you," said he in a faint voice. Then he turned his head and precipitated himself with great strides under the staircase, choked with sobs.

When he arrived upon the square, he saw nothing more than the handsome horse tied to the door of the Gondelaurier mansion. The captain had just entered there.

He raised his gaze to the roof of the church. Esmeralda was still there at the same place, in the same posture. He made her a sad sign with his head. Then he leaned against one of the posts of the Gondelaurier porch, determined to wait until the captain should come out.

It was, in the Gondelaurier mansion, one of those gala days which precede weddings. Quasimodo saw many people enter and saw no one come out. From time to time he looked toward the roof. The Egyptian moved no more than he. A stable-boy came to untie the horse, and led it into the stable of the mansion.

The whole day passed thus, Quasimodo upon the post, Esmeralda upon the roof, Phoebus no doubt at the feet of Fleur-de-Lys.

At last night came; a moonless night, a dark night. Quasimodo might well fix his gaze upon Esmeralda. Soon she was no more than a whiteness in the twilight; then nothing. All faded, all was black.

Quasimodo saw illuminated from top to bottom of the facade the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion. He saw lighted one after another the other cross-windows of the square; he saw them also extinguished up to the last. For he remained all the evening at his post. The officer did not come out. When the last passers-by had gone home, when all the cross-windows of the other houses were extinguished, Quasimodo remained quite alone, quite in the shadow. There was then no lighting in the Parvis of Notre-Dame.

However the windows of the Gondelaurier mansion had remained lighted, even after midnight. Quasimodo, motionless and attentive, saw pass upon the glass of a thousand colors a crowd of lively and dancing shadows. If he had not been deaf, as the murmur of sleeping Paris died away, he would have heard more and more distinctly, in the interior of the Gondelaurier mansion, a noise of feasting, of laughter and of music.

Toward one o'clock in the morning, the guests began to withdraw. Quasimodo, enveloped in darkness, watched them all under the porch lighted with torches. None was the captain.

He was full of sad thoughts. At moments he looked up into the air, like those who are bored. Great black clouds, heavy, torn, cleft, hung like crape hammocks under the starry arch of the night. One would have said the cobwebs of the vault of heaven.

In one of those moments, he suddenly saw open mysteriously the French window of the balcony whose stone balustrade was outlined above his head. The frail glass door gave passage to two persons behind whom it closed without noise. It was a man and a woman. It was not without difficulty that Quasimodo managed to recognize in the man the handsome captain, in the woman the young lady whom he had seen in the morning welcome the officer, from the top of that same balcony. The square was perfectly dark, and a double crimson curtain which had fallen behind the door at the moment it closed scarcely let the light of the apartment reach the balcony.

The young man and the young girl, as far as could be judged by our deaf man who did not hear one of their words, appeared to abandon themselves to a very tender tete-a-tete. The young lady seemed to have permitted the officer to make a girdle of his arm about her, and resisted gently a kiss.

Quasimodo assisted from below at that scene all the more graceful to see in that it was not made to be seen. He contemplated that happiness, that beauty with bitterness. After all, nature was not mute in the poor devil, and his vertebral column, badly twisted as it was, was no less trembling than another. He mused upon the miserable part that providence had allotted him, that woman, love, voluptuousness would eternally pass before his eyes, and that he would never do more than see the felicity of others. But what rent him most in that spectacle, what mingled indignation with his vexation, was the thought of what the Egyptian must suffer if she saw it. It is true that the night was very black, that Esmeralda, if she had remained in her place (and he doubted it not), was very far, and that it was at most if he could himself distinguish the lovers on the balcony. That consoled him.

Meanwhile their interview became more and more animated. The young lady appeared to beg the officer to ask nothing further of her. Quasimodo distinguished of all that only the beautiful hands joined, the smiles mingled with tears, the glances raised to the stars of the young girl, the eyes of the captain ardently lowered upon her.

Happily, for the young girl began to struggle but weakly, the balcony door reopened suddenly, an old lady appeared, the beauty seemed confused, the officer took a vexed air, and all three went in again.

A moment after, a horse pawed under the porch and the brilliant officer, wrapped in his night cloak, passed rapidly before Quasimodo.

The bell-ringer let him double the corner of the street, then he set himself to run after him with his monkey agility, crying: "Ho there! captain!"

The captain stopped.

"What does this knave want with me?" said he, making out in the shadow that sort of lopsided figure which came toward him jolting.

Quasimodo, however, had arrived at him, and had boldly taken the bridle of his horse: "Follow me, captain, there is here someone who wishes to speak with you."

"Cornemahom!" grumbled Phoebus, "here is an ugly ruffled bird whom it seems to me I have seen somewhere.--Holà! master, will you let go the bridle of my horse?"

"Captain," answered the deaf man, "do you not ask me who?"

"I tell thee to loose my horse," replied Phoebus, impatient. "What does this rogue want who hangs upon the front of my steed? Dost thou take my horse for a gallows?"

Quasimodo, far from quitting the bridle of the horse, was disposing himself to make him retrace his steps. Not being able to explain the resistance of the captain, he hastened to say to him:

"Come, captain, it is a woman who awaits you." He added with effort: "A woman who loves you."

"Rare blackguard!" said the captain, who believed him obliged to go to all the women who loved him! or who said so!--And if by chance thou resemblest her, owl-face?--Tell her who sends thee that I am going to marry, and that she may go to the devil!"

"Listen," cried Quasimodo, believing to vanquish with a word his hesitation, "come, my lord! it is the Egyptian whom you know!"

That word made in fact a great impression upon Phoebus, but not that which the deaf man expected from it. One recalls that our gallant officer had withdrawn with Fleur-de-Lys some moments before Quasimodo saved the condemned woman from the hands of Charmolue. Since then, in all his visits to the Gondelaurier mansion, he had taken care not to speak again of that woman whose remembrance, after all, was painful to him; and on her side Fleur-de-Lys had not judged it politic to tell him that the Egyptian lived. Phoebus believed therefore the poor Similar dead, and that there was already a month or two of it. Let us add that for some moments the captain had been thinking of the deep obscurity of the night, of the supernatural ugliness, of the sepulchral voice of the strange messenger, that midnight was past, that the street was deserted like the evening when the surly monk had accosted him, and that his horse snorted in looking at Quasimodo.

"The Egyptian!" cried he, almost frightened. "Now then, comest thou from the other world?"

And he put his hand upon the handle of his dagger.

"Quick, quick," said the deaf man seeking to drag the horse. "This way!"

Phoebus dealt him a vigorous kick in the breast with his boot.

Quasimodo's eye sparkled. He made a movement to throw himself upon the captain. Then he said, stiffening himself: "Oh! how happy you are that there is someone who loves you!"

He emphasized the word someone, and loosing the bridle of the horse:

"Begone!"

Phoebus spurred hard, swearing. Quasimodo watched him plunge into the mist of the street.

"Oh!" said softly the poor deaf man, "to refuse that!"

He re-entered Notre-Dame, lighted his lamp and remounted into the tower. As he had thought, the Bohemian was still at the same place.

From as far as she perceived him, she ran to him.

"Alone!" cried she, joining dolorously her beautiful hands.

"I could not find him again," said Quasimodo coldly.

"You should have waited for him all night!" resumed she with vehemence.

He saw her gesture of anger and understood the reproach.

"I will watch for him better another time," said he, lowering his head.

"Go away!" said she to him.

He left her. She was displeased with him. He had rather be ill-treated by her than afflict her. He had kept all the pain for himself.

From that day, the Egyptian saw him no more. He ceased to come to her cell. At most she caught sight from time to time at the top of a tower of the figure of the bell-ringer melancholically fixed upon her. But as soon as she perceived him, he disappeared.

We must say that she was little afflicted by this voluntary absence of the poor hunchback. At the bottom of her heart, she was grateful to him for it. For the rest, Quasimodo deceived himself not at all in that regard.

She no longer saw him, but she felt the presence of a good genius around her. Her provisions were renewed by an invisible hand during her sleep. One morning, she found upon her window a cage of birds. There was above her cell a sculpture which frightened her. She had testified it more than once before Quasimodo. One morning (for all those things were done by night), she no longer saw it. Someone had broken it; he who had climbed up to that sculpture must have risked his life.

Sometimes, in the evening, she heard a voice hidden under the louvers of the bell tower sing, as if to lull her to sleep, a sad and bizarre song. They were verses without rhyme, such as a deaf man may make.

_Look not at the face,_ _Young girl, look at the heart._ _The heart of a handsome young man is often deformed._ _There are hearts where love is not kept._ _Young girl, the fir is not beautiful,_ _Is not beautiful like the poplar,_ _But it keeps its foliage in winter._ _Alas! what good to say that?_ _What is not beautiful is wrong to be;_ _Beauty loves only beauty,_ _April turns its back on January._ _Beauty is perfect,_ _Beauty can do all,_ _Beauty is the only thing which exists not by halves._ _The crow flies only by day,_ _The owl flies only by night,_ _The swan flies by night and by day._

One morning, on waking, she found upon her window two vases full of flowers. One was a crystal vase, very beautiful and very brilliant, but cracked. It had let escape the water with which it had been filled, and the flowers it contained were faded. The other was a coarse and common earthen pot, but which had kept all its water, and whose flowers had remained fresh and red.

I know not if it was with intention, but Esmeralda took the faded bouquet, and carried it all day upon her breast.

That day, she did not hear the voice of the tower sing.

She cared moderately for it. She passed her days caressing Djali, watching the door of the Gondelaurier mansion, talking softly to herself of Phoebus, and crumbling her bread for the swallows.

She had besides quite ceased to see, ceased to hear Quasimodo. The poor bell-ringer seemed to have disappeared from the church. One night, however, as she did not sleep and mused upon her handsome captain, she heard sighing near her cell. Frightened, she rose, and saw by the light of the moon a shapeless mass lying across before her door. It was Quasimodo, who slept there upon a stone.

V

THE KEY OF THE RED DOOR

Meanwhile public report had made known to the archdeacon in what manner miraculously the Egyptian had been saved. When he learned that, he knew not what he felt of it. He had arranged himself with the death of Esmeralda. In that way he was tranquil, he had touched the bottom of possible despair. The human heart (Dom Claude had meditated upon these matters) can contain only a certain quantity of despair. When the sponge is saturated, the sea may pass over it without making enter into it another tear.

Now, Esmeralda dead, the sponge was saturated, all was said for Dom Claude upon this earth. But to feel her alive, and Phoebus also, were the tortures recommencing, the shocks, the alternations, life. And Claude was weary of all that.

When he knew this news, he shut himself up in his cell of the cloister. He appeared neither at the capitular conferences, nor at the offices. He closed his door to all, even to the bishop. He remained walled up thus several weeks. He was believed ill. He was so indeed.

What did he do thus shut up? Under what thoughts did the unfortunate struggle? Did he deliver a last combat to his redoubtable passion? Did he combine a last plan of death for her and of perdition for himself?

His Jehan, his dear brother, his spoiled child, came once to his door, knocked, swore, supplicated, named himself ten times. Claude opened not.

He passed whole days with his face glued to the panes of his window. From that window, situated in the cloister, he saw the lodging of Esmeralda, he saw her often herself with her goat, sometimes with Quasimodo. He remarked the little cares of the ugly deaf man, his obediences, his delicate and submissive ways with the Egyptian. He recalled, for he had a good memory, he, and memory is the tormentor of the jealous, he recalled the singular glance of the bell-ringer upon the dancer one certain evening. He asked himself what motive could have pushed Quasimodo to save her. He was witness of a thousand little scenes between the Bohemian and the deaf man whose pantomime, seen from afar and commented by his passion, appeared to him very tender. He mistrusted the singularity of women. Then he felt confusedly awaken in him a jealousy which he would never have expected, a jealousy which made him redden with shame and indignation. "Pass still for the captain, but this one!" That thought upset him.

His nights were frightful. Since he knew the Egyptian alive, the cold ideas of specter and of tomb which had obsessed him one whole day had vanished, and the flesh returned to goad him. He writhed upon his bed at feeling the brown young girl so near him.

Each night, his delirious imagination represented Esmeralda to him in all the attitudes which had most made his veins boil. He saw her stretched upon the captain, stabbed, eyes closed, her beautiful naked breast covered with the blood of Phoebus, at that moment of delight when the archdeacon had imprinted upon her pale lips that kiss of which the unhappy girl, though half dead, had felt the burning. He saw her again undressed by the savage hands of the torturers, letting put to nakedness and fit into the screw vice her little foot, her fine and round leg, her supple and white knee. He saw again that ivory knee remained alone outside the horrible apparatus of Torterue. He figured to himself finally the young girl in her smock, the rope at her neck, shoulders bare, feet bare, almost naked, as he had seen her the last day. These images of voluptuousness made his fists clench and a shiver run along his vertebrae.

One night among others, they heated so cruelly in his arteries his blood of virgin and of priest that he bit his pillow, sprang out of his bed, threw a surplice over his shirt, and went out of his cell, his lamp in his hand, half naked, wild-eyed, his eye on fire.

He knew where to find the key of the Red Door which communicated from the cloister to the church, and he had always upon him, as is known, a key of the staircase of the towers.

VI

SEQUEL OF THE KEY OF THE RED DOOR

That night, Esmeralda had fallen asleep in her lodging, full of forgetfulness, of hope and of sweet thoughts. She had been sleeping some time, dreaming, as always, of Phoebus, when it seemed to her that she heard noise around her. She had a light and restless sleep, a sleep of a bird. A nothing woke her. She opened her eyes. The night was very black. However she saw at her dormer window a figure which looked at her. There was a lamp which lighted that apparition. At the moment when she saw herself perceived by Esmeralda, that figure blew out the lamp. Nevertheless the young girl had had time to see it. Her eyelids closed again with terror.

"Oh!" said she in a faint voice, "the priest!"

“Stories of the world, in your language.”