“Oh, mother!”said the girl, finding strength at last to speak in her emotion, “the gipsy woman spoke true. There was a good gipsy woman among our people who died last year, and who had always taken care of me like a foster-mother. It was she who hung this little bag round my neck. She used always to say to me: ‘Child, guard this trinket well; ’tis a treasure; it will make thee find thy mother again. Thou wearest thy mother about thy neck!’ She foretold it—the gipsy woman.”
Again the sachette clasped her daughter in her arms. “Come, let me kiss thee; thou sayest that so prettily. When we are back in our own home, we will put the little shoes on the feet of an Infant Jesus in a church. We owe so much to the dear Virgin. Lord, what a sweet voice thou hast! When thou wert speaking to me just now it was just like music. Oh, Father in heaven, have I found my child again? Could any one believe such a story? Surely, nothing can kill one, for I have not died of joy.”And she began clapping her hands and laughing as she cried: “Oh, we are going to be so happy!”
At that moment the cell resounded to the clank of arms and the galloping of horses, coming apparently from the Pont Notre-Dame and hastening nearer and nearer along the quay. The girl threw herself in anguish into the sachette’s arms.
“Save me! save me! Mother, they are coming!”
The recluse grew pale. “Oh, heaven! what dost thou say? I had forgotten; they are pursuing thee. What hast thou done?”
“I know not,”answered the unhappy girl, “but I am condemned to death.”
“To death!”said Gudule, staggering as if struck by a thunder-bolt. “Death!”she repeated slowly, and fixed her daughter with wide staring eyes.
“Yes, mother,”repeated the girl distractedly, “they want to kill me. They are coming to hang me. That gallows is for me. Save me! save me! Here they come; oh, save me!”
The recluse stood for a moment as if petrified, then shook her head in doubt, and finally burst into a fit of laughter—the horrid laughter of her former days.
“Oh, oh, no! ’tis a dream thou art telling me. What, I should have lost her for fifteen years, and then should find her, but only for a minute! And they would take her from me now—now that she is so beautiful, that she is a woman grown, that she speaks to me and loves me! And now they would come and devour her under my very eyes—who am her mother! Oh, no, such things are not possible. God would never permit it.”
The cavalcade now apparently made a halt, and a distant voice could be heard saying: “This way, Messire Tristan! The priest told us we should find her at the Rat-Hole.”The tramp of horses commenced again.
The recluse started up with a cry of despair: “Fly, fly, my child! It all comes back to me now. Thou art right. They seek thy death! Horror! Malediction!—Fly!”
She thrust her head through the window, but drew it back again hastily.
“Stay where you are,”she said in a quick, terrified whisper, convulsively pressing the hand of the girl, who was already more dead than alive. “Keep still, do not breathe, there are soldiers everywhere. Thou canst not go out. It is too late.”
Her eyes were dry and burning. For a few moments she did not speak, but paced her cell with rapid steps, stopping at intervals to pluck out whole strands of her gray hair and tear them with her teeth.
“They are coming,”she said suddenly; “I will speak to them. Do thou hide in that corner. They will not see thee. I will tell them that thou hast escaped—that I let thee go!”
She carried her daughter to a corner of the cell which could not be seen from outside; made her crouch down; disposed her carefully so that neither foot nor hand came beyond the shadow; spread her long black hair round her to cover the white robe, and set up the pitcher and flag-stone, the only furniture she had, in front of her, trusting that they would conceal her. This done, finding herself calmer, she knelt down and prayed. The day, which was only just dawning, left abundant darkness still in the Rat-Hole.
At this moment the voice of the priest—that voice from hell—sounded close to the cell, crying: “This way, Captain Ph?bus de Chateaupers!”
At that name, uttered by that voice, Esmeralda, cowering in her corner, made a movement.
“Do not stir!”murmured Gudule.
She had scarcely spoken before a tumultuous crowd of men and horses stopped in front of the cell. The mother rose hastily and posted herself at the loophole to cover the aperture. She beheld a strong body of armed men, horse and foot, drawn up in the Grève. Their commander dismounted and came towards her.
“Old woman,”said this man, whose face wore a repulsive expression, “we are seeking a witch to hang her. They tell us you had hold of her.”
The poor mother assumed the most unconscious air she was able.
“I do not quite take your meaning,”she answered.
“Tête-Dieu! Then what was this story of the crazy Archdeacon’s?”said Tristan. “Where is he?”
“My lord,”said one of the soldiers, “he has disappeared.”
“Go to, old hag,”the commander went on; “lie not to me. A witch was given into thy hand. What hast thou done with her?” The recluse feared to deny altogether lest she should arouse suspicion, so she answered in a truthful but surly tone:
“If you mean a strong young wench that they thrust into my hands a while ago, I can tell you that she bit me, and I let her go. That’s all I know. Leave me in peace.”
The commander pulled a disappointed face. “Let me have no lies, old spectre!”he said. “My name is Tristan l’Hermite, and I am the King’s Gossip. Tristan l’Hermite, dost thou hear?”and he added, casting his eyes round the Place de Grève, “’tis a name that has echoes here.”
“And if you were Satan l’Hermite,”retorted Gudule, gathering hope, “I would have nothing different to say to you, nor would I be afraid of you!”
“Tête-Dieu!”exclaimed Tristan, “here’s a vixen! So the witch girl escaped! And which way did she go?”
“Through the Rue du Mouton, I think,”answered Gudule carelessly.
Tristan turned and signed to his men to prepare for resuming their march. The recluse breathed again.
“Monseigneur,”said an archer suddenly, “ask the old beldame how it is that her window-bars are broken thus?”
This question plunged the wretched mother back into despair. Still she did not lose all presence of mind. “They were always so,”she stammered.
“Bah!”returned the archer, “only yesterday they made a fine black cross that inclined one to devotion.”
Tristan glanced askance at the recluse. “The beldame seems uneasy,”he said.
The unhappy woman felt that all depended on her keeping up her self-possession, and so, with death in her heart, she began to laugh at them. Mothers are capable of efforts such as this.
“Bah!”said she, “the man is drunk. ’Tis more than a year since the back of a cart laden with stones ran against my window and burst the bars. I mind me well how I railed at the driver.”
“It’s true,”said another archer, “I was there.”
There are always people to be found in all places who have seen everything. This unlooked-for testimony revived the spirits of the recluse, to whom this interrogatory was like crossing an abyss on the edge of a knife.
But she was doomed to a continual see-saw between hope and alarm.
“If a cart had done that,”resumed the first soldier, “the stumps of the bars must have been driven inward, whereas they have been forced outward.”
“Ha! ha!”said Tristan to the soldier, “thou hast the nose of a cross-examiner at the Chatelet! Answer what he says, old woman!”
“Mon Dieu!”she exclaimed, reduced to the last extremity, and bursting into tears in spite of herself; “I swear to you, my lord, that it was a cart that broke those bars: you hear that man say he saw it. Besides, what has that to do with your gipsy?”
“H’m!”growled Tristan.
“Diable!”continued the soldier, flattered by the provost’s commendation; “the iron looks quite fresh broken.”
Tristan shook his head. Gudule turned pale. “How long is it, say you, since the affair of the cart?”
“A month; a fortnight may-be, my lord; I do not remember.”
“At first she said above a year!”remarked the soldier.
“That looks queer!”said the provost.
“Monseigneur!”she cried, still filling the window, and trembling lest suspicion should prompt them to put their heads through and look into the cell; “monseigneur, I swear to you that it was a cart that broke this grating. I swear it by all the holy angels in paradise. If it was not a cart, may I go to everlasting perdition and deny my God!”
“Thou art very urgent in that oath of thine!”said Tristan with his inquisitorial glance.
The poor creature felt her assurance ebbing fast away. She was making blunders, and had a terrible consciousness that she was not saying what she should have said.
Here another soldier came up, crying: “Monseigneur, the old wife lies. The witch cannot have got away by the Rue du Mouton, for the chain was across the street all night, and the watchman saw no one pass.”
“What hast thou to say to that?”asked Tristan, whose countenance grew every moment more forbidding.
She strove to offer a bold front to this fresh incident. “Why, monseigneur, I do not know; I must have made a mistake, I suppose. In fact, now I come to think of it, I believe she crossed the water.”
“That’s at the opposite side of the Place,”said the provost. “And then it’s not very likely that she should want to return to the city where they were making search for her. Thou liest, old woman!”
“Besides,”added the first soldier, “there’s no boat either on this side or the other.”
“She will have swam across then,”said the recluse, fighting her ground inch by inch.
“Do women swim?”said the soldier.
“Tête-Dieu! old woman, thou liest, thou liest!”cried Tristan angrily. “I’ve a good mind to leave the witch and take thee instead. A little quarter of an hour’s question would soon drag the truth out of thy old throat. Come! Thou shalt go along with us!”
She caught eagerly at these words.
“As you will, my lord; do as you say. The question! I am quite ready to submit to it. Carry me with you. Quick! let us go at once!—and meantime,”thought she, “my daughter can escape.”
“Mort-Dieu!”said the provost, “what a thirst for the rack! This crazy old wife’s quite beyond my comprehension.”
A grizzled old sergeant of the watch now stepped out of the ranks and addressed the provost. “Crazy indeed, monseigneur! If she let the gipsy go, tis not her fault, for she has no love for gipsy women. For fifteen years I’ve held the watch here, and every night I hear her calling down curses without end on these Bohemian women. If the one we’re looking for is, as I believe, the little dancer with the goat, she hated her beyond all the rest.”
Gudule gathered up her strength:
“Yes, her beyond all the rest,”she repeated.
The unanimous testimony of the men of the watch confirmed what the old sergeant had said. Tristan l’Hermite, despairing of getting anything out of the recluse, turned his back on her, and, with irrepressible anxiety, she saw him slowly return to his horse.
“Come!”he growled between his teeth. “Forward! we must continue the search. I will not sleep till the gipsy has been hanged.”
Nevertheless, he lingered a moment before mounting. Gudule hung between life and death as she saw him scanning the Place with the restless look of the hound that instinctively feels himself near the lair of his quarry, and is reluctant to go away. At last he shook his head, and sprang into the saddle.
Gudule’s heart, so horribly contracted, now expanded, and she whispered, with a glance towards her daughter, whom she had not ventured to look at since the arrival of her pursuers, “Saved!”
All this time the poor child had remained in her corner, without breathing, without moving a muscle, death staring her in the face. She had lost no word of the scene between Gudule and Tristan, and each pang of her mother’s had echoed in her own heart. She had heard each successive crack of the thread that held her suspended over the abyss, and twenty times she thought to see it snap. Only now did she begin to take breath and feel the ground steady under her feet.
At this moment she heard a voice call to the provost: “Corb?uf! Monsieur the Provost, it’s none of my business as a man-at-arms to hang witches. The rabble populace is put down; I leave you to do your own work alone. You will permit me to return to my company, who are meanwhile without a captain.”
The voice was that of Ph?bus de Chateaupers. What passed in her breast is impossible to describe. He was there, her friend, her protector, her safeguard, her refuge—her Ph?bus! She started to her feet, and before her mother could prevent her had sprung to the loophole, crying:
“Ph?bus! To me, my Ph?bus!”
Ph?bus was no longer there. He had just galloped round the corner of the Rue de la Coutellerie. But Tristan had not yet gone away.
The recluse rushed at her daughter with a snarl of rage and dragged her violently back, her nails entering the flesh of the girl’s neck. But the mother turned tigress has no thought of careful handling. Too late. Tristan had seen it all.
“Hé! hé!”he chuckled with a grin that bared all his teeth and made his face wolfish; “two mice in the trap!”
“I suspected as much,”said the soldier. Tristan slapped him on the shoulder. “Thou are a good cat! Now, then,”he added, “where is Henriet Cousin?”
A man, having neither the dress nor the appearance of a soldier, stepped out from their ranks. He wore a suit half gray, half brown, with leather sleeves, and carried a coil of rope in his great hand. This man was in constant attendance on Tristan, who was in constant attendance on Louis XI.
“Friend,”said Tristan l’Hermite, “I conclude that this is the witch we are in search of. Thou wilt hang me that one. Hast thou thy ladder?”
“There is one under the shed at the Maison-aux-Piliers,”answered the man. “Is it at the gallows over there we’re to do the job?”he continued, pointing to the gibbet.
“Yes.”
“So, ho!”said the man, with a coarse laugh more brutal even than the provost’s, “we shall not have far to go!”
“Make haste,”said Tristan, “and do thy laughing afterward.”
Since the moment when Tristan had seen her daughter, and all hope was lost, the recluse had not uttered a word. She had thrown the poor girl, half dead, into a corner of the cell and resumed her post at the window, her two hands spread on the stone sill like two talons. In this attitude she faced the soldiers unflinchingly with a gaze that was once more savage and distraught. As Henriet Cousin approached the cell, she fixed him with such a wild beast glare that he shrank back.
“Monseigneur,”said he, turning back to the provost, “which must I take?”
“The young one.”
“So much the better; the old one seems none too easy.”
“Poor little dancer!”said the sergeant of the watch.
