Henriet Cousin advanced once more to the window. The mother’s eye made his own droop.
“Madame,”he began timidly—
She interrupted him in a whisper of concentrated fury:
“What wilt thou?”
“It is not you,”he said, “but the other one.”
“What other one?”
“The young one.”
She shook her head violently. “There is nobody! nobody! nobody!”she cried.
“Yes, there is!”returned the hangman, “as you very well know. Let me take the girl. I mean no harm to you.”
“Ah! ha!”she said, with a wild laugh; “you mean no harm to me?”
“Let me take the other, good wife; ’tis the provost’s orders.”
“There is nobody else,”she repeated distractedly.
“But I tell you there is!”retorted the hangman. “We all saw the two of you.”
“Thou hadst best look, then,”said the recluse with a mad chuckle. “Thrust thy head through the window.”
The hangman considered the nails of the mother, and dared not.
“Haste thee now!”cried Tristan, who had drawn up his men in a circle round the Rat-Hole, and stationed himself on horseback near the gibbet.
Henriet returned to the provost in perplexity. He laid the coil of rope on the ground, and was twisting his cap nervously in his hands.
“Monseigneur,”he asked, “how must I get in?”
“By the door.”
“There is none.”
“Then by the window.”
“It is too narrow.”
“Widen it, then,”said Tristan impatiently. “Hast thou no pickaxes?”
The mother, still on guard at the opening to her den, watched them intently. She had ceased to hope, ceased to wish for anything. All she knew was that she would not have them take her daughter from her.
Henriet Cousin went and fetched the box of executioner’s tools from the shed of the Maison-aux-Piliers; also, from the same place, the double ladder, which he immediately set up against the gibbet. Five or six of the provost’s men provided themselves with crowbars and pickaxes, and Tristan accompanied them to the window of the cell.
“Old woman,”said the provost in stern tones, “give up the girl to us quietly.”
She gazed at him vacantly.
“Tête-Dieu!”exclaimed Tristan, “why dost thou hinder us from hanging this witch as the King commands?”
The wretched creature broke into her savage laugh again.
“Why do I hinder you? She is my daughter.”
The tone in which she uttered these words sent a shudder even through Henriet Cousin himself.
“I am sorry,”returned the provost. “But it is the good pleasure of the King.”
Whereat she cried, her dreadful laugh ringing louder than before:
“What is he to me—thy King? I tell thee it is my daughter.”
“Break through the wall!”commanded Tristan.
To do this it was only necessary to loosen a course of stone underneath the loophole. When the mother heard the picks and lever sapping her fortress, she uttered a blood-curdling cry, and then started running round and round her cell with startling quickness—a wild-beast habit she had learned from her long years of confinement in that cage. She said no word, but her eyes blazed. The soldiers felt their blood run cold.
Suddenly she snatched up her stone in both hands, laughed, and hurled it at the workmen. The stone, ill-thrown, for her hands were trembling, touched no one, but fell harmless at the feet of Tristan’s horse. She gnashed her teeth.
Meanwhile, though the sun had not yet risen, it was broad daylight, and the old, moss-grown chimneys of the Maison-aux-Piliers flushed rosy red. It was the hour when the windows of the earliest risers in the great city were thrown cheerfully open. A countryman or so, a few fruit-sellers, going to the markets on their asses, were beginning to cross the Grève, and halted for a moment to gaze with astonishment at the group of soldiers gathered about the Rat-Hole, then passed on their way.
The recluse had seated herself on the ground close beside her daughter, covering her with her body, her eyes fixed, listening to the poor child, who, as she lay motionless, kept murmuring the one word, “Ph?bus! Ph?bus!”
As the work of demolition seemed to advance, so the mother drew mechanically farther back, pressing the girl closer and closer against the wall. All at once she saw the stone, from which she had never taken her eyes, begin to give way, and hear the voice of Tristan urging on the men. At this she awoke from the kind of stupor into which she had fallen for a few moments, and cried aloud; and her voice as she spoke now lacerated the ear like the rasp of a saw, now faltered and choked as if every kind of execration crowded to her lips to burst forth at once. “Ho, ho, ho! but ’tis horrible! Robbers! brigands! Are ye truly coming to take my daughter from me? I tell you, ’tis my own child! Oh, cowards! oh, hangman’s slaves! miserable hired cut-throats and assassins! Help! help! Fire! And can they have the heart to take my child from me thus? Who is it then they call the good God in heaven?”
Then, addressing herself to Tristan, foaming, glaring, bristling, on all-fours like a panther: “Now come and dare to take my daughter from me. Dost thou not understand when this woman tells thee ’tis her daughter? Dost thou know what it is to have a child, eh, thou wolf? Hast thou never lain with thy mate? Hast never had a cub by her?
And if thou hast little ones, when they howl, is there never an answering stir within thee?”
“Down with the stone,”said Tristan; “it is loose enough now.”
The crowbars heaved the heavy block. It was the mother’s last bulwark. She threw herself upon it, trying to hold it in its place; she furrowed the stone with her nails—in vain; the great mass, displaced by half a dozen men, escaped her grasp and slid slowly to the ground along the iron levers.
The mother, seeing the breach effected, then cast herself across the opening, barring it with her body, writhing, striking her head against the floor, and shrieking in a voice so hoarse with anguish and fatigue that the words were hardly articulate:
“Help! Fire! Help!”
“Now, then, take the girl,”said Tristan, imperturbably.
The mother faced the soldiers with so menacing a glare that they seemed more fain to retreat than advance.
“Forward!”cried the provost. “Henriet Cousin—you!”
No one advanced a step.
The provost rapped out an oath. “Tête-Christ! my soldiers afraid of a woman!”
“Monseigneur,”ventured Henriet, “you call that a woman?”
“She has a bristling mane like a lion,”said another.
“Forward!”repeated the provost. “The gap is large enough. Enter three abreast, as at the breach of Pontoise. Let’s make an end of it, death of Mahomet! The first man that draws back, I cleave him in two!”
Fixed thus between the devil and the deep sea, the soldiers hesitated a moment, then, deciding for the lesser evil, advanced upon the Rat-Hole.
When the recluse saw this, she swept back her long hair from her eyes, struggled to her knees, and dropped her bleeding and emaciated hands upon them. Great tears welled up one by one to her eyes and rolled down a long furrow in her cheeks, like a torrent down the bed it has hollowed out. And then she began to speak, but in a voice so suppliant, so gentle, so submissive and heart-breaking that more than one hardened old fire-eater in Tristan’s company furtively wiped his eyes.
“Good sirs,”said she, “messieurs the sergeants, one word. There is a thing I must tell you. This is my daughter, look you—my dear little child who was lost to me! Listen, ’tis quite a story. It may surprise you, but I know messieurs the sergeants well. They were always good to me in the days when the little urchins threw stones at me because I was a wanton. Look you; you will leave me my child when you know all! I was a poor wanton. The gipsies stole her from me—by the same token I have kept her shoe these fifteen years. Look, here it is. She had a foot like that. At Reims. La Chantefleurie! Rue Folle-Peine! Perhaps you knew of this? It was I. In your young days; then it was a merry time, and there were merry doings! You will have pity on me, won’t you, good sirs? The gipsies stole her, and hid her from me for fifteen years. I thought her dead. Picture to yourself, my good friends, that I thought her dead. I have passed fifteen years here, in this stone cave, without any fire in winter. That is hard. The poor, sweet little shoe! I cried so long to God that he heard me. You will not take her from me, I am sure. Even if ’twere me you wanted, I would not mind; but a child of sixteen! Leave her a little while longer to live in the sunshine! What has she done to you? Nothing at all. Nor I either. If you only knew—I have no one but her. I am old—this is a blessing sent me from the Holy Virgin! And then, you are all so good! you did not know that it was my daughter; but now you know. Oh, I love her! Monsieur the Chief Provost, I would rather have a stab in my body than a scratch on her little finger! You have the air of a kind gentleman! What I tell you now explains the whole matter, surely? Oh! if you have a mother, sir—you are the captain, leave me my child! See how I entreat you on my knees, as we pray to Jesus Christ! I ask not alms of any one. Sirs, I come from Reims; I have a little field from my uncle Mahiet Pradon. I am not a beggar. I want nothing—nothing but my child! Oh, I want to keep my child! The good God, who is master over all, has not given her back to me for nothing. The
King!—you say the King! It cannot give him much pleasure that they should kill my daughter! Besides, the King is good! She is my daughter; mine, not the King’s! She does not belong to him! I will go away! we will both go. After all, just two women passing along the road—a mother and her daughter; you let them go their way in peace! Let us go; we come from Reims. Oh, you are kind, messieurs the sergeants. I have nothing to say against you. You will not take my darling; it is not possible! Say it is not possible! My child! My child!”
We shall not attempt to convey any idea of her gestures, her accent, the tears that trickled over her lips as she spoke, her clasping, writhing hands, the heart-breaking smiles, the agonized looks, the sighs, the moans, the miserable and soul-stirring sobs she mingled with these frenzied, incoherent words. When she ceased, Tristan l’Hermite knit his brows, but it was to hide a tear that glistened in his tiger’s eye. He conquered this weakness, however, and said brusquely: “It is the King’s will.”
Then leaning down to Henriet Cousin’s ear, he whispered hurriedly, “Do thy business quickly.”It may be that the redoubtable provost felt his heart failing him—even his.
The hangman and the sergeant accordingly entered the cell. The mother made no attempt at resistance; she only dragged herself over to her daughter and threw herself distractedly upon her.
The girl saw the soldiers advancing towards her, and the horror of death revived her senses.
“Mother!”she cried in a tone of indescribable anguish; “oh, mother! they are coming! defend me!”
“Yes, yes, dear love, I am defending thee!”answered the mother in expiring tones; and clasping her frantically in her arms, she covered her face with kisses. To see them together on the ground, the mother thus protecting her child, was a sight to wring the stoniest heart.
Henriet Cousin took hold of the gipsy girl under her beautiful shoulders. At the touch of that hand she gave a little shuddering cry and swooned. The executioner, from whose eyes big tears were dropping, would have carried her away, and sought to unclasp the mother’s arms, which were tightly coiled about her daughter’s waist, but she held on to her child with such an iron grasp that he found it utterly impossible to separate them. He therefore had to drag the girl out of the cell, and the mother along with her. The mother’s eyes, too, were closed.
The sun rose at this moment, and already there was a considerable crowd of people in the Place looking from a distance at what was being dragged over the ground to the gibbet. For this was Tristan’s way at executions. His one idea was to prevent the curious from coming too near.
There was nobody at the windows. Only, in the far distance, on the summit of that tower of Notre-Dame which looks towards the Grève, two men, their dark figures standing out black against the clear morning sky, appeared to be watching the scene.
Henriet Cousin stopped with his burden at the foot of the fatal ladder, and with faltering breath, such a pity did he think it, he passed the rope round the girl’s exquisite neck. At the horrible contact of the hempen rope, the poor child opened her eyes and beheld the skeleton arm of the gibbet extended over her head. She struggled to free herself, and cried out in an agonized voice: “No! no! I will not! I will not!”The mother, whose head was buried in her daughter’s robe, said no word, but a long shudder ran through her whole frame, and they could hear the frenzied kisses she bestowed upon her child. The hangman seized this moment to wrench asunder the arms clasped round the doomed girl, and whether from exhaustion or despair, they yielded. He then lifted the girl to his shoulder, where the slender creature hung limp and helpless against his uncouth head, and set foot upon the ladder to ascend.
At this moment the mother, who had sunk in a heap on the ground, opened her eyes wide. A blood-curdling look came over her face; without a word she started to her feet, and in a lightning flash flung herself, like a wild beast on its prey, on the hangman’s hand, biting it to the bone. The man howled with pain; the others ran to his assistance, and with difficulty released his bleeding hand from the mother’s teeth. Still she uttered no sound. They thrust her back with brutal roughness, and she fell, her head striking heavily on the stones. They raised her up; she fell back again. She was dead.
The hangman, who had kept his hold on the girl, began once more to ascend the ladder.
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1 The salt tax.
Chapter 2 - La Creatura Bella Bianco Vestita.—Dante
When Quasimodo saw that the cell was empty, that the gipsy girl was gone, that while he was defending her she had been carried off, he clutched his hair with both hands and stamped with surprise and grief; and then set off running, searching the Cathedral from top to bottom for his gipsy, uttering strange unearthly cries, strewing the pavement with his red hair. It was the very moment at which the King’s archers forced their victorious way into Notre-Dame, likewise on the hunt for the gipsy. Poor deaf Quasimodo, never suspecting their sinister intentions (he took the truands to be the enemies of the gipsy girl), did his utmost to assist them. It was he who led Tristan l’Hermite into every possible nook and cranny, opened secret doors, double bottoms of altars, hidden sacristies. Had the unhappy girl still been there, it would have been Quasimodo himself who betrayed her into the hands of the soldiers.
When Tristan, who was not easily discouraged, gave up the search as hopeless, Quasimodo continued it alone. Twenty times, a hundred times over, did he go through the church, from end to end, from top to bottom; ascending, descending, running here, calling there, peering, searching, thrusting his head into every hole, holding up a torch under every vault, desperate, frenzied, moaning like a beast that has lost his mate.
