“Amen,” said the archdeacon.
He turned his back upon the prisoner, his head again fell upon his breast, his hands were crossed, he rejoined his train of priests, and a moment later he disappeared, with cross, candles, and copes, beneath the dim arches of the cathedral, and his sonorous voice faded slowly down the choir, chanting these words of despair: “Omnes gurgites tui et fluctus tui super me transierunt!”di
At the same time the intermittent echo of the iron-bound shaft of the beadles’ halberds, dying away by degrees between the columns of the nave, seemed like the hammer of a clock sounding the prisoner’s final hour.
Meantime the doors of Notre-Dame remained open, revealing the church, empty, desolate, clad in mourning, silent and un-lighted.
The prisoner stood motionless in her place, awaiting her doom. One of the vergers was obliged to warn Master Charmolue, who during this scene had been studying the bas-relief upon the great porch, which represents, according to some, the Sacrifice of Abraham ; according to others, the great Alchemical Operation, the sun being typified by the angel, the fire by the fagot, and the operator by Abraham.
He was with some difficulty withdrawn from this contemplation; but at last he turned, and at a sign from him, two men clad in yellow, the executioner’s aids, approached the gipsy girl to refasten her hands.
The unhappy creature, as she was about to remount the fatal tumbrel and advance on her last journey, was perhaps seized by some poignant regret for the life she was so soon to lose. She raised her dry and fevered eyes to heaven, to the sun, to the silvery clouds here and there intersected by squares and triangles of azure; then she cast them down around her, upon the ground, the crowd, the houses. All at once, while the men in yellow were binding her elbows, she uttered a terrible shriek,—a shriek of joy. Upon yonder balcony, there, at the corner of the square, she had just seen him, her lover, her lord, Ph?bus, the other apparition of her life.
The judge had lied! the priest had lied! It was indeed he, she could not doubt it; he was there, handsome, living, clad in his splendid uniform, the plume upon his head, his sword at his side!
“Phoebus!” she cried; “my Phoebus!”
And she strove to stretch out her arms quivering with love and rapture; but they were bound.
Then she saw the captain frown, a lovely young girl who leaned upon him look at him with scornful lip and angry eyes; then Ph?bus uttered a few words which did not reach her, and both vanished hastily through the window of the balcony, which was closed behind them.
“Ph?bus,” she cried in despair, “do you believe this thing?”
A monstrous idea had dawned upon her. She remembered that she had been condemned for the murder of Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers.
She had borne everything until now. But this last blow was too severe. She fell senseless upon the pavement.
“Come,” said Charmolue, “lift her into the tumbrel, and let us make an end of it!”
No one had observed, in the gallery of statues of the kings carved just above the pointed arches of the porch, a strange spectator who had until now watched all that happened with such impassivity, with so outstretched a neck, so deformed a visage, that, had it not been for his party-colored red and violet garb, he might have passed for one of those stone monsters through whose jaws the long cathedral gutters have for six centuries past disgorged themselves. This spectator had lost nothing that had passed since noon before the doors of Notre-Dame. And at the very beginning, unseen by any one, he had firmly attached to one of the small columns of the gallery a strong knotted rope, the end of which trailed upon the ground below. This done, he began to look about him quietly, and to whistle from time to time when a blackbird flew by him.
All at once, just as the hangman’s assistants were preparing to execute Charmolue’s phlegmatic order, he bestrode the balustrade of the gallery, seized the rope with his feet, knees, and hands; then he slid down the fa?ade as a drop of rain glides down a window-pane, rushed towards the two executioners with the rapidity of a cat falling from a roof, flung them to the ground with his two huge fists, seized the gipsy girl in one hand, as a child might a doll, and with one bound was in the church, holding her above his head, and shouting in a tremendous voice,— “Sanctuary!”
All this was done with such speed that had it been night, one flash of lightning would have sufficed to see it all.
“Sanctuary! sanctuary!” repeated the mob; and the clapping of ten thousand hands made Quasimodo’s single eye flash with pride and pleasure.
This shock restored the prisoner to her senses. She raised her eyelids, looked at Quasimodo, then closed them suddenly, as if alarmed by her savior.