The priest impatiently wrenched the buttons from his cassock, saying, “What a flood of words! What is your scheme?”
“Yes,” resumed Gringoire, talking to himself, and laying his finger to his nose in token of his absorption, “that’s just it! The Vagabonds are brave fellows. The gipsy nation love her! They will rise at a single word! Nothing easier! A sudden attack; amidst the confusion she can readily be carried off. Tomorrow night. They will ask nothing better.”
“Your plan! speak!” said the priest, shaking him roughly.
Gringoire turned majestically towards him. “Let me alone! Don’t you see that I am in the throes of composition?” He reflected for a few moments more, then clapped his hands in delight, exclaiming, “Capital! success is assured!”
“Your plan!” angrily repeated Claude.
Gringoire was radiant.
“Come close, and let me whisper it to you. It is really a jolly countermine, and one which will get us all out of difficulty. Zounds! you must confess that I am no fool.”
He interrupted himself,—
“Oh, by the way! is the little goat still with the girl?”
“Yes. May the foul fiend fly away with you!”
“They were going to hang her too, were they not?”
“What is that to me?”
“Yes, they would have hanged her. They did hang a sow last month. The hangman likes that; he eats the animal afterwards. Hang my pretty Djali! Poor little lamb!”
“Curses on you!” cried Dom Claude. “You are the executioner yourself. What means of saving her have you hit upon, rascal? Must I tear your idea from you with the forceps?”
“Softly, master! It is this.”
Gringoire bent to the archdeacon’s ear, and whispered to him, casting an anxious glance up and down the street meanwhile, although there was no one in sight. When he ended, Dom Claude took his hand and said coldly, “It is well. Until tomorrow, then.”
“Until tomorrow,” repeated Gringoire. And as the archdeacon departed in one direction, he moved away in the other, muttering. “Here’s a pretty business, Master Pierre Gringoire! Never mind! It shall not be said that because a man is little he is afraid of a great enterprise. Biton carried a full-grown bull upon his shoulders; wag-tails, black-caps, and stone-chats cross the sea.”
CHAPTER II
Turn Vagabond!
The archdeacon, on returning to the cloisters, found his brother, Jehan du Moulin, awaiting him at the door of his cell. He had whiled away the fatigue of waiting by drawing upon the wall in charcoal his elder brother’s profile, enriched with an exaggerated nose.
Dom Claude scarcely looked at his brother; he had other cares. That merry roguish face, whose radiance had so often brightened the priest’s gloomy countenance, was now incapable of dissipating the clouds which grew daily thicker over that corrupt, mephitic, stagnant soul.
“Brother,” timidly said Jehan, “I have come to see you.”
The archdeacon did not even deign to look at him.
“Well?”
“Brother,” continued the hypocrite, “you are so good to me, and you give me such good advice, that I am always coming back to you.”
“Well?”
“Alas! brother, how right you were when you said to me, ‘Jehan! Jehan! cessat doctorum doctrina, discipulorum, disciplina! Jehan, be prudent; Jehan, be studious; Jehan, do not wander outside the college bounds at night without just cause and leave from your master. Do not quarrel with the Picards （noli, Joannes, verberare Picardos）。 Do not lie and molder like an illiterate ass （quasi asinus illiteratus） amidst the litter of the schools. Jehan, suffer yourself to be punished at the discretion of your master. Jehan, go to chapel every evening, and sing an anthem with a collect and prayer to our Glorious Lady, the Virgin Mary.’ Alas! What excellent counsels were these!”
“Well?”
“Brother, you see before you a guilty wretch, a criminal, a miserable sinner, a libertine, a monster! My dear brother, Jehan has trampled your advice beneath his feet. I am fitly punished for it, and the good God is strangely just. So long as I had money I rioted and reveled and led a jolly life. Oh, how charming is the face of Vice, but how ugly and crooked is her back! Now, I have not a single silver coin; I have sold my table-cloth, my shirt, and my towel; no more feasting for me! The wax candle has burned out, and I have nothing left but a wretched tallow dip, which reeks in my nostrils. The girls laugh at me. I drink water. I am tormented by creditors and remorse.”