“Well, yes, an assassin!” said he; “and you shall be mine. You will not have me for your slave, you shall have me for your master. You shall be mine! You shall be mine! I have a den whither I will drag you. You must follow me, you must needs follow me, or I will give you up to justice! You must die, my beauty, or be mine,—be the priest‘s, the apostate’s, the assassin‘s! and that this night; do you hear me? Come! rejoice; come, kiss me, foolish girl! The tomb, or my bed!”
His eyes flashed with rage and desire. His impure lips reddened the neck of the young girl. She struggled in his arms. He covered her with frantic kisses.
“Do not bite me, monster!” she shrieked. “Oh, the hateful, poisonous monk! Let me go! I will tear out your vile grey hair, and throw it by handfuls in your face!”
He flushed, then paled, then released her, and looked at her gloomily. She thought herself victorious, and went on:— “I tell you that I belong to my Ph?bus, that ‘tis Phoebus I love, that Ph?bus alone is handsome! You priest, are old! you are ugly! Begone!”
He uttered a violent cry, like the wretch to whom a red-hot iron is applied. “Then die!” he said, gnashing his teeth. She saw his frightful look, and strove to fly. He overtook her, shook her, threw her down, and walked rapidly towards the corner of the Tour-Roland, dragging her after him over the pavement by her fair hands.
Reaching it, he turned to her:—
“For the last time, will you be mine?”
She answered emphatically,—
“No!”
Then he called in a loud voice,—
“Gudule! Gudule! here is the gipsy girl! Avenge yourself!”
The young girl felt herself suddenly seized by the elbow. She looked. A fleshless arm was thrust from a loop-hole in the wall, and held her with an iron grip.
“Hold her fast!” said the priest; “it’s the runaway gipsy. Do not let her go. I will fetch the officers. You shall see her hanged.”
A guttural laugh from the other side of the wall replied to these bloody words: “Ha! ha! ha!” The gipsy saw the priest depart in the direction of the Pont Notre-Dame. The tramp of horses was heard coming from that quarter.
The girl recognized the spiteful recluse. Panting with terror, she tried to release herself. She writhed, she twisted herself in agony and despair; but the woman held her with unnatural strength. The thin bony fingers which bruised her flesh fastened about her arm like a vise. That hand seemed riveted to her wrist. It was stronger than any chain, stronger than any pillory or iron ring; it was a pair of intelligent and living pincers issuing from a wall.
Exhausted, she sank back, and the fear of death took possession of her. She thought of the beauty of life, of youth, of the sight of the sky, of the various aspects of Nature, of the love of Ph?bus, of all that was behind her and of all that was rapidly coming upon her, of the priest who would denounce her, of the hangman who would soon arrive, of the gallows which was already there. Then terror rose to the very roots of her hair, and she heard the melancholy laugh of the recluse, as she whispered in her ear,— “Ha! ha! ha! You shall be hanged!”
She turned, almost fainting, to the window, and saw the savage face of the sachette through the bars.
“What have I done to you?” she asked feebly.
The recluse made no answer; she began to mumble in angry, mocking sing-song, “Gipsy girl! gipsy girl! gipsy girl!”
The luckless Esmeralda veiled her face with her hair, seeing that it was no human being with whom she had to deal.
All at once the recluse exclaimed, as if the gipsy’s question had taken all this time to penetrate her troubled brain:— “What have you done to me, do you say? Ah! What have you done to me, indeed, you gipsy! Well, listen, and I will tell you. I had a child, even I! Do you hear? I had a child,—a child, I say! A pretty little girl! My Agnès,” she repeated, her wits wandering for a moment, and kissing something in the gloom. “Well, are you listening, gipsy? They stole my child; they took my child from me; they ate my child! That is what you have done to me.”
The young girl answered, as innocently as the lamb in the fable,— “Alas! I probably was not even born then!”
“Oh, yes!” rejoined the recluse, “you must have been born. You had a hand in it. She would have been about your age! There! For fifteen years I have been in this hole; for fifteen years I have suffered; for fifteen years I have prayed; for fifteen years I have dashed my head against these four walls. I tell you, ‘twas the gipsies who stole her from me,—do you hear?—and who gnawed her bones. Have you a heart? Fancy what it is to have a child who plays at your knee; a child who sucks your breast; a child who sleeps in your arms. It is such a helpless, innocent thing! Well, that,—that’s what they took from me, what they killed for me! The good God knows it well! Now it is my turn; I will slaughter the Egyptians. Oh, how I would bite you, if the bars did not prevent me! My head is too big to pass through them! Poor little thing! they took her while she slept! And if they waked her when they snatched her up, all her shrieks were vain; I was not there! Ah, gipsy mothers, you ate my child! Come, look at yours!”