The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [137]
It would have been hard to explain the nature of his gaze, and the source of the fire which flashed from his eyes. It was a fixed gaze, and yet it was full of agitation and trouble. And from the perfect repose of his whole body, scarcely shaken by an occasional involuntary shiver, like a tree stirred by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more stony than the railing upon which they rested; from the rigid smile which contracted his face, you would have said that there was nothing living about Claude Frollo but his eyes.
The gipsy danced; she twirled her tambourine upon the tip of her finger, and tossed it into the air as she danced her Provençal sarabands: light, alert, and gay, quite unconscious of the weight of that terrible gaze which fell perpendicularly upon her head.
The crowd swarmed about her. Now and then a man accoutred in a loose red and yellow coat waved the people back into a circle, then sat down again in a chair a few paces away from the dancer, and let the goat lay its head upon his knees. This man seemed to be the gipsy’s comrade. From the lofty point where he stood, Claude Frollo could not distinguish his features.
From the moment that the archdeacon observed this stranger, his attention seemed to be divided between him and the dancer, and his face grew blacker and blacker. Suddenly he straightened himself up, and trembled from head to foot. “Who is that man?” he muttered between his teeth. “I have always seen her alone till now!”
Then he plunged down the winding stairs once more. As he passed the half-open belfry door, he saw something which struck him: he saw Quasimodo, who, leaning from an opening in one of those slate pent-houses which look like huge Venetian blinds, was also gazing steadily out into the square. He was so absorbed in looking that he paid no heed to his foster father’s presence. His savage eye had a strange expression; it looked both charmed and gentle. “How strange!” murmured Claude. “Can he be looking at the gipsy?” He continued his descent. In a few moments the anxious archdeacon came out into the square through the door at the foot of the tower.
“What has become of the gipsy girl?” he said, joining the group of spectators called together by the sound of the tambourine.
“I don’t know,” answered one of his neighbors. “She has just vanished. I think she has gone to dance some sort of a fandango in the house over opposite, where they called her in.”
In the gipsy’s place, upon the same carpet whose pattern had but just now seemed to vanish beneath the capricious figures of her dance, the archdeacon saw no one but the red-and-yellow man, who, hoping to gain a few coppers in his turn, was walking round the ring, his elbows on his hips, his head thrown back, his face scarlet, his neck stretched to its utmost extent, and a chair between his teeth. Upon this chair was fastened a cat, lent by a neighboring woman, which spit and squalled in desperate alarm.
“By‘r Lady!” cried the archdeacon, as the mountebank, dripping with perspiration, passed him with his pyramid of chair and cat, “what is Master Pierre Gringoire doing here?”
The archdeacon’s stern voice so agitated the poor wretch that he lost his balance, and his entire structure, chair, cat, and all, fell pell-mell upon the heads of the spectators, amid a storm of inextinguishable shouts and laughter.
Master Pierre Gringoire (for it was indeed he) would probably have had a serious account to settle with the mistress of the cat, and the owners of all the bruised and scratched faces around him, if he had not hastily availed himself of the confusion to take refuge in the church, where Claude Frollo had beckoned him to follow.
The cathedral was dark and deserted; the side aisles were full of shadows,