The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [159]
For some moments the young girl, wrapped in her own delightful thoughts, had been dreaming to the sound of his voice, without heeding the meaning of his words.
“Oh, how happy you will be!” continued the captain; and at the same time he gently unclasped the gipsy’s belt.
“What are you doing?” said she, quickly. This act of violence startled her from her reverie.
“Nothing,” answered Phoebus; “I was merely saying that you must give up this ridiculous mountebank dress when you come to live with me.”
“When I live with you, my Phœbus!” said the young girl, tenderly.
She again became pensive and silent.
The captain, made bold by her gentleness, took her by the waist without any resistance on her part, then began noiselessly to unlace the poor child’s bodice, and so disarranged her neckerchief that the panting priest saw the gipsy’s lovely shoulder issue from the gauze, plump and brown, like the moon rising through the mists on the horizon.
The young girl let Phoebus have his way. She did not seem conscious of what he was doing. The bold captain’s eyes sparkled.
All at once she turned towards him.
“Phœbus,” she said, with a look of infinite love, “instruct me in your religion.”
“My religion!” cried the captain, bursting into laughter. “I instruct you in my religion! Thunder and guns! What do you want with my religion?”
“To be married to you,” she answered.
The captain’s face assumed an expression of mingled surprise, scorn, recklessness, and evil passion.
“Nonsense!” said he. “Why should we marry?”
The gipsy turned pale, and let her head sink sadly on her breast.
“My pretty love,” tenderly added Phoebus, “what are all these foolish ideas? Marriage is nothing! Is any one less loving for not having spouted a little Latin in some priest’s shop?”
So saying in his sweetest voice, he approached extremely near the gipsy girl; his caressing hands had resumed their place around the lithe, slender waist, and his eye kindled more and more, and everything showed that Master Phoebus was about to enjoy one of those moments in which Jupiter himself commits so many follies that the good Homer is obliged to call in a cloud to help him.
But Dom Claude saw all. The door was made of decayed pun cheon staves, which left ample room between them for the passage of his hawk-like glance. The brown-skinned, broad-shouldered priest, hitherto condemned to the austere rule of the convent, shuddered and burned at this scene of love, darkness, and passion.
The young and lovely girl, her garments in disorder abandoning herself to this ardent young man, made his veins run molten lead. An extraordinary agitation shook him; his eye sought, with lustful desire, to penetrate beneath all these unfastened pins. Any one who had at this moment seen the face of the unhappy man glued to the worm-eaten bars, might have thought he saw a tiger glaring from his cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle. His pupils glowed like a candle through the cracks of the door.
Suddenly, with a rapid motion, Phoebus removed the gipsy’s neckerchief. The poor child, who still sat pale and dreamy, sprang up with a start; she retreated hastily from the enterprising officer, and, glancing at her bare throat and shoulders, red, confused, and dumb with shame, she crossed her lovely arms over her bosom to cover it. But for the flame which mantled her cheeks, any one seeing her thus silent and motionless, might have thought her a statue of Modesty. Her eyes