The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [193]
But when the breathless and disheveled bell-ringer laid her down in the cell of refuge, when she felt his great hands gently untie the rope which bruised her arms, she experienced that sort of shock which wakens with a start the passengers on a ship that runs aground in the middle of a dark night. Her ideas woke too, and returned to her one by one. She saw that she was still in Notre-Dame; she remembered being torn from the hangman’s hands; that Phoebus lived, that Phoebus had ceased to love her; and these two ideas, one of which lent such bitterness to the other, presenting themselves simultaneously to the poor victim, she turned to Quasimodo, who stood before her and who terrified her, saying,—
“Why did you save me?”
He looked anxiously at her, as if striving to guess what she said. She repeated her question. He gazed at her with profound sadness, and fled.
She was amazed.
A few moments later he returned, bringing a packet which he threw at her feet. It contained clothes left at the door of the church for her by charitable women.
Then she looked down at herself, saw that she was almost naked, and blushed. Life had returned.
Quasimodo appeared to feel something of her shame. He covered his eye with his broad hand, and again departed, but with lingering steps.
She hastily dressed herself. The garments given her consisted of a white gown and veil,—the dress of a novice at the Hotel Dieu, the great hospital managed by nuns.
She had scarcely finished when Quasimodo returned. He carried a basket under one arm and a mattress under the other. In the basket were a bottle, a loaf of bread, and a few other provisions. He set the basket down, and said, “Eat!” He spread the mattress on the floor, and said, “Sleep!”
It was his own food, his own bed, which the bell-ringer had brought.
The gipsy lifted her eyes to his face to thank him, but she could not utter a word. The poor devil was hideous indeed. She hung her head with a shudder of fright.
Then he said,—
“I alarm you. I am very ugly, am I not? Do not look at me; only listen to me. During the day, you must stay here; by night, you can walk anywhere about the church; but do not leave the church by day or night. You would be lost. They would kill you, and I should die.”
Moved by his words, she raised her head to reply. He had vanished. Alone once more, she pondered the strange words of this almost monstrous being, struck by the sound of his voice, which was so hoarse and yet so gentle.
Then she examined her cell. It was a room of some six feet square, with a little dormer-window and a door opening on the slightly sloping roof of flat stones. Various gutter-spouts in the form of animals seemed bending over her and stretching their necks to look at her through the window. Beyond the roof she saw the tops of a thousand chimneys, from which issued the smoke of all the fires of Paris. A sad spectacle for the poor gipsy girl,—a foundling, condemned to death, an unhappy creature, without a country, without a family, without a hearth.
Just as the thought of her forlorn condition struck her more painfully than ever, she felt a hairy, bearded head rub against her hands and knees. She trembled (everything frightened her now) and looked down. It was the poor goat, the nimble Djali, who had escaped with her when Quasimodo scattered Charmolue’s men, and who had been lavishing caresses on her feet for nearly an hour without winning a glance. The gipsy girl covered her with kisses.
“Oh, Djali,” said she, “how could I forget you! But you never forget me! Oh, you at least are not ungrateful!”
At the same time, as if an invisible hand had lifted the weight which had so long held back her tears, she began to weep; and as her tears flowed, she felt the sharpest and bitterest of her grief going from her with them.
When evening