Then he called out as loud as he could, and presently a body of armed
men appeared. Soon the public hangman was aroused, and the execution
which had been interrupted by Quasimodo's heroic rescue was carried out.
Meantime, what of Quasimodo?
He had rushed to her cell when the king's troops, having beaten off the
vagrants, entered the church, and it was empty! Then he had explored
every nook and cranny of Notre Dame, and again and again gone the round
of the church. For an hour he sat in despair, his body convulsed by
sobs.
Suddenly he remembered that Claude Frollo had a secret key, and decided
that the priest must have carried her off.
At that very moment Claude returned to Notre Dame, after handing over
Esmeralda to the hangman. Quasimodo watched him ascend to the balustrade
at the top of the tower, and then followed him; the priest's attention
was too absorbed to hear the hunchback's step.
Claude rested his arms on the balustrade, and gazed intently at the
gallows in the Grève. Quasimodo tried to make out what it was the priest
stared at, and then he recognised Esmeralda in the hangman's arms on the
ladder, and in another second the hangman had done his work.
A demoniac laugh broke from the livid lips of Claude Frollo; Quasimodo
could not hear this laughter, but he saw it.
He rushed furiously upon the archdeacon, and with his great fists he
hurled Claude Frollo into the abyss over which he leaned.
The archdeacon caught at a gutter, and hung suspended for a few minutes,
and then fell--more than two hundred feet.
Quasimodo raised his eyes to the gypsy, whose body still swung from the
gibbet; and then lowered them to the shapeless mass on the pavement
beneath. "And these were all I have ever loved!" he said, sobbing.
He was never seen again in Notre Dame.
Some two years later, when there were certain clearances in the vault
where the body of Esmeralda had been deposited, the skeleton of a man,
deformed and twisted, was found in close embrace with the skeleton of a
woman. A little silk bag which Esmeralda had always worn was around the
neck of the skeleton of the woman.
* * * * *