New Arabian Nights

A Lodging for the Night

A STORY OF FRANCIS VILLON

It was late in November 1456. The snow fell over Paris with

rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally

and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull,

and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent,

circuitous, interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist

eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master

Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a

tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon

Olympus? or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor

Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched

upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old

priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the young

rascal to a bottle of wine in honour of the jest and the grimaces

with which it was accompanied, and swore on his own white beard

that he had been just such another irreverent dog when he was

Villon's age.

The air was raw and pointed, but not far below freezing; and the

flakes were large, damp, and adhesive. The whole city was sheeted

up. An army might have marched from end to end and not a footfall

given the alarm. If there were any belated birds in heaven, they

saw the island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim

white spars, on the black ground of the river. High up overhead

the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a

niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on

its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed

into great false noses, drooping towards the point. The crockets

were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of

the wind, there was a dull sound of dripping about the precincts of

the church.

The cemetery of St. John had taken its own share of the snow. All

the graves were decently covered; tall white housetops stood around

in grave array; worthy burghers were long ago in bed, benightcapped

like their domiciles; there was no light in all the neighbourhood

but a little peep from a lamp that hung swinging in the church

choir, and tossed the shadows to and fro in time to its

oscillations. The clock was hard on ten when the patrol went by

with halberds and a lantern, beating their hands; and they saw

nothing suspicious about the cemetery of St. John.

Yet there was a small house, backed up against the cemetery wall,

which was still awake, and awake to evil purpose, in that snoring

district. There was not much to betray it from without; only a

stream of warm vapour from the chimney-top, a patch where the snow

melted on the roof, and a few half-obliterated footprints at the

door. But within, behind the shuttered windows, Master Francis

Villon the poet, and some of the thievish crew with whom he

consorted, were keeping the night alive and passing round the

bottle.

A great pile of living embers diffused a strong and ruddy glow from

the arched chimney. Before this straddled Dom Nicolas, the Picardy

monk, with his skirts picked up and his fat legs bared to the

comfortable warmth. His dilated shadow cut the room in half; and

the firelight only escaped on either side of his broad person, and

in a little pool between his outspread feet. His face had the

beery, bruised appearance of the continual drinker's; it was

covered with a network of congested veins, purple in ordinary

circumstances, but now pale violet, for even with his back to the

fire the cold pinched him on the other side. His cowl had half

fallen back, and made a strange excrescence on either side of his

bull neck. So he straddled, grumbling, and cut the room in half

with the shadow of his portly frame.

On the right, Villon and Guy Tabary were huddled together over a

scrap of parchment; Villon making a ballade which he was to call

the "Ballade of Roast Fish," and Tabary spluttering admiration at

his shoulder. The poet was a rag of a man, dark, little, and lean,

with hollow cheeks and thin black locks. He carried his four-and-

twenty years with feverish animation. Greed had made folds about

his eyes, evil smiles had puckered his mouth. The wolf and pig

struggled together in his face. It was an eloquent, sharp, ugly,

earthly countenance. His hands were small and prehensile, with

fingers knotted like a cord; and they were continually flickering

in front of him in violent and expressive pantomime. As for

Tabary, a broad, complacent, admiring imbecility breathed from his

squash nose and slobbering lips: he had become a thief, just as he

might have become the most decent of burgesses, by the imperious

chance that rules the lives of human geese and human donkeys.

At the monk's other hand, Montigny and Thevenin Pensete played a

game of chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good

birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe,

and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the

face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a

good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques,

and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile

illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of

red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent

chucklings as he swept in his gains.

"Doubles or quits?" said Thevenin. Montigny nodded grimly.

"Some may prefer to dine in state," wrote Villon, "On bread and

cheese on silver plate. Or - or - help me out, Guido!"

Tabary giggled.

"Or parsley on a golden dish," scribbled the poet.

The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and

sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made

sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper

an the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the

gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an

eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet's, much detested by the

Picardy monk.

"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are

all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance,

my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down

went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged

medlar-tree! - I say, Dom Nicolas, it'll be cold to-night on the

St. Denis Road?" he asked.

Dom Nicolas winked both his big eyes, and seemed to choke upon his

Adam's apple. Montfaucon, the great grisly Paris gibbet, stood

hard by the St. Denis Road, and the pleasantry touched him on the

raw. As for Tabary, he laughed immoderately over the medlars; he

had never heard anything more light-hearted; and he held his sides

and crowed. Villon fetched him a fillip on the nose, which turned

his mirth into an attack of coughing.

"Oh, stop that row," said Villon, "and think of rhymes to 'fish'."

"Doubles or quits," said Montigny doggedly.

"With all my heart," quoth Thevenin.

"Is there any more in that bottle?" asked the monk.

"Open another," said Villon. "How do you ever hope to fill that

big hogshead, your body, with little things like bottles? And how

do you expect to get to heaven? How many angels, do you fancy, can

be spared to carry up a single monk from Picardy? Or do you think

yourself another Elias - and they'll send the coach for you?"

"HOMINIBUS IMPOSSIBILE," replied the monk, as he filled his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

"Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.

"It was very good," objected Tabary.

Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to 'fish'," he said.

"What have you to do with Latin? You'll wish you knew none of it

at the great assizes, when the devil calls for Guido Tabary,

clericus - the devil with the hump-back and red-hot finger-nails.

Talking of the devil," he added in a whisper, "look at Montigny!"

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not seem to be

enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little to a side; one nostril

nearly shut, and the other much inflated. The black dog was on his

back, as people say, in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he

breathed hard under the gruesome burden.

"He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Tabary, with round

eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread his open hands

to the red embers. It was the cold that thus affected Dom Nicolas,

and not any excess of moral sensibility

"Come now," said Villon - "about this ballade. How does it run so

far?" And beating time with his hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief and fatal

movement among the gamesters. The round was completed, and

Thevenin was just opening his mouth to claim another victory, when

Montigny leaped up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the

heart. The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry,

before he had time to move. A tremor or two convulsed his frame;

his hands opened and shut, his heels rattled on the floor; then his

head rolled backward over one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and

Thevenin Pensete's spirit had returned to Him who made it.

Everyone sprang to his feet; but the business was over in two twos.

The four living fellows looked at each other in rather a ghastly

fashion; the dead man contemplating a corner of the roof with a

singular and ugly leer.

"My God!" said Tabary; and he began to pray in Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a step forward

and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin, and laughed still louder.

Then he sat down suddenly, all of a heap, upon a stool, and

continued laughing bitterly as though he would shake himself to

pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked; and he picked the

dead man's pockets with a practised hand, and divided the money

into four equal portions on the table. "There's for you," he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a single stealthy

glance at the dead Thevenin, who was beginning to sink into himself

and topple sideways of the chair.

"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his mirth. "It's a

hanging job for every man jack of us that's here - not to speak of

those who aren't." He made a shocking gesture in the air with his

raised right hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on one

side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who has been

hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the spoil, and executed a

shuffle with his feet as if to restore the circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at the money,

and retired to the other end of the apartment.

Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and drew out the

dagger, which was followed by a jet of blood.

"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he wiped the blade

on his victim's doublet.

"I think we had," returned Villon with a gulp. "Damn his fat

head!" he broke out. "It sticks in my throat like phlegm. What

right has a man to have red hair when he is dead?" And he fell all

of a heap again upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with

his hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Tabary feebly chiming

in.

"Cry baby," said the monk.

"I always said he was a woman," added Montigny with a sneer. "Sit

up, can't you?" he went on, giving another shake to the murdered

body. "Tread out that fire, Nick!"

But Nick was better employed; he was quietly taking Villon's purse,

as the poet sat, limp and trembling, on the stool where he had been

making a ballade not three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary

dumbly demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently

promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of his gown.

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical

existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Villon shook

himself, jumped to his feet, and began helping to scatter and

extinguish the embers. Meanwhile Montigny opened the door and

cautiously peered into the street. The coast was clear; there was

no meddlesome patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip

out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to escape from

the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin, and the rest were in a

still greater hurry to get rid of him before he should discover the

loss of his money, he was the first by general consent to issue

forth into the street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds from heaven. Only

a few vapours, as thin as moonlight, fleeting rapidly across the

stars. It was bitter cold; and by a common optical effect, things

seemed almost more definite than in the broadest daylight. The

sleeping city was absolutely still: a company of white hoods, a

field full of little Alps, below the twinkling stars. Villon

cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he

went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering

streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the

cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own

plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind

him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with

a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his

own spirits, and choosing a street at random, stepped boldly

forward in the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went: the aspect of the gallows

at Montfaucon in this bright windy phase of the night's existence,

for one; and for another, the look of the dead man with his bald

head and garland of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart,

and he kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from

unpleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes he looked

back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous jerk; but he was the

only moving thing in the white streets, except when the wind

swooped round a corner and threw up the snow, which was beginning

to freeze, in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black clump and a couple

of lanterns. The clump was in motion, and the lanterns swung as

though carried by men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was

merely crossing his line of march, he judged it wiser to get out of

eyeshot as speedily as he could. He was not in the humour to be

challenged, and he was conscious of making a very conspicuous mark

upon the snow. Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel,

with some turrets and a large porch before the door; it was half-

ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty; and so he made

three steps of it and jumped into the shelter of the porch. It was

pretty dark inside, after the glimmer of the snowy streets, and he

was groping forward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over

some substance which offered an indescribable mixture of

resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart gave a leap,

and he sprang two steps back and stared dreadfully at the obstacle.

Then he gave a little laugh of relief. It was only a woman, and

she dead. He knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point.

She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little ragged

finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and her cheeks had

been heavily rouged that same afternoon. Her pockets were quite

empty; but in her stocking, underneath the garter, Villon found two

of the small coins that went by the name of whites. It was little

enough; but it was always something; and the poet was moved with a

deep sense of pathos that she should have died before she had spent

her money. That seemed to him a dark and pitiable mystery; and he

looked from the coins in his hand to the dead woman, and back again

to the coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life.

Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he had conquered

France, and this poor jade cut off by a cold draught in a great

man's doorway, before she had time to spend her couple of whites -

it seemed a cruel way to carry on the world. Two whites would have

taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would have been

one more good taste in the mouth, one more smack of the lips,

before the devil got the soul, and the body was left to birds and

vermin. He would like to use all his tallow before the light was

blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,

half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopped

beating; a feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs,

and a cold blow seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified

for a moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and

then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with

perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual - it

is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is

only one limit to their fortune - that of time; and a spendthrift

with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent.

For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking

reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a

breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for

it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly

earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw

the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he

stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor

corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps towards the

house beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the

patrol, which was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but

that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked right and

left upon the snow: nothing was to be seen. He had not dropped it

in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have liked

dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant

unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their

efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary,

it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the

chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the

authorities and Paris gibbet.

He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the

snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But

he could only find one white; the other had probably struck

sideways and sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket,

all his projects for a rousing night in some wild tavern vanished

utterly away. And it was not only pleasure that fled laughing from

his grasp; positive discomfort, positive pain, attacked him as he

stood ruefully before the porch. His perspiration had dried upon

him; and though the wind had now fallen, a binding frost was

setting in stronger with every hour, and be felt benumbed and sick

at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour, improbable

as was success, he would try the house of his adopted father, the

chaplain of St. Benoit.

He ran there all the way, and knocked timidly. There was no

answer. He knocked again and again, taking heart with every

stroke; and at last steps were heard approaching from within. A

barred wicket fell open in the iron-studded door, and emitted a

gush of yellow light.

"Hold up your face to the wicket," said the chaplain from within.

"It's only me," whimpered Villon.

"Oh, it's only you, is it?" returned the chaplain; and he cursed

him with foul unpriestly oaths for disturbing him at such an hour,

and bade him be off to hell, where he came from.

"My hands are blue to the wrist," pleaded Villon; "my feet are dead

and full of twinges; my nose aches with the sharp air; the cold

lies at my heart. I may be dead before morning. Only this once,

father, and before God I will never ask again!"

"You should have come earlier," said the ecclesiastic coolly.

"Young men require a lesson now and then." He shut the wicket and

retired deliberately into the interior of the house.

Villon was beside himself; he beat upon the door with his hands and

feet, and shouted hoarsely after the chaplain.

"Wormy old fox!" he cried. "If I had my hand under your twist, I

would send you flying headlong into the bottomless pit."

A door shut in the interior, faintly audible to the poet down long

passages. He passed his hand over his mouth with an oath. And

then the humour of the situation struck him, and he laughed and

looked lightly up to heaven, where the stars seemed to be winking

over his discomfiture.

What was to be done? It looked very like a night in the frosty

streets. The idea of the dead woman popped into his imagination,

and gave him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early

night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so

young! and with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement

before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own

fate, as if it had been some one else's, and made a little

imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they should

find his body.

He passed all his chances under review, turning the white between

his thumb and forefinger. Unfortunately he was on bad terms with

some old friends who would once have taken pity on him in such a

plight. He had lampooned them in verses, he had beaten and cheated

them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought

there was at least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance.

It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see.

On the way, two little accidents happened to him which coloured his

musings in a very different manner. For, first, he fell in with

the track of a patrol, and walked in it for some hundred yards,

although it lay out of his direction. And this spirited him up; at

least he had confused his trail; for he was still possessed with

the idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the snow, and

collaring him next morning before he was awake. The other matter

affected him very differently. He passed a street corner, where,

not so long before, a woman and her child had been devoured by

wolves. This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when

wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris again; and a

lone man in these deserted streets would run the chance of

something worse than a mere scare. He stopped and looked upon the

place with an unpleasant interest - it was a centre where several

lanes intersected each other; and he looked down them all one after

another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should detect some

galloping black things on the snow or hear the sound of howling

between him and the river. He remembered his mother telling him

the story and pointing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His

mother! If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at

least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon the morrow;

nay, he would go and see her too, poor old girl! So thinking, he

arrived at his destination - his last hope for the night.

The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and yet after a few

taps, he heard a movement overhead, a door opening, and a cautious

voice asking who was there. The poet named himself in a loud

whisper, and waited, not without come trepidation, the result. Nor

had he to wait long. A window was suddenly opened, and a pailful

of slops splashed down upon the doorstep. Villon had not been

unprepared for something of the sort, and had put himself as much

in shelter as the nature of the porch admitted; but for all that,

he was deplorably drenched below the waist. His hose began to

freeze almost at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him in

the face; he remembered he was of phthisical tendency, and began

coughing tentatively. But the gravity of the danger steadied his

nerves. He stopped a few hundred yards from the door where he had

been so rudely used, and reflected with his finger to his nose. He

could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that was to take

it. He had noticed a house not far away, which looked as if it

might be easily broken into, and thither he betook himself

promptly, entertaining himself on the way with the idea of a room

still hot, with a table still loaded with the remains of supper,

where he might pass the rest of the black hours, and whence he

should issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate. He

even considered on what viands and what wines he should prefer; and

as he was calling the roll of his favourite dainties, roast fish

presented itself to his mind with an odd mixture of amusement and

horror.

"I shall never finish that ballade," he thought to himself; and

then, with another shudder at the recollection, "Oh, damn his fat

head!" he repeated fervently, and spat upon the snow.

The house in question looked dark at first sight; but as Villon

made a preliminary inspection in search of the handiest point of

attack, a little twinkle of light caught his eye from behind a

curtained window.

"The devil!" he thought. "People awake! Some student or some

saint, confound the crew! Can't they get drunk and lie in bed

snoring like their neighbours? What's the good of curfew, and poor

devils of bell-ringers jumping at a rope's end in bell-towers?

What's the use of day, if people sit up all night? The gripes to

them!" He grinned as he saw where his logic was leading him.

"Every man to his business, after all," added he, "and if they're

awake, by the Lord, I may come by a supper honestly for this once,

and cheat the devil."

He went boldly to the door and knocked with an assured hand. On

both previous occasions, he had knocked timidly and with some dread

of attracting notice; but now when he had just discarded the

thought of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a mighty

simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of his blows echoed

through the house with thin, phantasmal reverberations, as though

it were quite empty; but these had scarcely died away before a

measured tread drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one

wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of guile were

known to those within. A tall figure of a man, muscular and spare,

but a little bent, confronted Villon. The head was massive in

bulk, but finely sculptured; the nose blunt at the bottom, but

refining upward to where it joined a pair of strong and honest

eyebrows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with delicate markings, and

the whole face based upon a thick white beard, boldly and squarely

trimmed. Seen as it was by the light of a flickering hand-lamp, it

looked perhaps nobler than it had a right to do; but it was a fine

face, honourable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and

righteous.

"You knock late, sir," said the old man in resonant, courteous

tones.

Villon cringed, and brought up many servile words of apology; at a

crisis of this sort, the beggar was uppermost in him, and the man

of genius hid his head with confusion.

"You are cold," repeated the old man, "and hungry? Well, step in."

And he ordered him into the house with a noble enough gesture.

"Some great seigneur," thought Villon, as his host, setting down

the lamp on the flagged pavement of the entry, shot the bolts once

more into their places.

"You will pardon me if I go in front," he said, when this was done;

and he preceded the poet upstairs into a large apartment, warmed

with a pan of charcoal and lit by a great lamp hanging from the

roof. It was very bare of furniture: only some gold plate on a

sideboard; some folios; and a stand of armour between the windows.

Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, representing the

crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and in another a scene of

shepherds and shepherdesses by a running stream. Over the chimney

was a shield of arms.

"Will you seat yourself," said the old man, "and forgive me if I

leave you? I am alone in my house to-night, and if you are to eat

I must forage for you myself."

No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from the chair on

which he had just seated himself, and began examining the room,

with the stealth and passion of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons

in his hand, opened all the folios, and investigated the arms upon

the shield, and the stuff with which the seats were lined. He

raised the window curtains, and saw that the windows were set with

rich stained glass in figures, so far as he could see, of martial

import. Then he stood in the middle of the room, drew a long

breath, and retaining it with puffed cheeks, looked round and round

him, turning on his heels, as if to impress every feature of the

apartment on his memory.

"Seven pieces of plate," he said. "If there had been ten, I would

have risked it. A fine house, and a fine old master, so help me

all the saints!"

And just then, hearing the old man's tread returning along the

corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began humbly toasting his

wet legs before the charcoal pan.

His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a jug of wine

in the other. He set down the plate upon the table, motioning

Villon to draw in his chair, and going to the sideboard, brought

back two goblets, which he filled.

"I drink to your better fortune," he said, gravely touching

Villon's cup with his own.

"To our better acquaintance," said the poet, growing bold. A mere

man of the people would have been awed by the courtesy of the old

seigneur, but Villon was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth

for great lords before now, and found them as black rascals as

himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands with a ravenous

gusto, while the old man, leaning backward, watched him with

steady, curious eyes.

"You have blood on your shoulder, my man," he said. Montigny must

have laid his wet right hand upon him as he left the house. He

cursed Montigny in his heart.

"It was none of my shedding," he stammered.

"I had not supposed so," returned his host quietly.

"A brawl?"

"Well, something of that sort," Villon admitted with a quaver.

"Perhaps a fellow murdered?"

"Oh no, not murdered," said the poet, more and more confused. "It

was all fair play - murdered by accident. I had no hand in it, God

strike me dead!" he added fervently.

"One rogue the fewer, I dare say," observed the master of the

house.

"You may dare to say that," agreed Villon, infinitely relieved.

"As big a rogue as there is between here and Jerusalem. He turned

up his toes like a lamb. But it was a nasty thing to look at. I

dare say you've seen dead men in your time, my lord?" he added,

glancing at the armour.

"Many," said the old man. "I have followed the wars, as you

imagine."

Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just taken up

again.

"Were any of them bald?" he asked.

"Oh yes, and with hair as white as mine."

"I don't think I should mind the white so much," said Villon. "His

was red." And he had a return of his shuddering and tendency to

laughter, which he drowned with a great draught of wine. "I'm a

little put out when I think of it," he went on. "I knew him - damn

him! And then the cold gives a man fancies - or the fancies give a

man cold, I don't know which."

"Have you any money?" asked the old man.

"I have one white," returned the poet, laughing. "I got it out of

a dead jade's stocking in a porch. She was as dead as Caesar, poor

wench, and as cold as a church, with bits of ribbon sticking in her

hair. This is a hard world in winter for wolves and wenches and

poor rogues like me."

"I," said the old man, "am Enguerrand de la Feuillee, seigneur de

Brisetout, bailly du Patatrac. Who and what may you be?"

Villon rose and made a suitable reverence. "I am called Francis

Villon," he said, "a poor Master of Arts of this university. I

know some Latin, and a deal of vice. I can make chansons,

ballades, lais, virelais, and roundels, and I am very fond of wine.

I was born in a garret, and I shall not improbably die upon the

gallows. I may add, my lord, that from this night forward I am

your lordship's very obsequious servant to command."

"No servant of mine," said the knight; "my guest for this evening,

and no more."

"A very grateful guest," said Villon politely; and he drank in dumb

show to his entertainer.

"You are shrewd," began the old man, tapping his forehead, "very

shrewd; you have learning; you are a clerk; and yet you take a

small piece of money off a dead woman in the street. Is it not a

kind of theft?"

"It is a kind of theft much practised in the wars, my lord."

"The wars are the field of honour," returned the old man proudly.

"There a man plays his life upon the cast; he fights in the name of

his lord the king, his Lord God, and all their lordships the holy

saints and angels."

"Put it," said Villon, "that I were really a thief, should I not

play my life also, and against heavier odds?"

"For gain, but not for honour."

"Gain?" repeated Villon with a shrug. "Gain! The poor fellow

wants supper, and takes it. So does the soldier in a campaign.

Why, what are all these requisitions we hear so much about? If

they are not gain to those who take them, they are loss enough to

the others. The men-at-arms drink by a good fire, while the

burgher bites his nails to buy them wine and wood. I have seen a

good many ploughmen swinging on trees about the country, ay, I have

seen thirty on one elm, and a very poor figure they made; and when

I asked some one how all these came to be hanged, I was told it was

because they could not scrape together enough crowns to satisfy the

men-at-arms."

"These things are a necessity of war, which the low-born must

endure with constancy. It is true that some captains drive over

hard; there are spirits in every rank not easily moved by pity; and

indeed many follow arms who are no better than brigands."

"You see," said the poet, "you cannot separate the soldier from the

brigand; and what is a thief but an isolated brigand with

circumspect manners? I steal a couple of mutton chops, without so

much as disturbing people's sleep; the farmer grumbles a bit, but

sups none the less wholesomely on what remains. You come up

blowing gloriously on a trumpet, take away the whole sheep, and

beat the farmer pitifully into the bargain. I have no trumpet; I

am only Tom, d**k, or Harry; I am a rogue and a dog, and hanging's

too good for me - with all my heart; but just you ask the farmer

which of us he prefers, just find out which of us he lies awake to

curse on cold nights."

"Look at us two," said his lordship. "I am old, strong, and

honoured. If I were turned from my house to-morrow, hundreds would

be proud to shelter me. Poor people would go out and pass the

night in the streets with their children, if I merely hinted that I

wished to be alone. And I find you up, wandering homeless, and

picking farthings off dead women by the wayside! I fear no man and

nothing; I have seen you tremble and lose countenance at a word. I

wait God's summons contentedly in my own house, or, if it please

the king to call me out again, upon the field of battle. You look

for the gallows; a rough, swift death, without hope or honour. Is

there no difference between these two?"

"As far as to the moon," Villon acquiesced. "But if I had been

born lord of Brisetout, and you had been the poor scholar Francis,

would the difference have been any the less? Should not I have

been warming my knees at this charcoal pan, and would not you have

been groping for farthings in the snow? Should not I have been the

soldier, and you the thief?"

"A thief!" cried the old man. "I a thief! If you understood your

words, you would repent them."

Villon turned out his hands with a gesture of inimitable impudence.

"If your lordship had done me the honour to follow my argument!" he

said.

"I do you too much honour in submitting to your presence," said the

knight. "Learn to curb your tongue when you speak with old and

honourable men, or some one hastier than I may reprove you in a

sharper fashion." And he rose and paced the lower end of the

apartment, struggling with anger and antipathy. Villon

surreptitiously refilled his cup, and settled himself more

comfortably in the chair, crossing his knees and leaning his head

upon one hand and the elbow against the back of the chair. He was

now replete and warm; and he was in nowise frightened for his host,

having gauged him as justly as was possible between two such

different characters. The night was far spent, and in a very

comfortable fashion after all; and he felt morally certain of a

safe departure on the morrow.

"Tell me one thing," said the old man, pausing in his walk. "Are

you really a thief?"

"I claim the sacred rights of hospitality," returned the poet. "My

lord, I am."

"You are very young," the knight continued.

"I should never have been so old," replied Villon, showing his

fingers, "if I had not helped myself with these ten talents. They

have been my nursing mothers and my nursing fathers."

"You may still repent and change."

"I repent daily," said the poet. "There are few people more given

to repentance than poor Francis. As for change, let somebody

change my circumstances. A man must continue to eat, if it were

only that he may continue to repent."

"The change must begin in the heart," returned the old man

solemnly.

"My dear lord," answered Villon, "do you really fancy that I steal

for pleasure? I hate stealing, like any other piece of work or of

danger. My teeth chatter when I see a gallows. But I must eat, I

must drink, I must mix in society of some sort. What the devil!

Man is not a solitary animal - CUI DEUS FAEMINAM TRADIT. Make me

king's pantler - make me abbot of St. Denis; make me bailly of the

Patatrac; and then I shall be changed indeed. But as long as you

leave me the poor scholar Francis Villon, without a farthing, why,

of course, I remain the same."

"The grace of God is all-powerful."

"I should be a heretic to question it," said Francis. "It has made

you lord of Brisetout and bailly of the Patatrac; it has given me

nothing but the quick wits under my hat and these ten toes upon my

hands. May I help myself to wine? I thank you respectfully. By

God's grace, you have a very superior vintage."

The lord of Brisetout walked to and fro with his hands behind his

back. Perhaps he was not yet quite settled in his mind about the

parallel between thieves and soldiers; perhaps Villon had

interested him by some cross-thread of sympathy; perhaps his wits

were simply muddled by so much unfamiliar reasoning; but whatever

the cause, he somehow yearned to convert the young man to a better

way of thinking, and could not make up his mind to drive him forth

again into the street.

"There is something more than I can understand in this," he said at

length. "Your mouth is full of subtleties, and the devil has led

you very far astray; but the devil is only a very weak spirit

before God's truth, and all his subtleties vanish at a word of true

honour, like darkness at morning. Listen to me once more. I

learned long ago that a gentleman should live chivalrously and

lovingly to God, and the king, and his lady; and though I have seen

many strange things done, I have still striven to command my ways

upon that rule. It is not only written in all noble histories, but

in every man's heart, if he will take care to read. You speak of

food and wine, and I know very well that hunger is a difficult

trial to endure; but you do not speak of other wants; you say

nothing of honour, of faith to God and other men, of courtesy, of

love without reproach. It may be that I am not very wise - and yet

I think I am - but you seem to me like one who has lost his way and

made a great error in life. You are attending to the little wants,

and you have totally forgotten the great and only real ones, like a

man who should be doctoring a toothache on the Judgment Day. For

such things as honour and love and faith are not only nobler than

food and drink, but indeed I think that we desire them more, and

suffer more sharply for their absence. I speak to you as I think

you will most easily understand me. Are you not, while careful to

fill your belly, disregarding another appetite in your heart, which

spoils the pleasure of your life and keeps you continually

wretched?"

Villon was sensibly nettled under all this sermonising. "You think

I have no sense of honour!" he cried. "I'm poor enough, God knows!

It's hard to see rich people with their gloves, and you blowing in

your hands. An empty belly is a bitter thing, although you speak

so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would

change your tune. Any way I'm a thief - make the most of that -

but I'm not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have

you to know I've an honour of my own, as good as yours, though I

don't prate about it all day long, as if it was a God's miracle to

have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till

it's wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been in this

room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone in the house?

Look at your gold plate! You're strong, if you like, but you're

old and unarmed, and I have my knife. What did I want but a jerk

of the elbow and here would have been you with the cold steel in

your bowels, and there would have been me, linking in the streets,

with an armful of gold cups! Did you suppose I hadn't wit enough

to see that? And I scorned the action. There are your damned

goblets, as safe as in a church; there are you, with your heart

ticking as good as new; and here am I, ready to go out again as

poor as I came in, with my one white that you threw in my teeth!

And you think I have no sense of honour - God strike me dead!"

The old man stretched out his right arm. "I will tell you what you

are," he said. "You are a rogue, my man, an impudent and a black-

hearted rogue and vagabond. I have passed an hour with you. Oh!

believe me, I feel myself disgraced! And you have eaten and drunk

at my table. But now I am sick at your presence; the day has come,

and the night-bird should be off to his roost. Will you go before,

or after?"

"Which you please," returned the poet, rising. "I believe you to

be strictly honourable." He thoughtfully emptied his cup. "I wish

I could add you were intelligent," he went on, knocking on his head

with his knuckles. "Age, age! the brains stiff and rheumatic."

The old man preceded him from a point of self-respect; Villon

followed, whistling, with his thumbs in his girdle.

"God pity you," said the lord of Brisetout at the door.

"Good-bye, papa," returned Villon with a yawn. "Many thanks for

the cold mutton."

The door closed behind him. The dawn was breaking over the white

roofs. A chill, uncomfortable morning ushered in the day. Villon

stood and heartily stretched himself in the middle of the road.

"A very dull old gentleman," he thought. "I wonder what his

goblets may be worth."