A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT
by R L Stevenson
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
honor 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 toward 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 neighborhood
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 vapor 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
flavor 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 silver
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 as
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 humpback 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 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 clucked 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 off 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 neighborhood 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 vapors, as thin as moonlight, fleeted
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 humor 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 inside 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 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 toward 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 the 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 he 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
wrists," 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 humor 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 colored his musings in a very different manner. For,
first, he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked in it for some 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 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
neighbors, 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 some 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 favorite 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 neighbors! 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,
honorable 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 up-stairs
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 armor 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 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
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 armor.
"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 would 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 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 se
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
honor," 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, and not for
honor."
"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 overhard; 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 the farmer's sheep; 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, Dick, 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 honored. 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 honor.
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 honor
to follow my argument!" he said.
"I do you too much honor in
submitting to your presence," said the knight. "Learn to curb your
tongue when you speak with old and honorable 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 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 foeminam 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 honor, 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 honor, 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 honor 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 sermonizing. "You think I have no sense of honor!" he cried.
"I'm poor enough, God knows! It's hard to see rich people with their
gloves, and you blowing 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. Anyway, 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 honor of my
own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about it all day long, as if it
were 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 honor—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
drank 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 honorable."
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."
-0-0-0-
Grateful thanks to Project Gutenberg
