The Project Gutenberg Etext of New Arabian Nights

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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.

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