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."




INDEX

  Aesop
    beast-fables
  Apuleius
    _The Golden Ass_
    likeness to Kipling
  Aristotle
    _Secretum Secretorum_

  Barrett, Charles Raymond
    _Short-Story Writings_
  Beast-fables
  Boccaccio
    _Teseide_
    _Decameron_
  Brown, Dr. John (1810-1882)
    _Rab and His Friends_
  Bunyan, John

  Cable
    _Strange True Stories of Louisiana_
  Cervantes
    _Don Quixote_
  Chaucer
  Coleridge
    _Ancient Mariner_

  _Deeds of the Romans, The_
  Defoe, Daniel (1661-1731)
    _Short-Story Essay_
    _The Apparition of Mrs. Veal_
  Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
    _The Boots at the Holly-Tree Inn_
  Drelincourt
    _Book on Death_

  Fenton, Geoffrey
    _Tragical Discourses_
  Fuller, Thomas

  Garnett, Richard
    _The Poison Maid_
    _Gesta Romanorum, The_

  Hardy, Thomas (1840)
    _The Three Strangers_
  Harris, Chandler
    _Uncle Remus_
  Harte, Bret (1839-1902)
    _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_
  Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1807-1864)
    _Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_
  Hogg, James (1770-1835)
    the Ettrick Shepherd
    early life
    _Shepherd's Calendar_
    _The Brownie of Bodsbeck_
    Professor Wilson on
    _The Mysterious Bride_
  Holmes, Oliver Wendell
    _Elsie Venner_
  Hood, Thomas
    _The Dream of Eugene Aram_

  _Ingoldsby Legends, The_
  Irving, Washington (1783-1859)
    _The Devil and Tom Walker_

  James, Henry (1843)
    _Julia Bride_

  Kipling, Rudyard
    _Just-so Stories_
    _Jungle-Book_
    _Finest Story in the World_
    _The Man Who Would be King_

  Laws of the short-story
  _Leech of Folkstone, The_

  Malory, _Morte D'Arthur_
  Matthews, Professor Brander
  Morris, William, _Defence of Guinevere_

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, _Rappaccini's Daughter_
  North, Sir Thomas, _Plutarch's Lives_

  _Of Temporal Tribulation_
  _Of the Transgressions and Wounds of the Soul_

  Paynter, William, _The Palace of Pleasure_
  _Peregrine Pickle_
  Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849),
    laws of short-story;
    essay on Hawthorne;
    _Tale of the Ragged Mountains_;
    _The Purloined Letter_.
  Powell, Prof. J.W.
  _Practical Treatise on the Art of the Short-Story_

  _Redgauntlet_
  _Roderick Random_
  Rossetti, _White Ship_

  Shakespeare, _Pericles, Prince of Tyre_;
    borrower.
  Shelton, Thomas, _Don Quixote_
  Short-Story, Evolution of the
  Smith, Herbert H.
  Sterne, Laurence
  Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894),
    _A Lodging for the Night_
  Stockton, Frank R. (1834-1902),
    _A Story of Seven Devils_

  Tennyson,
    _The Idylls of the King_;
    _The Lady of Shalott_.
  _Tom Jones_
  Trollope, Anthony
  Twain, Mark (1835),
    _A Dog's Tale_

  Underdown, Thomas, _Heliodorus_

  _Vicar of Wakefield_

  Walton, Isaak
  Wilson, Professor, on James Hogg


END OF VOL. I



***