curves, the hue of a strawberry, tender but rather fretful, and beneath it a firm chin; only her nose left something to be desired,—for that feature, though well-formed, was diminutive and bent toward the left, by perhaps the thickness of a cobweb. She might reasonably have smiled at what the mirror showed her, but, for all that, she sighed.
'O Beauty of her, whereby I am undone,' said Catherine, wistfully. 'Ah, God in Heaven, forgive me for my folly! Sweet Christ, intercede for me who have paid dearly for my folly!'
Fate grinned in her weaving. Through the open window came the sound of a voice singing.
Sang the voice:
and the singing broke off in a fit of coughing.
Catherine had remained motionless for a matter of two minutes, her head poised alertly. She went to the gong and struck it seven or eight times.
'Macee, there is a man in the garden. Bring him to me, Macee,—ah, love of God, Macee, make haste!'
Blinking, he stood upon the threshold. Then, without words, their lips met.
'My king!' said Catherine; 'heart's emperor!'
'O rose of all the world!' he cried.
There was at first no need of speech.
But after a moment she drew away and stared at him. Francois, though he was but thirty, seemed an old man. His bald head shone in the candle-light. His face was a mesh of tiny wrinkles, wax-white, and his lower lip, puckered by the scar of his wound, protruded in an eternal grimace. As Catherine steadfastly regarded him, the faded eyes, half-covered with a bluish film, shifted, and with a jerk he glanced over his shoulder. The movement started a cough tearing at his throat.
'Holy Macaire!' said he. 'I thought that somebody, if not Henri Cousin, the executioner, was at my heels. Why do you stare so, lass? Have you anything to eat? I am famished.'
In silence she brought him meat and wine, and he fell upon it. He ate hastily, chewing with his front teeth, like a sheep.
When he had ended, Catherine came to him and took both his hands in hers and lifted them to her lips. 'The years have changed you, Francois,' she said, curiously meek.
Francois put her away. Then he strode to the mirror and regarded it intently. With a snarl, he turned about. 'The years!' said he. 'You are modest. It was you who killed Francois de Montcorbier, as surely as Montcorbier killed Sermaise. Eh, Sovereign Virgin! that is scant cause for grief. You made Francois Villon. What do you think of him, lass?'
She echoed the name. It was in many ways a seasoned name, but unaccustomed to mean nothing. Accordingly Francois sneered.
'Now, by all the fourteen joys and sorrows of Our Lady! I believe that you have never heard of Francois Villon! The Rue Saint Jacques has not heard of Francois Villon! The pigs, the gross pigs, that dare not peep out of their sty! Why, I have capped verses with the Duke of Orleans. The very street-boys know my Ballad of the Women of Paris. Not a drunkard in the realm but has ranted my jolly Orison for Master Cotard's Soul when the bottle passed. The King himself hauled me out of Meung gaol last September, swearing that in all France there was not my equal at a ballad. And you have never heard of me!'
Once more a fit of coughing choked him mid-course in his indignant chattering.
She gave him a woman's answer: 'I do not care if you are the greatest lord in the kingdom or the most sunken knave that steals ducks from Paris Moat. I only know that I love you, Francois.'
For a long time he kept silence, blinking, peering quizzically at her lifted face. She did love him; no questioning that. But presently he again put her aside, and went toward the open window. This was a matter for consideration.
The night was black as a pocket. Staring into it, Francois threw back his head and drew a deep, tremulous breath. The rising odor of roses and mignonette, keen and intolerably sweet, had roused unforgotten pulses in his blood, had set shame and joy adrum in his breast.
The woman loved him! Through these years, with a woman's unreasoning fidelity, she had loved him. He knew well enough how matters stood between her and Noel d'Arnaye; the host of the Crowned Ox had been garrulous that evening. But it was Francois whom she loved. She was well-to-do. Here for the asking was a competence, love, an ingleside of his own. The deuce of it was that Francois feared to ask.
'—Because I am still past reason in all that touches this ignorant, hot-headed, Pharisaical, rather stupid wench! That is droll. But love is a resistless tyrant, and, Mother of God! has there been in my life a day, an hour, a moment when I have not loved her! To see her once was all that I had craved,—as a lost soul might covet, ere the Pit take him, one splendid glimpse of Heaven and the Nine Blessed Orders at their fiddling. And I find that she loves me—me! Fate must have her jest, I perceive, though the firmament crack for it. She would have been content enough with Noel, thinking me dead. And with me?' Contemplatively he spat out of the window. 'Eh, if I dared hope that this last flicker of life left in my crazy carcass might burn clear! I have but a little while to live; if I dared hope to live that little cleanly! But the next cup of wine, the next light woman?—I have answered more difficult riddles. Choose, then, Francois Villon,—choose between the squalid, foul life yonder and her well-being. It is true that starvation is unpleasant and that hanging is reported to be even less agreeable. But just now these considerations are irrelevant.'
Staring into the darkness he fought the battle out. Squarely he faced the issue; for that instant he saw Francois Villon as the last seven years had made him, saw the wine-sodden soul of Francois Villon, rotten and weak and honeycombed with vice. Moments of nobility it had; momentarily, as now, it might be roused to finer issues; but Francois knew that no power existent could hearten it daily to curb the brutish passions. It was no longer possible for Francois Villon to live cleanly. 'For what am I?—a hog with a voice. And shall I hazard her life's happiness to get me a more comfortable sty? Ah, but the deuce of it is that I so badly need that sty!'
He turned with a quick gesture.
'Listen,' Francois said. 'Yonder is Paris,—laughing, tragic Paris, who once had need of a singer to proclaim her splendor and all her misery. Fate made the man; in necessity's mortar she pounded his soul into the shape Fate needed. To king's courts she lifted him; to thieves' hovels she thrust him down; and past Lutetia's palaces and abbeys and taverns and lupanars and gutters and prisons and its very gallows—past each in turn the man was dragged, that he might make the Song of Paris. He could not have made it here in the smug Rue Saint Jacques. Well! the song is made, Catherine. So long as Paris endures, Francois Villon will be remembered. Villon the singer Fate fashioned as was needful: and, in this fashioning, Villon the man was damned in body and soul. And by God! the song was worth it!'
She gave a startled cry and came to him, her hands fluttering toward his breast. 'Francois!' she breathed.
It would not be good to kill the love in her face.
'You loved Francois de Montcorbier. Francois de Montcorbier is dead. The Pharisees of the Rue Saint Jacques killed him seven years ago, and that day Francois Villon was born. That was the name I swore to drag through every muckheap in France. And I have done it, Catherine. The Companions of the Cockleshell—eh, well, the world knows us. We robbed Guillamme Coiffier, we robbed the College of Navarre, we robbed the Church of Saint Maturin,—I abridge the list of our gambols. Now we harvest. Rene de Montigny's bones swing in the wind yonder at Montfaucon. Colin de Cayeux they broke on the wheel. The rest—in effect, I am the only one that justice spared,— because I had diverting gifts at rhyming, they said. Pah! if they only knew! I am immortal, lass.
