If I Were King Part 20

"A man might live a thousand years and yet be no more account at the last than as a great eater of dinners. Whereas to suck all the sweet and snuff all the perfume but of a single hour, to push all its possibilities to the edge of the chessboard, is to live greatly though it be not to live long, and an end is an end if it come on the winged heels of a week or the dull crutch of a century."

Louis leaned back and looked at his companion in astonishment.

"Pray heaven this philosophy may sound as fine when your neck is in the halter."

"Your majesty's wit and my wish run nose and nose in a leash."

Louis changed the subject as if there were more important matters in the world than the life, loves and death even of a Grand Constable.

"Messire Noel brings me a new astrologer to-night. The heavens seem in a conspiracy of confusion, the stars are all a tangle! My dream of a star falling from heaven defies divination."

Villon looked at him pityingly.

"Do you never tire of these sky doctors?" he questioned.

Louis frowned, as he always frowned at any hint of disbelief in the science of the stars.

"Don't jest, master poet," he said, "but ply your suit with proud Kate, for I swear if you fail, you shall hang to-morrow. Now leave me, for I must work while you play," and he bent over a chart and seemed to forget all else in his profound contemplation.

Villon looked at him for a moment in silence and then went out of the room and descended the steps, opened the little door, and pa.s.sed into the garden. The summer sun was dying in a splendid riot of colour among the rose trees. Its last rays, falling on the face of the G.o.d Pan, illuminated his fantastic features and seemed to lend them the life of an ironic leer. The warm air was rich with the blended odours of a thousand blossoms, and from the palace, faint and far off, came the sound of joyous voices. It was almost the moment when the rose garden was to be thrown open to the royal guests.

Villon pulled a rose from a bush by his hand and gazed into its crimson heart as if he sought to read there the secret which all flowers hold but which no flower has ever yet betrayed to the longing eyes of a poet. He leaned against the statue of Pan and mused pensively.

"The petals of my reign are falling from me full of life, full of colour to the end. Shall I win this wonderful woman? Am I mad to hope it? If I lose, it is a short shrift and a long rope at the end of a dazzling dream."

He shivered as he thought and cast the rose he held away from him.

"How cold the June air seems, and these roses smell of graves." He paused a little till his hopes took heart again. "But if I win, how will it be, I wonder, to marry my heart's desire, to grow old sedately, to live again with the children on my knee, a little Francois here more honest than his father, a little Katherine there less comely than her mother!"

He flung out his hands as if he were dismissing the phantoms of his fancy.

"Run away, my dear dream children to your playground of shadows where you belong, for your father may be hanged to-morrow, and he fights for love and life to-night."

Villon's reflections were fluttered by a sudden blare of music, and a gaudy fellow in a pursuivant's coat made his appearance on the top of the terrace and rattled blast after blast from his brazen trumpet. In obedience to the long-looked-for signal, a many-coloured crowd of revellers gushed from the palace and flowed like a glowing wave of merry-making down the steps and into the walks and alleys of the rose garden. All the strange figures that a freakish fancy could suggest leaped and danced and shouted in a rapture of mirth-satyrs and follies, clowns and devils wheeled wildly by, waving torches, clashing cymbals, or screaming at the top of their voices, while sedater spirits, masked and m.u.f.fled in mantles of sombre hue, moved through the tumultuous throng and found their abated pleasure in mystification and intrigues.

Villon had a mask in his girdle. He put it on and pushing into the press allowed himself to drift hither and thither with the eddying currents of pleasure. His fantastic imagination took fire from the strange shapes and sounds about him. The sense of being in a dream, which had never deserted him from the first moment of his awakened consciousness in the rose garden, clung closely about him on this night, and the jocund figures around him flitted by as unreal as the phantoms of a noon-tide sleep.

Suddenly his attention was arrested by the sound of a voice that seemed familiar to him. A man habited like a pilgrim from the Holy Land, in long hood and gabardine of grey, and with the pilgrim's c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l on his shoulder, had met another masker, habited like himself. The pair were exchanging salutations, in a speech that the speakers might well a.s.sume to be unknown to any person in the royal garden. The speech, however, jingled very familiarly on Villon's ear, for the man was talking in the amazing jargon which the worshipful company of c.o.c.klesh.e.l.ls had devised for the better furtherance of their thievish purposes, and it appealed to Villon as intimately as a song that is learned in childhood.

The first pilgrim questioned the other,

"What do you carry in your scrip?"

And the second answered:

"I carry a c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l."

The first pilgrim questioned again:

"What do you carry in your hand?"

And the second responded:

"A foot of steel."

Yet again the first speaker queried:

"Will you drink the king's health?"

And the answer came decisively:

"In a flagon of Burgundy."

Whereat the two pilgrims saluted and parted and went their several ways and were swallowed up in the motley masquerade.

Villon's curiosity was piqued to the quick.

"How in heaven's name," he asked himself, "does it come to pa.s.s that people speaking the thieves' lingo of the Court of Miracles find themselves at a feast in the rose garden of King Louis?"

He set himself to try and track down one or the other of the mysterious pilgrims, but neither of them was to be found. His wanderings brought him back to the fair s.p.a.ce at the foot of the terrace protected by the image of the G.o.d Pan. The place was deserted; the revellers had drifted elsewhere. A lute lay on the marble seat. Villon seated himself and taking up the instrument was touching it carelessly, when a light step on the gra.s.s arrested him, the sweetest voice in the world sounded in his ears, and he found himself addressed by the Lady Katherine de Vaucelles, who was attended by a number of fair court ladies.

"I am the voice of these ladies to pray for a favour."

Villon bowed low.

"My ear is all obedience," he said, "and my heart all homage."

"You are a poet, my lord," said Katherine, "and this is an eve which should please a poet. Rhyme us a rhyme which shall match this night of summer."

Villon sighed a little.

"No rhyme ever rhymed was worth a beam of summer sun or summer moon; but I have lingered in Provence where every man is a nightingale, and I caught there the fever of improvisation. What shall I rhyme about?"

Katherine laughed as she pointed to her attendant ladies.

"Your suitors are women; therefore, nothing better nor worse than love."

"The burden of the world," Villon said. "Sigh, my lute, sigh."

He let his fingers ripple over the strings, waking the faint wail of a plaintive minor. In a moment or two he began to recite, touching every now and then a chord on his lute to emphasize the words he spoke:

"I wonder in what Isle of Bliss Apollo's music fills the air; In what green valley Artemis For young Endymion spreads the snare: Where Venus lingers debonair: The Wind has blown them all away-- And Pan lies piping in his lair-- Where are the G.o.ds of Yesterday?

"Say where the great Semiramis Sleeps in a rose-red tomb; and where The precious dust of Caesar is, Or Cleopatra's yellow hair: Where Alexander Do-and-Dare; The Wind has blown them all away-- And Redbeard of the Iron Chair; Where are the Dreams of Yesterday?

"Where is the Queen of Herod's kiss, And Phryne in her beauty bare; By what strange sea does Tomyris With Dido and Ca.s.sandra share Divine Proserpina's despair; The Wind has blown them all away-- For what poor ghost does Helen care?

Where are the Girls of Yesterday?