If I Were King Part 34

A murmur of approval stirred the silent crowd, but it died away as Katherine suddenly advanced and stood, a white figure like a fair lily, between the king and Villon.

"Nay, you gain more than this. I am the Lady Katherine de Vaucelles, kinswoman of the royal house, mistress of a hundred lands, Grand Seneschale of Gascony, Warden of the Marches of Poitou. In my own domains I exercise the High Justice and the Low. This man is of humble birth, and when I marry him he becomes my va.s.sal. Over my va.s.sals I hold the law of life and death."

Villon dropped on his knees beside his lady.

Louis clapped his thin hands together as a man might applaud a play.

"You are a bold minion and you have a quick wit. But if you marry this gaol bird you decline to his condition. Your high t.i.tles fall from you, your great estates are forfeit to the crown and you and he must go out into exile together; the beggar woman with the beggar man."

Katherine turned to Villon where he knelt beside her.

"'Tis a little price to pay for my lover."

Villon looking up into her eyes, questioned her:

"Do you think I'm worth it, Kate? 'Tis a big price to pay for this poor anatomy."

She repeated her words.

"'Tis a little price to pay for my lover. Do you doubt me?"

Unheeded a man-at-arms pushed his way through the crowd to the king's dais and whispered some words in the ear of Noel le Jolys, who in turn whispered in the ear of Olivier and Olivier hearing, grew paler than before. Villon caught Katherine by the hand.

"No, Kate, no! The world is wide, our hearts are light. For a star has fallen to me from heaven and it fills the earth with glory."

His words fell on the king's ears like the voice of an oracle.

Standing in his place with staring eyes and trembling fingers, he repeated falteringly the mystic words.

"A star has fallen from heaven. My dream, my dream!"

Olivier plucked at his mantle, whispering with twitching lips:

"My liege, this story spreads like the plague in the city and every alley vomits mutiny."

Louis pushed him aside.

"Rub your pale cheeks," he said; "for all is well. Destiny has spoken."

Then leaning over and stretching his thin hand towards the crowd, he cried:

"People of Paris, that man shall have his life; this woman her lover. I have tried a man's heart and found it pure gold; a woman's soul and found it all angel. True man and true woman, to each other's arms!"

And Katherine and Villon obeyed the king.

EPILOGUE

At about this point in his narrative, Dom Gregory, as those happy few who are familiar with his ma.n.u.script in the Abbey of Bonne Aventure are aware, diverges from the full current of his story to indulge in some philosophical reflections upon the character of Louis XI.

What, Dom Gregory asks in cautious interrogation, were the real intentions of the monarch with regard to Francois Villon and the Lady Katherine de Vaucelles? His enemies no doubt a.s.sert that he played with their destinies for a purely malignant purpose and was only prevented from carrying his evil intentions into effect by the storm of popular indignation that threatened him. Others, again, who pretend to a more intimate acquaintance with the shifty character of the king, insist that he did indeed purpose to send Master Villon to the gallows, or at least and worse, into a beggar's exile, but that lie was stayed by Master Villon's happy use of the phrase concerning a star fallen from heaven, which words, harping upon the superst.i.tious wits of his majesty, made him believe that the dream which had puzzled him was interpreted and fulfilled. In this regard Dom Gregory records with a sly gravity how many suggest that Master Francois used those words of set purpose with the very intention of playing upon the strained strings of the king's mind. But there be those, too, Dom Gregory adds, and we gather from his manner that he is inclined to include himself in their number, there be those partisans of the king who maintain that the king's cruelty was from the start a mere mask for clemency, that he only intended a little malicious sport with the too outspoken lover and the too disdainful la.s.s, and that it had never been in the scope of his thoughts seriously to punish either the broker of ballads or the valiant maid of Vaucelles.

Starting from this point, Dom Gregory indulges in a great many reflections upon kings and kingship and the consequences of kingly acts, all of which seemed perhaps more momentous at the time when they were written and in the sleepy Abbey where they lie enshrined, than in busier and more bustling times. One could have wished that Dom Gregory had let such philosophies go by the board and had given us instead some greater knowledge of what happened to Francois Villon and Katherine de Vaucelles after they fell upon each other's necks in that open place in Paris, with the mob huzzahing, the king staring and Tristan's strange satellites busily dismantling the useless gibbet. But here Dom Gregory is little less than dumb.

Losses in the ma.n.u.script account for much of his silence; perhaps his ecclesiastical indifference to the wedded state may account for more. If we can gather vaguely from other sources that the poet and his mistress settled down on a small and quiet estate in Poitou, lived a peaceful country life for many years and died a peaceful country death at the end, it is the most we can hope to gain with surety. We are glad to believe in their happiness, for he was a true lover and she was a fair woman.