The Line of Love Part 15

I warrant you that rascal Montcorbier has lain awake in half the prisons in France thinking of what he flung away. Seven years, no less, since he and Montigny showed their thieves' faces here. La, the world wags, neighbor, and they say there will be a new tax on salt if we go to war with the English."

Not quite thus, perhaps, ran the meditations of Catherine de Vaucelles one still August night as she sat at her window, overlooking the acacias and chestnuts of her garden. Noel, conspicuously prosperous in blue and silver, had but now gone down the Rue Saint Jacques, singing, clinking the fat purse whose plumpness was still a novelty. That evening she had given her promise to marry him at Michaelmas.

This was a black night, moonless, windless. There were a scant half-dozen stars overhead, and the thick scent of roses and mignonette came up to her in languid waves. Below, the tree-tops conferred, stealthily, and the fountain plashed its eternal remonstrance against the conspiracy they lisped of.

After a while Catherine rose and stood contemplative before a long mirror that was in her room. Catherine de Vaucelles was now, at twenty-three, in the full flower of her comeliness. Blue eyes the mirror showed her,--luminous and tranquil eyes, set very far apart; honey-colored hair ma.s.sed heavily about her face, a mouth all 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, G.o.d 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:

_"O Beauty of her, whereby I am undone!

O Grace of her, that hath no grace for me!

O Love of her, the bit that guides me on To sorrow and to grievous misery!

O felon Charms, my poor heart's enemy--"_

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 G.o.d, 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, la.s.s? 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, la.s.s?"

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 pa.s.sed. 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 G.o.d! 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 carca.s.s 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 n.o.bility 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 pa.s.sions. 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 d.a.m.ned in body and soul. And by G.o.d! 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 c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l--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, la.s.s. _Exegi monumentum_. Villon's glory and Villon's shame will never die."

He flung back his bald head and laughed now, t.i.ttering over that calamitous, shabby secret between all-seeing G.o.d and Francois Villon. She had drawn a little away from him. This well-reared girl saw him exultant in infamy, steeped to the eyes in infamy. But still the nearness of her, the faint perfume of her, shook in his veins, and still he must play the miserable comedy to the end, since the prize he played for was to him peculiarly desirable.

"A thief--a common thief!" But again her hands fluttered back. "I drove you to it. Mine is the shame."

"Holy Macaire! what is a theft or two? Hunger that causes the wolf to sally from the wood, may well make a man do worse than steal. I could tell you--For example, you might ask in h.e.l.l of one Thevenin Pensete, who knifed him in the cemetery of Saint John."

He hinted a lie, for it was Montigny who killed Thevenin Pensete. Villon played without scruple now.

Catherine's face was white. "Stop," she pleaded; "no more, Francois,--ah, Holy Virgin! do not tell me any more."

But after a little she came to him, touching him almost as if with unwillingness. "Mine is the shame. It was my jealousy, my vanity, Francois, that thrust you back into temptation. And we are told by those in holy orders that the compa.s.sion of G.o.d is infinite. If you still care for me, I will be your wife."

Yet she shuddered.

He saw it. His face, too, was paper, and Francois laughed horribly.

"If I still love you! Go, ask of Denise, of Jacqueline, or of Pierrette, of Marion the Statue, of Jehanne of Brittany, of Blanche Slippermaker, of Fat Peg,--ask of any trollop in all Paris how Francois Villon loves. You thought me faithful! You thought that I especially preferred you to any other bed-fellow! Eh, I perceive that the credo of the Rue Saint Jacques is somewhat narrow-minded. For my part I find one woman much the same as another." And his voice shook, for he saw how pretty she was, saw how she suffered. But he managed a laugh.

"I do not believe you," Catherine said, in m.u.f.fled tones. "Francois! You loved me, Francois. Ah, boy, boy!" she cried, with a pitiable wail; "come back to me, boy that I loved!"

It was a difficult business. But he grinned in her face.

"He is dead. Let Francois de Montcorbier rest in his grave. Your voice is very sweet, Catherine, and--and he could refuse you nothing, could he, la.s.s? Ah, G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d!" he cried, in his agony; "why can you not believe me? I tell you Necessity pounds us in her mortar to what shape she will. I tell you that Montcorbier loved you, but Francois Villon prefers Fat Peg. An ill cat seeks an ill rat." And with this, tranquillity fell upon his soul, for he knew that he had won.

Her face told him that. Loathing was what he saw there.