Stories By English Authors: France (Selected by Scribners) | Page 5

breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he
may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so dearly earned, so
foolishly departed! Villon stood and cursed; he threw the two whites
into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he stamped, and was not
horrified to find himself trampling the poor corpse. Then he began
rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house beside the cemetery. He
had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which was long gone by at any rate,
and had no idea but that of his lost purse. It was in vain that he looked
right and left upon the snow; nothing was to be seen. He had not
dropped it in the streets. Had it fallen in the house? He would have
liked dearly to go in and see; but the idea of the grisly occupant
unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts
to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken
into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and
window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.
He returned to the hotel with the porch, and groped about upon the

snow for the money he had thrown away in his childish passion. But he
could only find one white; the other had probably struck sideways and
sunk deeply in. With a single white in his pocket, all his projects for a
rousing night in some wild tavern vanished utterly away. And it was
not only pleasure that fled laughing from his grasp; positive discomfort,
positive pain, attacked him as he stood ruefully before the porch. His
perspiration had dried upon him; and although the wind had now fallen,
a binding frost was setting in stronger with every hour, and he felt
benumbed and sick at heart. What was to be done? Late as was the hour,
improbable as was his success, he would try the house of his adopted
father, the chaplain of St. Benoit.
He ran 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 wrist," 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 humour 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