Villon, leaning forward with entreating hands, pleaded with beseeching lips.

"Would you pity me if I told you that I loved you?"

Katherine laughed, and the music of her laughter seemed to wake faint echoes among the roses as if every blossom were a magic bell with a fairy hand at the clapper.

"Heaven's mercy," she said. "How fast your fancy gallops. I care little to be flattered and less to be wooed, and I swear that I should be very hard to win."

She turned to mount the steps as she spoke, as if she had said all that she wanted to say, but Villon delayed her with imploring protest.

"I have more right to try than your taproom bandit. I see what he saw; I love what he loved."

Again the girl's laughter brightened the summer air.

"You are very inflammable."

Villon caught at her words.

"My fire burns to the ashes. You can no more stay me from loving you than you can stay the flowers from loving the soft air, or true men from loving honour, or heroes from loving glory. I would rake the moon from heaven for you."

The girl swayed her head daintily, as a queen rose might in a realm of roses. There was something like pity in her eyes, but laughter lingered on her lips.

"That promise has grown rusty since Adam first made it to Eve." She eyed him in silence for a second time, deriding his sighs with a smile: then "There is a rhyme in my mind," she cried, "about moons and lovers," and she began to declaim, half muse, half minx, some lines that had pleased her, to tease the importunate stranger.

"Life is unstable, Love may uphold; Fear goes in sable, Courage in gold.

Mystery covers Midnight and noon, Heroes and lovers Cry for the moon."

As the first words of the verse fell from her lips, Villon's heart leaped and his eyes brightened for he knew the sound. They were part of the rhymes himself had sent her on that very parchment which had cost him first a dinner and then a drubbing. He had fancied the words and the rhymes when he wrote them, but now they seemed to sound on his ears with the married music of all the falling waters and all the blowing winds of the world. It was a shining face that he turned to the girl as he jeered, denying the thought in his heart:

"What doggerel!"

The girl flashed scorn at him.

"Doggerel! It is divinity," she insisted, flinging a kiss from her finger-tips in G.o.dspeed, as it were, to the banished ballad-maker, as she moved a little further up the steps. Villon followed her. Let come what might come, he was the maid's equal for the moment and would press his suit if he died for it.

"Tell me what I may do," he said, "to win your favour."

The girl's smiling face grew graver as she looked down on the imploring poet.

"A trifle," she said lightly, as a child might bid for a doll; and then, as Villon's eyes glowed questions, her voice rang out like the call of a clarion. "Save France!" she trumpeted.

Villon caught fire from both her moods.

"No more?" he said, and though the sound of his voice jested, the look in his eyes was earnest.

The girl responded to jest and earnest royally.

"No less. Are you not Grand Constable, chief of the king's army?

There is an enemy at the gates of Paris, and none of the king's men can frighten him away." She pointed out where, in the distance, beyond the walls of Paris, the pitched tents of the enemy fluttered their hostile flags. Her bosom heaved with great desire. "Oh, that a man would come to court! For the man who shall trail the banners of Burgundy in the dust for the king of France to walk on, I may perhaps have favours."

Villon looked at her as men must have looked at Joan of Arc when she bade them rise up and strike for France.

"You are hard to please," he said, but his heart was full of joy at the thought of trying to please her. If he could do this thing!

The girl answered his words and not his thoughts.

"My hero must have every virtue for his wreath, every courage for his coronet. Farewell."

By this time she had reached the terrace and she made to enter the palace. Villon called to her longingly:

"Stay! I have a thousand things to say to you."

The girl smiled denial.

"I have but one," she said, "and I have said it long since.

Farewell."

Villon made a dash for audacity.

"I will follow you," he said, and he moved to do so, but the girl's lifted finger stayed him.

"You may not," she said peremptorily. "I go to the queen." And so with a swift salutation, gracious as the dip of a dancing wave, she entered the palace and left him standing there, dazed and ardent, as a man might be who had just been vouchsafed the vision of an angel.

He murmured to himself her words as he slowly descended the steps to the ground,

"Oh, that a man would come to court," and on that text he wove the hopeful commentary of his thoughts.

"Why should I not deserve her? Last night I was only a poor devil with a rusty sword and a single suit. To-day all's different. I am the king's friend, it would seem, a court potentate, a man of mark.

What may I not accomplish? This finery smiles like sunlight and the world will warm its hands at me."

He was exquisitely pleased with himself, exquisitely pleased with the world that held him and Katherine. He forgot, as lovers always will forget, that there was any one else in the world save himself and his beloved, and he was so wrapped in his sweet contemplations that he did not hear the tower door gently open, did not hear the soft, creeping footsteps of the king as he came out of his hiding place and shuffled across the soft gra.s.s toward his plaything.

CHAPTER VII

THE ANSWER TO BURGUNDY

A touch on the shoulder roused Villon from his honeyed meditations, and he turned with a start to find the sable figure of the king at his side and the sinister visage smiling upon him.

"Good afternoon, Lord Constable," Louis said amiably, and as Villon dropped respectfully on his knee, he questioned:

"Does power taste well?"