Even as he spoke Guy Tabarie puffed out the last candle left alight in the room, which was plunged instantly into almost total darkness.

Even the faint moonlight that had come through the window was swiftly veiled by Huguette, who drew the crimson curtains close together. The dim light from the fire only seemed to accentuate and intensify the darkness through which the two lanterns burned, pale planets of yellow fire, in the hands of Casin and Colin. Villon s.n.a.t.c.hed the one and Thibaut took the other. There was a moment of intense silence; then the voice of Huguette cried out of the blackness: "Are you ready?"

Both combatants cried, "Yes!" in the same breath, and in the next the battle began.

No stranger fight had ever been fought within those walls before, or even perhaps within the walls of Paris. In the dense obscurity the two antagonists groped for each other, alternately guided and baffled by the light of the lanterns, as their holder lifted his light suddenly in the air or dexterously concealed it under the fold of his mantle. Every now and then the swords would meet with a clash, there would be a hurried exchange of thrust and blow, and then the adversaries would drift back again to grope and gleam and seek each other anew, their lanterns flashing and disappearing like accentuated glow-worms, and their blades now shining in sudden illumination like streaks of blue lightning across the blackness and now invisible even to those who held them in their hands.

Tristan had in vain endeavoured to persuade the king to leave before the preliminaries for the fantastic strife had been completed, but Louis was firm in his determination to remain.

"I would not miss this for the world, man," he had insisted. All his childlike delight in the adventurous was being sated to the full this evening, and there was no happier man at that moment in the kingdom than the man who by strange fortune was its king.

The fight persisted for some minutes that seemed like hours to more than one of the anxious spectators. Now the room would be steeped in the deepest silence, and now, as the revealed lantern glowed and the naked weapons met, some woman's scream or some man's suppressed oath would fill the place with a sense of watching, eager humanity.

Suddenly, when the tension of watcher and watched was keenest, there came a mighty crashing at the door and a voice shouted loudly a summons to open in the king's name.

Tristan knew well enough what the summons meant. "It is the watch, sire," he whispered to the king.

Thibaut too, groping for his nimble antagonist and beginning to despair of crushing the man, heard and understood the summons. He was tired of the baffling struggle.

"Open the door!" he shouted noisily, and the cry stirred Villon to a more vehement a.s.sault. He sprang like a cat at the giant, flashed the lantern dazzlingly in his eyes, and as Thibaut, furious, made a wild lunge at him, Villon dexterously swung his lantern on to his enemy's sword point and in another second had driven his own blade into Thibaut's side.

"Not so fast, rat-catcher!" he shouted exultantly, and as Thibaut fell with a heavy crash of rattling armour on the floor, the door was dashed open and the armed watch poured in with blazing torches, filling the room with light and armoured men. Francois, after a moment's glance of triumph at the fallen giant, sprang round and glanced up at the gallery.

Katherine, standing, leaned over the bal.u.s.trade and flung a knot of ribbon to her champion, who caught it as it skimmed through the air, pressed it to his lips and thrust it into the bosom of his jerkin.

In another moment Katherine had disappeared and Villon found himself roughly held in the strong grasp of two soldiers, while the captain of the watch surveyed the scene with some astonishment, and the rogues were overawed by the bills of the new-comers.

"What is this tumult?" the captain demanded. Villon answered him airily, smiling over the crossed pikes that penned him.

"A fair fight, good captain, conducted according to the honourable laws of sword and lantern."

The captain of the watch turned his attention to Thibaut, who, a.s.sisted by one of the soldiers, had raised himself upon one elbow and was glaring vindictively at Villon.

"Who is this man?" he asked.

A desire for revenge got the better of the wounded man's discretion.

"I am Thibaut d'Aussigny," he gasped. "I am the Grand Constable."

A little shiver of surprise and alarm ran round the room at the sound of that dreaded name. The captain of the watch kneeled in salutation.

"Monseigneur," he said, "how did this happen?" Thibaut's senses were running away from him with his running blood, but malignity overcrowed weakness for a moment. He pointed at Villon. "Take that fellow and hang him on the nearest lantern," and as he spoke he swooned. Promptly the captain turned towards his prisoner. "Take that fellow outside and hang him," he commanded curtly. Villon glanced wildly about for a way to escape and saw none. His friends gave a groan of sympathy, but they could do no more, for the soldiers overawed them. Huguette flung her arms about him, sobbing.

The grasp of his captors tightened and Villon shivered at the clasp.

Suddenly the little insignificant burgess at the table rose and advanced towards the soldier.

"Stop, sir," he said imperatively. "That young gentleman is my affair." The soldier turned angrily upon the interfering citizen.

"Who are you," he growled, "who dare to interfere with the king's justice?"

The citizen pulled his heavy cap from his head and revealed the wrinkled, eager visage that was so well known and so well feared.

"I am the king's justice," he said simply, while Tristan behind him cried "G.o.d save the king!" and the astonished soldier bent the knee in homage. Villon, staring, dumfounded, caught the humour of the situation and could not hold his tongue.

"The king! Good Lord!" he said, and punctuated his comment with a prolonged whistle.

CHAPTER V

THE VOICES OF THE STARS

Louis loved roses. All that was royal in his nature went out to the royal flower; whatever desire of beauty lay hidden in his heart found its gratification in its splendid colours, in its splendid odours. The Greeks believed that the red rose only came into being on the fair day when Venus, seeing Ascanius slumbering on a bed of white roses, pressed handsful of the blossoms to her lips, and the pale petals blushed into their crimson loveliness beneath the kisses of the G.o.ddess. Louis the Eleventh knew nothing of the legend, but the red rose was his fancy and a corner of the royal garden was dedicated to its service. In the oldest part of the palace, hard by the grey and ancient tower where the king loved to out-watch the stars and to brood over strange wisdom, overlooked by a terrace whose very steps were littered with petals, the caressed earth glowed into a very miracle of roses. Every shade of red that a rose can wear was represented in that dazzling pleasaunce, from the faint pink that surely the lips of divinity had scarcely brushed to the smiling scarlet that suggested Aphrodite's mouth, from the imperial purple of a Caesar's pomp to the crimson so deep that it was almost black, black as the congealed blood on the torn thigh of Adonis.

Here, when the stars eluded or deceived him, King Louis would come, creeping down the winding stairs of his tower, with the names of saints upon his thin lips, to breathe the sunlit or moonlit fragrance of his roses, to seek a little rest for his restless mind, a little quiet for his unquiet heart.

On the morning after his visit to the Fircone Tavern King Louis sat in his rose garden and snuffed the scented air with pleasure, while his keen eyes shifted from a scroll of parchment on his knee to the face of one who stood beside him, and spoke in a low voice, pointing as he spoke to marks and figures on the outspread parchment. The king's companion was an old man in a furred gown, whose countenance was seamed with years and study, and whose eyes seemed always to be gazing at objects that others could not see. In his right hand he held a large sphere of crystal, and whenever the king lapsed into silent study of his scroll the sage would lift the shining globe and gaze into its gla.s.sy depths with an air of exaggerated wisdom.

From one of these moments of abstraction the king suddenly looked up, and immediately the astrologer's glance swung from the sphere to the face of Louis.

"You know the aspect of the planetary bodies," said the king, "and you know of the strange dream that I have dreamed three nights running."

The sage inclined his head gravely. The king had told him of the dream in all its particulars at least a dozen times that morning. It seemed to be mixed up with the sunlight and the scent of the roses; to be a portion of the chorus of the birds. But he listened to the narrative with the same air of surprised attention that he had offered to its first recital.

"I dreamed that I was a swine rooting in the streets of Paris, and that I found a pearl of great price in the gutter. I set it in my crown and it filled all Paris with its light. But it seemed to grow so heavy for my forehead that I cast it from me and would have trodden it into the earth, but that a star fell from heaven and stayed me, and I awoke trembling."

The king's nasal voice droned through the familiar repet.i.tion; then he suddenly turned his head with a kind of bird-like alacrity upon the astrologer and asked sharply: "Well, what do you make of it?"

The astrologer shook his head. "The stars are bright," he said slowly, "but their brightness is bewildering to mortal eyes and it is hard to read between the lines of their effulgence. Dreams are dim, and it is difficult for mortal minds to interpret their obscurity."

The king frowned. "I know well enough," he said, "that stars are bright and that dreams are dim, but your wisdom is clothed and housed and nourished for deeper knowledge than this. Interpret my dream for France as Joseph interpreted the vision of the Egyptian."

With an unmoved face the astrologer scanned the crystal. "Thus I seem to read the riddle of your dream, sire," he answered. "There is one in the depths who, if exalted to the heights, might do you great service and who yet might irk you so greatly that you would seek to cast him back again into the depths from which he rose. The stars seem to speak of such a coming, and, as it seems to me, this stranger should have potent influence for good for a period of seven days from this day. I have sought and sought in vain to see something of this man in the crystal. I only see confusedly great crowds of people, pageants and masques, and movings of many soldiers, battle and bloodshed, and great victory for France--and then a star falls from heaven and all the vision vanishes."

The king was silent for a moment; then with an imperative gesture he dismissed the astrologer, who entered the tower and climbed the winding stairs to the room where he pursued his occult studies. The king walked restlessly up and down, indifferent to the roses, thinking only of the stars.

"If Francois Villon were the king of France," he muttered. "How that mad ballad maker glowed last night. Fools are proverbially fortunate, and a mad man may save Paris for me as a mad maid saved France for my sire."

A heavy tread behind him stirred him from his meditations. Turning, he beheld the companion of his adventure of the previous evening.

"Well, Tristan?" he questioned apprehensively, for Tristan had the evil smile on his face which he always wore when he had news of any disagreeable kind to impart.

"The bird has flown, sire," he said. "Thibaut d'Aussigny's wound was much slighter than we thought last night. After we carried him to his house, he made his escape thence in disguise, and has, as I believe, fled from Paris to join the Duke of Burgundy."

The king shrugged his shoulders indifferently.