spared to carry up a single monk from Picardy ? Or do
you think yourself another Elias and they'll send the
coach for you ? "

" Hominibus impossible," replied the monk as he filled
his glass.

Tabary was in ecstasies.

Villon filliped his nose again.

" Laugh at my jokes, if you like," he said.

" It was very good," objected Tabary.

Villon made a face at him. "Think of rhymes to
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'fish,' " he said. "What have you to do with Latin ?
You'll wish you knew none of it at the great assizes,
when the devil calls for Guido Tabary, clericus the
devil with the hump-back and red-hot finger-nails.
Talking of the devil," he added in a whisper, "look at
Montigny ! "

All three peered covertly at the gamester. He did not
seem to be enjoying his luck. His mouth was a little
to a side ; one nostril nearly shut, and the other much
inflated. The black dog was on his back, as people say,
in terrifying nursery metaphor; and he breathed hard
under the gruesome burden.

" He looks as if he could knife him," whispered Ta-
bary, with round eyes.

The monk shuddered, and turned his face and spread
his open hands to the red embers. It was the cold that
thus affected Dom Nicolas, and not any excess of moral
sensibility.

"Come now," said Villon "about this ballade.
How does it run so far?" And beating time with his
hand, he read it aloud to Tabary.

They were interrupted at the fourth rhyme by a brief
and fatal movement among the gamesters. The round
was completed, and Thevenin was just opening his
mouth to claim another victory, when Montigny leaped
up, swift as an adder, and stabbed him to the heart.
The blow took effect before he had time to utter a cry,
before he had time to move. A tremor or two con-
vulsed his frame; his hands opened and shut, his heels
rattled on the floor; then his head rolled backward over
one shoulder with the eyes wide open; and Thevenin
Pensete's spirit had returned to Him who made it.

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Everyone sprang to his feet; but the business was
over in two twos. The four living fellows looked at
each other in rather a ghastly fashion; the dead man
contemplating a corner of the roof with a singular and
ugly leer.

"My God!" said Tabary; and he began to pray in
Latin.

Villon broke out into hysterical laughter. He came a
step forward and ducked a ridiculous bow at Thevenin,
and laughed still louder. Then he sat down suddenly,
all of a heap, upon a stool, and continued laughing bit-
terly, as though he would shake himself to pieces.

Montigny recovered his composure first.

"Let's see what he has about him," he remarked, and
he picked the dead man's pockets with a practised hand,
and divided the money into four equal portions on the
table. "There's for you," he said.

The monk received his share with a deep sigh, and a
single stealthy glance at the dead Thevenin, who was
beginning to sink into himself and topple sideways off
the chair.

"We're all in for it," cried Villon, swallowing his
mirth. "It's a hanging job for every man jack of us
that's here not to speak of those who aren't." He
made a shocking gesture in the air with his raised right
hand, and put out his tongue and threw his head on
one side, so as to counterfeit the appearance of one who
has been hanged. Then he pocketed his share of the
spoil, and executed a shuffle with his feet as if to re-
store the circulation.

Tabary was the last to help himself; he made a dash at
the money, and retired to the other end of the apartment.

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Montigny stuck Thevenin upright in the chair, and
drew out the dagger, which was followed by a jet of
blood.

"You fellows had better be moving," he said, as he
wiped the blade on his victim's doublet.

"I think we had," returned Villon, with a gulp.
" Damn his fat head! " he broke out. " It sticks in my
throat like phlegm. What right has a man to have red
hair when he is dead ? " And he fell all of a heap again
upon the stool, and fairly covered his face with his
hands.

Montigny and Dom Nicolas laughed aloud, even Ta-
bary feebly chiming in.

"Cry baby," said the monk.

" I always said he was a woman," added Montigny,
with a sneer. "Sit up, can't you ?" he went on, giv-
ing another shake to the murdered body. "Tread out
that fire, Nick!"

But Nick was better employed ; he was quietly tak-
ing Villon's purse, as the poet sat, limp and trembling,
on the stool where he had been making a ballade not
three minutes before. Montigny and Tabary dumbly
demanded a share of the booty, which the monk silently
promised as he passed the little bag into the bosom of
his gown. In many ways an artistic nature unfits a
man for practical existence.

No sooner had the theft been accomplished than Vil-
lon shook himself, jumped to his feet, and began help-
ing to scatter and extinguish the embers. Meanwhile
Montigny opened the door and cautiously peered into
the street. The coast was clear; there was no meddle-
some patrol in sight. Still it was judged wiser to slip

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out severally; and as Villon was himself in a hurry to
escape from the neighbourhood of the dead Thevenin,
and the rest were in a still greater hurry to get rid of
him before he should discover the loss of his money, he
was the first by general consent to issue forth into the
street.

The wind had triumphed and swept all the clouds
from heaven. Only a few vapours, as thin as moon-
light, fleeted rapidly across the stars. It was bitter cold ;
and by a common optical effect, things seemed almost
more definite than in the broadest daylight. The sleep-
ing city was absolutely still ; a company of white hoods,
a field full of little alps, below the twinkling stars. Vil-
lon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing!
Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind
him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was
still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John;
wherever he went he must weave, with his own plod-
ding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and
would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead
man came back to him with a new significance. He
snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and
choosing a street at random, stepped boldly forward in
the snow.

Two things preoccupied him as he went; the aspect
of the gallows at Montfaucon in this bright, windy phase
of the night's existence, for one; and for another, the
look of the dead man with his bald head and garland
of red curls. Both struck cold upon his heart, and he
kept quickening his pace as if he could escape from un-
pleasant thoughts by mere fleetness of foot. Sometimes
he looked back over his shoulder with a sudden nervous

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NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

jerk; but he was the only moving thing in the white
streets, except when the wind swooped round a corner
and threw up the snow, which was beginning to freeze,
in spouts of glittering dust.

Suddenly he saw, a long way before him, a black
clump and a couple of lanterns. The clump was in
motion, and the lanterns swung as though carried by
men walking. It was a patrol. And though it was
merely crossing his line of march he judged it wiser to
get out of eyeshot as speedily as he could. He was not
in the humour to be challenged, and he was conscious
of making a very conspicuous mark upon the snow.
Just on his left hand there stood a great hotel, with some
turrets and a large porch before the door ; it was half-
ruinous, he remembered, and had long stood empty;
and so he made three steps of it, and jumped into the
shelter of the porch. It was pretty dark inside, after the
glimmer of the snowy streets, and he was groping for-
ward with outspread hands, when he stumbled over
some substance which offered an indescribable mixture
of resistances, hard and soft, firm and loose. His heart
gave a leap, and he sprang two steps back and stared
dreadfully at the obstacle. Then he gave a little laugh
of relief. It was only a woman, and she dead. He
knelt beside her to make sure upon this latter point.
She was freezing cold, and rigid like a stick. A little
ragged finery fluttered in the wind about her hair, and
her cheeks had been heavily rouged that same afternoon.
Her pockets were quite empty; but in her stocking, un-
derneath the garter, Villon found two of the small coins
that went by the name of whites. It was little enough ;
but it was always something; and the poet was moved

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with a deep sense of pathos that she should have died
before she had spent her money. That seemed to him a
dark and pitiable mystery ; and he looked from the coins
in his hand to the dead woman, and back again to the
coins, shaking his head over the riddle of man's life.
Henry V. of England, dying at Vincennes just after he
had conquered France, and this poor jade cut off by a
cold draught in a great man's doorway, before she had
time to spend her couple of whites it seemed a cruel
way to carry on the world. Two whites would have
taken such a little while to squander; and yet it would
have been one more good taste in the mouth, one more
smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul, and the
body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to
use all his tallow before the light was blown out and
the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind,
he was feeling, half mechanically, for his purse. Sud-
denly his heart stopped beating; a feeling of cold scales
passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow seemed
to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment;
then he felt again with one feverish movement; and
then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at
once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so
living and actual it is such a thin veil between them
and their pleasures ! There is only one limit to their
fortune that of time ; and a spendthrift with only a few
crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent
For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most
shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all
to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put
his head in the halter for it ; if he may be hanged to-

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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 towards 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 success, he would

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A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

try the house of his adopted father, the chaplain of St.
Benoit.

He ran there 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 in-
terior 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 un-
der 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

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NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

mouth with an oath. And then the humour of the sit-
uation 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 amuse-
ment 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 at least,
and he would go and see.

On the way, two little accidents happened to him
which coloured his musings in a very different manner.
For, first, he fell in with the track of a patrol, and walked
in it for some hundred yards, although it lay out of his
direction. And this spirited him up; at least he had
confused his trail ; for he was still possessed with the
idea of people tracking him all about Paris over the
snow, and collaring him next morning before he was
awake. The other matter affected him quite differently.

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A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

He passed a street corner, where, not so long before, a
woman and her child had been devoured by wolves.
This was just the kind of weather, he reflected, when
wolves might take it into their heads to enter Paris
again; and a lone man in these deserted streets would
run the chance of something worse than a mere scare.
He stopped and looked upon the place with an unpleas-
ant interest it was a centre where several lanes inter-
sected each other; and he looked down them all, one
after another, and held his breath to listen, lest he should
detect some galloping black things on the snow or hear
the sound of howling between him and the river. He
remembered his mother telling him the story and point-
ing out the spot, while he was yet a child. His mother !
If he only knew where she lived, he might make sure at
least of shelter. He determined he would inquire upon
the morrow; nay, he would go and see her too, poor
old girl ! So thinking, he arrived at his destination his
last hope for the night.

The house was quite dark, like its neighbours; and
yet after a few taps, he heard a movement overhead, a
door opening, and a cautious voice asking who was
there. The poet named himself in a loud whisper, and
waited, not without some trepidation, the result. Nor
had he to wait long. A window was suddenly opened,
and a pailful of slops splashed down upon the doorstep.
Villon had not been unprepared fcr something of the
sort, and had put himself as much in shelter as the nature
of the porch admitted ; but for all that, he was deplorably
drenched below the waist. His hose began to freeze al-
most at once. Death from cold and exposure stared him
in the face ; he remembered he was of phthisical ten-

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NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

dency, and began coughing tentatively. But the gravity
of the danger steadied his nerves. He stopped a few
hundred yards from the door where he had been so
rudely used, and reflected with his finger to his nose.
He could only see one way of getting a lodging, and that
was to take it. He had noticed a house not far away,
which looked as if it might be easily broken into, and
thither he betook himself promptly, entertaining himself
on the way with the idea of a room still hot, with a table
still loaded with the remains of supper, where he might
pass the rest of the black hours and whence he should
issue, on the morrow, with an armful of valuable plate.
He even considered on what viands and what wines he
should prefer; and as he was calling the roll of his favour-
ite dainties, roast fish presented itself to his mind with
an odd mixture of amusement and horror.

"I shall never finish that ballade," he thought to him-
self ; and then, with another shudder at the recollection,
"Oh, damn his fat head!" he repeated fervently, and
spat upon the snow.

The house in question looked dark at first sight; but
as Villon made a preliminary inspection in search of the
handiest point of attack, a little twinkle of light caught
his eye from behind a curtained window.

" The devil! " he thought. " People awake ! Some
student or some saint, confound the crew ! Can't they
get drunk and lie in bed snoring like their neighbours !
What's the good of curfew, and poor devils of bell-
ringers jumping at a rope's end in bell-towers ? What's
the use of day, if people sit up all night ? The gripes
to them! " He grinned as he saw where his logic was
leading him. "Every man to his business, after all,"

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A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

added he, "and if they're awake, by the Lord, I may
come by a supper honestly for once, and cheat the
devil."

He went boldly to the door and knocked with an
assured hand. On both previous occasions, he had
knocked timidly and with some dread of attracting no-
tice ; but now when he had just discarded the thought
of a burglarious entry, knocking at a door seemed a
mighty simple and innocent proceeding. The sound of
his blows echoed through the house with thin, phantas-
mal reverberations, as though it were quite empty; but
these had scarcely died away before a measured tread
drew near, a couple of bolts were withdrawn, and one
wing was opened broadly, as though no guile or fear of
guile were known to those within. A tall figure of a
man, muscular and spare, but a little bent confronted
Villon. The head was massive in bulk, but finely sculp-
tured; the nose blunt at the bottom, but refining up-
ward to where it joined a pair of strong and honest eye-
brows; the mouth and eyes surrounded with delicate
markings, and the whole face based upon a thick white
beard, boldly and squarely trimmed. Seen as it was by
the light of a flickering hand-lamp, it looked perhaps
nobler than it had a right to do; but it was a fine face,
honourable rather than intelligent, strong, simple, and
righteous.

" You knock late, sir," said the old man in resonant,
courteous tones.

Villon cringed and brought up many servile words of
apology; at a crisis of this sort the beggar was upper-
most in him, and the man of genius hid his head with
confusion.

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NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

" You are cold," repeated the old man, "and hungry ?
Well, step in." And he ordered him into the house with
a noble enough gesture.

"Some great seigneur," thought Villon, as his host,
setting down the lamp on the flagged pavement of the
entry, shot the bolts once more into their places.

"You will pardon me if I go in front," he said, when
this was done ; and he preceded the poet upstairs into
a large apartment, warmed with a pan of charcoal and
lit by a great lamp hanging from the roof. It was very
bare of furniture : only some gold plate on a sideboard ;
some folios ; and a stand of armour between the win-
dows. Some smart tapestry hung upon the walls, rep-
resenting the crucifixion of our Lord in one piece, and
in another a scene of shepherds and shepherdesses by a
running stream. Over the chimney was a shield of
arms.

" Will you seat yourself," said the old man, "and for-
give me if I leave you ? I am alone in my house
to-night, and if you are to eat I must forage for you
myself."

No sooner was his host gone than Villon leaped from
the chair on which he had just seated himself, and be-
gan examining the room, with the stealth and passion
of a cat. He weighed the gold flagons in his hand,
opened all the folios, and investigated the arms upon
the shield, and the stuff with which the seats were lined.
He raised the window curtains, and saw that the win-
dows were set with rich stained glass in figures, so far
as he could see, of martial import. Then he stood in the
middle of the room, drew a long breath, and retaining
it with puffed cheeks, looked round and round him,

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A LODGING FOR THE NIGHT

turning on his heels, as if to impress every feature of the
apartment on his memory.

" Seven pieces of plate," he said. " If there had been
ten, I would have risked it. A fine house, and a fine
old master, so help me all the saints! "

And just then, hearing the old man's tread returning
along the corridor, he stole back to his chair, and began
humbly toasting his wet legs before the charcoal pan.

His entertainer had a plate of meat in one hand and a
jug of wine in the other. He set down the plate upon the
table, motioning Villon to draw in his chair, and going to
the sideboard, brought back two goblets which he filled.

" I drink your better fortune," he said, gravely touch-
ing Villon's cup with his own.

"To our better acquaintance," said the poet, growing
bold. A mere man of the people would have been
awed by the courtesy of the old seigneur, but Villon
was hardened in that matter; he had made mirth for
great lords before now, and found them as black rascals
as himself. And so he devoted himself to the viands
with a ravenous gusto, while the old man, leaning back-
ward, watched him with steady, curious eyes.

"You have blood on your shoulder, my man," he said.

Montigny must have laid his wet right hand upon
him as he left the house. He cursed Montigny in his
heart.

"It was none of my shedding," he stammered.

"I had not supposed so," returned his host quietly.
"A brawl?"

"Well, something of that sort," Villon admitted with
a quaver.

" Perhaps a fellow murdered ?"
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NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

"Oh, no, not murdered," said the poet, more and
more confused. "It was all fair play murdered by
accident. 1 had no hand in it, God strike me dead ! "
he added fervently.

" One rogue the fewer, I dare say," observed the mas-
ter of the house.

" You may dare to say that," agreed Villon, infinitely
relieved. " As big a rogue as there is between here
and Jerusalem. He turned up his toes like a lamb. But
it was a nasty thing to look at. I dare say you've seen
dead men in your time, my lord ? " he added, glancing
at the armour.

"Many," said the old man. "I have followed the
wars, as you imagine."

Villon laid down his knife and fork, which he had just
taken up again.

"Were any of them bald ?" he asked.

"Oh yes, and with hair as white as mine."

" I don't think I should mind the white so much," said
Villon. "His was red." And he had a return of his
shuddering and tendency to laughter, which he drowned
with a great draught of wine. "I'm a little put out
when I think of it," he went on. "I knew him
damn him ! And then the cold gives a man fancies
or the fancies give a man cold, I don't know which."

"Have you any money ?" asked the old man.

"I have one white," returned the poet, laughing.
" I got it out of a dead jade's stocking in a porch. She