"Sleeping, I suppose."
"And Mademoiselle de Vesc?"
"How should I know!" answered La Mothe crossly. It vexed him that Villon should speak at all of Ursula de Vesc, and still more that his answer was so lame. But recognizing the symptoms out of a wide experience, Villon only laughed softly at the brusque retort.
"Some peaches hang themselves high," he said, the laugh broadening as
La Mothe's face grew wrathful, "but they are peaches all the same.
Shake the tree, my young friend, shake the tree, and see that you keep
your mouth open when the fruit drops."
"Monsieur Villon, if we are to be friends——"
"So young, so very young," said Villon softly. "Friends? most certainly. If we are not friends, who should be? Are we not both jackals hunting in the one pack, and jackal does not bite jackal." Then his mood changed with a swiftness which La Mothe soon found to be characteristic, a kindliness cast out the jarring banter from his face, and his luminous eyes grew wistful. "Friends? It is a good word, the very best word in the world. Friends are more than family or kinship, and not many care to call old Francois Villon friend nowadays. There was a time——" He paused, running his hand down the long trail of his beard reflectively, a slender-fingered supple hand. La Mothe noted it was, a hand that had a distinct character of its own, just as the contradictory face had, though the finger-tips were less sensitive than in the days when their itching acquisitiveness had brought their owner to the cold shadows of the gallows. "Aye! there was a time. There were four of us——"
"The ballad says six," said La Mothe.
"Four, four: a man—yet, more, a woman—may have many lovers but few friends, many to tuck an arm in his or throw it across his neck when the pockets are full. But that's not friendship, and I don't call every man friend who dips his fingers into the same till with me. Yes, there were four of us, Montigny, Tabary, Cayeux, poor snows of yester year sucked down by the cold earth. But while the blood was warm in our veins we four were as one with one purse. When it was full we laughed and sang and feasted as no king feasts, because no king has such spice of appetite nor can snap his fingers at the world and care as we could: when it was empty, and it was mostly empty, we laughed and sang the louder and shared our crusts or went gaily hungry. Brave lads every one, and brave days. Aye, aye."
"And where are they now?"
"With the snows of yester year! God knows where! and I fear me the devil knows too. Montigny was hung in '57, Tabary in '58, and Cayeux, Cayeux of the light heart and lighter fingers, went by the same path two years later: I only am left. They said I killed a man and would have hung me—me! Francois Villon! Certainly a man died or there would be no Villon now: it was either he or I, and they would have hung me." The full lips parted in a comfortable laugh and the eyes twinkled. "I appealed to Parliament in a ballad, and the humour of the notion moved the good gentlemen to mercy. 'How can we choke the breath from so sweet a singer?' said they. 'There are ten thousand hangable rogues in Paris, but only one poet amongst them!' God be praised for humour. I think it gave Francois Villon his life; but since then friendship has walked the other side of the street."