If I Were King

by Justin H. McCarthy

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 assault. 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. François, after a moment's glance of triumph at the fallen giant, sprang round and glanced up at the gallery.

Katherine, standing, leaned over the balustrade 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.