CHAPTER VII.

THE HOUSE BY THE BRIDGE.

"Come," said Martin to the trembling pastor, "come. We may do something, avert some awful calamity. You are of their faith. They will listen to you," and he arranged his porte épée and motioned to the old man to follow him.

"Not you! Not you!" the other whispered, shuddering. "Not you! You know not what will befall you if you take part in this."

"Yes, I. I must go too. I am a Protestant as much as they. I tell you, Pastor Buscarlet, I will wear the mask no longer. Come. Hark! There is firing. Come. We can do nothing here. Help neither Huguenot nor Papist."

"On my knees I beseech you to stop," the old man said, flinging himself upon them before Martin, "on my knees. You know not what you do. Think, think! If these men have risen it is at the worst but Frenchmen against Frenchmen. But with you--you are English. And we are at war again. Oh! I sicken with dread that it should be known."

"It can never be known. I have the French as well as you, or they--better than they, for mine is the speech of Paris and theirs of the mountains. Hark! they sing of Judah once more--also there is firing. Come with me or let me go alone." And he tore himself from the hands of the other.

Yet he did not go alone; even as he stepped into the garden the pastor went with him, running by his side to keep pace with his eager strides, whispering, entreating as he did so.

"Promise me, promise me, Martin," he said, "that you will take no part in any fray that is happening, will not to-night proclaim yourself. Oh, promise me! Remember," and he sunk his quavering voice even still lower, "Cyprien de Beauvilliers."

Recalled to himself by that name, recollecting the atonement of many years that had yet to be made, the wrong that had to be righted, as he himself had said, he too sunk his own voice, saying: "I promise. To-night I do nothing."

Down the street they went, therefore, together, Buscarlet's hand in Martin's, both glancing at the closed windows of the thatched houses and seeing the lights in them, with white faces against the mica panes and dark eyes gleaming from behind curtains, yet with no head showing. The orders to keep within doors were being followed.

In all the street (there was but one) no form was visible; if it had not been for the uproar at the end of it, where Le Tarn rolled under the three small bridges, and for the spits and tongues of flame that belched forth out of musketoons and carabines from the windows of the "house by the bridge," beneath the deeper, denser flames that rolled from under the eaves of that house, they might have deemed it was a deserted village or one peopled only with the dead.

Yet again the solemn chant uprose as they drew close to that house, but mingled now with something deeper than itself--the hammering of great trees, or tree trunks, on doors, the rumbling of flames escaping from the burning house, the firing from the windows, the loud shrieks from within the house itself.

"What are you?" cried a huge man as they entered the crowd, "Papist or Protestant? Child of God or Devil? Answer, or----" then ceased, seeing Buscarlet still holding Martin's hand; ceased and murmured, "Pardon, reverend; I did not see or know in the darkness. Yet begone; seek a safer place. The villain has his house full of De Broglie's fusileers to fire on us and help him. Oh, Lord of Hosts, wilt thou let them help such as he?"

"What will you--they--do?" Martin asked.

"Release the prisoners. If he resists, slay him. We have suffered too long."

"Nay, nay," said Buscarlet, "that must not be. Murder must not be done; or, if done, not by our side. Let the shedding of blood be theirs----"

"It has been for too long," the Cévenole answered sternly, his eyes glittering. "It has been. Now it is our turn. What saith the Scriptures? 'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' So be it! The Papists have shed blood--our blood--like water; now let them look to themselves. You know, father, that the downtrodden have risen. At last!"

"God help us all!" Buscarlet exclaimed, wringing his hands.

"Ay, God help us all! Yet even he can not give us back our dead--those who have hung in chains on the bridges of Montpellier, N?mes, Anduse, even here upon this bridge of Montvert. What balm is there for our daughters whipped to death through the streets, our sons sent to the galleys without trial, our pastors--your brethren--broken on the wheel, burnt at the stake? We have risen; it will not end here. That great evil king still sits in his great white palace, his reformed wanton by his side; she is old now, yet she shall not es----"

He staggered as he spoke, flung out his arms, then fell heavily to the ground to the sound of a fresh discharge of musketry. The fusileers of De Broglie had fired another volley from the windows of the abbé's house, and a bullet had found the man's heart.

"Come," said Martin, "come. We can do naught here. I may not draw my sword. No use to be mowed down here. Let us gain the bridge; there are no windows which give on that."

Half supporting, wholly leading the unhappy old man, he made his way through the besiegers who remained outside the house, some still singing their psalms and hymns of praise, while amid them moved the inspired ones, the prophets--men who were crazed with religious fervour and maddened with persecution until they did, in truth, believe that they were appointed by Heaven to direct and guide the others.

Also among this mass of infuriated peasants, some of whom fell or staggered away as fresh discharges came from the house, were three persons who had been brought from out of it. One, bent double from long confinement in the stocks, was Masip, of whom Buscarlet had spoken. The second was a girl not over sixteen, who screamed, "My back, my back, O God, my back!" if any touched her. She had been thrashed daily, because she would not be converted, by thongs steeped in pitch which had been allowed to harden ere the abbé used the whip. The third was an old man who could not stand, and with an arm broken.

Gaining the bridge, Martin and Buscarlet saw a fresh sight of horror.

The roof of the house was alight now. From between the walls and where the eaves of thatch hung over, bubbles and puffs of flame burst out and leaped toward the thatch itself, each tongue flickering higher until at last the ends of straw glowed and sparkled, then caught and began to burn. And on the sloping roof was a man crouching, his heels dug tight into the dried straw and reeds to prevent him from slipping down and over into the garden beneath, while with his hands he frantically twisted round a chimney stack a coil of white rope which another man, clinging himself to the roof, handed to him.

It was the abbé and his valet.

"Could we but save them," Buscarlet whispered, "but save them! Return evil with good, repay his persecutions with Christian charity and mercy. Oh, that we might!"

"Nothing can save them," Martin replied, watching the men's actions in the gleam of the flames from below, and also in the light of the now fast-rising moon. "Nothing. They are doomed. If they stay there they must be burned to death; if they descend it is only to be caught; also if seen now, those below will shoot them like sparrows on the roof. All are lost who are in that house--all! The soldiers too!"

He had judged right. Both men were doomed.

Infuriated by still further fusillades from De Broglie's soldiers by which two more men were killed, maddened, too, by the sight of the abbé's victims, some of whom were lying on the ground from inability to stand, the rioters determined to make an end of their first act of revenge. From the chapel, therefore, in the vicinity--into which they had also broken by now--they fetched the benches on which the worshippers sat, as well as the altar-rails and the pulpit, and piled them up in the old square hall of the house, thereby to add fuel to the flames. And also from the living rooms in that house they took the furniture and flung it on too, not even forgetting the straw mattresses which the soldiers had brought with them when the abbé applied to N?mes for a guard, saying that he feared an attack, and on which they slept nightly.

The house was doomed.

Paralyzed with fear, terror-stricken and horrified, Buscarlet could bear the sight no longer. His white hair streaming in the night breeze, he rushed into the midst of the Camisards, screaming to them to show mercy, begging them to desist, imploring them to forget their own sufferings in the past, and to save the abbé and all within the house. Yet his appeal touched not one single heart.

"Away, old man," said one of the inspired prophets, "away to your bed and out of this. The hour for mercy is gone; the servants of the Lord have arisen. Go preach to women and babes; leave us, the priests of men, to deal with men," and as he spoke he dragged Buscarlet out of the crowd, telling Martin also to beware lest he interfered.

The latter was nigh doing so now. Protestant as he was, with, in his heart, a hatred for the cruelties which he knew the Papists practised here in Languedoc--cruelties condemned, indeed, by many of their brother Roman Catholics, so terrible were they--he could yet scarce keep his hand from his sword hilt, scarce forbear rushing into that burning house and endeavouring to save Du Chaila's life.

For now the end was very near. If the man was not saved soon his final hope was gone. The soldiers had fired their last shots, their powder-horns and cartouches were empty, they were endeavouring to escape, some leaping from the lower windows at which they, fortunately for themselves, had been stationed, and plunging into the little river and across it; some rushing out into the crowd of fierce Cévenoles, only to be cut down to the earth by reaping hooks and scythes, or, more happily, to escape with wounds alone. There were none left now in the burning house but the abbé and his man-servant. On the former all eyes were fixed, the crowd drawing farther back from the dwelling to get a fairer view of the roof on which they could see him still crouched, or moving on to the bridge, thereby the better to observe his fate. And they gloated over it--these miserable peasants who had turned at last, these human downtrodden worms who had not been allowed to practise their religion in peace in their own land, nor permitted to emigrate to others where they might do so; they fed themselves full with revenge on this the first night of their uprising. One, a marksman, raised his carabine and covered Du Chaila as he clung to the roof--maybe his heart was not yet entirely warped nor turned to the deepest tinge of cruelty, and he wished to end the wretch's sufferings--but it was knocked up by half a dozen strong arms. A dozen voices cried fiercely:

"Help him not, assist him to no easy death. Remember our brothers' dooms, our fathers in the flames, our girls' backs raw and bleeding. Observe Fleurette lying there at your feet; let him expiate all. Then, after him, the others. There are more to suffer too. Baville--ho, Baville!--le Roi de Languedoc, as he is termed--the prior of St. Maurice--the priest of Frugéres--it is their turn to-morrow."

And above the roar of the flames these louder roars of threatened vengeance rose; above all else their psalms were heard telling how Jehoshaphat exhorted the people, how Jahaziel prophesied, and how the God of Battles had delivered the enemy into their hands.

The end was near.

Du Chaila, the cruellest priest in the Cévennes--the man who, under the office of Inspector of Roman Catholic Missions in Languedoc, had for sixteen years perpetrated cruelties on the Protestants which, it was said in the district, he could have only learned while a missionary in Siam--was about to expiate his merciless rigour on others.

Part of the eaves overhanging the garden had by now fallen away in great masses of charred straw. One of two things alone could happen soon: either he must perish in the flames when the roof fell in, as it would do in a few moments, or he must escape from that roof. It was the latter which he prepared to attempt, hoping perhaps that even now he might do so without his intentions being known.

Slowly, therefore, he crept away from the spot where he had crouched so long. They could see his hands and feet thrust deep into the thatch at each move he made. He disappeared from their sight, yet for a moment only; for as he left the side of the house where the rioters were, so those rioters followed below in the road. Compactly, in a mass, all went together, and silently. Their voices, their hymns had ceased; but for their footfalls there was naught to tell of how they were tracking the man from beneath as he himself moved above. Like sleuth-hounds who make no noise as they follow their trail, yet follow it unerringly, these human sleuth-hounds followed him.

They passed round the house, they stood upon the slope leading to the bridge. Between them and the house itself there ran a thick-set privet hedge, separating the latter from the road and shielding the lower rooms on that side from the dusts of summer and the snows of winter. Now, on this July night, convolvuli and roses and honeysuckle twined about it, dotting the deep green with many a delicate blossom and emitting sweet perfumes on the air. And above this hedge, between it and the roof, the doomed man was hanging at this time, clinging to a rope made of twisted bedclothes, wrenched, doubtless, from the beds of the upper rooms.

None spoke in all that crowd, no hymn was sung. Save for the sobs of Buscarlet and the moans of Fleurette, who lay in her sister's arms, no sound broke the silence--none until, a second later, while all their eyes were turned up to that frantic figure and while the moon's rays glistened on their eyeballs, a piercing shriek broke the stillness and the abbé fell headlong some thirty feet into the hedge, bounding off from one of the stakes, that supported it at intervals, into the dusty road; then lay there groaning. The roughly and hastily constructed rope had given way, and in his fall, as was soon seen, his leg was broken.

"Spare me!" he moaned--he who had never yet spared one, man, woman, or child--"spare me!"

At first none answered him, none spoke. Then amid the silence, from the lips of Pierre Esprit, the chief of the three prophets, the words fell:

"You are lost--your body in this world, your soul in the next."

"Alas!" he wailed, "even though I have damned myself, will you too do the same thing by murdering me?"

His words were the signal for his doom.

They rushed at him as he lay there and plunged their knives into his body, one man exclaiming, "This for my mother, burned at N?mes," another, "This for my father, broken at Anduse"; a third, "This for my brother, sent to the galley, 'Le Réquin'"; a fourth, "This for my sister, Fleurette, lying here."

When his nephew, Le Marquis du Chaila, afterward recovered his body from where they left it, it was pierced by fifty-two wounds, of which twenty-four were mortal.

"The beginning has been made," Pierre Esprit exclaimed. "There must be no backsliding. Henceforth each man's hand to guard each man's life. Now for the prior of St. Maurice, next for the priest of Frugéres. While for those who have been rescued from that man's clutches, away with them to the mountains and safety. Come, let us sing unto the Lord."

And up the slopes and pastures of the purple hills encircling the little village rose once more the chant of the army of Jehoshaphat.

Soon none were left in the blood-stained road but the pastor, Buscarlet, lying where he had fainted, and Martin Ashurst, white to the lips and endeavouring to arrange the dead man's limbs into something resembling humanity.