CHAPTER X.

THE LIGHTED TORCH.

The night had come, and, with the exception of one troop of dragoons and one company of the milices, also with the exception of the Marquis du Chaila, who had remained behind with the intention of having his uncle's body properly interred, all were on their way to Alais.

And behind Baville and de Peyre rode Martin and Buscarlet, the former on his own horse, the pastor on one which had belonged to the dead man.

It was a night such as those who dwell in the south--in Languedoc, or Provence, or Dauphiné--in the height of its summer know well. A night when, up from the Mediterranean, but a few leagues away, there come the cool breezes that sunset invariably brings, and when, from the caps of the purple mountains, the soft evening air descends, passing over cornfields and meadows and woods after it has left the sterile and basaltic summits until, when it reaches the valleys, its breath is perfumed and odorous. Summer nights so calm and soft that here the nightingale remains later than is its wont in other spots and sings sometimes far into August and September, the throats of hundreds of birds making the whole valley musical.

Now, however, their trills were drowned by the clank of sabres against the flanks of the horses bestridden by the dragoons, by the rattle of chain and bridle, the occasional neigh of the animals, and by various orders given as all went forward. Also by the hum of conversation as the men talked to one another.

Suddenly upon the night air, however, there came now another sound, silencing and deadening all else--a sound that subdued and deadened even the clatter of harness and accoutrements, the voices of the men, the songs of the birds of night. The sound of the deep booming of a bell not far off which swelled and rose in the summer calm, as sometimes it rang violently and sometimes slowly and intermittently, sometimes ceased, too, and then began again, with sharp, hurried clangs, as though rung by some frightened, terror-stricken hand.

"It is the tocsin," one hoarse-throated dragoon called out, who rode in the troop behind the leaders, "the tocsin from some village church. Is more murder being done? Are more abbés being slaughtered?"

"The fellow speaks truly," de Peyre said, then roared himself at the top of his voice: "Who among you knows the locality? What village is near?"

From twenty mouths the answer came at once: "It is Frugéres. The place is close at hand. The steeple is the highest for miles around."

Even as these men spoke, their voices were in their turn silenced or drowned by still more numerous shouts from others in the cavalcade.

"See, see!" those other voices yelled. "There is a fire--a church that burns. Behold!"

"My God!" Martin heard Baville whisper to himself, though not so low but that the words were distinguishable. "The fanatics have attacked another priest, another church. This is no riot, but a rebellion."

Then he turned at once to de Peyre and said hurriedly but authoritatively:

"Order all forward. They are there. We may be in time to save some. Also to trap these mountain wolves. Forward, I say! Give the word of command."

From de Peyre that word went forth, harsh and raucous as bellowed from the lips of the rough soldier who had fought at Senef and Ensisheim and had himself taken orders from Turenne and Condé. A moment later every man who was mounted was spurring toward the thin streak of flame that rose in the night air half a mile ahead, while the milice followed on foot as fast as they were able.

"Pray God, no more horrors are being perpetrated," Buscarlet muttered as he rode by Martin's side down the dusty road. Then murmured: "God forgive them. God forgive them. They are mad."

"He may forgive them," said Baville, who had caught his words, and paraphrasing unconsciously as he spoke the words of one by whose side he would have been accounted obscure and humble. "He may. I never will. Oh, that Julien arrives ere long! Then--then--then--they shall know what it is to outrage Languedoc thus."

The flames grew more furious as all neared the tower whence they issued. It was the tower of the church at Frugéres; behind those flames rose the thick white smoke from the burning material below. Also great pieces of the copings were falling from the summit, and sometimes a pinnacle or gargoyle fell too. And once as they drew near there came a smothered clang, followed a moment later by a deep sonorous clash, and those approaching rapidly knew that the great bell had fallen from its beam, probably by now burned through, and had been hurled far down below.

Upon the air as this happened there rose a psalm, a hymn of praise, telling how the false priests of Baal had been consumed by the flames of God's wrath in ages long since past, also the shouts and cries of many voices. Yet none of those shouts were derisive, none scornful or contemptuous. Instead, the shouts and cries of avengers who testified to justice being done on sinners; who approved of the justice, yet saw no reason for adding rejoicing to that approval.

"See," cried Baville, "they are there. Behold! They move below the tower. We have them. De Peyre, give the order to charge. At them, among them, spare none."

The belief in witchcraft was not yet dead in the world. People still believed in sorcery and enchantment. What wonder, then, that the dragoons thought there was some necromancy in the fact that, as they tore down the dusty road, their blades gleaming in the light cast by the flames, all against whom they rode vanished suddenly? Were there one moment, gone the next. It seemed incredible. Half a hundred men had been before them when they were five minutes' distance off; now that they had reached the burning church, not a living soul was to be seen. Truly it savoured of the miraculous. Yet, ere many months had passed--indeed, but a few weeks--these soldiers, and others too who were soon to join them, learned that no foe against whom they had ever been opposed possessed so thoroughly the art of sudden disappearance as did these fanatics, known later as the Camisards. For, trained in their mountain homes to every physical feat--to leaping great chasms, climbing dizzy heights unaided by aught but their strong and agile feet and hands, descending giddy precipices as easily as their own goats--they could disappear, disperse, as quickly and as thoroughly as the snow wreath under the spring sun. Could lure on bodies of their enemies to sports fraught with danger to all but themselves, into quagmires and morasses, lonely mountain passes and fatal hilltops, then themselves vanish and be no more seen.

It was so now upon this second night of their uprising.

As the dragoons charged down upon the paved, open place outside the church of Frugéres they charged upon empty space alone, encountered nothing that offered resistance either to their onrush or their gleaming blades. Nothing but the dead body of a man, a priest, lying on those stones beneath the tower, the head broken in, the limbs twisted and contorted.

"Grand Dieu! what are we dealing with?" exclaimed the Lieutenant General, wiping the sweat from his face as his men pulled up around him, while some rushed into the church on foot, their long swords in their hands, ready to be thrust through any breast that they encountered, and others to the presbytery, thinking the attroupés might be hiding there. "With human beings or devils?"

"Nay," said Baville, "with the children of the desert and the mountains. Yet also the children of the devil. They escape but for a time, however. Even these jugglers can not disappear when they are surrounded. And," he added, striking one white-gloved hand into the palm of another, "they shall be surrounded by such a fast-closing circle that ere long not one shall escape. I swear it here before this murdered man."

Easy to swear such an oath. More difficult to keep it. As, at last, Baville found.

"Who is he?" Martin asked. Then added in a whisper to Buscarlet: "This is murder, not justice. Cruelty, not retribution. See, he is an old man."

"You are right, sir," Baville replied, whose ears nothing ever escaped. "Yet be sure their time will come." Then, looking down at the dead priest, he also asked, "Who is he?"

"It is the reverend curé," one of the dragoons said, regarding the old man and wiping from his face at the same time the beads of perspiration, even as his leader had done a moment before. "I know him well; am of the next parish. He has thrown himself from the tower. As well have staid for the flames as perished thus, broken all to pieces."

All gazed down also as the man uttered these words, and as they did so, none speaking, they recognised that they were face to face with an awakened fury, with a vengeance that had slumbered but which now awoke even as the baited lion awakes and turns at last to rend its foes.

For more than sixteen years the affectés, the New Religionists, the Heretics, had bowed their heads beneath the yoke of him whom they called the Scourge of God, as well as of the priests and the De Maintenon, the woman whom Louvois and La Chaise had once used as an instrument to work on her lover's intolerance, but who, since she had become that lover's wife, had herself carried on the system. Born a Protestant, she had seen that the king's mind became more sunken in superstition as he grew near his end, and that, to keep that mind under her subjection, the surest way was to persecute those whom she had deserted and whom she hated. Therefore she revelled in their suppression, therefore she boasted to her sister bigot, the Princesse des Ursins, that in twenty years, if Louis' life was spared, there would be no more Huguenots in France.

Meanwhile her orders were carried out strenuously wherever Protestants harboured, especially so in the Midi. "Saccagez ces chiens des Huguenots, saccagez les, c'est la volonté du roi," her minister, Louvois, wrote. "Drive out ce monstre de l'hérésie, ces chaires de pestilence, ces synagogues de Satan," exclaimed the priest. And it was done.

Swiftly to all the jails in the warm south, to the galleys waiting at Marseilles for their victims, to the lamp-posts on the town and village bridges, to the fuel in the market places, to the axe, the wheel and the rope, the Protestants were hurried.

Also the dragonnades began. The dragoons, les cravats, were quartered in houses, sometimes in Protestant churches. Wives and daughters were so treated that, to hide the bitterness of their shame and to escape the horror of ever meeting their father's or brother's glances again, they took their own lives. They need not have feared those glances, for, the jails being soon full to overflowing, hundreds of male Protestants were huddled off in crazy brigs and tartans and snows to the Mississippi and New France generally, where, if they were not drowned on the way, they mostly perished from the effects of the climate or by the hands of the Natchez.

For sixteen years it had gone on. By the end of that time the Protestant churches were all closed and the Protestant ministers forbidden to perform their services under pain of death; scores, indeed, had been executed for doing to, while still scores more, at the risk of death, performed those services and held Divine worship in the mountains and woods. Also none were allowed to quit the land who could be prevented from doing so, though a hundred thousand did manage to escape to other countries, high-born women and girls being disguised in most cases as muleteer's boys; high-born men of the oldest blood in France--such men as Ruvigny and Duquesne--driving pigs and asses toward the frontier, or disguised as pilgrim monks, or pushing handcarts full of fruit and vegetables or N?mes serges, which they pretended they were desirous of selling. But these were people of wealth, people who left behind them in their flight the chateaux in which countless generations of their race had been born, left also their rich furniture and equipages and costly plate and silks and satins, and the woods and forests and vineyards to which they had been born the heirs and to the enjoyment of which they had looked forward for the rest of their lives. Or they were skilled mechanics and artisans who could gain a livelihood wherever they found themselves. But for the poorer sort there was no flight possible; if they left France they must die of hunger in other lands. They had no money, could speak no tongue but their own, often knew no trade by which they could earn their bread; understood nothing beyond the breeding of cattle and the arts of husbandry. Yet they, too, fled from persecution, though in a different manner. High up in the gloomy and, to strangers, inaccessible plateaux of the Cévennes--a region of sterile mountains on which for six months in the year the snow sometimes falls unceasingly, while for the other six the heat is almost the heat of the tropics--they sought a refuge. Here in this mountainous region, which covers an extent of one hundred and twenty miles, they found a home, here worshipped God in their own fashion and unmolested, which was all they asked, yet saw with horror, when disguised they ventured down into the plains, the misery that was still overwhelming those of their own faith. Also they knew that plans were being formed for their extermination; that from Paris was coming an army under Julien, a bloodthirsty soldier who had once been a Protestant like themselves, but who was now a convert possessing all the tigerish fury of the convert against those whom he had deserted; knew that Du Chaila was the most brutal of all priests as Baville was the most cruel of all rulers. No wonder that they groaned over the ferocities inflicted on any of their number who were caught below in the plains. The capture of the girl Fleurette and of the guide Masip ignited the flame of revenge which had long been smouldering. But even then, when they descended to Montvert, it was more with the desire of rescuing the victims than aught else. In their hearts there had been at first no intention of murdering either the abbé or the curé of Frugéres. Moreover, it was not against Louis that they rebelled but against his Church and the priests of that Church.

But Du Chaila had caused the dragoons to fire on them, and the first shot from the soldiers' musketoons had roused their passion; also it brought about a conflict of horrible cruelty and bloodshed which the passage of years alone extinguished. For now that war of retaliation had commenced which two of Louis' field marshals were successively unable to quench, and which a third only succeeded in doing, more by diplomacy and tolerance than by steel or ball.

* * * * * * *

"What has he on his breast?" asked Baville, leaning over the dead priest and pointing to something white that gleamed in the light cast by the flames from the burning church.

"A scrap of paper, Monsieur l'Intendant," the dragoon who had taken the most prominent part among his fellows replied, "with writing upon it. It is pinned to his vest."

"Give it to me."

Then he read aloud, not heeding, apparently, whether either Buscarlet or Martin heard the words:

"This paper replaces another containing the names of a score of men to be denounced to the monster, Baville. The man has gone before his God. Baville will follow."

"Will he?" the Intendant said to himself in a low, clear voice, which all heard. "Will he? Doubtless some day, but not now. For a surety not before these wolves have been tracked to their caves and exterminated--as they shall be--as they shall be."

And all watching him in the lurid light cast from the burning tower, saw that the white-gloved hands were opened and clenched again twice, as though he had the throats of those wolves he spoke of within them.