The Scourge of God: A Romance of Religious Persecution
be dreaded. That he deems his presence is necessary to insure fitting
vengeance being taken."
"Fear not," said Martin. "They can not execute us here to-night;
afterward, inquiry will show that we have done nothing to deserve
their vengeance. Be calm."
Amid clouds of dust from the road on which no rain had fallen for many
days the cavalcade came onward, reaching at last the farther end of
the bridge from where these two men stood side by side; then the
officer on the right gave the orders for all following to halt, and
slowly he with the other two rode on to the bridge itself and up the
slope to where Buscarlet and Martin stood.
"It is the Lieutenant General, de Peyre," Buscarlet whispered. "The
other is the Marquis du Chaila, the dead man's nephew. O God! what a
sight for him to see!"
"What has been done here?" said Baville, looking down at the two men
on foot who stood close by where they had halted their horses, though
not until he and his companions had turned their eyes to the burned
house, from which little spiral wreaths of smoke rose vertically in
the calm evening air. "What? And who, messieurs, are you?"
The quiet tones of his full rich voice, the absence of all harshness
in it, almost startled Martin Ashurst. Was this the man, he
wondered--or could the pastor have been mistaken?--of whose cruelty to
the Protestants as well as his fierce and overbearing nature not only
all the province rang, but also other parts of the land far remote
from here? The man whose name was known and mentioned with loathing by
the refugees in Holland and Switzerland, in Canterbury and
Spitalfields?
"Who are you, messieurs?" he repeated quietly, "though I think I
should know you, at least," and he directed his glance to the pastor.
"Monsieur André Buscarlet, _prédicateur_ of the--the--so-called
Reformed Religion, if I am not mistaken."
"André Buscarlet," the old man replied, looking up at him; and now,
Martin observed, he trembled no more, but answered fearlessly,
"Protestant minister of Montvert and----"
"Where," exclaimed the young Marquis du Chaila, "my uncle has been
barbarously murdered by you and your brood. Oh, fear not, you shall
pay dearly for it. Where, vagabond, is his body?"
"Sir," said Martin, speaking for the first time, "your grief carries
you into violent extremes. This gentleman whom you term 'vagabond' has
had no part nor share in your uncle's murder. Neither has his flock.
The deed was done by the refugees from the mountains. Monsieur
Buscarlet attempted in vain to prevent it."
"Bah!" exclaimed the marquis. "You are another Protestant, I should
suppose. Valuable testimony! Who are you?"
"One who at least is not answerable to you. Suffice it that no person
in this village had any hand in the abbé's murder, that it was done by
the men of whom the pastor speaks."
"To me, monsieur, at least all persons are answerable," Baville
interposed. "I am the king's Intendant. I must demand your name and
standing."
"My name is----" he began, yet ere he could tell it a shout from the
foremost dragoons who had dismounted startled all on the bridge. Some
of these men had been engaged in tethering their horses close by the
hedge, several of the animals indeed had already begun to crop the
dusty grass that grew beneath it, and they had found the bodies.
"My God, my God!" the marquis almost shrieked as he bent over the
abbé's form, the soldiers having led him to where it lay after he had
hastily quitted the saddle. "Oh, my God! my father's brother
slaughtered thus. Devils!" he exclaimed, turning round and glancing up
the long street, imagining probably that the inhabitants were all
within their houses. "Devils! was not his death enough, that you must
glut your rage with such butchery as this? See, Baville--see, de
Peyre, the wounds in his body. Enough to kill twenty men."
Looking down from their saddles at the murdered man's form, which they
could observe very plainly over the hedge from the elevation at which
they were, the Intendant and the leader of the troops shuddered, the
former turning white beneath the clear olive of his complexion. Yet,
even as Martin observed him blench, he wondered why he should do so.
Countless men and feeble women and children had gone to the gibbet,
the fire, the wheel, and the rack, as well as to the galleys and the
lash, at this man's orders, unless all Languedoc and every Huguenot
tongue lied. Why should he pale now, except it was because this
retaliation, this shifting of murder from the one side to the other,
told of a day of reckoning that had begun, of a Nemesis that had been
awakened?
"Baville," the young man cried again, "Baville! Vengeance! Vengeance!
He has died slaughtered at his post, as he knew he would die. But last
week, at our house in Montpelier, he spoke of how he was doomed
because he served God. Baville!--de Peyre! give the orders to fall on,
to destroy all. Otherwise I make my way to the king of the north and
cry on my knees for vengeance on these accursed heretics, these
bloodthirsty _Protestants_, as they term themselves. Burn down their
hovels, I say; slaughter them, exterminate."
"Alas, unhappy man!" exclaimed Buscarlet, still firm in his speech
now, and undaunted before the distracted marquis, who had already torn
his sword from its scabbard and stood before them gesticulating like a
madman in his grief and rage. "What use to destroy empty houses,
barren walls? Besides ourselves there is no living soul left in all
Montvert."
"What!" the two other men exclaimed together in their surprise. "What!
All gone? None left?"
And now on the Intendant's face there came another look, also the
return of his dark colour, as he said:
"Gone, yet you proclaim their innocence. Tell us in one breath that
they are guiltless, in another that they have fled. Do the innocent
flee?"
"They feared your cruelty. They knew that your Church spares not the
innocent; that it punishes them alike with the guilty."
"Blasphemer!" Baville exclaimed, though still his voice was low and
calm, belying the terrible accusation which lay beneath this word.
Terrible anywhere in France--now pious by law!--but doubly so in the
Cévennes.
"I blaspheme not," Buscarlet said, waxing even bolder. "Pause. Look
back. Twenty-seven Protestants have been done to death by you in the
past month----"
"Silence!" the other ordered, still in his unruffled voice, yet
uttering words enough to affright the boldest, "or I will have you
gagged; if that suffices not, strung up there," and he pointed to the
lamp.
Then turning to the marquis, he said:
"Be sure your uncle shall be avenged. Let them flee to the mountains,
yet we will have them. Extirpate them like rats in a granary. Julien,
the field marshal, has left Paris to assist in the holy work.
Meanwhile, de Peyre, send your men into every house in the place; see
if this abandonment is true. If not, if you find any, bring them
before me. As for you, and you," directing a glance at the pastor and
Martin, "you will sleep to-night in Alais. To-morrow a court will be
held." Then he added, under his breath, as though talking to himself:
"You must be bold men. Otherwise you would have decamped too."
"Or innocent ones," Martin replied, hearing his words, low as they
were. "You yourself have said it. Asked but now, 'Do the innocent
flee?'"
The Intendant bit his lips; the _riposte_ had gone fairly home. Then,
while de Peyre gave his orders and told off some of the dragoons to
enter and search every house in the village, and the marquis, who was
in command of the _milices_, bade them take up the bodies carefully
and cover them decently with their capes, Baville glanced down at
Martin, saying:
"Monsieur, I do not know you. You are not, I think, of this locality.
Yet I observe you are of the better classes. Where is your property?"
"In La Somme, department of the Ile de France. I am a proprietor; the
property of Duplan La Rose is mine, such as it is."
Had he not in truth been the owner of this property he would have
scorned to shelter himself beneath a falsehood. Had he been asked his
faith it was his fixed resolve to declare it, as, had it been possible
for Baville to recognise that he was an Englishman--which, after his
earliest years being spent in France, was not so--he had determined to
avow his nationality, no matter what the consequences might be. But so
far the truth alone was necessary.
When his father waited long and eagerly for the time to come for the
Stuart Restoration--as no follower of the Stuarts ever doubted it
would come, sooner or later--he, hating Paris and all its garish
dissipations under the then young and immoral king (the king now so
old and self-righteous!), purchased this property from the Baron
Duplan La Rose, a man himself broken and ruined by his participation
in the outbreaks of the Fronde. Purchased it because all the Ile de
France and the Pas de Calais were full of English refugees waiting
like himself for happier days to come; also because, when the time did
come, it would be near to England. And he dying, it became Martin's
property.
Baville touched his hat as an acknowledgment of Martin's explanation,
perhaps also as an acknowledgment of his position, since he was a
great believer in _les propriétaires_ as men who were almost always
opposed to the murmurings and discontents of the _canaille_ and _les
ordres bas_, such as the wretches belonged to who had massacred the
abbé and the others. And as he did so he said:
"Monsieur is therefore a visitor here only--to--perhaps"--and his eyes
rested piercingly on Martin--"Monsieur Buscarlet?"
"Monsieur is," Martin replied, "a visitor here seeking for a lost
person. A connection by marriage. A man who has been wronged, has
partly wronged himself. Monsieur has lodged with Monsieur Buscarlet
before."
"May I demand the name of the lost man?"
"Alas, monsieur, I do not know it. He discarded his own over forty
years ago. That which he has adopted I can not tell you. Also he may
be dead and my quest in vain."
"Would he be," and again his eyes stared fixedly into the eyes of the
other man, "would he be, do you think, of--of--well--of Monsieur
Buscarlet's religious faith?"
"He would."
"I hope you will find him, sir. If you do so, use your utmost
endeavours to persuade him to abjure that faith. Otherwise the
province of Languedoc will be no pleasant refuge for him henceforth,
even though he has been here for the forty years you speak of. Now,
sir," and he left this subject to speak of that which had brought him
to Montvert, "I must beg you will accompany us to Alais. As a visitor
to the neighbourhood and, as I suppose, a person not interested in our
unhappy local troubles, you can give us much information as to how
last night's murder was perpetrated. You are, I presume, willing to do
so?"
"I am willing to speak as truthfully as I can on the matter. To speak
as I do now, when I tell you that neither Monsieur Buscarlet nor any
of the inhabitants of this place had any hand whatever in last night's
doings."
"I shall--the Court will be--glad to be assured of that," Baville
replied.
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