The Scourge of God: A Romance of Religious Persecution
the murder of the Abbé Du Chaila was revolting to him; that he would
have saved him had he not been powerless."
"Where is he now?" Baville asked, without making any remark on what
she told him as to Martin Ashurst's sentiments. "I have not seen him
for some days."
"I do not know," the girl said; "neither have I seen him. Yet he spoke
of going to Alais to see his friend the pastor."
"Urbaine," Baville said, "you must speak to him before you set out for
Paris. He may listen to words from you which he will not hear from me.
You must warn him to leave Languedoc, to return to the north."
"To leave Languedoc! Return to the north!" she repeated. And it seemed
to the sharp eyes of the Intendant as though her colour changed again.
"Ay, child, he is in deadly peril here. Can you not understand?"
"No," Urbaine replied, "no. What has he done?"
"Actively, he has done nothing. Yet he is a doomed man, because of his
religion. My dear one, ere long the king will be roused to awful fury
by this rebellion; there will not be a _réformé_ left in France. And
those who are passive will suffer the same as those who take up
arms--in the Midi--here--at least. Even I shall not be able to shield
him. Nay, more, how can I shield one and destroy all the rest?"
"Can there be no peace?"
"None! Peace! How can there be peace when none will make it? These
Protestant rebels are the aggressors this time. Ask for no peace. It
is war, a war which means extermination. A month ago I should have
said extermination of them alone; now God knows who, which side, is to
be exterminated. Louis is weakened by these attacks from without, from
every side; all over Europe there is a coalition against France. And
half her enemies are of the Reformed faith, as they term it. It is
said that the old religion is to be destroyed, abolished. Yet Louis,
France, will not fail without one effort; dying, we shall drag to
destruction numberless foes. Urbaine, if we do not suppress these
Camisards we have an internal foe to deal with as well. Do you think
one Protestant will be spared?"
"I may not see him again ere I set out for Versailles," the girl
whispered, terrified at his words.
"Then he must take his chance. At best he is but a quixotic fool."
"Let me remain here; if there is danger let me share it."
"Never!" Baville said. "The nobility are threatened, the 'Intendant'
above all. Your place must be in safety. Oh, that your mother would go
too! Yet," he added reflectively, "her place is by my side."
"And mine is not? Do you say that?" And she touched his face
caressingly with her hand.
"Your place is where I can best shield you from the least threat of
danger, my loved one; where danger can never come near you." And
beneath his breath he added the word "again."
Speaking thus to the girl upon his knee, a girl scarce better than a
child, seeing she was now but seventeen years old, Baville--of whom
the greatest of French diarists has said that _il en étoit la terreur
er l'horreur de Languedoc_--was at his best. For if he loved any
creature more than another on this earth--more than Madame
l'Intendante, more even than his own son--that creature was Urbaine.
She was not in truth his daughter, was of no blood relationship to
him, yet he cared for her dearly and fondly and the love was returned.
As the history of this girl was known to many in the province, so it
shall be told here.
Early in his Intendancy, when Baville (already known as an _esprit
fort_ by the ministers round Louis) had been appointed to this distant
Government, with, to console him, an absolute authority, he had
returned one winter night from a raid that he had been making on a
village in the Cévennes which, to use his own words, "reeked of
Calvinism" and was full of persons who refused to comply with the new
orders that were brought into force by the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. He was then but newly married to a sister of Gourville, the
colonel of a local regiment of dragoons, and his wife's welcome to him
was somewhat cooled by the announcement which he made to her that an
intimate friend of his had perished in the raid, leaving behind a
motherless child of whom he proposed to constitute himself the
guardian.
Apprised of the fact that Ducaire was the name of the intimate friend,
Madame l'Intendante shrugged her shoulders and contented herself with
saying that it was the first time she had ever heard of him.
Later, after reflection, she laughed a little, quoted some words of M.
de Voiture as to _les secrets de la comédie_ which were no secrets
either to actors or audience, and, in the course of the next two or
three days, uttered pointed remarks to the effect that if politics
failed at any future time, doubtless M. l'Intendant might earn a
pleasant livelihood as a weaver of romances and of plots for plays.
"_En vérité_" she said, with her little laugh, "Jean de la Fontaine is
old, also _Racine; profitez vous de l'occasion, mon ami. Profitez
vous_."
Then, because they were alone in Madame's boudoir, Baville rose and
stood before his wife and, speaking seriously, bade her cease her
badinage forever.
And after the conversation which ensued, after, also, the story which
Baville told her, Madame did cease her flippancy, and henceforth had
no further qualms of jealousy.
In truth, as the child grew up, she too came to love it, to pet it as
much as her husband did, to--because she was an honest, tender-hearted
woman who, beneath all her pride for Baville's great position, had
still many feminine qualities in her breast--weep over it.
"_Pauvrette!_" she would sometimes whisper to little Urbaine, long ere
the child had come to understanding, "_pauvre petite_. Neither mother
nor father either. Ah, well! Ah, well! they shall never be wanting
while we live--say, Baville, shall they?"
And the Intendant, the man of "horror and terror" to all around,
looking down upon the babe as she slept in her little bed, would
answer before God that they should never be wanting.
Both kept their word. Urbaine Ducaire grew up, petted, caressed,
beloved, the light of the Intendant's home, the flower, as he told her
sometimes, of his life; a thing far, far more precious to him than the
son, who, instead of being any comfort to them, was revelling in the
impurities of Paris.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE ATTACK.
Between where the mountains of the Cévennes rise in tumultuous
confusion, with, towering above them all, the gigantic Lozère and La
Manzerre whence springs the beauteous Loire; between this vast
mountainous region, which gives to the mind of him who beholds it the
idea of a world falling to ruin and perishing of its own worn-out
antiquity, and the Rhône, the road to the north winds through a
fertile valley--a valley where the meadows and the orchards and the
vineyards run down to the river on which the rafts and boats float
along until the stream empties itself into the Mediterranean at last;
boats from which are wafted the perfume of the new-mown hay, or the
fruits which they are conveying. A valley this in which are little
houses set in among the pear trees and the chestnuts, and covered with
bird-swarming ivy wherein the southern oriole builds its nest and
rears its young; houses in front of which the fair roses of Provence
grow in great clusters as they have grown there for centuries, and
over which the pigeons whirl in their flight.
Once, not twenty years before the period of this narrative, and before
a reformed wanton had urged a superstitious king (already then growing
old and shuddering at the phantoms that arose from his evil and
unclean past, as well as from the fear of what his enemies--the whole
world!--might wreak upon him in the shape of human vengeance) to wage
what he termed a holy war, this valley had been one of a thousand in
France where peace and contentment had reigned. Peace and contentment
coupled, it is true, with, in most cases, a simple humble life, yet
still a life free from care. An existence scarce disturbed by aught
more serious than some trifling ailments of the children who ran about
barefooted in the long lush grass, or plunged into the cool stream
that watered the land, or by the sound of the passing bell telling at
solemn intervals how one who had lived there all his days was going to
his rest. A life spent in the open air all through the summer time, or
by the blazing chestnut logs when the snows of winter kept all shut up
in their cottages, carding, weaving, combing, earning their living
thus as in the golden prime of July they earned it by gathering fruit,
or cutting the corn and sheaving it, or rearing the cattle.
Now all was changed, all but the beauty of the land. The red-roofed
houses on whose tiles the topmost boughs of the pear trees rested,
borne down with fruit, were closed; the wicker basket in which the
thrushes and blackbirds had sung so joyously, not deeming their lives
captivity, were empty; so, too, were the stalls where once the kine
had lowed and the horses trampled as daybreak stole over the mountain
tops. All were gone now. The old grandam who had looked after the
children; the children themselves; the stalwart fathers; the
dark-eyed, brown-bosomed women whose black tresses hung down their
backs and served as ropes for their babes to tug at.
Gone--but where?
Half of the men to the galleys, to toil until their hearts burst and
they died, worn to skeletons by belabourings and thrashings,
starvation and ill usage; the other half to the mountains, there to
meditate upon, and afterward to take, a hideous, black revenge on
those who had driven them from their homes. The old women gone also,
some to fester in the prison cellars of Nîmes, Uzès, Alais, Niort, and
Montpellier. The black-haired mothers to do the same, to groan in the
dungeons for water, even though it were but one drop to cool their
tongues; to shriek to God to take their lives, even though they were
sacrificed in the flames of the market place; to pray to their Creator
to let them die and join their slaughtered babes once more; see again
the husbands from whom the gibbet and the wheel had torn them forever
in this world.
Because they were Protestants, Reformés, Huguenots! That was their
crime! The crime that had roused the woman in Paris--_la femme célèbre
et fatale_--to urge on her husband the devastation of the Garden of
France.
Down this road now, which wound between the base of the Cévennes
and the banks of the rapid Rhône, upon a sunny afternoon in
September--when all the uncut corn (there being no one to gather it)
was bending on its stalks upon which, later, it would rot, past a
burned and ruined church, past, too, a wheel on which a dried,
half-mummified body was bound and left to shrivel--there came a
cortége. A cortége consisting first of a troop of dragoons of the
regiment of Hérault, their sabres drawn and flashing in the sun, their
musketoons slung ready at their backs, their glances wary and eager.
Ahead of them rode their captain, a man tall and muscular, burned
black almost from constant exposure to the sun and by taking part in
many campaigns from his youth, commencing in Germany and Austria. This
was Poul, a Carcassonnais, who, since the outbreak of the Cévennes
rising, had been distinguished as one of the most determined opponents
of the _attroupés_. Also he was a marked man, doomed to death by them,
and he knew it. But over his midnight draughts of Hermitage he had
sworn often that, ere his fate overtook him, many of the _canaille_
should also meet theirs.
Behind his troop of dragoons, numbering thirty-five men, there came a
travelling carriage, large, roomy, and much ornamented, and drawn by
four horses. In it there sat Urbaine Ducaire on her way to Langogne,