The Scourge of God: A Romance of Religious Persecution
Montrevel is not yet here. His great army moves slowly. Time, still."
"For what?"
"Have you forgotten? Her real father--that friend of yours--Monsieur
Ducaire--have you not often told me he was himself of their faith--a
Huguenot?"
"Mon Dieu!" Baville exclaimed, "it is so. He was. Yet, again, what
then?"
"If--if she does still live, and it could be communicated to them,
they would perhaps spare her. Surely, among the old of those
refugees--even among those who are now but elderly--there may be some
who would remember her father, could recall this Monsieur Ducaire----"
She paused, alarmed at the strange effect of her words, for Baville's
face had turned an ashen hue as she spoke. Almost it seemed to his
wife as though his handsome features were convulsed with pain as he,
repeating those words, whispered:
"Recall Ducaire? Remember her father? Oh! Dieu des Dieux, if they
should do that, if there should be one among those who surround her,
if she still lives, who could do so! If there is but one who should
tell her----"
"What, Baville?"
"No, no, no!" he whispered. "No, no! If so--yet it can not be!--but if
it is, if there is any still living to tell her that, then better she
be dead. Better dead than bear it."
"Husband," Madame l'Intendante said, "I know now, something tells
me--alas! alas! ever have I suspected it, feared it," and she wrung
her hands; "you have deceived me, trifled with me from the first.
Baville, is it you? Are you in solemn truth her father? Is Ducaire
another name, known once in the far-off past, for Baville? Would she
be better dead than alive to learn that? Answer me."
"No," he said, "no; you do not understand, can not understand; must
not know yet. But I am innocent of that wrong to you. I swear it. And
Alice, my wife," he continued as he bent over her and kissed her brow,
"Alice, my love, if you knew all you would pity me. Alice, I swear it
to you--swear that it is not what you think."
Then, as again he kissed her, he murmured the old French proverb:
"Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner," adding, "Oh, believe in me,
counsel me, my wife."
CHAPTER XX.
WHAT IS THIS MYSTERY?
The swallows were gone--a month earlier in this mountainous region
than in the rest of the golden south of France. Below, the corn had
fallen ungathered from its stalks, since of those who remained in the
valleys, and faithful to the iron rule of Baville, none dared reap it,
for fear that, while doing so, from its midst might spring up a body
of the dreaded Camisards. Already, too, high up in the mountains, the
first flurries of snow had sprinkled the ground; autumn had come. And
still Baville was no nearer to finding Urbaine, or to gathering news
of whether she was alive or dead, than he had been before. Neither did
he know what had become of the man who, he deemed, had betrayed her
into his enemies' hands; who, he believed, had sent her to her death.
Meanwhile, Montrevel had arrived. Montrevel, the general and newly
created field marshal, second only to Tallard, who next year lost
Blenheim, and to Villars, who was ordained later to bring peace to the
distracted land. Montrevel, of whom it was said that he fought like a
Paladin of old, made love like a Troubadour, and had the air of a hero
of the stage or the leader of a chorus in the newly invented operas.
With him came a vast army--one which, to any other rebels but the
all-triumphant Protestants, harbouring defiantly in the mountain
deserts on high and in the inaccessible caverns, would have brought
fear and terror. To them, however, this army brought none. "_Nous
sommes les rochers que les vents combattants en vaine_," they cried,
and even as they so taunted their late persecutors they stole down by
night and by unknown paths, sacked a fresh village, provided
themselves with fresh food, more arms and more ammunition, seized on
costly uniforms and laces, and, when possible, horses and cattle,
while once more like phantoms they vanished quietly afterward from
human sight. Vanished as the crawling Indians whom some of their
adversaries had encountered on the Mississippee or the St. Lawrence;
vanished, after devastating lonely settlements and townships;
disappeared as disappears the snowflake which falls on the bosom of
the ocean, is seen a moment, and then is gone forever.
In that army, sent to destroy the men whose retaliation of half a
century's persecution was now so terrible, came soldiers who had never
yet known defeat. From Italy the Marquis de Firmacon brought back the
men of a regiment of cuirassiers who had fought like victorious tigers
at Cremona and had even driven back the fiery Eugene and his soldiers
before their rush; in that army also were the guards of Tarnaud, De
Saulx, and Royal Comtois; marines who had faced Russel's and Shovel's
squadrons; dragoons of Saint-Sernin who had seen Marlborough ride all
along the line giving orders to the great English force to advance,
and had observed, but a year or two before, the consumptive invalid,
William of England and Holland, stand undismayed beneath a hailstorm
of bullets while superintending the siege of some great fortress in
the Netherlands. Also there came the brigade of Lajonquiére which had
followed Turenne in victory and defeat, and that of Marsilly which had
stood shoulder to shoulder awaiting the orders of Condé to charge. And
still there were others who might have struck more terror to any
mountain rebels than these trained battalions; a regiment of men,
themselves mountaineers, whose fierceness and brutality were a byword
through all the South.
These were the Miquelets, a body of six hundred Pyrenean soldiers
under the command of a rough one-armed free lance named De
Palmerolles. From sunny Roussillon and Foix these men came, their
faces burned black, their bodies half clad in red shirts and trousers,
resembling sailors' slops in vastness, _espardillos_, or shoes of
twisted cord, upon their feet, in their belts two pistols on one side,
a scimitar dagger on the other, while in their hands they bore the
long-barrelled _gyspe_ peculiar to the Pyrenean. Also, to render
greater Montrevel's chance of defeating those who were termed rebels
to the king, he brought with him twenty large brass cannons, five
thousand bullets, four thousand muskets, and fifty thousand pounds of
powder--enough, in truth, to defeat all the rebels in the Cévennes, if
they could only be got at.
From far up on the height of La Lozère, sheltered in a small copse of
wind-swept firs, Jean Cavalier, looking down on the road which wound
from Genoillac to Alais, laughed lightly as he turned to the
companions by his side--his comrade, Roland, and his prisoner, Martin
Ashurst.
"In truth," he said, "'tis a brave array of men. Yet what will they do
against us? They can never get up here in spite of Baville's recently
constructed roads, while as for us we can get down and back again as
we choose." Then, turning to Martin, he said politely, and with that
attempt at gracious ease and condescension which he never forgot to
assume:
"Monsieur, I know we are safe with you. When you and your charge,
Mademoiselle Ducaire, have left us you will betray no secrets."
"No more," replied Martin, "than I should betray any of Monsieur
Baville's to you. You know now that, though I am of your religion, I
am no partisan of either side. I pray God the day may come when all of
our faith may be free, happy."
"We pray so, too," both chiefs answered, while Cavalier continued:
"'Tis what we seek. Peace--peace above all! And we are no rebels to
the king. Let him but give us leave to worship in our own way and
unmolested, earn our bread undisturbed, pay no taxes that go to
support his own Romish church--the other taxes we will willingly
pay--and he will find he has no more loyal subjects than the
Cévenoles. Nay, have we not offered our services to him against his
enemies, offered to furnish a Protestant regiment to aid him in Spain
against the Austrian claimant, to fight against all his foes except
the English, our brother Protestants? Yet he will not consent that it
shall be so, or, rather, those who dominate him in his old age will
not let him listen to us."
"Therefore," said Roland, "let him look to himself. See--hearken to
those Miquelets who tread the plains now, shrieking their barbaric
songs. Do you know what their war-cry is? 'Tis 'war to the knife.' So
be it; 'tis ours too. And ere we cease to shout it Louis will have
given in to us. While one Protestant remains in these mountains we
shall never yield. The king may conquer Europe, drive back all his
enemies; us he will never conquer."
* * * * * * *
After La Grande Marie had uttered these words of hers, "Those whom you
would slay are of our faith," there had fallen a great silence on all
within the vast vaulted cavern--a silence begotten of wonderment, yet
a wonderment which had in it no element of disbelief; for of all the
prophetesses, she it was who was most believed in by the Camisards,
her inspiration the one which they had never yet known to be at fault.
She had advised the descent to Montvert, fortelling how, on that
night, the abbé should atone for his crimes at their avenging hands in
spite of their not seeking his death. She also it was who had bidden
them attack the convoy of Urbaine under the hated command of Poul, and
the detachment under the equally hated command of De Broglie. Had
prophesied, too, that in that convoy should be found one whose capture
and death would wring the heartstrings of the tyrant Baville as
nothing else could wring them, would beat him down to misery, might
even force him in his despair to abandon all further cruelties toward
those of his creed.
And what she had prophesied had all come to pass. Baville's daughter,
as most of them supposed Urbaine to be, was in their hands, her death
assured. Therefore now, also, they believed her prophetic visions and
utterances, though, in believing, a victim thereby escaped them. Even
the women--whose bitterness, born of the horrors practised on their
own helpless babes and their old back-bowed mothers and fathers, as
well as on themselves, was more intense than that of the men who, in
their hearts, felt for the white delicate girl who stood a prisoner
before them--even the women paused, wondering, amazed.
"Of our faith," they muttered, "of our faith. Yet the wolf's own cub,
the persecutor's own blood. Marie, sister, think again of what you
say. Pause and reflect."
"I know what I say," La Grande Marie murmured, the misty eyes still
fixed upon the girl before her, her hand half raised. "God has entered
my heart, given me the power of divination. She and he, this man by
her side, are of our faith. Is it not so, little one?" and she leaned
forward to a child near her upon whom also the gift of prophecy was
reported to have fallen.
"It is so, Marie," the child lisped.[3]
"What is the mystery?" Cavalier asked, standing before Urbaine, his
voice expressing the surprise he felt at the turn matters had assumed,
expressing also his awe, for he, too, was sometimes visited with the
impulse of prophecy. "In God's name explain, mademoiselle."
"There is no explanation to offer. Your prophetess is wrong. Since my
father adopted me I have known no faith but the true one."
"Adopted you!" he repeated, while all round them stood listening
eagerly. "Ah! yes, I have heard; remember you said such was the case
at the Château de Servas, yet had forgotten. Mademoiselle, what is
your name since it can not be Baville?"
"Urbaine Ducaire."
"Ducaire?" he repeated, "Ducaire? There is no name such as that in the
lists of our unhappy brethren. Mademoiselle, _was_ your father of our
religion?"