ARNAUD’S first care was to gather up the scattered threads of the Vaudois powers, and to unite them, as far as might be, into one cord—a cord which should be firm enough to hold out against the sharp tension that must come.

Arnaud recalled those concluding words many and many a time in the months that followed. It would not be timorous and divided hearts that would win the end they held in view; it must be brotherly trust in one another, devoted trust in their fathers’ God, that alone could lift them on victoriously.

Nine hundred men; a small army to attempt the conquest of the valleys, where the soldiers of Savoy were holding the passes, the bridges, and the forts. Undisciplined and ill-armed they were, without stores or means of transport, and without money. Well they knew the dangers that were before them, the privations and fatigues, the scorching heat of the low-lying lands, the bitter snows of the mountains; but in all that crowd of resolute men there was not one who quailed or shrunk.

‘Father,’ said Gaspard, standing by the old man’s side and watching the rugged face wistfully as he spoke, ‘Father, wilt thou not abide here, and let me strike thy blow as well as mine own? This arm is surely strong enough; and the thought of thee here, and my mother and Rénée yonder, will nerve it to double strength. Can it not be so? Wilt thou not return in peace to Geneva?’

‘Nay,’ he said; ‘the sons of the Vaudois are but a remnant now, each hand must do its best. Our cause is just. As Israel of old seized sword and buckler to keep hold of the land the Lord had given, so we will fight for the land where our fathers held high the standard of the truth which is in Christ Jesus, the land which is our rightful heritage.’

Gaspard would have urged his point yet further, but the old man would not hear; and in his heart the son knew how impossible it was that Henri should stay at Geneva, feebly trying in loneliness and longing-heartedness to accomplish the task that should earn his daily sustenance. The worn-out body would flag and utterly fail if he were left behind while the rest marched out to regain, if so it might be, their fatherland. And yet, worn and aged as he was, how was he to battle through the dangers that lay before Arnaud and his band?

The sun set; the sweet summer night was silent and serene; the water lapped the flowering rushes and broke in ripples against the rocky shore; a star or two shone in the gleaming sky, and beyond the far horizon-line the shimmer of moonlight was creeping up the east.

It was two hours from midnight; presently a voice broke over the stillness—it was the leader, Arnaud, and his words were words of prayer. Kneeling there in the shadow of the trees, his eyes lifted to that growing eastern radiance, he poured out his pleadings—he asked for Divine help where other help was small and scant; for Divine guidance where a guiding hand would be so sorely needed; for Divine strength to fill the failing hands and brace the feeble knees. ‘Thou hast helped our fathers throughout the long ages, O God of our hope! help us still, according to Thine ancient promises. Be favourable to the simple and the needy, and preserve the souls of the poor; that our tongues may talk of Thy righteousness, and the mountains bring peace to Thy people!’

Across the still stretches of the Geneva water, over the sleeping lake into the shadow of the further shores; then, landing on the Savoy side, and marshalling their ranks in such brave battle-front as they could show, these nine hundred men began their march.

The months, long weary months, had told on her courage and broken her spirit; it was in the spring of 1687 when the thunderbolt of desolation had fallen on her home, when the house-master and Emile and her own Gaspard had gone out to keep the barricades. It was high summer-time when Gaspard had crept away from their cave shelter, and she had dashed the tears from her eyes, that her vision might hold him, clear and unbedimmed, until he had turned that sharp angle of rock where the broken bridge lay damming up the stream. It was again the summer when Madeleine lay so nigh to death, and she, in lowliness and sore distress, fought with the fever that threatened to rob her of her ‘mother.’

And now again it was summer-time. Was the brightness but empty mockery? Was the sunshine to gladden all the world save the homes of the Vaudois, and the heart of Rénée Janavel?

Some semblance of peace had come to the country-side; the professors of the ‘new religion’ had been driven out with sword and with fire: and there must needs be cessation of persecution when none are left to be persecuted. Even such refugees and stragglers as had hidden in the mountains had mostly perished or been seized ere this, and even the priests and preaching friars were content with their finished work, and let their energy in heretic-hunting slacken down.

Madeleine and Rénée ventured occasionally into the empty villages, and walked abroad upon the upper slopes, even by daylight. There were some cottagers dwelling on the foot-road to Casiana, who, although Romanists, were as friendly as they dared to be; and from them Madeleine now and then heard stray scraps of intelligence; she had been kind to them in years gone by, and even the fury of the death-decrees that had desolated the valleys had not quite extinguished their memories of gratitude.

But Rénée shuddered when she heard that: she had hoped for long and long, but now her hope was dead. Neither the house-master nor Gaspard would ever come back!—so she believed, in her dreary despair.

In the long June days Madeleine heard news which made her decide on trying to light again the dead hope in Rénée’s heart. Some rumours of what was happening in the great centres of life, in Paris, and Vienna, and Turin, penetrated as far as Luserna, and echoes reached the friendly cottage on the Casina road, and finally were heard by Madeleine.

‘Child,’ said Madeleine, ‘once, long months ago, you spoke of creeping away to the Swiss country, to live in security where God has granted freedom to serve Him unchidden. Do you remember, dear? and how I felt I could not face the weary journey, nor bear to see you go alone? And—— ’

‘Mother!’—the interruption came with a flash of the girl’s old spirit—‘mother! would it be possible for me to have left you?’

There was a garrison at the town of Luserna, and large monasteries established at La Torre and Bobbio. But these places were easily avoided, the travellers entering only the most retired hamlets and hill-side cottages when seeking a market for their wares, and, unless in want of food, keeping as far as possible from all human haunts. Though immediate danger seemed afar off, they had suffered too bitterly not to be cautious.

The planning and the caution were mostly left to Madeleine, for Rénée still looked round her with indifferent eyes, and seemed too hopeless, too miserable to care whether they ever reached Switzerland or not. She walked by her foster-mother’s side, gentle, indeed, and sweet and bidable, but unlike the gay girl whom Gaspard had wooed before the fury of this last persecution had burst upon Savoy.

One evening, it was the 29th of August, the travellers halted on the slopes of the Giuliano Pass. They had come through Armatier, and up the banks of the torrent that runs down to Bobbio from the mighty glacier-skirts of Mount Cournan. They were weary, for the day’s march had been unusually long.

Rénée stood by the doorway; the broken hinges told their tale of forcible entry; the few rude articles of furniture were broken likewise; the feet of the spoiler had entered here, and that not so very long ago, judging from the splinters of the fir-wood which showed white in the gathering shadow.

The girl’s eyes were fixed on the snowy dome of the great mountain which shone to the northward in a radiance and purity which might almost befit the hills of heaven, round its feet soft mist, as of opal and of pearl, floated in streaming trails and wreaths. And beyond it the clear sky was fair and stainless in its immensity of blue; one glittering point of sharp silver trembled above—the first shy star of the summer night.

‘Rénée,’ Madeleine called to her in tones which were full of love—of yearning love that longed to help her child. ‘Rénée, of what thinkest thou now in the evening silence? Of the difficult ways we have trodden? or of those we yet must tread? Shall our prayer to our Father this night begin with thankfulness? or with pleading for yet more of His help? Come here to me, Rénée, and let me hear thy voice.’

‘Is there ever an answer, mother?’ she said.

‘An answer?’

‘Aye, to these prayers of ours? And to all the sighs and burden of prayer that has gone up from the valleys these centuries past? Does He hear us at all, our God? or are the places of His dominion too wide for Him to have thought to spare for the narrow shelters where the Vaudois have tried to hide from the spoiler and oppressor? Look there, mother! see where the head of that mountain lifts itself into the skies; it is the same, always the same, silent and cold and cruel, though our forefathers were hunted across its ridges in the past years, and we are now creeping wearily towards its feet. It cares nothing. It smiles in the sun or it frowns in the tempest, and heeds not Savoyard, nor Frenchman, nor Vaudois! Mother, is it not like this Power that we implore?—this Power that is deaf to our cries—indifferent, though we His servants are dying here on His earth?’

‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him,’ repeated Madeleine, the fervent words coming distinct and brave, although her lips were trembling.

The girl was weeping. Not the burning tears of a passionate despair, but the blessed drops that ease the heart from whence they flow. Into her soul there came some faint fair imagining of the meaning of it all—this trial and torture, this desolation and weariness of waiting. Just such a glimpse as had come to Gaspard when he knelt alone on Mount Vadolin came now to her. Life, and the wreck of such riches as life had held for her, was small indeed compared with this higher weal and wealth—the unsearchable riches of Christ.

And, presently, when the purple shade crept over the gleaming snows of the upper pass, and even the mountain’s mighty brow was shadowed—two voices sang the ‘Psalm of Strong Confidence,’ albeit the notes fell quaveringly, and the words were mingled with the echoes of sobs.

quarrel with the towns of Upper Savoy; all they asked was free passage, and to be allowed to purchase food—a demand not always granted.

At Boëge they met with the first resistance; and here Arnaud made his first stroke of generalship. He seized several gentlemen as hostages, and made one of them write letters to the mayors of the towns of Vin, St. Joyre, and Cluse, to the effect that the Vaudois ‘had requested hostages to accompany them, to give an account of their conduct, which should be in all respects honest and regular; that they wished to pay for everything they demanded, and to go peaceably on their way.’ The mayors were advised ‘not to sound the tocsin nor to alarm the country, and to withdraw their people, if they were already under arms.’

These letters, signed by all the hostages, names well known and honoured in Savoy, had an excellent effect; and the little army pressed on up the Valley of the Arve, to gain, if possible, the Bridge of Sallenches, before the news of their approach could give opportunity for it to be fortified against them.

Within a hundred paces of the great wooden bridge they halted, putting themselves in their best battle-array. A regular army corps might have smiled to see their uneven ranks, their curious collection of weapons, their queer attempts at soldierly equipment. But a second glance at those lines of steadfast faces, a further thought of what those steady eyes, those firm lips, and eager looks must mean, would have put an end to smiling. The nine hundred men drawn up before the Bridge of Sallenches were no fitting mark for scoffing—so much at least was certain. The townsmen hoped to gain time by parleying. They sent deputies and messengers; and meanwhile were getting the guard under arms.

Arnaud divined the meaning of their delay. He looked carefully at the bridge, laden as it was with houses, and flanked by towers which in half-an-hour would be filled with soldiers. He looked along the ranks of his men. He could read the meaning of those steadfast faces! The word was given. There was a rush forward. Swift and silent—the mountaineers had crossed the bridge. Sallenches was won.

THE Vaudois had lived from generation to generation a life described by a modern writer as one of absolute seclusion, ‘without thought or forethought of foreign help or parsimonious store;’ drinking draughts from their own grape-clusters and saving of last year’s harvest only seed enough for the next. They had the serenity given them by God and by Nature, with thanks for the good and submission for the evil; they persisted through better and worse in their fathers’ ways, in the use of their fathers’ tools, and in holding to their fathers’ fields as faithfully as the trees to their roots or the lichens to their rocks.

Some opposition they had already overcome. They avoided the French garrison of Exilles, but they could not avoid the Marquis de Larrey, who with two thousand five hundred soldiers kept the passage of the Doire at Salabertrand.

They had hurried past Exilles, hoping to win this bridge as they had won the bridge over the Arve, but the night was falling as they came within sight of the place, and they were forced to halt at a village to snatch rest and a meal. They asked if they could buy bread. The answer, significantly spoken, sounded threatening.

‘Come on to the river, you will get there all you want; they are preparing excellent suppers for you.’

It was Gaspard Botta to whom those words were said, and he reported them at once to Arnaud. The chief shared his fears as to what they might mean, but there was no room for hesitation in Arnaud’s heart. He gathered his men for the usual evening prayer; perhaps his words were more intensely fervent, higher in their note of faith than they had been before, and the ‘Amen’ that rose from the tightened bearded lips was fit echo to such petitions.

The tramp of their feet provoked the sharp challenge—

‘Who goes there?’

‘Friends,’ cried Arnaud; ‘all we ask is——’

But the answer came in a tempest of bullets, and wild cries of ‘Kill! kill!’ The mountaineers flung themselves on their faces, and the deadly hail flew almost harmless above their heads. Then when the French muskets were empty Arnaud dashed on.

‘Courage,’ he called. ‘Forward, Vaudois! the bridge is won!’

And it was even so! The fierce onslaught of the desperate men confused and shattered the enemy’s lines. Ten or twelve wounded, fourteen or fifteen killed, was the Vaudois loss—and their gain was the passage of the Doire, the open door to their valleys!

The French had fled. The town was at the mercy of its captors. They seized what military stores they needed, and blew up what ammunition they could not carry away. They did sup well that night; the threat had turned to a prophecy.

There were the well-known landmarks; there the sharp horizon-line of their own mountains, the hills of their native land. Before their eyes it lay, bright in the sunshine, the country of the Vaudois—the home for which they had hungered—the land for which they had longed. The very wind as it blew from off it seemed charged as with breath of blessing.

They knelt reverently, with one accord, lifting moist eyes to the blue sky-depths, while Arnaud, their captain and their minister, poured out thanksgiving and praise for the help that had brought them thus far. ‘The Lord hath done great things for us, whereof we are glad. Turn again our captivity, O Lord, that they that sow in tears may reap in joy. Though we walk in the midst of trouble, Thou wilt revive us. Thou shalt stretch forth Thine hand against the wrath of our enemies, and Thy right hand shall save us.’

Each day increased the difficulties gathering about the devoted band. The news of their approach had reached Piedmont, and troops were on the alert to intercept their march. The valleys were not to be gained without a deadly struggle; and Arnaud knew it.

Eleven days after leaving Geneva they set foot in the first Vaudois village, Balsille, in the Vale of St. Martino. It was empty; the new inhabitants had fled down the river-bank towards Le Perrier, where a strong force of Piedmontese soldiers were forming across the valley.

But the Vaudois avoided the force they could scarcely hope to defeat. Arnaud turned to the south-westward, up the gorge of Prali, intending to reach the Valley of Luserna by the Guliano Pass, leaving Le Perrier and its garrison on his left.

Henri Botta bared his head as he entered it. He gave small heed to the movements and exclamations of his comrades, who were sternly removing all superstitious ornaments and popish adornments; his heart had gone back to the old days when he had come here from Rora to woo Madeleine, who had lived in yonder farm-stead all her girlish years—one could see it yet, the broken gable rising sharp above the tufted chestnut grove; and there in that humble cottage by the foot-bridge, the heroic pastor Leydat had lived—Leydat, who had been martyred in 1686, seized while singing psalms with his hunted flock in a cave below the mighty crest of Mont Cournan. Henri Botta almost thought he could yet hear his well-known voice as he read from the great Bible chained on the desk by the further arch; a voice easily to be held in memory, with its deep cadences and rolling utterance.

BOTTA could see Gaspard from where he stood, and his eyes kindled and grew luminous as he watched the athletic figure bending under its load of forage. The young carpenter had proved himself good metal, and Arnaud—one of whose many gifts it was to judge men’s qualities swiftly and justly—had advanced him from the ranks to a place of trust about his own person. There was not a man in his whole troop that he trusted more fully than Botta’s son, Gaspard.

‘There are other measurements than hours and weeks,’ returned the young man slowly; ‘I have learned that. How long is it since we crossed the mountains into Switzerland? They count our exile as a score or two of months, to me it is a very lifetime.’

‘His day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years in His sight but as a day,’ returned Henri Botta, whose slower mind had not grasped the inner meaning of his son’s words.

‘And,’ Gaspard went on, ‘there are the small things we give our lives to grasp, and the great things we have not eyes to see. Will God judge us for our foolishness, and punish us for our blindness in the day of the account?’

‘He bids us ask for wisdom, Gaspard, and He has promised us the light.’

Still he did not follow the workings of his son’s mind, but he added:

‘God understandeth our frame, and remembereth that we are but dust. If His heaven is high and far above us, His Son came here that in all things He might understand.’

It was but little that they seemed able to effect, this handful of men marching across the confines of their native land; their bivouac fires were few and feeble on that summer night in the Prali fields; and Henri Botta’s white hairs and Gaspard’s ill-armed hands showed as poor samples of the stuff of which Arnaud’s army was made. Yet, judged by wider measurements, they were not ignoble, nor was their effort mean. These men of the Vaudois were holding forth to the world the spectacle of reverent faith in the promises of their God. They trusted in Him, and they believed that that fervent trust would never be confounded.

Yet all about that ruined hut were cruel and violent men, the hired soldiery of the duke. Men little better than brigands, who had been sent expressly upon work of rapine and slaughter, that a ‘strong hand’ might crush the Vaudois now and for ever.

The singing had roused the attention of the outpost of the troops that had been thrown forward to keep the Giuliano Pass. A soldier had crept forward to reconnoitre the advance of Arnaud, and his men had made the Savoyards cautious, and the sound of a Huguenot hymn might mean serious mischief. But the alarm died away in a brutal scoff, when the scout brought news that it was no meeting of heretics, no vanguard of the Vaudois army, but an aged woman and a young girl singing themselves to sleep under the shattered roof of a herdsman’s hut.

But when the sun had climbed the morning sky, and the scented tassels of the pines were swaying to the breeze stealing from the snow-fields, when the soldiers had shaken off their slumbers and were clamouring for their morning meal, they might do what they pleased with such trifles as a couple of defenceless women, for all their captain cared.

There were, as he said, but two hundred of them; but half that number might hold the Giuliano Pass; the Vaudois were marching southwards by Rodoret and Prali, as the duke’s troops were all aware. What mattered it? Arnaud and his horde of fanatics might beat themselves to pieces against the swords of the soldiers without risk or loss to that two hundred, so wonderfully did the rocks stand round the forge, an entrenchment and barrier stronger than mortal hands could build, a fastness which neither Arnaud nor his mountaineers could force.

When at peep of day rude hands flung open the hut door, and ruder voices called across the empty space, there fell a brief silence of surprise upon the group of men. The hut was vacant: the quarry had fled.

So the soldiers hung their camp-kettles over their fires and pushed chestnuts into the edges of the ashes and made ready their morning meal, blythe as the birds in the copse of birches below them. And yonder where the mighty mountains sloped northward and eastward towards Prali, Madeleine and her foster-child sped through the forest paths with pale looks and quickened breathings. They had lived through so much, escaped so much, but perhaps the fiercest danger was this last—the Savoy guard on the Giuliano Pass.

ONCE clear of the defile, with its perils, the two women hurried onwards, each turn of the hills revealing some well-remembered scene to Madeleine. There, below, was Prali, where she had lived when a girl; those tall poplars by the waters seemed to be unchanged since the days when she had driven her cows into their shadow; and there away to the right was the gleam of water where the thirteen lakes lay in the snowy mountain spurs like dew-drops in the bosom of a rose; and surely no rose could be lovelier than was the snow at that moment, as the sun broke through the level mists that veiled his dawning.

‘And I shall never see him on earth again!’ she went on more to herself than to Rénée.

‘I shall never hear his voice, as when evening brought him home to me at Prali and at Rora; but he is in higher hands than ours, ah, yes. And I know that in the land of light I shall see him and hear him, when these turmoils and troubles are past. Only a little while more, a very short while, and our Master will call me too.’

‘It must not be that I am left behind,’ said Rénée, with a girl’s swift thought of self. ‘Thou art all I have, mother, and we must die together.’

The woman turned slowly from regarding the distance, and let her eyes rest upon the sweet sad face so near her own. ‘That is as the Master wills,’ she answered softly. ‘He loves thee better than I do.’

‘Yes,’ answered Rénée, a smile breaking over the sorrow of her mouth. ‘Yes, I know it now.’

They were far from the crest of the Giuliano Pass by this time, and they could hear no sign of pursuit. They turned aside to rest awhile on a grassy slope which broke the hill-side with its long terrace, a lovely stretch of sward, where flowers gleamed amongst the grass, and the bees were flying heavily above the patches of wild-thyme. The shadow of a birch-tree crossed it, making a trembling play of light and shade in the strong sunshine; and below this clear space of grass and flowers there came a tossed and tangled brake, full of creeping plants and broken stones, and tussocks of moss, and the stately spires of some alpine larkspur crowded thick with bloom.

Here they sat, silent for the most part, for their hearts were too full for much speech, but between them lay a sacred sympathy that scarcely needed words.

Then, suddenly, over the peace and the stillness there fell a horror of alarm.

Down below them, coming by the poplar rows and the river-bank, were armed men. They could see the regular ranks, and catch the gleam of steel. Soldiers! And to these hunted women of the valleys that word meant terror and the danger of death.

Should they hide themselves amongst the stones and trees? Should they fly to the right or left?

‘Ah,’ Rénée’s hand clutched her mother’s convulsively as the cry left her lips, ‘they are all about us; see!’

They shrank back into the shadow of the birch, a flickering and slight shadow at best, but any movement might betray them if they crossed the bare slope; sunlight so strong as that which bathed the grass would reveal them only too sharply. Madeleine hid her face in her hands, and lifted her heart in prayer. Rénée watched the approaching figures with wide-open defiant eyes, her beautiful head held back like a stag at bay; she threw her black cloak over the white coif and kerchief of her foster-mother, and flung her own scarlet capucin into the shadow; it came naturally to her to protect her mother—Madeleine, but even as she covered and sheltered her the thought came flashing through her brain that it was now for the last time. Surely the end had come.

There could be no escape. The troops were advancing rapidly, led by those who apparently knew every feature of the ground. The scouts were close upon them now, the sound of their feet crashing through the underwood could be distinctly heard, even the hoarse tones of their voices and the clank of their accoutrements. Madeleine cowered yet lower, and a whispered word of prayer came like a groan from her lips.

‘Gaspard!’ she called, ‘Gaspard!’

The hill above her echoed it, the dear, long-unuttered word; and Madeleine, bewildered, repeated it in her turn, as if speaking in a dream. ‘Gaspard! Gaspard!’

And there were hurrying steps bounding over the brake, and a voice loud and strong calling across the distance. And then....

But neither Rénée nor Madeleine could remember very clearly what happened then. They knew that, instead of danger, help had come, instead of death a newer and dearer life, instead of the faces of their foes the sight of their best-beloved.

And there on the hill-slopes where he had first beheld her Henri Botta met his wife again. Safe after perils unspeakable; together after bitterest separation. Was it strange that for the moment they forgot that there was still trouble and trial in God’s fair world, and that while the golden sunshine lay bright upon the grass they should, for those brief minutes at least, forget that the Vaudois had yet to win the valleys?