It was the end of April, 1686. The home of the Bottas was a blackened heap of ruin; the orchards, where the tufts of pink apple-blossom should be already showing, were hacked and hewed away, and the down-trodden vines lay in long trailing lines amid the wrecks of the village.
A few soldiers lounged and laughed in their encampments hard by; they were roasting a goat that they had shot for their supper, and their rude jokes as they did so roused noisy mirth. Their task of blood and cruelty had brutalized them to a degree hard to believe, did not one know how low human nature can fall when riot and licence cut away the cords of gentleness and justice, and the blood-thirst is awakened—that thirst which men share with the tigers.
Henri, the house-master, was gone from Rora; where, none could tell, for the Vaudois troops had been scattered like clouds before the tempest. Gaspard had come back alone, creeping up the passes in the night, hiding, and groping his dangerous way, to find out what had befallen his mother and Rénée.
He knew every nook and crevice of the ridges that rose grim and almost inaccessible between the ravine and Villaro; somewhere hereabouts he hoped to find them, unless—indeed——
And the young man’s haggard eyes gleamed with the look that it is ill to see on mortal face as he counted out what that ‘unless’ might mean.
His search was long, and his heart grew heavier hour by hour. Perhaps they had already been driven off to prison in Turin; or, perhaps—and if he were not to find them Gaspard knew that he ought to pray that it might be so—perhaps they had already joined Emile in the land where fighting and desolation and death is over for ever, where God Himself will give comfort and the calmness of His peace.
The dawn was breaking, the glad, sweet dawn of the spring morning, and Gaspard slowly dragged himself beneath the shelter of the pines. He must not stand there, exposed, under those shafts of clear, keen light, unless he were willing to take his chance of a musket-ball from the duke’s soldiers, whose orders were to clear the country as a broom sweeps over a floor.
There was a cavern here, up under the cliff, a place where he might lie and rest, and eat the crust of bread he carried in his wallet. Rest—food—they were sorely needed, yet he felt as though rest were impossible, and food would choke him.
