RENEE, if God gives me life, I will return; I will return here to thee.’
So said Gaspard Botta as he parted from his promised wife in the cavern on the cliff.
He had stayed long enough to gather them a store of wood and firing. He had even crept down in the darkness to the ruined home, and, with the silent hunter-craft of his nation, had managed to evade the Savoy soldiers while he loaded himself with things which he knew his mother and Rénée must need.
A dangerous service—yes, but existence was just one long course of danger in those months to the Vaudois.
Madeleine had urged him to go back to his father. She herself would have chosen to dare all things, and go also. To stay in that cliff-cage, hiding in silence, with no knowledge of how it fared with her nearest and dearest, would be a terrible strain and trial; the risks of crossing the Luserna valley and the heights of Roussina and Mount Vandalin, watched as they were by the duke’s troops, would be as nothing compared with the waiting and the longing for news there in the cave.
But Gaspard, who had threaded the passes and forded the torrents swelled with melting snows, who had doubled and dived and scrambled like the hunted thing that he was, implored her to stay in the comparative safety of their hiding-place.