Gaspard understood things better now. There was love, and there was gentleness, in spite of the sharpness of that cry of human pain. And Gaspard knelt mute upon the hill-side, with a look upon his face that had never before rested there, a look too full of love for fear, and yet which was too near to awe to take the semblance of gladness.
It seemed to him as though he knelt with his whole soul bare before the glance of God.
The days that followed were full of excitement, anxiety, and trouble. His father had been taken to Luserna, together with all the rest of the valley folk, and there Gaspard followed. It was rather like a lamb searching the den of a wolf, this going into the very stronghold of the Papists; but Gaspard had no thought of evading the duke’s troops now. His first duty was to find his father, to tend him, if so it might be; and to carry to him the news of the safety of those two women—news which would go far, so Gaspard guessed, to calm the fever left by that Savoyard lance-thrust.
It was easy to find a way to the interior of the prison, for Gaspard had only to declare that he too was a Vaudois when he was seized and flung into the fortress already full to overflowing with his wretched countrymen; and amongst that pitiful host was his father.
The horrors of that imprisonment will never be fully known now. An old writer says that the Vaudois perished by hundreds of hunger, thirst, and the festering of neglected wounds. Their bread was rough and filled with rubbish, their water was impure and insufficient. The places of the dead—numbers dying every day—were filled with fresh prisoners; the intense heat of summer, the throng of sick and suffering ones, and the crowded state of every corner of the dungeons, made a mass of evil too horrible for recital.
Was not this harder to be borne than were the savage swords of the soldiery, than the fighting at the barricades, than even the brutal insults of victorious foes? For in the past there had at least been the clear air of heaven, and the heart-stirring of struggle; now there seemed only the blankness of noisome despair.
What was it that Henri Botta’s parched lips were murmuring as he lay in uneasy sleep across Gaspard’s knees? The young man bent to listen, and the broken words he caught were of peace and of beauty, of rest for the weary ones, of the waters of comfort, and the loving-kindness of God.
The old herdsman’s rugged nature had also found some trace of gentleness and love amid all this chaos of dismay.
‘It must be that the Lord Himself is pitiful,’ thought Gaspard, ‘and He Himself sends comfort to such as are sore stricken.’
Over and over again did that thought return as he watched frail women rise triumphant above the power of pain, and men—just the rude and untaught peasants of the hills—meeting insult with dignity, and outrage with a smile.