He had never seen her, this child of his best-beloved son; he had been driven from the valleys when she was an infant. But he was strangely moved when they told him of her sweetness, her womanly ways and words, of the help she had been to Madeleine, and of how she had faced the trial-storm along with the best and bravest.
‘Our God has demanded much from me,’ he said in his thin, quavering tones. ‘And He knows I have reckoned it as honour to spend and be spent in His cause. I am glad, aye, doubly glad, that the girl, the last of my race, has been ready to take up the standard of Christ, since my weak hands can grasp it no more.’
Henri Botta stood in the doorway, looking down on the old man’s face, and he silently thought that neither age nor death would quite rob the Vaudois of Joshua Janavel; such names and memories as his linger long in the hearts of men, and being dead, yet speak in those voices which have far echoings.
The time passed slowly on, the spring, the hot summer, and the scented autumn. There was a great deal stirring in the courts of Europe, but the people of the Cantons were busy with their own affairs, and troubled themselves but little with the rebellion in England, or the war which the Emperor Leopold was bent on waging with France. The fate of the Vaudois concerned them far more nearly.
It was only kindness, and the most active Christian charity, that moved them to make plans for the welfare of the exiles; but the proposals brought forward filled the Vaudois with dismay.
It was suggested that some should be settled in Brandenburg, the dominions of the Great Elector, on the banks of the Elbe; a country which seemed far and foreign to the simple mountaineers. But Brandenburg, distant as it was, was as nothing to the journeys which others urged. The Cape of Good Hope, the unexplored lands of America, these were mentioned as possible homes for the children of the valleys: and the Swiss were inclined to be impatient when they saw how very unwelcome such suggestions were.
The plain fact was that the Vaudois were breaking their hearts with longings for home. Every time they looked to the eastward they saw the Alps gleaming white against the sky; the rushing of the Rhone River was always in their ears, the water which had melted from those upper snows—the snows of the hills.
Here in the west there might indeed be freedom, friends, and no shadow of fear nor pressure of want—but over there, beyond those great white barriers, lay the land they loved, the ruined hearths for which they had shed their blood, the fields their ancestors had tilled, the chestnuts, and the vines, and the mulberries that their grandsires had planted, the graves of their dear ones, the sacred spots made holy by their tears.
The Jews of old sighed by the waters of Babylon over their silent harps: and these poor exiles turned their yearning eyes eastward, unable to forget their Jerusalem, the land of their inheritance.
To Gaspard Botta in these days the hope of return was the very mainspring of life. He worked for his living, as did all the Vaudois; he indeed worked doubly hard, doing his father’s share as well as his own, for the old man’s strength had never recovered that wound given on the slope of La Vachère, and it was as much as Gaspard could do to keep him from fretting over his uncompleted tasks.