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.
‘This was your mother’s home,’ said the house-master, later that evening, when he and Gaspard had withdrawn themselves a little from the rest, and climbed the steep bank which swept up from the hill-torrent to the bastion of rock that kept watch and ward above. ‘Your mother’s home. Here I saw her first, binding rye in those fields—the grey and silver rye. I never see it now but I think of that day in autumn, two and thirty years ago. Two and thirty years—a long time, Gaspard, to you, for it is more than your whole life; but to me it seems but a handful of days, few and evil, like those of Jacob. Two and thirty years!’
‘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.’
The young man did not answer. He was thinking of that day on the Angrogna hill when first he caught an inkling of the truth that the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment—that day when it was first given him to see that God’s stroke, falling as sharp pain, is yet His Hand of Love.
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.