As the notes of Madeleine’s evening psalm died down on the hill-side, a figure raised itself from behind a jutting crag and crept stealthily off in the darkness. The two women, well used to the desolate mountains, slept serene and safe in the hut. Rénée’s head rested on her foster-mother’s arm, and over the sweet flower-like face there was spread the reflection of the peace that passeth understanding. The evil mood that had tried her faith was gone, and in its place had come the nameless Light that shines from the Spirit of Comfort. She was dreaming, not of Gaspard, nor of happy days past or come, but of her Mother-Madeleine and her ‘Psalm of Confidence.’
Yet all about that ruined hut were cruel and violent men, the hired soldiery of the duke. Men little better than brigands, who had been sent expressly upon work of rapine and slaughter, that a ‘strong hand’ might crush the Vaudois now and for ever.
The singing had roused the attention of the outpost of the troops that had been thrown forward to keep the Giuliano Pass. A soldier had crept forward to reconnoitre the advance of Arnaud, and his men had made the Savoyards cautious, and the sound of a Huguenot hymn might mean serious mischief. But the alarm died away in a brutal scoff, when the scout brought news that it was no meeting of heretics, no vanguard of the Vaudois army, but an aged woman and a young girl singing themselves to sleep under the shattered roof of a herdsman’s hut.
‘Leave them in peace,’ ordered the captain, an old soldier, who was weary from his forced march, and who wished for undisturbed repose. ‘If those two hundred hounds of mine start such a quarry, there will be no quiet for hours. So hold thy tongue an thou canst, Antoine, and go back to thy post. Dost hear? It is well.’
But when the sun had climbed the morning sky, and the scented tassels of the pines were swaying to the breeze stealing from the snow-fields, when the soldiers had shaken off their slumbers and were clamouring for their morning meal, they might do what they pleased with such trifles as a couple of defenceless women, for all their captain cared.
There were, as he said, but two hundred of them; but half that number might hold the Giuliano Pass; the Vaudois were marching southwards by Rodoret and Prali, as the duke’s troops were all aware. What mattered it? Arnaud and his horde of fanatics might beat themselves to pieces against the swords of the soldiers without risk or loss to that two hundred, so wonderfully did the rocks stand round the forge, an entrenchment and barrier stronger than mortal hands could build, a fastness which neither Arnaud nor his mountaineers could force.
The captain laughed as he glanced up at the cliffs towering towards the snows. Ah, yes! it would be strange indeed if his two hundred could not hold the Giuliano Pass against greater odds than Arnaud was likely to bring.
When at peep of day rude hands flung open the hut door, and ruder voices called across the empty space, there fell a brief silence of surprise upon the group of men. The hut was vacant: the quarry had fled.
