THE siege for weeks went on—uselessly. And then, as the days grew cold and dark, the French retired to seek winter quarters. They flung a jibing message to the Vaudois, bidding them have patience, and wait for them there until Easter.
But, meanwhile, how was the Rock of Balsille to be provisioned? The enemy had burned the corn-stacks and granges in the valley, and had carried off every eatable thing to be found. Starvation came very closely into the Vaudois’ reckoning in those early winter days, and starvation might have done the work in which the French had failed and conquered the garrison there and then, had it not been for a discovery of Rénée Janavel’s.
She had wandered into the valley, past the mill of Macel, and along the banks of the river, seeking something, if it were but a few frost-bitten cabbages, wherewith to make soup for her Mother-Madeleine. She was unsuccessful; the ground had been searched over and over again; not a leaf of salad, not an edible root was to be found. Icicles hung to the idle mill-wheel and fringed the edges of the stream. Long wisps of grasses lay dead and drifted in the water; and the dark sky stooped so low and frowningly that the peak of the Balsille had pierced the clouds and was out of sight beyond the lowering vapours.
Rénée was cold, and she was hungry, yet her eye was bright and her heart was lightsome; privation and suffering were not so hard to bear when safe in the love of those who loved her—the trials of the Balsille were small compared to the silence and the waiting-time in that cave in the vale of Luserna. She wrapped her tattered cloak more tightly round her, and shook the loosened hair from her eyes. She might even have been heard singing to herself as she crossed the wide snow-covered land that stretched by the banks of the river.
Suddenly she noticed a spot where some animal had been scratching in the snow. Could it be straw, grain—eatable, useful food, that lay there under the white crust, frozen beneath the snow? She flung herself on her knees, and began to search further and deeper. Presently a burning flush came on her cheeks, an eager light to her eyes.
There was rye beneath the snow. Rye, ripe and plentiful! weighed down, hidden and preserved by the thick white covering that had lain unmelted since the heavy storm of last September. Whole fields of rye! unreaped by the fugitive owners, unguessed at by the troops that had trodden across that white expanse, little dreaming of the treasure beneath their feet.