So ‘The Psalm of Strong Confidence’ was chanted once more, the notes of the woman’s voice filling the place with its rich volume of sound. The quick blaze had died down, and the dark shades fell across the cavern. But without, beyond the stooping pines, the sky was brightening. The stars stole out on the deep vault of blue, those glittering stars which tell through all speech and language that the statutes of the Lord are true, and that in keeping of them there is great reward.
And the two women sat, hand in hand, serene in spite of trouble; content, although they were homeless and hunted on the earth. Nay, just now they were more than ‘content!’ they could rejoice that they, like their martyred ancestors, were found worthy to bear the cross of suffering for their Master’s sake.
Rénée Janavel was an orphan. Madeleine Botta, the woman she called ‘mother,’ was bound to her not by ties of blood, but by the stronger ties of love and gratitude. She had inherited a name which was known throughout the length and breadth of the valleys. Her grandfather, ‘the hero of Rora,’ Joshua Janavel, had led the patriot bands who battled against enormous odds in the persecution of 1655 and the few following years. Her father had been sentenced by the Inquisition, and if he were not dead, his miserable existence, chained to an oar as a galley-slave, was worse a hundred times for him than death itself.
Her young mother had perished in the prisons of Turin, and Rénée, a mere child when the Duke of Savoy stopped for a time those terrible deeds of blood, had lived always at Rora with the Bottas.
Madeleine Botta had lost her own daughter, and she had taken Rénée to her heart instead, loving and cherishing her until the desolate child almost forgot that Madeleine was not in very truth what she always called her, ‘her mother.’ And was she not Gaspard’s mother? and were not Gaspard’s people to be her people? his life, her life? She would have been Gaspard’s wife at Easter-tide, had not this new time of death and danger come upon the valleys. Now he was swept off with the fighting men, none exactly could tell whither; and she was here, hidden in the rock-ledges, seeking shelter with Madeleine from the ravaging hordes that had sworn to ‘exterminate the heretics as they would exterminate all other sorts of noxious beasts.’
The home at Rora was a heap of ashes; the peaceful days when Rénée drove the goats down the hill in the shadowy afternoon, or sat busily spinning the flax at Madeleine’s knee, were gone for ever. There had been troubles then, of course, but troubles so tiny that now in comparison they seemed to be positive pleasures.
Henri Botta, the house-master, was a hard-featured man, whose rare words were sometimes wont to be hard; he looked on the world as a vale of sighing, a place where evil reigned, and no man should desire to be happy. Rénée used to shrink from his warning words, and strive to avoid his grim glances. Now how glad she would have been to have heard the sound of his voice, or to have seen the outline of his rugged face!
Then there was Emile, the eldest son, almost as hard and silent as his father; and even Gaspard had a trick of shutting his lips tightly together and frowning till his black brows met, when the talk was of the future or the past.
But Gaspard had never been hard to Rénée—never. He had been to Turin learning his trade, a carpenter he was, and the best carpenter, as Rénée proudly said, in all the commune. He was away for years, for such delicate work as his is not learned in a hurry, and on his return he found the child Rénée grown into a fair and gracious maiden, the realisation of the dreams which had haunted his young manhood.
And so he loved her, and wooed her, and won her; learning from her gentleness to unbend his sternness, teaching her girlish heart to be staunch and earnest.