"She has pronounced justly," he said. "I am of the Reformed faith. A Protestant."
Amid the murmurs that arose from all who surrounded those two prisoners, amid their cries, in some cases exultant ones, that La Grande Marie had never yet been mistaken and was not, could not be so now; amid, too, their strongly expressed opinion that, since she had been right as regards the man, therefore also she must be so as regards the woman, Cavalier exclaimed:
"In heaven's name why not say so before? Also why risk your life as you have done at the Château de Servas and here?"
"She was alone and defenceless," Martin exclaimed. "I desired to protect her."
"Knowing that she too is a Protestant, by birth at least?"
"Nay, knowing only that she was a woman."
"Yet Baville's cherished ward?"
"Yes, his cherished ward."
Cavalier shrugged his shoulders and turned away. Perhaps the bitter sufferings of all of his, of their, faith were too present to his mind to make that mind, young as it was--he being not twenty--capable of understanding such magnanimity. Also he did not know that the man before him belonged to a land where, for now nearly fifteen years, none had suffered for their religious opinions as over all France they suffered horribly and were to suffer for still some years to come, and that, consequently, he could not feel as strongly as they themselves felt.
Whatever Cavalier might think, however, of the motives which had prompted a man who avowed himself a Protestant to protect the worshipped idol of the Protestant's greatest persecutor in the most persecuted part of France, one thing was very certain: neither would be put to death--the one because he was undoubtedly of their faith, the other because, not being the actual child of Baville, she might in truth have been born a Huguenot, as La Grande Marie had had revealed to her. La Grande Marie! in whose auguries and predictions they believed for the simple reason that, until now, all that she had foretold, all that she had uttered as prophetic inspiration, had come to pass.