"God may pardon them," the guide said. "One, however, would not. Cavalier! We caught them, tried them; you see the sentence. It is not women we war upon."
As he finished, again the loathsome figures swung to the breeze, again they danced and pirouetted in their chains, while from behind a rock Cavalier himself strode forward.
It was the spot that had been the meeting place appointed with the guide.
"It is true," he said. "We war not with women. Let Montrevel or Julien do that. Or their master--Louis!"
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
"LOVE HER! BEYOND ALL THOUGHT! AND SHE IS THERE."
With the rapidity of wildfire the news had run over all Languedoc at this time--was known, too, and shared by Catholics as well as Protestants--that the English, who once they drew the sword never sheathed it until its work was done, meditated an attack on France in a fresh place, that place being her Mediterranean seaboard, the one spot still free from their assaults up to now, also a spot more vulnerable, since there were scarce any troops to defend it, the armies of Montrevel and Julien being sufficiently occupied in endeavouring, without success, to prevent the terrible reprisals the Camisards were at last making.
And now indeed the desolation of Languedoc was supreme; now, like a torch that flareth in the night, was visible an awful terror upon all of the old faith, as well as the adherents of Louis, who dwelt therein. Men of that old faith barricaded themselves in their houses, refusing to either quit them or let any of their families do so, or to receive bread into those houses in any other way than by baskets raised by cords, either for fear that they should be stabbed to the heart on their doorsteps or that they should add one more body to the many that hung upon the branches of the trees by the wayside--bodies having affixed to their dead breasts the label bearing the words, "Tous qui tomberont entre les mains des vengeurs seront traités ainsi." Verily, Languedoc was, as its greatest churchman, Fléchier, said, but one vast gaping wound!
Yet not only was it the avengers who caused the wound. Maddened by defeat, by merciless retaliation on their enemies' part, by their fierce determination to never give or ask for quarter, Baville, Montrevel, and Julien enacted more awful cruelties than had ever yet been practised upon those of the Reformed faith. Again the dungeons of the prisons, the vaults of the cathedrals, which living prisoners shared with the coffined dead, re-echoed with the groans of the former; les places publiques were foul with the odour of burning flesh and of corpses that rotted on wheels; the very roofs were laden with carrion birds waiting their opportunity to swoop down and plunge their beaks into the dying; even mothers slew the babes in their arms sooner than see them perish slowly before their eyes from the pangs of thirst and hunger. But still the war went on, if such oppression, such retaliation, could be dignified by the name of war. Went on because from Paris the word still came that none should worship God in their own way, or in any other method than the priests of Rome directed--priests who declared with their lips that the God they served was one of love and mercy, yet sowed with full hands the seeds of violence and trouble, of blood and death.
And now to add to all the terrors that the papists felt at last, to all the fierce joys that the Protestants had begun to thrill with, it was rumoured through the country that some great admiral of the accursed English race, backed up by the Duke of Savoy, was about to land an army at one of the ports with the full intention of assisting the Protestants, and of, so those papists said, establishing Protestantism over all the land. No wonder, therefore, that the priests fled from their churches, that the archbishop said (forgetting how he and his had outraged God for years) that "God had deserted them."