And he laughed bitterly while repeating aloud the word "Away!" Also he added, "If you can but induce them to hold their hands for twenty-four hours we will do the rest."
Lunel came nearer and nearer now. He thanked God again and again that still the horse beneath him did not falter, still swept on in an even, easy stride. Already he could see in the morning air, now clear and bright, the great wooden spire of its church, which up to now had escaped destruction. And he remembered how Cavalier had told him to have no fear in entering it, since neither papists nor Protestants had made any attack upon it because it was principally inhabited by Jews from Marseilles, who, from the days of Philip of Valois, had been permitted to dwell within it, they taking, as was natural, no share in the troubles with which the province was torn.
Nearer and nearer, close now, its one peaked, calotte-roofed tower, which faced to the south, standing up like an arrow pointing to the sky in the cool light of the swift advancing dawn.
Close now, and hammering on the great gray storm-beaten door of the ramparts, against which for centuries the mistral and the bise had howled and flung themselves on winter nights and days; on which all through the summer the southern sun had glared. Hammering with pistol-butt and clenched hand, loud enough to arouse the dead, and calling:
"Awake! Open! Open! In God's name open!"
"Hola!" a voice shouted answeringly from within. "No more. Cease. I come! 'In God's name.' Good! You give the password. 'Tis well!" the utterance being mingled with the grating of a key in a lock and the rumbling of a bar. And Martin divined that by a chance, a miracle, he had uttered the royalist sign.
A moment later the gate was open wide. Before it stood a lean, gray-haired warder, the very counterpart of Cervante's hero, fastening the tags of his jacket with one hand as he threw back the door with the other.
"Monsieur rides in haste," he said, seeing that he had a gentleman to do with, though no soldier clad in bleu royal or scarlet, as he had expected. "What is the news you carry? Have the accursed English landed, the vile Protestants captured the port?"
"Nay," answered Martin, "but I ride on an errand of life or death. I must reach Baville; above all, Montrevel or Julien. They know not what they do."
"What they do! What is't? I have heard they barricade themselves in Uzès and Alais, yet thousands strong! Soldiers! Bah! Tosspots and vauriens, afraid of a beggarly set of goatherds. Dieu des Dieux! 'twas not so when I rode behind Condé."