"It can never be known. I have the French as well as you, or they--better than they, for mine is the speech of Paris and theirs of the mountains. Hark! they sing of Judah once more--also there is firing. Come with me or let me go alone." And he tore himself from the hands of the other.
Yet he did not go alone; even as he stepped into the garden the pastor went with him, running by his side to keep pace with his eager strides, whispering, entreating as he did so.
"Promise me, promise me, Martin," he said, "that you will take no part in any fray that is happening, will not to-night proclaim yourself. Oh, promise me! Remember," and he sunk his quavering voice even still lower, "Cyprien de Beauvilliers."
Recalled to himself by that name, recollecting the atonement of many years that had yet to be made, the wrong that had to be righted, as he himself had said, he too sunk his own voice, saying: "I promise. To-night I do nothing."
Down the street they went, therefore, together, Buscarlet's hand in Martin's, both glancing at the closed windows of the thatched houses and seeing the lights in them, with white faces against the mica panes and dark eyes gleaming from behind curtains, yet with no head showing. The orders to keep within doors were being followed.
In all the street (there was but one) no form was visible; if it had not been for the uproar at the end of it, where Le Tarn rolled under the three small bridges, and for the spits and tongues of flame that belched forth out of musketoons and carabines from the windows of the "house by the bridge," beneath the deeper, denser flames that rolled from under the eaves of that house, they might have deemed it was a deserted village or one peopled only with the dead.
Yet again the solemn chant uprose as they drew close to that house, but mingled now with something deeper than itself--the hammering of great trees, or tree trunks, on doors, the rumbling of flames escaping from the burning house, the firing from the windows, the loud shrieks from within the house itself.
"What are you?" cried a huge man as they entered the crowd, "Papist or Protestant? Child of God or Devil? Answer, or----" then ceased, seeing Buscarlet still holding Martin's hand; ceased and murmured, "Pardon, reverend; I did not see or know in the darkness. Yet begone; seek a safer place. The villain has his house full of De Broglie's fusileers to fire on us and help him. Oh, Lord of Hosts, wilt thou let them help such as he?"
"What will you--they--do?" Martin asked.
"Release the prisoners. If he resists, slay him. We have suffered too long."