"Help him not, assist him to no easy death. Remember our brothers' dooms, our fathers in the flames, our girls' backs raw and bleeding. Observe Fleurette lying there at your feet; let him expiate all. Then, after him, the others. There are more to suffer too. Baville--ho, Baville!--le Roi de Languedoc, as he is termed--the prior of St. Maurice--the priest of Frugéres--it is their turn to-morrow."
And above the roar of the flames these louder roars of threatened vengeance rose; above all else their psalms were heard telling how Jehoshaphat exhorted the people, how Jahaziel prophesied, and how the God of Battles had delivered the enemy into their hands.
The end was near.
Du Chaila, the cruellest priest in the Cévennes--the man who, under the office of Inspector of Roman Catholic Missions in Languedoc, had for sixteen years perpetrated cruelties on the Protestants which, it was said in the district, he could have only learned while a missionary in Siam--was about to expiate his merciless rigour on others.
Part of the eaves overhanging the garden had by now fallen away in great masses of charred straw. One of two things alone could happen soon: either he must perish in the flames when the roof fell in, as it would do in a few moments, or he must escape from that roof. It was the latter which he prepared to attempt, hoping perhaps that even now he might do so without his intentions being known.
Slowly, therefore, he crept away from the spot where he had crouched so long. They could see his hands and feet thrust deep into the thatch at each move he made. He disappeared from their sight, yet for a moment only; for as he left the side of the house where the rioters were, so those rioters followed below in the road. Compactly, in a mass, all went together, and silently. Their voices, their hymns had ceased; but for their footfalls there was naught to tell of how they were tracking the man from beneath as he himself moved above. Like sleuth-hounds who make no noise as they follow their trail, yet follow it unerringly, these human sleuth-hounds followed him.
They passed round the house, they stood upon the slope leading to the bridge. Between them and the house itself there ran a thick-set privet hedge, separating the latter from the road and shielding the lower rooms on that side from the dusts of summer and the snows of winter. Now, on this July night, convolvuli and roses and honeysuckle twined about it, dotting the deep green with many a delicate blossom and emitting sweet perfumes on the air. And above this hedge, between it and the roof, the doomed man was hanging at this time, clinging to a rope made of twisted bedclothes, wrenched, doubtless, from the beds of the upper rooms.
None spoke in all that crowd, no hymn was sung. Save for the sobs of Buscarlet and the moans of Fleurette, who lay in her sister's arms, no sound broke the silence--none until, a second later, while all their eyes were turned up to that frantic figure and while the moon's rays glistened on their eyeballs, a piercing shriek broke the stillness and the abbé fell headlong some thirty feet into the hedge, bounding off from one of the stakes, that supported it at intervals, into the dusty road; then lay there groaning. The roughly and hastily constructed rope had given way, and in his fall, as was soon seen, his leg was broken.
"Spare me!" he moaned--he who had never yet spared one, man, woman, or child--"spare me!"
At first none answered him, none spoke. Then amid the silence, from the lips of Pierre Esprit, the chief of the three prophets, the words fell: