In the coming dawn, when the stars had paled and died away, and when far off, where the Basses Alpes lifted their heads eastward, the gray light turned into daffodil and told that the day was at hand, Martin carried the pastor back into his little house.
"Rest," he said, "rest, and endeavour to sleep. I pray Heaven you may do so, after this night of horror."
"Horror indeed!" Buscarlet said, sinking into the old leather-covered fauteuil that for years he had sat in so calmly and happily, though solitary. "Horror undreamed of!" Then, a moment later, he went on: "I thought--nay, I knew--that they would rise at last and throw off the hideous yoke under which they bowed. Yet I deemed it would but be to release those of our religion who suffered, to prevent others from suffering too; to demand terms, even though only such terms as would permit us to seek peace in far-away lands; but never dreamed of such deeds as we have witnessed to-night. Where will it end? And how?"
"There were those who muttered in that crowd," Martin replied, his face still of a deathly pallor, "that it might not end until they stood outside Louis' gates--were within them. And there were some who seemed to know of what they spoke. Some who have been long leagues away from this lonely valley shut in by these mountains--men who know that on all sides and on all her frontiers France is sore beset. Crippled by her fresh war with Spain, the attacks made on her on the Italian border, also by the Dutch on the Rhine. Fighting as well my own countrymen in Bavaria and the whole length of the Danube, even to the borders of Austria."
The mention of his own countrymen by Martin Ashurst seemed to bring fresh trouble to the unhappy old man, to cause fresh terrors to spring into his mind; for at those words he started in his chair and regarded the younger one steadily, though with still upon his face the look of misery that the events of the last few hours had brought forth.
"Your own countrymen!" he repeated, half-dazed. "Your own countrymen! Ay, ay, les Anglais! Thank God, it is not known, and never will be known, that you are either English or Protestant. Baville would not spare you."
"Baville need not perhaps know that I am an Englishman," Martin replied calmly. "But one thing he will most assuredly know ere long, when he begins to make inquiry into the doings of this past night--namely, that I am a Protestant."
"Know it!" Buscarlet exclaimed, trembling even more than before, clasping his hands frenziedly as though overcome by a fresh fear. "How should he know it?"
"I shall announce it. For a certainty, shall not disguise it."
"Martin, Martin," the old man moaned, "are you mad? Do you value your life so little, desire so much the horrors of the wheel, the flames, to have your head upon this bridge as others' heads have been, that you will acknowledge this? Martin, for the love of God, pause. Think of what such an acknowledgment would mean to you."