"Are all of those others gone?" Buscarlet asked, turning his eyes away from the sight behind the lodge.
"All are gone, mon père," a man answered from the crowd. "Pardie! it is best we all go too. By to-night the dragoons who have escaped will be back from Alais. It is but ten leagues, and he (Baville) is there. Be sure more soldiers will come with them; we shall be put to fire and sword. And for those who are not slain--that!" And the man pointed to the post on the apex of the bridge on which the night lamp hung still alight, since none had remembered this morning to put it out; on which, too, other things of a more fearful nature had hung in all their recollections.
"You hear?" Buscarlet whispered to Martin. "You hear?"
"Yes, I hear," the other replied, calmly as usual. Then asked, "Do you flee with them?"
"Nay," the old man replied. "My place is here, by my church which I am no longer permitted to enter--the church whose keys have been taken from me after forty years. Yet I can not leave it."
"Nor I you. I stay too."
"God help us all!" the pastor said again, as he had said before, and once more he wrung his hands. That his flock were going it was impossible to doubt. They knew that henceforth Montvert was no abiding place for them; that if they would not be ridden down or burned in their beds, or hung as carrion on the bridge where when boys they had played, or taken to the jails of Alais and Nîmes and Uzès, they must go, and go at once. Later, perhaps, they might return, if it ever pleased God to soften the hearts of their persecutors. But now, after the doings of the night, this was no longer a home for them.
History repeats itself; also events in one part of the world resemble those occurring in the other. Even as in the old times before them, the people of God had fled into the deserts of the East to escape the tyranny of Pharaoh and of Ahab, even as the Covenanters had fled into the Pentland Hills, so now the Protestants of the Cévennes fled into their mountains to escape the persecutions of him whom they called the Scourge of God.
Peaceful, law-abiding men and women, asking only to be allowed to worship their Maker in their own way, or, failing that, to depart for other lands where they might do so unmolested, the refusal had turned them at last into rebels, if not against the king, at least against his local representatives--rebels who, having suffered long under the cruelties of their persecutors, had now become cruel themselves.
For the torch of rebellion was lighted at last in all Languedoc, and ere long it flamed fiercely. The "Holy War" had begun.