Once more the day was drawing to a close. Already across the plain the sun's rays were slanting horizontally. Soon the sun itself would have dipped behind the mountains and be gone. Another night was at hand, and Martin, gazing on the country around from the castle walls on which he stood, thanked God that it would bring no terrors to the girl whom he had saved, such as the past one had brought.
Since they had been received into the castle in the morning by the commandant, a man who had once fought in countless campaigns but who now passed his latter years as governor of this place, he had seen nothing of Urbaine. She had been escorted to a room in the west wing immediately on their admission, where, after having been given restoratives in the shape of wine and food, and after being attended to by two or three of the few women in the place--soldiers' wives--she had begged that she might be allowed to be alone and thus obtain some rest. In was sorely needed, Martin said, speaking to the old chatelaine, sorely needed.
"And can be procured," the other replied, twisting up his great moustachios. "Bon Dieu! we have a room here fit for the reception of a duchess. Madame de Servas--a pretty thing---une femme de la vieille souche also--loves a soft nest; yet not one perched in an eyrie around which such storms blow as those that are now devastating Languedoc, the pest seize them and those who brew them!"
"Is the lady here?" Martin asked, thinking that, if so, she would be a comfort to the girl until she could escape back to Montpellier under his care.
"Pouf! pouf! pouf!" the old soldier said, "not she indeed. I tell you the tempest is too rough for her; she fears too much the vagabonds up there," whereupon he nodded toward where by now all the mountain tops of the Cévennes were gleaming in the morning sun. "Thereupon she is fled to Paris, the paradise of women; to Versailles--Marly. Well, she is safe there from these men," and again he nodded toward the mountains. "From other men, ho! ho!--of the court, figurez vous--danger may come, drawn by her bright eyes. However, there is the nest for mademoiselle. Tant mieux!"
But by now, as the evening drew on, those mountains were suffused by the soft couleur de rose that, in a near and less troubled land, was known as the Alpine glow. And Martin, himself refreshed after some hours' sleep during the day, was leaning over the castle wall looking down into the valley and the plain all flushed with the burning sunset of the golden autumn, with, far off and running through the latter, the silver thread that was the river Gardon hurrying on to join the Rhône. He was thinking now of many things, even as his eyes took in the beauties of all the fair department that lay around him--the distant woods whose leaves were scarce yet browned by the touch of autumn's fingers; the mill house on the Gardon's bank whose wheel was now still, since its owner had fled, perhaps forever; the gray convent that lay farther off and had been half destroyed by fire two nights ago; the crumbled ivy-clad tower a mile away, in which the king's father, Louis "The Just," had caused a score of Protestants to be burned alive--was thinking of many things as he regarded the fair scene. Whether he would ever see his own land once more, ever escape out of France, ever meet again in future years the pure fair girl whose life he had saved but a few hours ago--the girl whose faith and convictions were so bitterly hostile to his own, as every word she spoke, every thought she allowed utterance to, testified. Also he was wondering if the search he had undertaken for the lost de Rochebazon--the search he now deemed a foolish, Quixotic one--could result in aught but failure here in such a tempest-tossed spot as this.
"Never," he muttered to himself, "never shall I find him. France's empty coffers must swallow up all the wealth that is his, the Church he renounced must profit by my own renunciation. Find him! How? Where? Hanging to some gibbet if he has lived till these days, or learn that years ago he perished on the wheel or at the stake; that his ashes were cast to the winds. I shall never find him." Then he turned, hearing a step upon the leads behind him, and observed the commandant approaching the spot where he stood.
Already, when the old soldier had been by his side a few moments before, he had been made acquainted with all that had happened on the previous day, and of how it was only by God's mercy that Martin had arrived at the fortunate moment he did.
"I was," he said, "on my way to Valence, to which some affairs led me, where I heard the sound of firing and the shouts of men engaged in fierce conflict. And I should have stood outside the fray, have taken no part in it, but that I saw the travelling coach and observed a serving woman screaming on the top of it; saw a face at the coach window--that of mademoiselle. I could not refrain from attempting her rescue. She was a helpless, defenceless girl. It was no place for her among those men fighting like tigers. Also we had met before at her father's residency."
"Ponz! ponz!" said the commandant, "you did well. Nonc d'un chien, you did well for yourself and her. Baville will not forget. She is the apple of his eye, although no blood relation, yet the child of a loved friend, confided to him in death. Also his own child is a trouble to him. The Intendant spends all his heart on this girl. They say he worships her tenderly, fondly, because of her father. Ask Baville for aught you desire when you return to Montpellier and you will get it. He will repay you as fully as if--well!--as if, had you injured her, he would have cut you into twenty thousand atoms."