"If I were to threaten it, it would not be done."
"Yes, it would. Do you suppose that your peasants here and your armed men would spare me if they knew that their Seigneur and his son had both been sacrificed by Le Gros Guillem? They would tear me to pieces. The women would stab me with their bodkins. I had rather be dashed down the cliffs than that."
The young man remained silent, considering. The girl's proposal did give him a hope of recovering his father; the threat, which he did not for a moment entertain the thought of executing, might, perhaps, force the routier captain to surrender his prey.
Noémi plucked a ring from her finger and extended it to Jean.
"I see," said she, "you will yield. Take this as token to my father that I am here, as sign that your menace is not an idle one. Now lead me away."
In the congeries of precipitous cliffs, like teeth, that rise above Ste. Soure and go by the name of Le Peuch, one possesses a rock-refuge of a peculiar character. To reach it a steep ascent has to be effected up an almost vertical piece of rock, in which places have been cut for the feet. This climb gives access to a grassy ledge. If this ledge be pursued, a buttress of crag is reached that completely blocks the terrace. But this has been scooped out, like a carious tooth, into a chamber or guard-room. It is entered by a door artificially cut, and he who explores the place there finds himself in an apartment with a window dug through the face looking south, and with sheer precipice below it. At the back are seats cut in the stone.
Immediately opposite the entrance is another door, communicating with another ledge, which, however, does not extend more than ten feet, and ends in steep cliff. Along the face of this cliff holes have been scooped for the reception of the feet, so that a man can walk along the front of the rock till he reaches a projecting mass like that he has traversed, and this mass is excavated into a series of chambers.
This rock-refuge is one that could not be taken, if only moderate precautions were observed. The man who passed in the socket-holes for his feet to the door of the first chamber scooped out in the scar must traverse in front of a window, through which it would suffice for a child to thrust his hand to touch him to upset his balance and send him headlong below to certain death.
There was no place better calculated to serve as a prison than this Raven's Nest, as it was called. Jean was by no means sure that what Noémi said might not come true; if the peasants learned who she was, they might take advantage of his absence literally to tear her to pieces, for they were greatly exasperated at the loss of their master, the old Seigneur. If he were to leave the girl for some hours at Le Peuch, she must not only be protected against an attempt at recapture, but against the resentment of his own people, who might lose their heads when they found that he as well as his father was lost to them. A woman like Rossignol's wife was a firebrand inflamed with unslaked lust for revenge. A few words from her might set all in movement. The Southern Gauls are an impulsive, excitable, and, when excited, an unreasoning people. The routiers had not spared their wives and daughters, why should they scruple about reprisals on the daughter of their deadliest oppressor?
Distressed as Jean was at his father's fate, the fear of what might happen to Noémi if left alone at Le Peuch for a moment overbore his filial distress.