CHAPTER VIII.

In a Geneva street, where the steep red roofs almost met across the way, in a tall house with a silversmith’s sign swinging above the door, lived a Vaudois who had been exiled years ago--the hero of Rora, Joshua Janavel.

The coming of his countrymen stirred him as a trumpet-note might stir an old war-horse. He could only see the glory of their trial, the martyr’s crown given to so many, the noble endurance, the faithfulness and steadfastness of heart which they had shown. For him to rejoice at tribulation was no new thing, and he now stood so near to the kingdom of God that he realised more than ever how small are the ‘sufferings of this present time’ when compared with the glory that shall be revealed.

His aged eyes flashed as he heard of weak women standing firm in face of death and danger; and something of his old ardour awoke again as they reckoned up the names of those who had fallen in a cause so holy, in defending rights so sacred. Once only did his head droop and his voice sink tremulous with feeling, and that was when Henri Botta came to tell him of his grand-daughter Rénée.

He had never seen her, this child of his best-beloved son; he had been driven from the valleys when she was an infant. But he was strangely moved when they told him of her sweetness, her womanly ways and words, of the help she had been to Madeleine, and of how she had faced the trial-storm along with the best and bravest.

‘Our God has demanded much from me,’ he said in his thin, quavering tones. ‘And He knows I have reckoned it as honour to spend and be spent in His cause. I am glad, aye, doubly glad, that the girl, the last of my race, has been ready to take up the standard of Christ, since my weak hands can grasp it no more.’

Henri Botta stood in the doorway, looking down on the old man’s face, and he silently thought that neither age nor death would quite rob the Vaudois of Joshua Janavel; such names and memories as his linger long in the hearts of men, and being dead, yet speak in those voices which have far echoings.

The time passed slowly on, the spring, the hot summer, and the scented autumn. There was a great deal stirring in the courts of Europe, but the people of the Cantons were busy with their own affairs, and troubled themselves but little with the rebellion in England, or the war which the Emperor Leopold was bent on waging with France. The fate of the Vaudois concerned them far more nearly.

It was only kindness, and the most active Christian charity, that moved them to make plans for the welfare of the exiles; but the proposals brought forward filled the Vaudois with dismay.

It was suggested that some should be settled in Brandenburg, the dominions of the Great Elector, on the banks of the Elbe; a country which seemed far and foreign to the simple mountaineers. But Brandenburg, distant as it was, was as nothing to the journeys which others urged. The Cape of Good Hope, the unexplored lands of America, these were mentioned as possible homes for the children of the valleys: and the Swiss were inclined to be impatient when they saw how very unwelcome such suggestions were.

The plain fact was that the Vaudois were breaking their hearts with longings for home. Every time they looked to the eastward they saw the Alps gleaming white against the sky; the rushing of the Rhone River was always in their ears, the water which had melted from those upper snows--the snows of the hills.

Here in the west there might indeed be freedom, friends, and no shadow of fear nor pressure of want--but over there, beyond those great white barriers, lay the land they loved, the ruined hearths for which they had shed their blood, the fields their ancestors had tilled, the chestnuts, and the vines, and the mulberries that their grandsires had planted, the graves of their dear ones, the sacred spots made holy by their tears.

The Jews of old sighed by the waters of Babylon over their silent harps: and these poor exiles turned their yearning eyes eastward, unable to forget their Jerusalem, the land of their inheritance.

To Gaspard Botta in these days the hope of return was the very mainspring of life. He worked for his living, as did all the Vaudois; he indeed worked doubly hard, doing his father’s share as well as his own, for the old man’s strength had never recovered that wound given on the slope of La Vachère, and it was as much as Gaspard could do to keep him from fretting over his uncompleted tasks.

But all the work, hard and anxious as it was, could not entirely blunt the pain which lay for him behind all other things, as shadows lie about the clouds. He could not forget that Rénée was still in danger; that whilst he had shelter, food, comfort, liberty, she and his mother were probably yet hiding among the mountains with but little more shelter and sustenance than God gives to the ravens.

There had been just a chance that they too had been driven off to exile with the rest, and Gaspard had searched with mingled hope and dread through every group of forlorn ones arriving in Geneva. But those he loved were not there. There was no news of them either; they had not been amongst those who had died in prison, nor amongst those who had perished on the journey.

If they were still in life they were near Rora, waiting and watching, as Gaspard knew, with weary hearts and sinking hopes for his coming back to them. His white teeth ground themselves together as he thought of it, and his eyes were dim with a mist of tears as he turned them towards the hills. Was it right to stay quietly here in Switzerland, to let his hands peaceably handle saws and planes? Was it right to let the long days pass in peacefulness when his nearest and dearest needed help so sorely?

He could scarcely hold himself back as he looked at the hills. Surely, his faithful heart kept saying, surely he could reach them, surely he could die with them, if the worst must come.

Not Gaspard only, but the whole company of the banished felt bitter longings and heart-sick yearnings drawing them towards Piedmont, as the magnet draws the steel. Their devotedness, strengthened as it had been by centuries of persecution, nourished their patriotism; they had suffered much for the love of God--they reckoned it now but a small thing to suffer for love of their country.

As the days crept on the longing grew. It was not that they were ungrateful; it was not that they did not prize the calm that had succeeded the struggle, the liberty that had come after the bitter oppression--but their simple hearts just drooped and pined for the valleys.

They had watered that land with their tears and with their blood. No other country could be ‘home’ to them. They must return, and lift again--if such were God’s good will--the voice of praise and prayer from the glens and the hills which now lay desolate.

Men with the same anxiety in their hearts as Gaspard had might be reckoned by the score. There was scarcely a Vaudois who would not have willingly died rather than have surrendered the hope of getting home to the valleys, somehow, some day.

In the silversmith’s house in the dark Geneva street, groups gathered evening after evening to talk with Janavel. He was, as was natural, a sort of rallying-point for his countrymen. His elbow-chair was the centre of elaborate plannings, fluctuating hopes and fears, and audacious ideas. Here differing ways and means were discussed endlessly; here all men spoke their minds.

And Janavel, who himself could never again strike a blow for country or for faith, was the most eager and hopeful of all.

‘Our land is the Lord’s,’ he would say; ‘and in the Lord’s good time it shall be restored to our trust.’

* * * * *

It was in July, 1687, that the first attempt at return was made. Two or three hundred impatient ones gathered at Ouchy, on the shores of the lake, full of ardour and hope. But that enterprise was promptly nipped in the bud. The Swiss had pledged their honour to the Duke of Savoy, and considered themselves responsible for the good behaviour of the Vaudois. They could not allow the exiles to cross the frontier with the avowed intention of regaining their country by force of arms, so the expedition was stopped at its very outsetting, and the two or three hundred men sent back to the places from whence they had gathered themselves. So the first effort, small and ill-advised as it was, came to an untimely end.

On the next occasion things were altered. Events marched quickly in those troublous times. In July, 1687, James II. was on the English throne, a bigoted Papist, whose sympathies were all with the extermination of what he called heresy. And in 1687 Louis of France had ample leisure to listen to all priestly plans for crushing the ‘new religion.’

In 1689 William of Orange was King of England, a prince wholly devoted to the cause of Protestantism, and King Louis had his hands full to overflowing with wars against the Germans and the Dutch.

And--a fact more important to them than affairs of foreign kings and potentates--the exiles had found what they had hitherto so sorely lacked--a leader. He was one Henri Arnaud, a simple pastor of the valleys, a man trained in the school of hardship, just one of themselves. But he was, in spite of this, a really great man, one not only like Joshua Janavel, but like that other and far greater Joshua, the Hebrew captain of old; for in his heart burnt the holy fire of God’s faith and fear, and on his lips was the old battle-cry of the Hebrews, ‘Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’

It is said that events shape the characters of men rather than men shape the events. If ever this be true, it was the case with Henri Arnaud. His character was the outcome of that hard struggle for existence that had made the Vaudois what they were. Past years of oppression and blood-shedding had nerved his heart and armed his hand; and the purity of the truth for which he and his had suffered had sunk into his soul as the sun’s warmth penetrates the surface of the earth.

The Vaudois were as sheep having no shepherd. That very need was a spur to Arnaud. He stood forth, and with one voice they hailed him as their captain. Reverently, and in God’s strength, he accepted the trust.