Each day increased the difficulties gathering about the devoted band. The news of their approach had reached Piedmont, and troops were on the alert to intercept their march. The valleys were not to be gained without a deadly struggle; and Arnaud knew it.
Eleven days after leaving Geneva they set foot in the first Vaudois village, Balsille, in the Vale of St. Martino. It was empty; the new inhabitants had fled down the river-bank towards Le Perrier, where a strong force of Piedmontese soldiers were forming across the valley.
But the Vaudois avoided the force they could scarcely hope to defeat. Arnaud turned to the south-westward, up the gorge of Prali, intending to reach the Valley of Luserna by the Guliano Pass, leaving Le Perrier and its garrison on his left.
There was utter peace up this mountain valley, the peace of the great hills in the warmth and hush of the summer. The church--the ‘Temple of Prals, as they had used to call it--was still standing; it had been transformed into a place for Romish worship, but the white walls raised by Vaudois hands were there, and the roof-tree that had echoed to the people’s prayers for generations.
Henri Botta bared his head as he entered it. He gave small heed to the movements and exclamations of his comrades, who were sternly removing all superstitious ornaments and popish adornments; his heart had gone back to the old days when he had come here from Rora to woo Madeleine, who had lived in yonder farm-stead all her girlish years--one could see it yet, the broken gable rising sharp above the tufted chestnut grove; and there in that humble cottage by the foot-bridge, the heroic pastor Leydat had lived--Leydat, who had been martyred in 1686, seized while singing psalms with his hunted flock in a cave below the mighty crest of Mont Cournan. Henri Botta almost thought he could yet hear his well-known voice as he read from the great Bible chained on the desk by the further arch; a voice easily to be held in memory, with its deep cadences and rolling utterance.
Leydat was dead--blessedly dead among God’s saints in God’s keeping; the farm-stead was wrecked; the great Bible and its clasps torn away--and Madeleine--who could say what had befallen her since they parted at the entrenchments across the Rora Valley? How long ago it seemed!