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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.
[Illustration: JANAVEL AND THE EXILES IN GENEVA.]
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.
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