Their case was indeed desperate. The room was already darkening with smoke, and the wood-work on the floor below crackling in the flames that began to light up the lawn outside, and tip with saffron the sleeping woods beyond. The door was broken in; the chest of drawers gave way with a loud crash, and brandishing his crowbar, Hippolyte leaped into the apartment like a fiend, but stood for an instant aghast, rigid, like that fiend turned to bronze, because the white lady, shielding her daughter with her body, neither quailed nor flinched. Her eye was bright, her colour raised, her lips set, her hand steady, her whole attitude resolute and defiant. All this he took in at a glance, and the Coromantee felt his craven heart shrink up to nothing in his breast, thus covered by the deadly pistol of the Marquise. CHAPTER XXXVII JUST IN TIME Moments are precious at such a time. The negro, goaded by shame, rage, and alcohol, had drawn his breath for a spring, when a loud cheer was heard outside, followed by two or three dropping shots, and the ring of a hearty English voice exclaiming— “Hold on, mates! Don’t ye shoot wild a-cause of the ladies. It’s yard-arm to yard-arm, this spell, and we’ll give these here black devils a taste of the naked steel!” In another moment Slap-Jack was in the passage, leaving a couple of wounded ruffians on the stairs to be finished by his comrades, and cutting another down across the very door-sill of the Marquise’s bed-chamber. Ere he could enter it, however, his captain had dashed past him, leaping like a panther over the dead negroes under foot, and flashing his glittering rapier in the astonished eyes of the Coromantee, who turned round bewildered from his prey to fight with the mad energy of despair. In vain. Of what avail was the massive iron crowbar, wielded even by the strength of a Hercules, against the deadliest blade but one in the Great Monarch’s body-guard? A couple of dazzling passes, that seemed to go over, under, all round the clumsier weapon—a stamp—a muttered oath, shut in by clenched, determined teeth, and the elastic steel shot through Hippolyte’s very heart, and out on the other side. Spurning the huge black body with his foot, Captain George withdrew his sword, wiped it grimly on the dead man’s woolly head, and, uncovering, turned to the ladies with a polite apology for thus intruding under the pressure of so disagreeable a necessity. He had scarcely framed a sentence ere he became deadly pale, and began to stammer, as if he, too, was under the influence of some engrossing and incontrollable emotion. The two women had shrunk into the farthest corner of the room. With the prospect of a rescue, Madame de Montmirail’s nerves, strung to their utmost tension, had completely given way. In a state of mental and bodily prostration, she had laid her head in the lap of Cerise, whose courage, being of a more passive nature, did not now fail her so entirely.