Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/326

 "You must drop from the window, my child," whispered the Marquise, when the shattered door fell in at length across this last obstruction, revealing a hideous confusion of black forms, and rolling eyes, and grinning fiendish faces. "It is not a dozen feet, but mind you turn round so as to light on your hands and knees. Célandine must be outside. If you can reach her you are safe. Adieu, darling! I can keep the two foremost from following you, still!"

The Marquise grasped a pistol in each hand, but she bent her brow—the haughty white brow that had never been carried more proudly than now—towards her child, and the girl's pale lips clung to it lovingly, while she vowed that neither life nor death should part her from her mother.

"It is all over, dear," she said, calmly. "We can but die together as we have lived."

Their case was indeed desperate. The room was already darkening with smoke, and the woodwork 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.