"They are coming to murder Tilly!" stammered the Abbot, livid with terror. "It is done for us! We are lost!"
"Abbot, you are losing your senses," replied the Marchioness endeavoring to allay her own alarm. "Matters are not at such an extremity."
"Madam, do you not hear those furious cries: 'Vengeance and reprisals!'" asked Mademoiselle Plouernel. "These people are coming to take vengeance upon us for the atrocities committed by the troops of your master, at the instigation of your infamous Catholic clergy!"
The danger grew ever more threatening. Hurried steps were heard in the house, where the frightened servants were running about crying out to one another and precipitately and noisily closing and bolting the main door on the ground floor. The door, though thick and strong, and studded with iron nails, could not long resist the assailants. Already it shook under the repeated blows of axes and the butts of muskets, while a volley of stones, thrown from the street, broke with a crash the window-panes in the parlor. The shattered windows allowed the clamor from without to reach the parlor with distinctness. "My sister was violated and disemboweled by the soldiers of Louis XIV," cried the butcher in his stentorian voice; "Vengeance and reprisals! French women are housed in Tilly's residence! Fire upon the door and windows! We will get in! Massacre and fury!"
The sound of a discharge of musketry fire followed almost instantly upon the butcher's words. The house seemed to rock to its very foundations. The fusilade continued uninterrupted. At the same time the main door, already half broken down, was attacked with renewed blows of axes, and a lever was applied to its hinges.
Suddenly the ceiling of the parlor shook with the vibrations of heavy blows given with iron maces and by dint of which the main street door finally fell in with a great crash. The vociferations of the assailants, who irrupted into the house, reached the ears of the Abbot, the Marchioness and Mademoiselle Plouernel. They stood petrified with terror. At that instant a little door, that communicated with, and was concealed by the drapery of the parlor flew open.
"The assassins are here!" stammered the Marchioness, almost dead with fright. "We are lost! Mercy! Mercy!"
"We are saved!" cried Bertha of Plouernel, as she recognized in the new arrivals Serdan and his two friends. "These are our liberators!"
The uproar and the distinct rush of hurrying and tumultuous steps announced that the assailants were mounting the staircase. Serdan ran to the principal door of the parlor, closed and double barred it. "Mademoiselle," he said hurrying back to the young lady and pointing to her the issue through which he had just entered, "flee by that door—the corridor leads to a concealed staircase."
Already the parlor door cracked under the repeated blows from without. Bertha, seized with a sort of vertigo, followed Serdan mechanically; the Abbot pushed the Marchioness before him, and disappeared after the two women in the corridor. The hall was left empty.