The next moment Madame de Bourke was on deck, holding by the Abbe’s arm, and Estelle, her hair on her shoulders, clinging to her.  She looked very pale, but her calmness was in contrast to the Italian sailors, who were throwing themselves with gestures of despair, screaming out vows to the Madonna and saints, and shouting imprecations.  The skipper came to speak to her.  ‘Madame,’ he said, ’I implore you to remain in your cabin.  After the first, you and all yours will be safe.  They cannot harm a French subject; alas! alas would it were so with us.’

‘How then will it be with you?’ she asked.

He made a gesture of deprecation.

’For me it will be ruin; for my poor fellows slavery; that is, if we survive the onset.  Madame, I entreat of you, take shelter in the cabin, yourself and all yours.  None can answer for what the first rush of these fiends may be!  Diavoli! veri diavola!  Ah! for which of my sins is it that after fifty voyages I should be condemned to lose my all?’

A fresh outburst of screams from the crew summoned the captain.  ’They are putting out the long-boat,’ was the cry; ‘they will board us!’

‘Madame!  I entreat of you, shut yourself into the cabin.’

And the four maids in various stages of deshabille, adding their cries to those of the sailors, tried to drag her in, but she looked about for Arthur.  ‘Come with us, Monsieur,’ she said quietly, for after all her previous depressions and alarms, her spirit rose to endurance in the actual stress of danger.  ‘Come with us, I entreat of you,’ she said.  ’You are named in our passports, and the treaties are such that neither French nor English subjects can be maltreated nor enslaved by these wretches.  As the captain says, the danger is only in the first attack.’

‘I will protect you, Madame, with my life,’ declared Arthur, drawing his sword, as his cheeks and eyes lighted.

‘Ah, put that away.  What could you do but lose your own?’ cried the lady.  ‘Remember, you have a mother—­’

The Genoese captain here turned to insist that Madame and all the women should shut themselves instantly into the cabin.  Estelle dragged hard at Arthur’s hand, with entreaties that he would come, but he lifted her down the ladder, and then closed the door on her, Lanty and he being both left outside.

’To be shut into a hole like a rat in a trap when there’s blows to the fore, is more than flesh could stand,’ said Lanty, who had seized on a hand-spike and was waving it about his head, true shillelagh fashion, by hereditary instinct in one who had never behold a faction fight, in what ought to have been his native land.

The Genoese captain looked at him as a madman, and shouted in a confused mixture of French and Italian to lay down his weapon.

’Quei cattivi—­ces scelerats were armed to the teeth—­would fire.  All lie flat on the deck.’