The count kept in his room a disguise which often served him in his campaign stratagems.  Putting on the shabby buff-coat that looked as thought it might belong to one of the poor horse-soldiers whose pittance was so seldom paid by Henri IV., he returned to the room where his wife was moaning.

“Try to suffer patiently,” he said to her.  “I will founder my horse if necessary to bring you speedy relief.”

These words were certainly not alarming, and the countess, emboldened by them, was about to make a request when the count asked her suddenly:—­

“Tell me where you keep your masks?”

“My masks!” she replied.  “Good God! what do you want to do with them?”

“Where are they?” he repeated, with his usual violence.

“In the chest,” she said.

She shuddered when she saw her husband select from among her masks a “touret de nez,” the wearing of which was as common among the ladies of that time as the wearing of gloves in our day.  The count became entirely unrecognizable after he had put on an old gray felt hat with a broken cock’s feather on his head.  He girded round his loins a broad leathern belt, in which he stuck a dagger, which he did not wear habitually.  These miserable garments gave him so terrifying an air and he approached the bed with so strange a motion that the countess thought her last hour had come.

“Ah! don’t kill us!” she cried, “leave me my child, and I will love you well.”

“You must feel yourself very guilty to offer as the ransom of your faults the love you owe me.”

The count’s voice was lugubrious and the bitter words were enforced by a look which fell like lead upon the countess.

“My God!” she cried sorrowfully, “can innocence be fatal?”

“Your death is not in question,” said her master, coming out of a sort of reverie into which he had fallen.  “You are to do exactly, and for love of me, what I shall now tell you.”

He flung upon the bed one of the two masks he had taken from the chest, and smiled with derision as he saw the gesture of involuntary fear which the slight shock of the black velvet wrung from his wife.

“You will give me a puny child!” he cried.  “Wear that mask on your face when I return.  I’ll have no barber-surgeon boast that he has seen the Comtesse d’Herouville.”

“A man!—­why choose a man for the purpose?” she said in a feeble voice.

“Ho! ho! my lady, am I not master here?” replied the count.

“What matters one horror the more!” murmured the countess; but her master had disappeared, and the exclamation did her no injury.

Presently, in a brief lull of the storm, the countess heard the gallop of two horses which seemed to fly across the sandy dunes by which the castle was surrounded.  The sound was quickly lost in that of the waves.  Soon she felt herself a prisoner in the vast apartment, alone in the midst of a night both silent and threatening, and without succor against an evil she saw approaching her with rapid strides.  In vain she sought for some stratagem by which to save that child conceived in tears, already her consolation, the spring of all her thoughts, the future of her affections, her one frail hope.