"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.
Sustained by maternal courage, she took the horn with which her husband summoned his men, and, opening a window, blew through the brass tube feeble notes that died away upon the vast expanse of water, like a bubble blown into the air by a child. She felt the uselessness of that moan unheard of men, and turned to hasten through the apartments, hoping that all the issues were not closed upon her.
Reaching the library she sought in vain for some secret passage; then, passing between the long rows of books, she reached a window which looked upon the courtyard. Again she sounded the horn, but without success against the voice of the hurricane.
In her helplessness she thought of trusting herself to one of the women,--all creatures of her husband,--when, passing into her oratory, she found that the count had locked the only door that led to their apartments. This was a horrible discovery. Such precautions taken to isolate her showed a desire to proceed without witnesses to some horrible execution. As moment after moment she lost hope, the pangs of childbirth grew stronger and keener. A presentiment of murder, joined to the fatigue of her efforts, overcame her last remaining strength.
She was like a shipwrecked man who sinks, borne under by one last wave less furious than others he has vanquished. The bewildering pangs of her condition kept her from knowing the lapse of time. At the moment when she felt that, alone, without help, she was about to give birth to her child, and to all her other terrors was added that of the accidents to which her ignorance exposed her, the count appeared, without a sound that let her know of his arrival. The man was there, like a demon claiming at the close of a compact the soul that was sold to him. He muttered angrily at finding his wife's face uncovered; then after masking her carefully, he took her in his arms and laid her on the bed in her chamber.