“Heavens and earth, monseigneur! What? disguise myself as a Leaguer! Excuse me, I will obey you; but I would rather be hanged.” The count smiled; then to efface that smile, which contrasted with the expression of his face, he answered roughly:-- “Choose the strongest horse there is in the stable and follow me. We shall ride like balls shot from an arquebuse. Be ready when I am ready. I will ring to let you know.” Bertrand bowed in silence and went away; but when he had gone a few steps he said to himself, as he listened to the howling of the storm:-- “All the devils are abroad, jarnidieu! I’d have been surprised to see this one stay quietly in his bed. We took Saint-Lo in just such a tempest as this.” 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.”