Surprised to hear no cries, he examined the child, thinking it dead.  The count, seeing the deception, sprang upon him with one bound.

“God of heaven! will you give it to me?” he cried, snatching the hapless victim which uttered feeble cries.

“Take care; the child is deformed and almost lifeless; it is a seven months’ child,” said Beauvouloir clinging to the count’s arm.  Then, with a strength given to him by the excitement of his pity, he clung to the father’s fingers, whispering in a broken voice:  “Spare yourself a crime, the child cannot live.”

“Wretch!” replied the count, from whose hands the bonesetter had wrenched the child, “who told you that I wished to kill my son?  Could I not caress it?”

“Wait till he is eighteen years old to caress him in that way,” replied Beauvouloir, recovering the sense of his importance.  “But,” he added, thinking of his own safety, for he had recognized the Comte d’Herouville, who in his rage had forgotten to disguise his voice, “have him baptized at once and do not speak of his danger to the mother, or you will kill her.”

The gesture of satisfaction which escaped the count when the child’s death was prophesied, suggested this speech to the bonesetter as the best means of saving the child at the moment.  Beauvouloir now hastened to carry the infant back to its mother who had fainted, and he pointed to her condition reprovingly, to warn the count of the results of his violence.  The countess had heard all; for in many of the great crises of life the human organs acquire an otherwise unknown delicacy.  But the cries of the child, laid beside her on the bed, restored her to life as if by magic; she fancied she heard the voices of angels, when, under cover of the whimperings of the babe, the bonesetter said in her ear:—­

“Take care of him, and he’ll live a hundred years.  Beauvouloir knows what he is talking about.”

A celestial sigh, a silent pressure of the hand were the reward of the leech, who had looked to see, before yielding the frail little creature to its mother’s embrace, whether that of the father had done no harm to its puny organization.  The half-crazed motion with which the mother hid her son beside her and the threatening glance she cast upon the count through the eye-holes of her mask, made Beauvouloir shudder.

“She will die if she loses that child too soon,” he said to the count.

During the latter part of this scene the lord of Herouville seemed to hear and see nothing.  Rigid, and as if absorbed in meditation, he stood by the window drumming on its panes.  But he turned at the last words uttered by the bonesetter, with an almost frenzied motion, and came to him with uplifted dagger.

“Miserable clown!” he cried, giving him the opprobrious name by which the Royalists insulted the Leaguers.  “Impudent scoundrel! your science which makes you the accomplice of men who steal inheritances is all that prevents me from depriving Normandy of her sorcerer.”