Now his resolve was growing weaker as the state of hostilities, his loneliness, the sight of that detestable barricade, became more and more odious to him. He began to make excuses for the Countess—not indeed for all that she had done (for her graver offences were unknown to him), but for what he knew of, for the broken promise and the renewal of acquaintance with Paul de Roustache. He imputed to her a picturesque penitence and imagined her, on her side of the barricade, longing for a pardon she dared not ask and a reconciliation for which she could hardly venture to hope; he went so far as to embody these supposed feelings of hers in a graceful little poem addressed to himself and entitled, "To My Cruel Andrea." In fine the Count was ready to go on his knees if he received proper encouragement. Here his pride had its turn: this encouragement he must have; he would not risk an interview, a second rebuff, a repetition of that insolence of manner with which he had felt himself obliged to charge the Countess or another slamming of the door in his face, such as had offended him so justly and so grievously in those involuntary interviews which had caused him to change his apartments. But now—the thought came to him as the happiest of inspirations—he need expose himself to none of these humiliations. Fortune had provided a better way. Shunning direct approaches with all their dangers, he would use an intermediary. By Heaven's kindness the ideal ambassador was ready to his hand—a man of affairs, accustomed to delicate negotiations, yet (the Count added) honourable, true, faithful, and tender-hearted. "My friend Dieppe will rejoice to serve me," he said to himself with more cheerfulness than he had felt since first the barricade had reared its hated front. He sent his servant to beg the favour of Dieppe's company.
At the moment—which, to be precise, was four o'clock in the afternoon—no invitation could have been more unwelcome to Captain Dieppe. He had received his note from the hands of a ragged urchin as he strolled by the river an hour before: its purport rather excited than alarmed him; but the rendezvous mentioned was so ill-chosen, from his point of view, that it caused him dismay. And he had in vain tried to catch sight of the Countess or find means of communicating with her without arousing suspicion. He had other motives too for shrinking from such expressions of friendliness as he had reason to anticipate from his host. But he did not expect anything so disconcerting as the proposal which the Count actually laid before him when he unwillingly entered his presence.
"Go to her—go to her on your behalf?" he exclaimed in a consternation which luckily passed for a modest distrust of his qualifications for the task. "But, my dear friend, what am I to say?"
"Say that I love her," said the Count in his low, musical tones. "Say that beneath all differences, all estrangements, lies my deep, abiding, unchanging love."
Statements of this sort the Captain preferred to make, when occasion arose, on his own behalf.
"Say that I know I have been hard to her, that I recede from my demand, that I will be content with her simple word that she will not, without my knowledge, hold any communication with the person she knows of."
The Captain now guessed—or at least very shrewdly suspected—the position of affairs. But he showed no signs of understanding.
"Tell her," pursued the Count, laying his hand on Dieppe's shoulder and speaking almost as ardently as though he were addressing his wife herself, "that I never suspected her of more than a little levity, and that I never will or could."
Dieppe found himself speculating how much the Count's love and trust might induce him to include in the phrase "a little levity."
"That she should listen—I will not say to love-making—but even to gallantry, to a hint of admiration, to the least attempt at flirtation, has never entered my head about my Emilia."