The upshot of the state in which he found himself for three or four days was a sudden decision to call on the Ambassador. The idea, in coming to him, brought him ease, offered an issue to his pressing need to communicate. He had been divided between this need and the equal one--the profound policy--of silence; than which conflict nothing in his life had ever more tormented him. He wished he had been a Catholic, that he might go to confession; his desire, remarkably enough, being no less for secrecy than for relief. He recalled the chapter in Hawthorne's fine novel in which the young woman from New England kneels, for the lightening of her woe, to the old priest at St. Peter's, and felt that he sounded as never before the depth of that passage. _His_ case in truth was worse than Hilda's and his burden much greater, for she had been but a spectator of what weighed upon her, whereas he had been a close participant. It mattered little enough that his sense was not the sense of crime; it was the sense, in an extraordinary degree, of something done in passion, and of an experience far stranger than a mere glimpse, or than, if it came to that, a positive perpetration, of murder. He wondered that a knowledge of anything less than murder could be able to constitute in one's soul such a closed back room; but what was of course now most present to him was that he had hitherto grasped of life a sadly insignificant shred. There were at least as many more things in it for one's philosophy than poor Hamlet himself was to have found in heaven and earth. He went about and took his food and did his business; he had tested the truth of the promise made, the promise that he should successively present, even to himself, on reappearance; he was in fact fully aware that he had never yet _had_ for the world--yes, and perhaps too for himself--so much to rest on as in the appearance he presented.
Nothing perhaps was more strange than that what he had accepted he still accepted; he was not attended with disorders or fears; he had neither alarms nor lapses nor returns, neither cold sweats nor hot flushes: it was much nearer true that he found in the excitement--for it was after all, however muffled and compressed, the felt throb of a pulse--an inordinate charm. But if it might be a charm, for the time, as much as one would, just so it might become later on, and was probably sure to, a terror; whatever form one should finally best know it by, he wanted in some single instance to impart his knowledge. He desired, he chose, that one other person, anxiously selected, should share his charge of it. One person would do--in fact more than one would spoil everything. There was a difference for him that he conceived this would make if he could only be sure of the safety of the vessel. His word once dropped into that moral receptacle and the key turned upon it and pocketed, he should come the more assuredly back to life, or might rather, and as for the first time, attack and perhaps surmount it. The motive he obeyed was indeed on the occasion of the visit itself as completely expressed as might be. The Ambassador, blest and distinguished man, was not a personal friend, was only the friend of friends. These latter had so taken the field that Ralph was more "introduced" than he had ever been to anyone, or than his Excellency could ever have known any bearer of letters. Such, however, was the high urbanity of this personage that our young man was as well received as if the heralds had been dumb. To the blare of trumpets Ralph had moreover not himself contributed, leaving his letters at the Embassy as little as elsewhere: he only knew that suggestion would have been applied from over the sea without action of his own, and this in fact put further delay at odds with good manners. It was sufficient that the representative of his country should be pre-eminent, accomplished, witty and kind, and that, much addicted to good cigars, he should usually be accessible at about six o'clock.