Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/254

248 read himself over. On those lines he could still be liberal, yet it was at best a sort of whistling in the dark. It was unmistakable, moreover, that the sense of being in the dark now pressed on him more sharply—creating thereby the need for a louder and livelier whistle. He whistled long and hard after sending his message; he whistled again and again in celebration of Chad's news; there was an interval of a fortnight in which this exercise helped him. He had no great notion of what, on the spot, Sarah Pocock would have to say—though he had indeed confused premonitions; but it shouldn't be in her power to say—it shouldn't be in anyone's anywhere to say—that he was neglecting her mother. He might have written before more freely, but he had never written more copiously; and he frankly gave for a reason, at Woollett, that he wished to fill the void created by Sarah's departure.

The increase of his darkness, however, and the quickening, as I have called it, of his tune, resided in the fact that he was hearing almost naught. He had for some time been aware that he was hearing less than before, but he was now clearly following a process by which Mrs. Newsome's letters could only, logically, stop. He had not had a line for many days, and he needed no proof—though he was, in time, to have plenty—that she wouldn't have put pen to paper after receiving the hint that had determined her telegram. She wouldn't write till Sarah should have seen him and reported on him. It was strange, though it might well be less so than his own behaviour appeared at Woollett. It was at any rate significant, and what was remarkable was the way his friend's nature and manner put on for him, through this very drop of demonstration, a greater intensity. It struck him really that he had never so lived with her as during this period of her silence, the silence being a sacred hush, a finer, clearer medium, in which her idiosyncrasies showed. He walked about with her, sat with her, drove with her, and dined face to face with her—a rare treat "in his life," as he could perhaps have scarce escaped phrasing it; and if he had never seen her so soundless, so, on the other hand, he had never felt her so highly, so almost austerely, her very self: pure and by the vulgar estimate "cold," but deep, devoted, delicate,