“Ah!” he cried bitterly to himself, “it would have been best to have resigned and gone abroad months ago, while there was yet time. Under another name I might have contrived to conceal my identity in one or other of the colonies, where they do not inquire too closely into a man’s antecedents. But, alas! it is now too late. My movements are evidently watched, and I am under suspicion, owing to the discovery of my connection with that scoundrel Lennox. To resign my appointment is impossible. I can only remain and face the ruin, shame, and ignominy that are inevitable. I have sinned before God, and before man!” he cried wildly, his face upturned, his clenched hands held trembling above his head in blank despair. “For me there is no forgiveness—none!—none! My only means of escape is suicide,” he gasped with bated breath. “A few drops of liquid in a wine-glass full of innocent water, and all will be over—all the anguish, all the fever. No, it is not difficult—not at all,” and he laughed a hard, dry, sarcastic laugh. “And a final drastic step of that sort is far preferable to shame and ruin.”
He was silent for some time. His lips were still moving as he stood there in the centre of the room, but no sound came from them. In the awful agony he suffered he spoke to himself and heard words that were unuttered. The possibility which he had suspected and dreaded during so many dark weeks was now becoming horribly realised. His secret sin would before long be revealed in all its true hideousness, and he, England’s rising statesman, the man of whom so much was prophesied, the man who was trusted by the Prime Minister, who held such a brilliant and responsible position, and who was envied by all the lesser fry in the House, would be rudely cast forth as unfit and unworthy, his name, honoured for generations, rendered odious.
Truly his position was graver and more precarious than that of ninety-nine out of a hundred men. Condemnation was at hand. Cator, now that he knew the name of Mayne Lennox, would not be long in laying bare the whole of the facts.
And then?
He thought it all over, sighing heavily and clenching his hands in wild despair. To no single person could he look for assistance, for he dared not confide in any one. He could only suffer alone, and pay the penalty for his sin.
How little the world knows of the inner life of its greatest men! The popular favourite, the chosen of fortune in the various walks of life, is too often an undeserving man, the skeleton in whose cupboard could not bear the light of day. Fortune never chooses the best men for the best places. Dishonesty grows fat, while virtue dies of starvation. The public are prone to envy the men who are popular, who are “boomed” by the newspapers, and whose doings are chronicled daily with the same assiduity as the movements of the Sovereign himself, yet in many cases these very men, as did Dudley Chisholm, shrink from the fierce light always beating upon them. They loathe the plaudits of the multitude, because of the inner voice of conscience that tells them they are charlatans and shams; and they are always promising themselves that one day, when they see a fitting opportunity, they will retire into private life.
In every public assembly, from the smallest parish council up to Westminster itself, there are prominent members who live in daily fear of exposure. Although looked upon by the world as self-denying, upright citizens, they are, nevertheless, leading a life of awful tension and constant anxiety, knowing that their enemies may at any moment reveal the truth.
Thus it was with Dudley Chisholm. That he was a man well fitted for the responsible post he occupied in the Government could not be denied, and that he had carefully and assiduously carried out the duties of his office was patent to all. Yet the past—that dark, grim past which had caused him to travel in the unfrequented tracks of the Far East—had never ceased to haunt him, until now he could plainly see that the end was very near. Exposure could not be long delayed.
The turret-clock chimed the hour slowly, and its bells aroused him.
“No,” he cried hoarsely to himself, “no, it would not be just! Before taking the final step I must place things in order—I must go out of office with all the honour and dignity of the Chisholms,” he added with a short and bitter laugh. “Out of office!” he repeated hoarsely to himself, “out of office—and out of the world!”