“I was a fool ever to have gone there!—an absolute fool!” he murmured to himself, as he flung himself back in the first-class compartment when alone. “I ran an unnecessary risk. And that man who came so suddenly upon me just as I was leaving! What if he had watched and recognised me? If so, he would certainly gossip about my presence there, describe my actions—and then—”
He was silent; his face became blanched and drawn.
“Even though six years have passed, the affair is not forgotten,” he went on in a hard voice. “It is still the local mystery which Scotland Yard failed to elucidate. Yes,” he added, “I was a fool—a confounded fool! What absurd whim took me to that place of all others, I can’t imagine. I’m mad—mad!” he cried in wild despair. “This madness is the shadow of suicide!”
Instead of going down to the House he drove back at once to his chambers.
Upon his table was a note from Claudia, affectionate as usual, and full of regret that they had not met again on the previous night—when they had been so suddenly separated at Penarth House.
“What do you think of little Muriel Mortimer? I saw you speaking with her,” she wrote. “She was full of you when I met her shopping in Bond Street this morning. You have made quite an impression, my dear Dudley. But don’t altogether forget me, will you?”
Forget? Could he ever forget the woman whom he loved, and yet despised? Strange that Claudia should have plotted with Lady Meldrum against his bachelor estate, and should have determined to bring about this marriage with Muriel Mortimer!
In a frenzy of despair he cast her letter into the flames. He recollected the words she had uttered to him in that room on the previous night, the sweet words of love and tenderness that had held him spellbound. No, there was no other woman in all the world save her—and yet, she was false and fickle, as all the world knew.
Life’s comforts are its cares. He smiled bitterly as he reflected upon that phrase, which was an extract from one of his many brilliant speeches. If a person has no cares, that person must make them, or be wretched; care is actually an employment, an action; sometimes even a joy. And so it is with love. Life and love must have employment and action. There must be responsibility and a striving to reach a goal; for if not, both the power to endure and the power to give comfort are shrunken and crippled.
When Dudley Chisholm was young he had long worshipped an ideal. But when he found his idol to be undeserving of the idolatry, madness fell upon him, and he accepted the creed of the prodigal. Raking over the ashes of the numerous bonfires he had made, for which his senses had been the fuel, he now found a revelation of his inner self. He recognised for the first time his weakness and his unworthiness. He wanted something better than he had known—not in others, but in himself. He had discovered a spot of tenderness in his heart that had, so to speak, remained virgin soil.