The girl who entered as he spoke had come into Mrs. Fair’s employ as a
governess from a Somersetshire parsonage. She was tall, carried herself
with the unconscious ease of one who, with a nature susceptible of the
deepest emotion and broadest culture, has grown up in the open and in
ignorance of the world, and at eight-and-twenty had settled down to the
monotony and hopelessness of a life of thankless dependence.
From the moment of coming into the family of the famous financier Kate
Mettleby had felt, as who had not, the subtle charm of his personality;
yet with her it was not a natural appreciation of a character at
once brilliant and winsome, but rather a sort of terrifying though
exquisitely pleasurable sense of oneness with the man. Hers was a
mind far too devoid of precedents and mental experience to be capable
or even desirous of analyzing the feeling which she was aware she
entertained for the calm, strong, self-reliant father of the
children whom she was to teach. She knew only that Maxwell Fair was
different—oh, so different—from all other men, and that, without the
faintest shadow of love for him—which her simple, country mind would
have thought sinful and degrading—he, or that mystical something that
he stood for in her mind, had made forever impossible all thought of
ever loving another.
Had she been asked to name the reason for so abnormal and morbid a
fancy, she would have been utterly powerless to do so. Maxwell Fair
was as much of a puzzle to her as he was to everybody, both in society
and in the city. This man, whose name was now in everybody’s mouth as
the most daring and successful operator on ’Change, had come to London
less than five years before with nothing, so far as was known, but the
entailed and heavily burdened estates in Norfolk which he had inherited
from his father, who, old men declared, had been little short of a
madman.
By a series of dashing ventures in mining stocks Fair had attracted
attention, and, what was more to the purpose, accumulated enough ready
cash to enable him to avail himself of the situation then confronting
the speculative world. At the very top of the Kaffir and other South
African securities boom, when men were buying with an eagerness and
recklessness amounting to frenzy, Fair was quietly selling, so that
when the crash came and the breaking out of the Boer War knocked the
bottom out of values, he had the satisfaction of buying back at panic
prices the very shares which he had prudently disposed of at absurdly
exaggerated prices some time before.
Establishing his family in the mansion which he had bought in the
princely Carlton House Terrace, Fair rapidly became as fascinating
and puzzling in society as he had proved Napoleonic and baffling in
Throgmorton street, where was his office. Women found him quaintly
and refreshingly chivalrous and almost annoyingly happy as a
conversationalist, while men who sought his acquaintance with an eye
to business connections—and were disappointed—discovered that the chap
from whom they had hoped to learn the secrets of success was a fellow
of infinite jest, a capital _raconteur_ and a frank, generous, genial
companion withal.
Such was Maxwell Fair when once more the newspapers announced that he
had disposed of the celebrated Empire Mines stock which he had picked
up—after a personal inspection of the property in Mexico—when nobody
else would touch it, at the staggering figure of over ten times what
he had paid for the shares, netting by the transaction close upon two
hundred thousand pounds.
At innumerable dinner-tables at that moment he was being discussed,
envied and lauded to the skies—and he himself sat with flushed,
nervous face awaiting guests, and now bidding the strangest woman whom
he had ever met enter with some message from the nursery.
“The children are ready for bed, Mr. Fair,” said Miss Mettleby,
standing in that humble posture which he had begged her never to
assume, because it somehow irritated him very much. “Are they to come
down to say good night? Or shall you come up?”
“That will do, Baxter,” said Fair, noticing that the old butler still
puttered about the room as if intending to remain. Baxter reluctantly
went out and closed the door, which, one is disposed to fear, meant
that the interested old servant did not go far on its other side.
“I am engaged,” continued Fair, looking up at Miss Mettleby. “I will go
up and kiss them afterward. Sit down—no, not on that chest, please.”
“Why not?” asked Miss Mettleby, surprised. “It’s my favorite seat—it
is so comfortable.”
“It makes me uncomfortable to see you sit there—at any time,” answered
Fair, endeavoring to appear whimsical and indifferent, as usual.
“So—thank you. That’s better. Well, Kate, the three months are
over—to the very day, I believe. Coincidences are strange sometimes,
are they not? The time is up. Have you decided?”
“I have,” returned Kate so quickly that he started.
“Well?” he asked, after waiting in vain for her to go on.
“I leave Mrs. Fair’s service on the first of next month,” quietly
replied the governess, evidently with a quietness which cost her much,
and as if bracing herself for the crisis of her life. “I have secured
another position—with Lord Linklater’s family. I have advised Mrs.
Fair already.”
“I’m glad of it—why, you look hurt. Fie!” taunted Fair. “Such virtue
should be pleased, not hurt. The eternal feminine will out, though,
always.”
“Pardon me,” retorted Kate stiffly, “I am heartily glad that you are
glad. May I ask what has moved you to so commendable a frame of mind?
If you had a conscience, I would say that it had at last awakened.
Ah, I see—it was pride. What a mercy it is that when nature left
conscience out of the aristocracy it supplied them with pride! Were it
not for good form, how many gentlemen would there be? I congratulate
you.”
“Go on,” urged Fair, settling back into his chair with the smile of
amused superiority which he very often indulged in, contrary to his
real feeling, to draw her out. “By Jove, you have enough cant to
stock a whole meeting of dissenting old ladies. What a mercy it is,
as you would put it, that when heaven forgot to endow young females
with common sense, it gave them such a superabundance of pharisaical
tommy-rot! If it were not for maiden aunts and governesses, how much
_talk_ of virtue—talk, I say—would there be in this naughty world?”
“It is well that there are some who, even by talking, remind men
that there is, in theory at least, such a thing as honor,” replied
Kate, with a sneaking notion that she was talking very platitudinous
platitudes.
“Oh, entirely so,” drawled Fair sneeringly. “But isn’t it a pity that
the milk of human kindness should be soured by the vinegar of
puritanical self-righteousness? I promised you that I would not speak
to you for three months. I have kept my promise. Now I am going to
have my say—now, now, don’t fidget, I beg of you! A very different
man is going to speak to you now from the one who said what I said to
you on the deck of the sinking yacht that night. Do you remember, Miss
Mettleby?”
“I wish that I could hope some day to forget it,” answered the girl,
flaming scarlet.
Fair rose as if trying to control emotions that were shaking his
foundations. “Don’t you see?” he burst out, confronting her; “don’t you
see that your hopelessness in that connection is the result of only one
possible cause? You love me.”
“Mr. Fair!” screamed the governess, springing to her feet with a
gesture of protest that died in the making, for the clutch of the truth
of his words was about her throat. “Truly, sir, you forget your own
dignity and my dependent and defenseless position. I cannot hear this
from you, sir.”
“But you must hear me—you shall hear me,” he flung back at her. Then
with a tenderness that was harder to resist: “And, Miss Mettleby—Kate,
you really need not fear or try to shun me now. God knows, I shall be
helpless and harmless enough. Yes, Kate, the rich and powerful Maxwell
Fair will in a day or two be buried under the contempt and scorn of
all good men. But, by the right of dying men, I claim that I may speak
to you. I am glad that you are leaving us. I wish to God that you had
never come. Among your many virtues you include courage. May I confide
in you? Ask your advice? Lean on you?”
Had he struck her, had he pressed on her a suit that bore dishonor on
its face, she could have met him, young and untutored in the arts of
life though she was. But when the great, calm, finished man to whom she
had looked up in an unspoken worship laid his hand pleadingly upon her
now, and those dear, merry lips of his quivered and almost failed
to shape his piteous cry that she should help him, it was with a
tremendous effort that she conquered the impulse to throw her arms
about his neck, and said calmly:
“Mr. Fair, this is scarcely kind of you. My God, how ill you look!
Forgive me, sir, if I am the unhappy cause of any of your present
suffering.”
“Kate,” he said at length, looking wistfully at her.
“Yes, Mr. Fair,” she replied, hushed and unable to protest further.
“Kate, you have been with us for two years,” he began, speaking very
low. “Little by little you grew into my life. The hungry yearning for
I knew not what, the restless madness, the sense of emptiness and of
despair, all that had turned my life into the aimless thing it was,
seemed to give place within me to a strange, new spirit of hope and
faith and comfort. And you, you, little woman, were the cause of that
wondrous change. As I saw you moving about the house so sweetly, as
I heard you singing the children to sleep, as I noted the difference
between you and the women who had made my world, I came slowly to
realize that you were all to me. Did I tell you this? Did I show it in
any way?”
“You were a gentleman,” replied Miss Mettleby, regaining control of
herself sufficiently to speak as she thought she should and no longer
as she wished. “And, anyhow, had you forgot your honor and my position
so far as to have spoken, you know that I would have left your roof at
once. Please, may I not go now?”
Her manner galled him as all that was not genuine did always, and he
was about to sneer at the phrase, “leave your roof,” but he at once
recognized that to her mind, in which truths were broad, general,
axiomatic propositions, and not complex and subtle many-sided phases
of propositions, there would be no halting ground between her present
attitude and actual dishonor. So he went on.
“No; please do not go yet. Good heavens! when I am done you will regret
your wish to leave me. Well then, I did not speak to you. I quite
ignored you, treated you like a servant. But it was from no sense of
honor, mark you; for I deny that honor, yours or mine, would have been
lost by speaking. Nor was it from a squeamish fear of the proprieties
and the conventionalities that I refrained, for I would brush the world
aside as so much stubble if it should stand between me and my right to
truth. No, Kate, it was not from the lofty principles which you imagine
to be God’s, nor from my foolish pride as an aristocrat—how could
you, even for a moment, think me so base? I remained silent because,
whether for good or ill, I have devoted all I am to an idea, a cause, a
purpose.”
As he spoke these last few words a number of conflicting thoughts
passed through Kate’s mind. With only the vaguest notion of his
meaning, jealousy shot a stinging, momentary, utterly illogical shaft
through her heart, which was followed by a profoundly feminine feeling
of injury in being thus coolly told that she would have been addressed
had not some paramount other interest absorbed his mind.
“Indeed?” she remarked, with what she thought was biting sarcasm, but
which a much less penetrating mind than Maxwell Fair’s would have at
once taken as an indication of jealousy and love. “And so you plume
yourself, do you, on considering your wife and children an idea, a
cause, a purpose, to which, for good or ill, you have made up your mind
to give all that you are? Heroic, I must say, and so unusual.”
“Governess! Sunday-school moralizer!” he jeered at her. “No, nor was
I deterred by that still more arrant humbug about ‘penniless and
dependent females’ that you learned from our past masters of humbug
and lachrymose moral biliousness, the great novelists. No, it was not
because you were a poor orphan girl in my employ, and, consequently,
incapable of defending yourself, that I refrained from speaking to
you. Rubbish! The cant of moral snobs! As if the virtue of poor girls
was made of weaker stuff than that of rich ones! My God, did I want
victims, I swear I would pursue them in drawing-rooms with more success
than in the servants’ hall.”
“I really cannot see what all this has to do with you and me,” coldly
remarked Miss Mettleby when he paused.
“You will see presently,” Fair answered, ignoring her freezing manner
and with rapidly growing intensity and feeling. “I remained silent. I
crucified my heart, denied my soul. But that night, Kate, when you and
I alone were clinging to the yacht and neither of us hoped to see the
sun again, I told you. It was my right. It was your right as well.”
“And, half dead as I was, I shamed you, sir, and called you what you
were by every law of God and man and honor,” she flung back at him with
a flush of remembered nobility very comforting in the light of more
recent less lofty thoughts.
“Yes,” replied Fair, with his old-time elevation and calmness, which
were a mainspring of his influence over her; “yes, the habits of a
lifetime cling to us, Kate, making us dare to lie upon the very edge
of death and coming judgment. I loved you, and I told you. You loved
me, and denied it. And we were both about to face eternity! Which of us
would have faced it with the cleaner heart?”
“Oh, don’t, don’t!” she cried, shrinking from him. “You know I cannot
argue with you. But I am sure that I was right, that I am right now.
Please let me go.”
“In a moment, in a moment,” he answered, grasping her two hands. “I
probably will never see you again, Kate—so let me now speak out. I
asked you to take three months to think it over, and promised you that
I would then give you the reasons for my strange conduct and beg of you
to face the world with me for our great love’s sake.”
“Yes,” she said, freeing her hands; “you said you would be able to
convince me that there was no dishonor in your love, no wrong in what
you would propose that we should do. Three months you gave me—three
months. Why, Mr. Fair, three minutes would be enough for me to reach
the only possible decision which you, an English gentleman, can ask a
young and unprotected English girl like me to make. But I was grateful
for your three months’ silence. If you could trust yourself, I am
compelled to own that I could not so trust myself. I love you—may God
forgive me, but I cannot help it! But your chivalrous respite of three
months has given me a grip upon myself. I do not fear myself. I do not
fear even you. I am to leave your house, never to see you again. And
some day you will thank me.”
There had been a wondrous new development of strength and beauty in her
as she spoke, and Fair had watched her with profoundest feeling.
“Kate, Kate, you wrong me, upon my honor!” he cried when she ceased.
“The promise that I made you was one that I could keep. There is a
mystery, an awful something in my life, that has through all these
years kept me so falsely true, that, being true to one great object
fixed on me by my fate, I’ve been compelled to seem what I am not to
all the world. To get you, Kate, to rest at last my broken heart upon
your love, I was this very night to break the self-imposed conditions
of my weird life-purpose. God! how I counted them, these long, slow
days, waiting for this one! An hour ago I still supposed that I could
fold you on my heart tonight and tell you everything! I thought that I
could say the word that would dispel your doubts and make you—you only
in the world see me as God does. But now I cannot. Be brave and hear
me, Kate,” he added, holding her arm, which was trembling under the
influence of his own great passion. “I am a criminal. I have done that
which must make you despise me, must drive me from the society of men,
and bring me to the gibbet.”
Forgetting all her previous moods, Miss Mettleby allowed the choking
man to lean against her as she cried. “You are ill. Take my arm—so.
And oh, believe me, that nothing that you imagine you have done,
nothing that you could do, can rob you of one poor and weak, but brave
and true girl’s friendship. Do let me call your wife. Yes, I will call
her—let me. And you must tell her. Tell her—her, not me.”
“Stop! Stop!” cried Fair, frantically holding the struggling girl, who
was making for the door; “and be quiet. Hear me. It’s all that I can
say, but it will show you, Kate, that, if I am a criminal, I mean you
no dishonor. You want to call my wife. _I have no wife!_ She is not——”
He was cut short by Baxter, who stood at the door at that moment and
announced, “Mr. Travers.” Travers entered smiling, and Fair, with a
completeness of mastery over his feelings which Kate could not believe
true, sang out: “Travers, old chap, glad to see you! What’s the good
word?”
Miss Mettleby slipped out of the library and ran up to her little room.
She knew that now it would be impossible to see him again that night,
as it would be late when the last guest had gone. Throwing herself on
her bed, she tried to make it all out. His crime—his saying that he
had no wife—the awful something in his life which, for her sake, he
was to have broken from that very night—what did it all mean?
She could grasp no idea out of the chaos long enough for it to
take shape in her mind. She drifted helplessly down the torrent of
tumultuous fears and hopes and hungers, knowing only one thing—that
she loved him, she loved him.