CHAPTER I
WITH the smoking pistol still in his hand he stepped over the prostrate man and, grasping Mrs. Fair’s bare shoulder, shook her until she looked up.
“Quick! For God’s sake, Janet, get to your room!” he said, trying to make her comprehend what he meant, but she only stared at him vacantly, her white face filled with terror and her eyes fixed on the form on the floor—that of a man in evening dress, across whose wide shirt front a streak of blood was widening.
“Why did he come here?” she asked, hiding the sickening sight with her hands before her eyes. “He swore he would not. This is horrible!”
“Come, Janet, come,” remonstrated Fair, seizing her again. “It’s past seven, and they will be here presently. My God, can’t you see what this means? He’s dead!”
“Oh, don’t, don’t,” she cried, shuddering as if the truth burned her brain. “Ugh! See!” she gasped as she caught sight of a splash of red on her gown.
“Yes, and you stand here! Are you mad?” muttered Fair, pushing her to the door. “Go, now, and change—and be careful what you do with that dress. Hark! There’s the bell now. Remember, until they go, you must betray no feeling. Are you great enough to do this? You won’t fail me?”
“Anything, Maxwell, for your sake—but you—what will you do with—that?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at the thing as if it fascinated her.
“Leave everything to me,” he answered, pulling her chin around so that she could not see. “I assume all. Remember, girl, it was I, do you understand? Go!”
When he had finally closed the door upon her, he gave way to his agony—but only for a moment. With a quietness and rapidity that seemed to astonish even himself he placed the pistol upon the library-table, locked both of the doors, drew the heavy red velvet curtains across the window and, bending over the fallen man, critically examined him.
Satisfied that life was extinct, he pulled the body over to the fireplace, beside which, at right angles to the side of the room, there stood a large Italian chest with a very high carved back. Into this chest Fair lifted the limp body of the man and thoughtfully placed a number of heavy books and magazines upon it. Then carefully glancing about the room and noticing no evidences of the crime, he sat down, wiped his brow, and closing his eyes, tried to let the stupendous facts of the last five minutes become realities to his mind—to formulate some practical line of action in the future which those five minutes had so fatally revolutionized.
The way that he started at a respectful tap at the library door showed him what a terribly changed man he already was, and it was with a petulant, unnatural voice that he shouted: “Well? That you, Baxter?”
“A man, sir, who insists upon seeing you, sir,” answered Baxter, Fair’s old butler, whom he had inherited with the estates and furniture, felt grateful to as a faithful servant, and tolerated as an incompetent old bore.
“Tell him to go to the devil, with my compliments, and to come to my office if he really has business with me!” thundered Fair, not at all like himself.
Baxter shook his head as he said: “Very good, sir,” and toddled downstairs, putting two and two together as servants will in the best regulated families.
The furniture seemed to be all out of place, so Fair pulled it this way and that, but wherever he placed it, it still seemed, to his mind, to show that a scuffle had taken place. After abandoning the idea of getting it to look right, he devoted his anxious attention to his own appearance, which, although his faultless evening attire was immaculate and his thin, brown hair, with a touch of gray, was smooth and precise, seemed to him to betray the fact that he had passed through a scene of some sort. Giving up the effort to discover just what was wrong, he unlocked the doors, drew his chair to the table and toyed with a pen and some sheets of paper on which he began several times to write.
“Maxwell Fair, old chap,” he said to himself, looking up at the ceiling, “this is pretty well near the end—but it’s all in the day’s work.”
Then he dashed off two telegrams and rang the bell, which Baxter promptly answered, having been standing at the door. “Did you ring, sir?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Fair. “Here, see that these two telegrams are sent immediately—but wait. Baxter, a gentleman called about twenty minutes ago. Did you let him in?”
He watched the old man’s face closely as he replied: “Yes, sir. A dark, foreign-looking gentleman, sir.”
“Yes,” went on Fair, picking up the evening paper carelessly and speaking with great indifference; “he is in my study. Just fetch his coat and hat here, will you? And, by the way, did any of the other servants see him?”
“The gentleman said he was an old friend of my lady’s—and none of the other servants saw him, sir. Aren’t you well, sir? I hope that nothing has occurred, sir,” answered Baxter, with an old servant’s liberty.
“No,” snapped Fair, with irritation, but going on more in his usual way. “Now look sharp and fetch the gentleman’s coat. A very old friend of Mrs. Fair’s. What was the other chap like—the one who wished to see me?”
“Oh, him, sir,” replied Baxter, with a servant’s contempt for callers of his own class in society, “he were a quiet-spoken, ordinary sort of party, sir, as said he come from Scotland Yard.”
Fair was too well in hand by this time to wince as he heard this bit of disturbing coincidence, but he said to himself: “My word, they are prompt—but, damn it, they can’t have known!” Then, happening to look up and seeing the old butler, “What are you waiting for?”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” gently began Baxter, shuffling nearer to Fair, “but, Mr. Fair, sir—Master Maxwell—you’ll forgive an old servant that served your father and grandfather before you, sir. There ain’t no trouble like, or anythink a-hangin’ over us, is there, sir? One of the parlormaids thought that she heard a shot, sir—and——”
“Oh, yes,” quickly responded Fair, with a laugh, “I was cleaning this old pistol and it went off. Get on now. Trouble? Why, look at me, Baxter. I’m the luckiest dog in the world. I have just made another fortune.”
“Thank God for that, sir,” quietly replied old Baxter, moving toward the door, at which he turned and said, “The gentleman will be dining, of course?”
“No, he can’t stop. In fact, he wishes to leave the house unobserved by our guests when we are at dinner—so fetch his hat and coat,” said Fair, again settling down to his evening paper.
“I was forgetting, sir,” once more the querulous old voice began, “that Miss Mettleby said that the children are coming to say good night——”
“The children?” exclaimed Fair, caught off his guard. “No—good God, no!—that is, I mean I shall be engaged. Tell Miss Mettleby so. Be off.”
With suspicions now thoroughly aroused and full of misgivings Baxter did as he was bid, and his master jerked the paper open again and slapped at the crease to make the sheet flat. But his eyes wandered aimlessly.
“The children—gad! I had forgotten them,” he muttered as he thought with horror what this all meant to them. Time after time he tried to read the leading article which was about his own brilliant achievement, but with a mad spasm he crumpled the newspaper into a ball and flung it across the great room, exclaiming, “Why didn’t the infernal blackguard know when he was well off?”
“The gentleman’s coat and hat, sir,” said Baxter, coming in annoyingly.
“Very well—now go,” retorted Fair peevishly. “Ask Mr. Travers to come up here the moment he arrives. Here, here—you are forgetting the telegrams. You seem to forget everything lately. You are too careless.”
“So I am, so I am,” quavered the poor old beggar, with tears in his voice. “I shall soon be of very little service, sir.”
“Nonsense,” answered Fair, touched by the old fellow’s feeling. “You have twenty years of good work before you. But, I say, Baxter, I forgot to tell you—we are leaving town tomorrow morning. Discharge all of the servants tonight. Hear me? All of them—tonight.”
“Tonight, sir?” exclaimed Baxter, dropping his little silver card-tray. “They will be expecting a month’s notice, sir.”
“That means a month’s pay, I suppose,” answered Fair sharply. “Give them a year’s pay, if you like—but get them out of the house tomorrow morning before nine o’clock. You see, I have sold the house, and the new owner takes possession at ten. You understand me? We shall, of course, take you and Anita with us—to the continent, you know.”
“I hear, sir,” replied Baxter, adding, after a dazed and groping moment, “some of them have been in our family’s service for twenty years. That is a long time, sir, and they will think it hard to be——”
“By Jove, that’s so!” exclaimed Fair, pacing up and down with a growing sense of disgust and rage at having to cramp his future into the ignominious bondage of a desperate situation. “No, I can’t turn them away. Tell them that I shall instruct my solicitor to provide for them for life—yes, tell them that. Come here, Baxter,” he went on, rapidly losing control of himself and pathetically stretching his hands out as if to grasp the love and sympathy of someone; “I haven’t been a hard master, have I? No. And when the end comes, you won’t turn against me? I—I—I—oh, damn it, clear out of here, won’t you?”
“Why, my dear young master, whatever ails you, sir?” cried the old butler, grasping the hand that Fair waved to him. “If you did but know how we all love you, sir, perhaps you would——”
“Do you? Do you?” broke in Fair feverishly. “That’s right, too. But, Baxter, things have gone wrong, and in a few hours I may need all the love that you or anybody else will give me. Get out of here, can’t you?”
Baxter threw his arms about the young man’s neck. “Come what may, sir, there shall not be found a better friend than your poor old servant.” And then, holding the lapels of Fair’s coat, he added, with much embarrassment and tenderness, “And, sir, if I might make so bold—I have close on a thousand pounds in the funds, and every penny——”
“Every penny is mine, you were going to say?” interrupted Fair, smiling even in his despair at the old man’s estimate of his needs. “Thanks, thanks, old comrade; but no amount of money can stave off the blue devils at times, you know. You knew my fathers, Baxter. They were a race of damned fools who were ready at a moment’s notice to lose everything for an idea! I am their son—I am their heir—and the damnedest fool of the lot.”
As he said this Fair raised his head with a look so defiant, so full of an almost supernatural exaltation, so nearly that which shines in the eye of the victim of a fixed idea or of a fatal hallucination that Baxter, who was not expert at psychological analysis, felt a vague misgiving that his eccentric young master had suddenly gone off his head.
And one more penetrating than old Baxter would have been amazed at the change which had come over the expression of the agitated man. The look of horror and disgust and consternation was gone, and in its place had come the fire of enthusiasm, the sublime uplift of the martyr, the terrifying concentration of some irrational, uncalculating, final idée fixe.
“See who that is,” he said to the butler when a knock was heard.
“It is Miss Mettleby, sir,” replied Baxter from the door.
“Oh, come in, come in,” called out Fair with unaccountable eagerness.