CHAPTER II
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.