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.
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.