“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.”