“No, hang it, Fair,” answered Travers, coming back from the door and confronting Fair, “you know that I will not leave you; but why must you ask Allyne and me to learn all this—when we could otherwise swear to the fact of your being what we have always known you to be—yes, know you to be now—for, by gad, you can’t get me to believe you.”
“Hang the swearing,” said Allyne, trying to laugh. “If they get me on the witness stand, I’ll let them know what I think of greasy foreigners, and my views as to sending them where they belong. Go on, Fair, and tell us what they did next.”
“Then sit down, Travers, and hear me out,” replied Fair, filling the three glasses and regaining an air of quiet.
“Blaze away,” answered Travers, dropping into a chair with resignation. “At the bottom of a hole one can’t fall lower—so go on.”
“Have a drink, both of you, and we’ll get on,” said Fair, and all three sipped their drink in silence for some minutes. Then Fair said:
“Many years ago the noble woman whom you know as Mrs. Fair was married to the wretched man whom I killed yesterday. She afterward discovered that he had a living wife, and she, of course, therefore, found herself a nameless outcast. She appealed to me, and for two reasons I offered her the protection of my name. I had loved her some years before, and I inherited from my fathers a sort of morbid craving to sacrifice my life to a cause or purpose which the reason and the prudence of all normally minded men would discountenance.”
“Surely wedding such a glorious woman as Mrs. Fair was scarcely what one could look at as a sacrifice of one’s life,” protested Travers when Fair paused for a moment.
“She is indeed a queen, a priceless woman,” murmured Fair quietly, “but her children are not my children—she never became my wife. She has been a sacred vocation to me, and while men envied me the love of such a wife, I was really living the life of a celibate because of a mad, but inexorable, fixed idea. You fail to understand this? So do I. I only know that nothing in heaven or earth could have deterred me from assuming the position in which I have lived so long. This may be madness—but it is of the very essence of my being. And then I came to love another woman—and you may imagine what I suffered. But there was a satisfaction in it all which, of course, you men will be unable to comprehend. But, see the irony of fate. The only thing that made life possible has been dashed away from me. I lived supported by the thought that Janet and her children were saved from shame by my effacement, and now I must proclaim that they are not my flesh and blood, to shield them from the disgrace of being thought a murderer’s kin. Isn’t it horrible? But it is only fate’s swift way of damning me for what I had just been so weak as to decide to do. I was about to let my love—the gnawing hunger of a real life—have way. I had decided, on this very day, to proclaim my love for— Fellows, for God’s sake, never go back upon your destiny even if, as in my case, it should mean lifelong torture. After all, there may not be a hell after death, for there’s one on this side of the grave—and I am in it.”
He dropped his head on the edge of the table. Allyne, whose heart was like a child’s, could bear the sight of his agony no longer, and walked to the end of the room. Travers came over to Fair’s side and laid his hand on his head.
“This is the most stupendous thing I ever heard of, Fair,” he said; “and if there is such a thing as justice, you shall not suffer.”