Chapter X

The voices that had frightened Mrs. March off were those of Sir Nelson and Maxwell Fair, who now came round the corner of the tower, with heads bowed in very earnest talk. The elder man had been the most intimate friend of the younger man’s father, and on the death of the latter Sir Nelson had assumed an informal guardianship of the erratic and wilful son. But while others were disappointed and baffled during the earlier years of Maxwell Fair’s manhood, Sir Nelson Poynter swore by him and predicted that all would be well in time. Fully had Maxwell Fair’s more recent career justified the confidence of his father’s old friend.

It was with the shock of surprise, as well as the natural sorrow of a friend, that Sir Nelson had just been hearing Fair speak in indefinite terms of some impending catastrophe that was to terminate in blight his brilliant and successful life.

“By Jove, my boy,” Sir Nelson was saying as they reached the terrace and began pacing up and down, “it distresses me unspeakably to hear your father’s son talking in this way. Of course, I shall do all I can—whatever you may ask of me—but don’t you think that you should make a clean breast of everything? It is nothing new to see a Fair acting from some high, compelling motive, which strikes us ordinary men as quixotic, but your fathers always did whatever they did in the open. They may have been enthusiasts and unpractical crusaders, but nobody could complain that they fought under a mask. Their object may sometimes have seemed chimerical, but in the struggle to reach it they wore their coat-of-arms where men could see it, and proclaimed their principles with trumpet blasts. Out with it, man! What in God’s name is it all?”

“I thank you, Sir Nelson,” quietly replied Fair, taking up his argument and appeal at the point where Sir Nelson had interrupted him. “You have relieved my mind by consenting to act as my executor. You will, I think, find my affairs in tolerably good order. Everything goes to Miss Mettleby—everything, so there will be little to do in the way of settlement.”

“To Miss Mettleby?” exclaimed Sir Nelson, confronting Fair with perfect consternation and disapproval. “To Miss Mettleby, you say? She is your children’s governess, is she not? My God, boy, there has been no—your wife and children, you know! What will be thought of this?”

“I have settled five hundred thousand pounds on Mrs. Fair and the children—long ago, as I think you know, so I can leave the rest to Miss Mettleby with justice and propriety,” answered Fair calmly.

“What if you have?” cried out Sir Nelson, growing vexed at the fellow’s amazing stubbornness and lack of decency, as he thought. “What if you have settled a considerable sum on your family? Do you suppose you can leave the bulk of your estate to a dependent girl, a young woman in your employ, without causing no end of evil surmises and comment reflecting on your memory—yes, and the young person’s honor? What can you mean by such a mad determination? Come, be reasonable, I beg of you. Make a suitable provision for this girl, if you think it due her for her faithful service in your family, but, for heaven’s sake, don’t leave the poor child a legacy of defamation, as you most certainly will, if you persist in carrying out such a preposterous course.”

“By the time that you come to settle my estate, sir, I shall have become an object too contemptible for even malice to stoop to notice,” replied Fair, poking his stick into the gravel and giving his words the tone that meant that he had thought out all the objections which his old friend had raised.

They walked back and forth once or twice before Sir Nelson responded with a laugh, which he tried to make genuine: “My word, what arrant nonsense we have been talking anyhow! Settling your estate, eh? Why, bless us all, I shall have been under the chancel stones twenty years before you retire from business to begin to enjoy middle age in the country. Come, come, dear fellow, pull yourself together, do!”

“Ah, my best of friends,” answered Fair, with a voice full of sincerest love and respect, but also of firmness and stem determination. “You ought to know my father’s son better than to suppose that anything can swerve me from a purpose once it has become a fixed idea—but,” he added, suddenly turning to the old man with great tenderness, “by all that is rational, I do suppose that it is unfair to keep you in the dark in this way. I think that I should tell you plainly what is in my heart.”

“Depend upon it, Maxwell, it will be best for both of us if you will tell me fully and honestly—everything,” eagerly returned Sir Nelson, slapping Fair on the back in that hearty, old-fashioned way of his. “Come, now, what the devil ails you?”

“Well, then, sir,” said Fair, taking Sir Nelson’s arm and pushing him back toward the seat, “sit down while I tell you—I am too nervous to do so.”

The old man sat as he was requested, and watched his young friend as he walked up and down before him, formulating his ideas in order to present them clearly and consecutively. It was some time before Fair had so far shaped his thoughts as to be willing to speak. But when he had done so he stopped on his next turn in front of Sir Nelson and said very quietly:

“Now I am ready. In carrying out the one compelling and absorbing purpose of my life I have been made the most wretched and most misunderstood of men. I have sternly brushed aside love, hope, joy—everything which means life to a passionate and intense nature like my own. But this is an old story. I had come to think that the dwarfing and cramping restraints of my self-imposed life-work were second nature—more, that the life I was leading was the only life possible to me. I would have died fighting for the triumph of my idea—they would have found my body in the last trench after the battle was done, and nobody had been the wiser, no one would ever have known what a falsely-true life had been mine, had not this last horrible sacrifice been required by the insatiable purpose which has sucked away my life.

“I had asked for nothing from fate, but the right to live and die with my secret unbetrayed. I had begged of God nothing more than that I be suffered to seal with my death the loyalty to poor Janet that I had striven to make of my whole life. But no. Even this beggarly scrap of comfort has been denied to me—and by the most unspeakable irony of fate, I find myself confronted with the damnable necessity of throwing away all these dumb years of denial and self-effacement in order to do Janet and the children the only service which still remains possible for me to do. Is it not horrible, Sir Nelson? I had thought to make my life of some little good by offering it to protect a woman and her children—and now, lest they be buried by my own ruin, I must undo everything that I have done during all these years.”

He paused and looked at his old friend, who showed a growing concern that indicated he began really to believe Fair had lost his reason.

“Sir Nelson, I see that you do not comprehend me—perhaps I am beginning at the wrong end. Yes, I am, of course. Let me give you some concrete facts before asking you to follow me. Well, then, I tell you that I, your old friend’s son, the man whom you have helped and watched over, as if I were your son—I, Sir Nelson, have committed a crime against society, against nature, against life!”

“Crime?” exclaimed the old Baronet, springing to his feet and grasping Fair’s hand, thoroughly convinced that he was acting under some mental and nervous excitement that had proved too much for his reason. “Crime? Good God, boy, you are mad! I can’t believe this—I do not believe it!”

“Wait, wait,” pleaded Fair, again forcing Sir Nelson to the seat, and trying to speak with the utmost composure. “Do not misunderstand me, sir. If I had told you that I had wilfully and deliberately violated my conscience or done some blackguardly thing, I should hope that nothing would induce you to believe me. I have done this awful thing, of which I now confess that I am guilty, with a clean heart—if you can understand me. Society must and assuredly will wreak its sudden and fatal vengeance upon me for my crime, but I want you, sir, to believe that when men are reviling me for my act I shall be flinging that very deed at the feet of my eternal Judge and asking Him to accept it in atonement for my blackest faults—and if God fails to accept this thing that I have done, then am I damned indeed forever. But you do not understand me?”

“On my word, I do not!” answered Sir Nelson, filled with very serious misgivings. “You are ill—dangerously ill.”

“On the contrary,” replied Fair spiritedly, “I was never better in my life. My mind was never so clear as it is at this moment. Listen, Sir Nelson. When this crime is made public—which will be tomorrow in all likelihood—I want you to shield Mrs. Fair and the children by announcing that Janet is not my wife, that I never married her—and that the poor children are not my children at all. Do this—it is the truth—and save innocent beings from the disgrace of being thought to be my flesh and blood.”

In spite of his efforts during this speech, Fair had yielded to the intoxication of his sublime grief, and when he ceased speaking he was holding the old man’s hand and the tears were streaming down his face.

“I sha’n’t put up with this,” declared Sir Nelson with much sternness, rising like a very determined man. “I shall have Sir Porter Hope down by special train at once. You are bad, on my honor, very bad indeed.”

“Spare Sir Porter Hope an unnecessary journey,” answered Fair, having regained control of himself. He went on laughingly: “I tell you, I am perfectly well. Have you a cigar? Thanks.”

He lighted the cigar, which poor old Sir Nelson was only too eager to give him as an evidence that the fellow was not totally mad, and with great deliberation puffed it slowly and carelessly, making rings of the smoke and praising the quality of the tobacco. Not until he had got him back to calmness and some measure of reassurance did he permit Sir Nelson to resume the discussion of the question which both of them felt was the last one they would ever discuss—the final question of Fair’s complex and much agonized life.

“But in heaven’s name,” began Sir Nelson, pulling Fair down on the seat beside himself, “what is the meaning of all this? Think what rubbish you have been asking me to believe. Janet not your wife? The children not your children? You don’t want me to believe this! You don’t ask me to believe that Janet is your——”

“No!” roared Fair, jumping up and with so much warmth that Sir Nelson was frightened; “no!—and don’t say the word either! On my honor as a gentleman, I tell you, sir, that no daughter in her father’s house, no sister under her brother’s roof, was ever safer, purer, more sacredly held than Janet has been under mine. Her children have had more than a father’s care and love from me, and it is only to save them all from the disgrace and odium which will attach henceforth to my name that I now ask you to proclaim the truth—to publish the fact that my polluting blood does not run in their veins.”

“But,” protested the Baronet, with manifest disgust and irritation, “what can be the explanation of this amazing state of affairs? If she is not your wife—and not——”

“Don’t say it!” again commanded Fair. “I tell you, sir, I am not in a mood to be exasperated just now—and the very word would madden me when I think of what that woman has been to me and I to her.”

Sir Nelson always afterward remembered how noble and elated by an almost supernatural uplift Fair had appeared as he stood there, warning him not to profane the tabernacled secret of his life. The old man’s heart went out to the tortured and defiant fellow.

“Never fear, dear boy,” he began with a feeble voice; “I shall not speak or think it of her. But you ought to help me to speak the truth of all this madness by telling me just what it is.”

Fair was deeply moved by his old friend’s sorrow and unwonted display of feeling, so he sat down by him and warmly shook his hand. After a few moments of quiet, he said in low, firm, deliberate tones:

“Sir Nelson, pardon my weakness in showing you my heart just now, but the fact is, sir, that I have been under a strain—and on that one point I have always been naturally sensitive. I owe you an apology also for delaying to advise you fully and without emotion of the exact situation in which I now find myself inextricably placed. Let me tell you the whole story. It will seem incredible to you—until you recollect that I am the son of my father and that my heritage was what you alone know that it was.”

Sir Nelson blew his nose, and finding nothing particular to say, blew it again; and Fair saw something over the terrace wall that took his attention until the dear old chap said with considerable heartiness in his voice again: “All ready, dear boy—forgive an old fellow—who loves you.

“I first met Janet in Rio Janeiro, at which port her father was British Consul, and I was happily able to take the unfortunate gentleman for a long cruise on my yacht when his health broke down. He died on the yacht and we buried him at sea. Janet returned to England, and, although I loved her madly, I did not speak, because that wretched Buda-Pesth escapade of mine was still unsettled. So I completely lost sight of Janet and the years passed.

“Six years ago I was in a small South American seaport acting as consul for Jack Trowbridge, who was down with yellow fever. One day when I was lazily killing time—and big flies—in the dusty, stuffy little consulate, Janet, whom I, of course, thought in England, and whom I had not seen for so long, came in.

“She was a wreck. She had a boy of two or three years clinging to her skirts and a child in her arms. You may imagine, sir, my awful shock on seeing her thus. Her story was short. She had married a Cuban planter of very large fortune in Jamaica, and after two years of suspicion and dread and suffering she had learned that the scoundrel had deceived her, that he had a wife living in Cuba, and that, in consequence, she had no legal or other claim upon him. She was penniless. Hearing that I was cruising in those parts, she learned through the British consuls at different places just where I then was, and she turned to me. I made investigation and found the damnable story told her by her supposed husband only too true. His wife in Cuba was his only lawful wife—and Janet was a nameless and helpless victim of his lust and perfidy. I cabled for my yacht, which was being renovated at New York, and soon had Janet and her two children on their way to England.

“I scarcely saw them during the long and bitterly sad voyage, but at night, as I stood at my trick at the wheel, and in the warm, dull days as I sat smoking in silence on deck, a thought grew and grew upon me. The little boat tossing about on the limitless waste of waters seemed to become the symbol of my aimless, drifting, worthless life. And then, one glorious tropical night, with the great stars burning sublimity and eternity into my heart, the blood of all my fathers seemed to rush hot and quick and insistent through all my being. I had it! I had at last found the Purpose, the Object, the Aim for which my life yearned, the Thing in waiting, for which all the common interests and passions of young men had failed to hold me, the One Thing, which, by absorbing my life, by becoming my way of defying and despising the world, would prove me my father’s son.

“The next day I told Janet. We were standing alone looking out over the sea—and to both of us it seemed that the sea and life and eternity were alike trackless and tending nowhither. I told her, Sir Nelson, that she should not land in England the outcast, nameless victim of a blackguard’s infamy, but as my proclaimed wife. Her children would never know that they were fatherless. I had been away from home so long that I could get myself believed when I returned with a wife and family—and the world would never know that I was a wretched man cut off by a vow like a monk’s vow from the joys and the heart of life. That is all, Sir Nelson; that is all.”

“All! All!” exclaimed Sir Nelson, grasping Fair’s hand and wringing it hotly. “My God, man, I never heard of anything quite so great! My word, sir, if you were not Tom Fair’s son, I could not believe such a sacrifice of one’s life possible!”

“It is never difficult to do what one’s nature demands,” replied Fair quietly, adding with less calmness: “But it is hard to see that all these years of work are to come to naught. My life has been wasted.”

“Not at all,” retorted the old man eagerly. “Crime? Crime, you say. By gad, boy, I’ll make you prove yourself guilty in a court of law—and if you do, then we will all know that you are off your head!”

“The proofs of my guilt will not be far to seek,” answered Fair, with a disheartening coolness and an air of ghoulish certainty.

(To be continued.)