To all New York, to all at least that counts, which numerically is not enormous, she had been hostess that night. Only Effingham had been absent. At thought of him a dizziness seized her, and as Duncan lit and looked, silently she crumpled. In that ornate and brilliant room she fell to the floor, her arms outstretched. It was as though death had touched her. She was ashen.
Duncan started. Old, cynical, astute, he loved her. Except for his millions, she was all he had. But now, before he could reach her, she turned, moaned. In a moment, assisted by him, she got to her knees, then to her feet.
“I’ll send for Sturgis,” he told her.
A hand to her head, she shook it, moved away.
“But Kate! You have never fainted before. You must see a doctor.”
She had reached the door. “No, I’ll go to bed. I suppose I am tired.”
But she spoke without conviction. Duncan followed her to the wide tapestry-hung hall, saw her to the lift. Then, entering the library, he took up the telephone, called for the physician, got him, asked him to come.
Barring Poor’s Manual and the Financial Chronicle, the library was bookless. Yet not otherwise empty. The furniture and woodwork had come from the Grand Canal. One great chair was dogian. Before it, on a vast table was a winged figure, a Mercury, the work of Benvenuto Cellini, that bandit who had the hands of a fairy. It was not priceless, since Duncan had bought it, but it was in keeping with the rest of this house which gave on upper Fifth Avenue.
Now, it was not the Mercury that occupied him, but his daughter. Since childhood and its multitudinous ills, always he had seen her active, ardent, alert, the picture of health and beauty. And yet, two minutes since, after an evening not more tiresome than any other, she had fainted. For the moment he could but hope that she was not in for anything serious.
The year before she had come out. At once there were aspirants. Among others, Jack Scarlet, a young man abominably good-looking, but with nothing else to his credit and no credit elsewhere.
“No man can have my daughter, with my consent, unless he can support her,” Duncan had told him, at which, Scarlet, after securing a berth in Wall Street, had returned to the charge. But Kate, who had laughed and danced with him, apparently wished to do nothing but that.
Meanwhile Solférino had put his modern, entirely authentic and equally nonexistent principality at her feet. Hohenzolras had asked that she share with him the title of Serene Highness. Finsbury had offered the strawberry leaves.
In each instance the girl had laughed and refused. “I don’t want to be duchess, I don’t want to be princess,” she told her father. “I want to be happy.”
“That is the most selfish wish in the world,” Duncan replied.
But the point of view pleased him. With his endless millions he had acquired the interior of palaces, the gems of galleries, the manuscripts of seers. Though a financier, he had taste and he had flair. But crowns and coronets he did not regard as assets, and what assets were he knew. What is more notable, everybody knew that he knew. In the old boom days a tip from him was a fortune, and so clearly that when Scarlet secured the berth in Wall Street, he got it by whispering, confidentially of course, that as Duncan’s future son-in-law he would be provided and amply with just such tips.
Duncan, who knew all that was going on and a good deal that was not, learned of the trick. The effrontery of it amused him. But it hardly heightened the young man in his esteem.
Now, as he sat in the library, he pressed a button. A footman appeared.
“Dr. Sturgis will be here in a moment. When he comes, take him to Miss Duncan and say with my compliments that I would like a word with him before he goes.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Duncan was again alone, but his thoughts were many. He had scented that the time to buy had come. Stocks, after their long agony, might go lower. But he never tried to get in at the bottom, precisely as he never waited to unload at the top. Presently stocks would, he felt, be selling at double their present quotations and his instinct regarding them was due to a prescience that had enabled him to foresee in a harlequinade at Washington, the panic, rebound and slump that ensued. He had been a bear ever since. Now that everything was at its blackest, he saw the light.
“Dr. Sturgis, sir,” the footman announced.
Duncan, without rising, nodded. “Nothing wrong upstairs, eh?”
The confessor of all New York—of all, that is, that counts—Dr. Sturgis had a pointed beard and a manner which if not ecclesiastic was at least sedate.
“Nothing abnormal,” he replied.
Duncan smiled. He had hoped as much. “And what did you prescribe?”
Sturgis plucked at his beard. “There is no need for any prescription—at present.”
“At present!” Duncan surprisedly repeated.
Sturgis turned. “Good night, Mr. Duncan.”
The hall engulfed him. It was long and wide. Before he reached the outer door, Duncan was telephoning to Kate.
In her stead, a maid answered. Miss Duncan had gone to bed.
But though the girl had gone to bed, she had not gone to sleep. Sleep, latterly, had been long in coming. Not until morning would it take her, lull her, free her from herself, from the knowledge of that which was and of that which was to be.
At Newport, that summer, love had swum into her life. Hitherto she had but laughed and danced while awaiting the heart’s desire which happiness is and which then Effingham had brought her.
Effingham was a widower with no tombstone to show. His wife, dead to him, to the world and to herself, was insane. But the fact had little weight with Kate,
