A Business Man

In the ornate and brilliant room, when the songbirds had flown, the musicians had departed and the last guest had gone, Duncan dropped into a chair, lit a cigar and looked at his daughter⁠—a slim, low-breasted beauty.

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, and prudence as much meaning as it has for children and for gods. There might have been a hundred Mrs. Effinghams. Love in swimming into her heart swept every other consideration away. Now and again in thinking of it all, she recalled a picture which she had somewhere seen. Entitled Le Vertige, it showed men and women in a ballroom, and behind a slender screen, two others embracing. Their vertige had been hers⁠—and his. Only⁠—some day, the screen must fall away.

Now, on this night, after Sturgis had appeared, questioned and gone, she saw another picture, one that had come to her just before she had fainted, the vision of a man with the face of a soldier and the eyes of a poet, that irresistible compound of the resolute and the magnetic which was Effingham’s.

Then her father had telephoned. The picture faded, another surged⁠—an engraving in a Victorian novel which represented an old man standing on a threshold and bidding a huddling girl begone!

Meanwhile, below, in the bookless library, her father sat. He too had his pictures. Kate’s mother who had died long since. Kate as a child, Kate as a young girl, Kate as a debutante, Kate dismissing Scarlet, Kate renouncing coronets, Kate refusing the strawberry leaves, Kate wanting only to be happy. There were these. There were others. In particular, a Newport vista in which together stood Kate and Effingham. Now the silent collapse, the ambiguousness of Sturgis and at once with that insight which had made Duncan what he was, he knew. The front door had not closed on Sturgis before he saw it all.

Passionless as algebra, devoid of nerves, accustomed in any crisis to think and to act, he rang, gave directions, had himself lifted to his rooms, from which, the next morning, mentally armed, he descended to the library again.

Always in Wall Street before the opening, he had intended on this morning to be there earlier still. There were brokers to be summoned, orders to be given, details to be arranged. Instead of which, telephoning to his office that he might not be down that day, he sent for Kate.

When presently, languid and lovely in a honey-colored gown, she appeared, he got up, motioned to the chair in which a doge had throned, closed the door, took another seat, looked at the girl and smiled.

“How did you sleep?”

Kate, settling herself, answered absently: “Fairly well, father. And you?”

“Oh, as usual. Now I want to have a talk with you.”

Kate who had been looking down, looked up. “About what, father?”

“About myself, of course. What do people ever want to talk about? But incidentally a little too about you. Now Kate, things have not been going very well lately, have they?”

Kate flushed. “In what way do you mean?”

“I mean that when things do not go well, ignorant people always blame someone else, sensible people blame themselves and wise people blame nobody. A wise man knows that whatever happens, happens because it had to happen and because it could not happen otherwise. Do you follow me?”

Confusedly Kate sat back. “Yes⁠—no. I mean not quite.”

Duncan nodded at her. “I will put it more clearly then. We all make mistakes. You may have also made them. In that case I shall not blame you. On the contrary. The only punishment a father should inflict is forgiveness.”

Kate turned uneasily. Was it possible, she wondered, that he knew⁠—and already! “But punishment for what?” she got out.

“Well⁠—for remaining single. Now I want you to marry and to marry Scarlet. Will you?”

Kate straightened. “Certainly not.”

“It will be a bit awkward then. It will mean going abroad and for the moment I had other plans.”

Kate now was crimson. She knew he knew. In miserable protest she half-raised a hand. “But⁠—”

“Oh,” he got in. “I know you don’t care for Scarlet. He is a damned scoundrel. It is for that reason I selected him.”

“But⁠—”

“Precisely. He will treat you badly. You can leave him. I will get you a divorce and afterward it may be that you will meet someone with whom you can be happy and for me at least it is not selfish to want you to be that.”

“But⁠—”

“There! I understand how you feel. Leave it all to me. I am a business man. But in every business man’s stock-in-trade there is, or ought to be, honesty and my honesty in regard to you will surprise Scarlet. But he is blackguard enough to thank his stars for even that opportunity of getting a quid pro quo in cash.”

Kate had shriveled. Pay a man to marry me! she tormentedly thought. But before she could protest again, nervously she started.

At the door a tap had come, low and discreet, and a footman appeared with a card on a tray which he brought to Duncan.

Duncan took the card, looked at it, looked again and from it looked at the footman.

“Where is he?”

“In the drawing room, sir.”

Duncan turned to Kate. “Poor’s Manual is at your elbow. It is one of the most diverting books ever printed. You might occupy yourself with it until I return.”

As he spoke, he got up, followed the servant, crossed the wide tapestried hall and entered the ornate, but now less brilliant room, in the center of which stood Effingham.

In similar circumstances there are fathers who would have reviled him, struck him, thrown him from the house. In places less ornate, he might have been cowhided, strangled, shot.

Duncan asked him to be seated. But the asking was accompanied by a look which was chill and pointed as a rapier.

With unswerving eyes, that look Effingham returned. “Mr. Duncan, I am sorry to trouble you. In coming here I asked for Miss Duncan. I was told she was engaged.”

Duncan nodded. “Well, what of it?”

For a second Effingham considered the question. Then out the answer came. “Mr. Duncan, I am here to ask your daughter⁠—”

Instantly Duncan got it. But what he said was: “We are not in Salt Lake.”

Effingham made a gesture. “Forgive me. I should have told you. Mrs. Effingham died yesterday. Though in her condition she has been dead so long that⁠—”

On with it he rambled. Duncan had ceased to hear, ceased rather to listen. The large fact occupied him. It overshadowed Scarlet, Europe as well, besides being just the thing. Mentally he waved it. But he said and simply enough: “And you want my daughter, is that it?”

Effingham bowed. “A year’s delay is usual I know, but in the circumstances⁠—”

Duncan, hastily swallowing something, caught him up. “Am I to understand that my daughter has already encouraged you?”

It was but a sprat for a mackerel, which at once Effingham produced.

“Not at all, sir. On the contrary. Moreover I have not been in a position to expect encouragement. But I had thought that with a divorce⁠—one which death has unexpectedly granted⁠—I might ask.”

You are a cool customer, Duncan thought. Yet the decency of it appeased him. “Well?” he threw out.

“I believe you knew my father,” Effingham resumed.

But that was coals to Newcastle. Duncan had not only known him, he knew practically to a dime how much he had left.

“I am quite able to support your daughter,” Effingham continued. “If⁠—”

There shall be no ifs, Duncan decided. But he said: “There is an if in everything. My daughter has refused many offers, some perhaps more advantageous than yours. But I do not believe in interference.”

“I have your consent then?”

Duncan stood up, took out his watch, looked at it, put it back and looked at Effingham.

“You will find my daughter in the library. But I have to go. It is after the opening and I am a business man.”