Then Linden Fells became transformed.
From the home of a recluse who used it only as a place of refuge while he awaited permission to return to his own country, it was turned into an open house of entertainment, for the Dantons liked to “sling things.”
Mrs. Danton was a beautiful woman of middle age, who still looked thirty—scarcely older, in fact, than her two children, Reginald and Mercedes, aged respectively, twenty-three and nineteen.
It had happened in the past that Nick Carter had done some little business for the head of the house of Danton, but it had been of a commercial character, and he had never met the other members of the family, although naturally they were all known to him by sight, as well as by the reputations they had earned for themselves in their own separate ways. Mrs. Danton—or the señora, as she was often called because of her Spanish ancestry—because she was a leader of society and a giver of the most lavish entertainments in New York and Newport; Reggie, because he was a self-confessed high roller who was inevitably getting into some sort of hot water and paying his way out of it with gold—whom everybody talked about, and laughed at, and wondered what he would do next, but who was nevertheless generally well liked, and among those who knew him best, respected, too; and Mercedes!
The reputation of Mercedes Danton can be comprehended in three words. She was beautiful, she was brilliant, and she was, above all, good.
Everybody loved Mercedes. Her father adored her; her mother worshiped her; her brother idolized her; her servitors almost deified her; and she merited it all.
Reference to her upon any occasion was comprehended in the utterance of her first name only. There was but one Mercedes in the world, one queen of beauty, one fountain of sympathy and goodness—Mercedes.
She was nineteen, with the poise, the repose and the presence of twenty-five. She was tall, regal, as graceful as a fawn; she had unfathomable, gipsy eyes, hair of a dead black, with a faint suggestion of waviness, and when the light struck it just right, a touch of amber somewhere in the depth of the tresses which disappeared as it came and which was inevitably changed to a reflection upon rather than from it; and with all her somber hair and eyes, her long black lashes and brunette presence, she had the complexion of an Irish beauty.
To describe Mercedes as beautiful is inadequate, for she was the standard of beauty.
And now, that we have outlined the chain of thought which flitted through the mind of Nick Carter as he descended the stairs to meet his early caller, we will return to the moment of their greeting.