A Million Bid

Summary

A marble staircase, slick with the sweat of auctioned futures, spirals downward in A Million Bid, where maternal avarice turns filial devotion into currency. Agnes, porcelain-skinned and trembling beneath gaslit chandeliers, watches her mother tally suitors like a broker weighing bullion; the doctor’s pulse of honest ardor is drowned beneath the clatter of coins. Ruin arrives on schedule: the father’s heart bursts like an over-taut violin string, poverty sweeps the survivors across oceans, and the girl is bartered to a sunburned Antipodean titan whose yacht will later splinter against oblivion. Salt fog erases names; memory becomes flotsam. Agnes, widowed by rumor, weds her first love amid lilies and lamplight, while somewhere on a Breton pier a bewildered millionaire drifts between identities. Five winters on, the surgeon’s scalpel hovers above the stranger’s skull, poised to resurrect the very past that could unmake two marriages at once. The operating theater glows like a secular confessional; the woman who once commanded prices now bargains with providence, begging the blade to fail. Fate, ever the shrewder negotiator, collects its due: the patient perishes, recollection stays buried, and the widow keeps her hard-won serenity, though the cost is measured in silence.

Synopsis

The story concerns a mercenary and managing mother and her daughter, Agnes. The young lady loves a youthful doctor, but a match is frustrated by the mother, who seeks to marry the daughter to the highest bidder. The mother's extravagance ruins the father, who, being in ill health, succumbs to heart failure. With poverty staring them in the face, the mother takes Agnes abroad, finally forcing her into a marriage with an Australian millionaire. To do so, the mother intercepts all letters between Agnes and the young doctor, with the result that each feels that the other has ceased to care. The millionaire and his young wife, while on their honeymoon on his yacht, are shipwrecked. He is dealt a terrible blow on the head, and it completely destroys his memory. The young wife is saved and returns to America, while her husband is picked up by a French fisherman. His memory gone, he does not recall his previous existence in America. Agnes and the doctor renew their love affair and finally marry, excellent proof having been furnished that her former husband had drowned in the shipwreck. There is no opposition to the marriage now, as the mother also had perished in the catastrophe. Five years later, the young doctor has become a famous brain specialist. To him, Agnes' former husband comes for an operation in the hope of restoring his lost memory. The two men, never having met, fail to learn they are both married to the same woman. She discovers it, however, and with her happiness at stake, does not tell her surgeon-husband the truth, but attempts to dissuade him from operating on her first husband, fearful that the operation will prove successful and her first husband regain his lost memory and recognize her as his wife. The humanity in the surgeon surmounts his wife's pleas, but the patient fails to withstand the operation and Agnes' happiness is assured, despite the terrible situations which confronted her.