Farson murmured something that sounded like the term which Hollinger had twice used, by way of contempt, in describing Brainard.
“No, I can’t understand!” he sighed.
“Well, you’d better get to bed,” Brainard laughed. “There’s nothing to worry about. That’s one happy result of my attitude. If it will make you feel any more sure of my sanity, I will see my lawyers in the morning. They are not likely to take sentimental views, I can tell you. I have been too profitable a client!”
After Farson had taken the hint and removed his bewildered person from the room, Brainard sat for another hour before the dead fire, in a sleepless revery. The unexpected visit of the stenographer and the fight-trust man had brought back vividly a long train of memories of what had constituted his active life for the last four years. The situation that had developed had again emphasized the dream quality of all living. It is the conventionally expected in life that makes what men ordinarily term reality. A slight turn from the ordinary course of events produces a sense of unreality. For four years there had come to Brainard, turn after turn, utterly unexpected and unforeseen, each one producing this sense of the essential unreality of life. But behind it all had grown the living reality of his own will and character that had been formed by meeting and dealing with the exigencies of each situation fairly according to the laws of his nature.
As he had said to his secretary, the result was that he found himself now ready to abandon his adventurous position upon demand without a sense of overwhelming loss and disaster. He had no more feeling of enmity or of contempt for Lorilla Walters than Hollinger evinced. She was playing her little part in the complex scheme of destiny, playing it vulgarly and crudely, and he suspected improperly. But what occupied his thoughts at this crisis, much more than the possible machinations the actress might be able to set on foot against him or the instability of his own fortunes, was the woman’s situation. What Hollinger had said for her in plea of extenuation had touched him more deeply than he had let the fight-trust man see. It was perfectly true that she should be provided for out of Krutzmacht’s loot in life. He tried to think how this could be brought about without compromising himself or his elusive mistress’s rights. He resolved on the morrow to see not only his lawyers but Hollinger also, and contrive some plan by which the ex-stenographer could obtain justice without gratifying her spite.
“But she is not the old man’s heir—of that I am sure!” he said to himself as at last he sought his bed. “And Melody lives—I stick to that! The dream will hold to the end, not go to pieces in any vulgar fashion like this!”
XIII
The perfectly correct New York lawyers to whom Brainard told his tale later that morning evinced no surprise. There was nothing in the heart or brain of man, they seemed to say, that could flutter a New York lawyer. “It would be advisable to find Miss Melody straightway,” they felt, and inquired what sort of title Brainard held to the Arizona mine. When he confessed that it was only a tax title, they remarked that under the Arizona laws any heirs of the dead German had a year more in which to redeem the property. That did not trouble Brainard. The lawyers very strongly urged their client not to make advances to Miss Walters or to her friend and manager on her behalf. That would be suicidal, they averred, opening the way at once to endless blackmail and even criminal prosecution. “Let the matter rest until the interested parties make some move,” they advised, in a perfectly cautious and obvious way.
“I’ve done my best to find the heirs, as you people very well know. I’m convinced there’s only one, and I’m not sure that she has any legal claim. But hers was the only name the old man mentioned the one time I saw him.”
“You certainly made a mistake in not getting hold of that trunk!”