X
They found the leading lady waiting for them on the darkened stage. She was dressed quite handsomely in her street costume, with the inevitable fur coat that seems the most characteristic mark of her profession. Without her makeup and stage costume she looked much older than Brainard remembered her to be and also stouter. But her dark face and flashing eyes still preserved an air of confident assurance in her good looks that had characterized Krutzmacht’s stenographer.
“Good evening, Mr. Wilkins!” she said promptly as the men approached her. At that unfortunate nom de guerre Farson laughed outright. Hollinger came to the rescue.
“Mr. Edgar Brainard, of the new People’s Theater; Miss Lorilla Walters of The Stolen Bonds company,” the fight-trust man said with a little cough.
“We seem both to have changed names,” Brainard observed, shaking hands with the leading lady.
“Walters is my stage name,” the former stenographer snapped.
“Wilkins was mine—for a few hours!” Brainard laughed.
There followed an awkward pause. In spite of the amiable greeting, Brainard could see fire in the woman’s dark eyes and realized that it was not simply for the pleasure of meeting her former antagonist again that she had got Hollinger to bring him behind the scenes. He realized also from the determined bearing and solid form of the woman he had once unceremoniously locked up in Krutzmacht’s safe for an hour, that she possessed a kind of vindictive energy which might easily become troublesome to any man she disliked. For a brief moment he wished that a wayward fate had not led his steps on this evening into the Boulevard Theater. But it was so patently absurd that the woman could in any way touch him now after all these years that he easily put aside the thought. He had led his new life so long, tested himself with men and affairs so thoroughly that his early adventures in Krutzmacht’s service seemed to him more like a youthful escapade than reality.
During this mute encounter Farson and Hollinger watched the two with interest. Hollinger leaned against one of the properties of the last act in The Stolen Bonds, a slightly satirical smile on his lips as if he found much intellectual amusement in the situation.
“That’s a pretty lively show you have made out of our little affair,” Brainard remarked at last to the leading lady. “You’ve touched up the story all along and the dénouement isn’t according to the facts as I remember them.”
Miss Walters gave a little twitch to her short veil as she snapped meaningly:
“Perhaps it isn’t finished yet!”
“As our friend Hollinger has been proving to me,” Brainard continued in his scoffing tone, “Art and Nature don’t always jibe. The artist has always found fault with dull fact, and he gets his revenge upon the real world as you took yours to-night in the play.”
“One gets it somehow,” Miss Walters replied enigmatically.
“If you are going to discuss Art and Nature,” Hollinger put in genially, “let’s go to some place where we can have supper.”
“A good idea,” Brainard agreed. “Come home with me. My man usually has something ready for me at this time.”
He felt that something more vital than a discussion of Art and Nature was impending and thought that his own house would be a better place for an animated interview than a public café. So the four picked their way in the gloom among the bulky properties of The Stolen Bonds to the stage exit and there found a cab, which carried them quickly to the little house in Gramercy Park. Miss Walters did not open her mouth during the ride; Hollinger and Farson maintained a factitious conversation on politics, and the contrasts between San Francisco and New York. The fight-trust man ridiculed “progressivism,” which was just then coming into vogue, shrewdly pointing out that it merely cloaked the aspirations of “the little fellows” to “get big Capital,” and praised California as the only place for an American to live in. From time to time Brainard eyed the actress from his corner of the cab, wondering what her relations with his versatile acquaintance might be. She did not seem interested in the conversation and stared steadily into the street.
There were bottles and cold meats on the table in the dining room as Brainard had promised. Farson discovered in the pantry the ingredients for a hot dish, and Hollinger showed himself to be an expert in this sort of an impromptu feast. The three men were soon busy with chafing dish and corkscrew in a comradely way, but Miss Walters, refusing to lay aside her long fur coat and hat, sauntered about the cheerful room, examining carefully the pictures and prints upon the walls, the furniture and appointments, which though not especially luxurious were thoroughly comfortable.
“Is this your house?” she asked her host point blank, and when he nodded she remarked:
“A pretty cozy sort of place.”
“It is comfortable,” Brainard agreed, “and very convenient. I can’t stand hotels,” he added by way of excuse.
“Some of us have to stand ’em and be mighty thankful when they’re fit to live in.”
Not having any appropriate reply to this remark, Brainard urged the actress to lay aside her wraps and sit down before the fire, which he had stirred into a blaze. She grudgingly unbuttoned her coat and sat on the edge of the large chair he pushed to the hearth, stretching forth her worn shoes to the warmth, and hitching up her skirt in a slightly vulgar manner.
When Hollinger announced that his dish was ready, the four drew up at the table and had supper, which, thanks to Farson and the fight-trust man, was lively enough. They discussed theatrical matters, especially the Danish play on which the People’s had come to grief. Hollinger maintained that the trouble with the play was that it was neither moral nor immoral enough. It was simply too much like life. “If you are going in for vice, you must paint it red,” he pronounced. The leading lady listened and taciturnly ate her supper. Afterwards she accepted a cigarette and turned again to the fire. Brainard searched his brain for a topic that might interest her and finally asked:
“How long have you been on the stage, Miss Walters?”
“It was a good many years ago, the first show I was in,” she replied, and added with intention,—“before I met Krutzmacht.”
“Where was that?” he asked lightly.
“In Los Angeles in ninety-two.”
“You gave up the stage for a time?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “He wanted me to.”
“Oh!”
Supper being finished, Brainard led the way to the large living room on the floor above. Here there were books, pictures, and old theatrical bills that seemed to interest Hollinger. He and Farson remained at one end of the room and thus gave Brainard a further opportunity for conversation with Miss Walters. Somewhat softened by the good supper and the friendly reception, she began to talk more freely of herself, her early experiences on the stage in a small stock company that played in the little towns of central and southern California, until she met Herbert Krutzmacht, who happened to be in Los Angeles one night when she was playing. Brainard, who was curious to find out all he could about Krutzmacht, observed carelessly:
“You were working in his office when I—when we last met?”
“Yes—I was working for him,” she said shortly.
“Then why,” he asked suddenly, “did you try to sell him out to his enemies?”
“I had good reasons,” she replied, looking him defiantly in the face, “a woman’s reasons. He hadn’t played fair with me!”
“That is, hadn’t married you as you hoped he would?” Brainard suggested.
“I didn’t say that!” she flashed quickly, realizing that she was in danger of committing herself.
“Well, I hope the railroad people paid you well for your services.”
“They quit paying me, naturally, after you got over to Europe with the stuff they wanted and sold it to the Germans.”
“They dealt with the Germans instead,” Brainard laughed. “It might have paid better to stick by the old man to the end? . . . So, after we parted at Vera Cruz, you went back to the stage—into the legitimate?”
“Mr. Hollinger suggested it when I met him at Jalapa. He got me a place in one of the San Francisco theaters a friend of his was running, and then later on when he went into the show business himself, he took me for one of his companies.”
“Do you like the work?”
“It’s as good as anything else,” the leading lady replied, “so long as you’ve got to work for your living.”
“Most of us have to do that.”
“Unless we are clever enough to get somebody else to do the work for us,” she sneered.
“Then I think we lose most of the fun.”
Miss Walters stared at him skeptically.
“What’s the use of your taking that lofty tone with me?”
Brainard laughed good-naturedly. He found in this case, as he had in so many others, that a little personal contact with an enemy modifies and humanizes any antagonism. “Eat with an enemy and lose your hate,” is an old proverb, the truth of which he was proving. In spite of the hardness and vulgarity of Miss Lorilla Walters, actress and stenographer, there was something pathetic in her commonplace struggle with life, which he felt through her brief admissions. She had been fighting all her life for herself with somewhat coarse weapons, the only ones she knew how to use, and her appearance, now that she had lost the advantage of youth and was declining towards middle age, her cheap clothes, her defiant manner,—all told of the losing game. He was already beginning to wonder what he could do for Krutzmacht’s old stenographer, wondering whether by any chance she could be fitted into the People’s company, when his amiable meditations were disagreeably interrupted by the actress.
“It’s no use your playing the great philanthropist with me,” she said truculently. “I know what you are.”
“What?”
“A crook.”
“You think so?”
“I happen to know it.”
“The trouble always has been from the moment I entered Krutzmacht’s office that afternoon that you have persisted in this wrong idea. You took me for a common thief then, and you think me a successful swindler now. Well, it happens that I am neither. So you can’t understand!”
She looked over the comfortable room, which for the moment they had to themselves, as Farson had taken Hollinger into the library.
“You seem to have done very well by yourself,” she observed.
“I was Krutzmacht’s legitimate agent then, when I entered his office, and I have been his executor so to speak every since,”—and as she shrugged her shoulders skeptically, he added, “I haven’t a cent of my own—really not a cent; I am poorer than you!”
“You want me to believe that song? . . . How about the theater and the mine in Arizona? You see I have been following you up.”
“They belong to somebody else.”
“Indeed—to whom?”
“I shan’t tell you that!”
“Because you can’t. . . . They belong to me.”
“Prove your claim then!”
“And you will hand them over on a platter with a fine bow? . . . You are smooth!”
She looked into Brainard’s smiling face with an expression of perplexity.
“But until you can prove your claim, beyond doubt, I shall continue in possession both of the mine and of the theater as guardian of the property. And I shall fight you with all the resources I have until I am convinced that your claim is sound.”
The actress slowly walked to the fire and threw away the cigarette she had been smoking.
“Well, I guess we understand each other,” she said in a less truculent voice.
“I think we do!”
“You are a curious sort of idiot,” she remarked musingly. “I don’t see why we should fight. There’s enough money for two from what the papers say about that mine.”
“There’s a great deal more than enough for two,” Brainard laughed, “in one sense, but only enough for one in another—the right one,” he added meaningly.
The actress watched him closely as he crossed the room to straighten a picture that hung awry on the wall. She swayed gently to and fro in the vulgar pose of the heroine of The Stolen Bonds, looking into the fire. When she glanced up she saw that Brainard was observing her, a slight smile on his lips. He was thinking that she had the temperament that might have made a good actress, but had been hopelessly spoiled by her bringing up and environment.
“Well?” he said. “Are you ready with the proof?”
“You are a queer sort of Willy,” she replied. “I don’t believe you and me can ever rightly understand each other.”
“I think I understand you,” Brainard laughed; “you want Krutzmacht’s money—that is quite intelligible! And you may not think so, but I am sorry for you—I would really like to help you out—get a better position for you!”
“But you won’t divide!”
“Never—all or nothing.”
“Do you know where I’m going to-night when I leave your swell little house? Over on Second Avenue into a third-class hotel where my mother and I get along with one bedroom between us. Hollinger don’t pay any big salaries!”
“I am sorry.”
“Krutzmacht treated me like most men treat women they’ve got cheap. I had no reason to be loyal to him, as I told you.”
“Unless,” Brainard suggested lightly, “you happened to be his wife!”
Miss Walters ignored the implication and continued explanatorily:
“When we lost you at Vera Cruz, and the railroad men I was working for had no more use for me, I was down and out. There didn’t seem to be anything for anybody from Krutzmacht’s money except what the Germans got and you! So I went into the show that I told you of. But it seems there was a good deal more property I didn’t know about—he was always close mouthed. You were clever enough to find that mine and keep it for yourself. . . . It wasn’t until you struck New York that anybody heard about it. Then the papers and the magazines were full of it and of you and of all the money you were throwing away on a theater.”
“Publicity is one of the penalties of success,” Brainard observed.
“It helped me to find you!”
Brainard bowed in acknowledgment.
“You don’t want any more trouble?” she suggested in a gentler tone than she had previously used.
“Don’t mind trouble,” Brainard retorted quickly.
“If I was content with a half million—”
“Why not make it two?”
XI
At this point Hollinger and Farson returned to the room. Hollinger looked quickly at the position of the two, smiled placidly, and helped himself to another cigar from the box on the table.
“Exchanging confidences?” he inquired.
“Miss Walters persists in acting all the time,” Brainard replied. “She thinks this is a sequel to the play and wants me to hand over to her a lot of money.”
“Sometimes,” Hollinger observed sententiously, “that’s the easiest way to square things, isn’t it?”
Brainard looked at the fight-trust man in astonishment. Was he an accomplice in a vulgar blackmail game?
“It’s not my way,” he said sharply.
“Half a loaf when no part of the loaf is really yours is always more enjoyable than a legal scrimmage over the whole loaf, it seems to me.”
“What do you mean?”
Hollinger threw himself into an easy-chair, lighted his cigar carefully, and beamed at Brainard.
“Did it ever occur to you, my young friend,” he began, “that we four are, so to speak, all in the same boat? We are all adventurers—of that noble company of gentlemen and lady adventurers in life—to paraphrase the quaint motto of the Hudson Bay Company. Now in the course of the complicated tissue of adventure that happens to have brought us three together from very unlike walks in life, you”—he thrust the glowing point of his cigar towards Brainard,—“have proved to be the Star. You’re It! You hold the bag, so to speak. You seem to have shared some of its golden contents with our young friend here who wants to write plays, as he tells me. I do not happen to want anything for myself. I am perfectly disinterested in this case,—fortunately can afford to be. For I have other and sufficiently fat fish frying in my own little pan. So I can play the gracious rôle of Wisdom. . . . Why not be generous to the lady who lost in this matter of the old Dutchman’s millions—you can afford it—and nothing becomes a young unmarried Idealist more than princely generosity with other people’s dollars.”
“But—” Brainard began.
“Pardon me—one moment—to finish clearing the ground. I don’t know the precise manner in which you came into possession of Herbert Krutzmacht’s money any more than I know exactly how he got it away from those who wanted it. I presume the methods were not essentially unlike. It never interests me, these details of acquisition,—to know just how our plutocratic masters have raked together their pelf. But the method of distribution does interest me tremendously. The rich usually show such little capacity for imagination or daring in the disposal of their wealth! However, that is another theme. . . . Now this lady, whose slender talent as an actress I have had the honor of supporting, thinks she has some cogent claim to the unearned increment of the deceased Dutchman. Her idea is probably fantastic—most of our ideas about ‘rights’ are—but it is a fixed idea with her!” He leaned forward and waved his cigar rhythmically to drive home his words. “Unless her idea is adequately gratified, I am afraid she will be unhappy and make you considerable trouble in the course of her effort to satisfy her quite unreasonable desire. Voilà tout, as the French say. Or if you prefer English, Better pay and forget, rather than save a few dollars and regret, my friend.”
“You are a good anarchist,” Farson observed.
“Thank you for the explanation. I know that I am a practical man. If our rich, our very rich citizens, would only recognize more frankly the truth I have been stating, they would be happier and so would we others. But they are very timid and conservative; they rarely get beyond libraries, museums, and hospitals. All dull and comparatively useless affairs!”
The fight-trust man sank back into his chair and smoked with half-closed eyes.
“Your talk is interesting, Hollinger, as always,” Brainard remarked, “but unfortunately this time I can’t follow your advice.”
“And why not?”
“Because it happens not to be my own money that Miss Walters desires.”
Hollinger waved one hand deprecatingly and murmured:
“A mere matter of words that.”
“No, I mean it! As I have been explaining to Miss Walters, I am really a poor man—”
“Poverty is a relative matter—science has demonstrated that.”
“Everything of Krutzmacht’s I hold as trustee.”
“Sounds like Carnegie, or was it the Emperor William? . . . Pardon me, that is another formula. We are all trustees, of course.”
Brainard paused and then resumed in a different tone:
“I have been over this matter with Miss Walters and explained my position. I think she understands it quite well. If she can produce proof that she was legally married to the late Herbert Krutzmacht—”
“You would not be as crude as that!” Hollinger exclaimed, opening his eyes. “You know as well as the next man how purely accidental marriage is—the ceremony I mean. The law fastens on that of course—it has to have some nail to cling to—”
“As I told Miss Walters, the trouble with her, and I am afraid with you, too, Hollinger, is that you can’t comprehend an honest man. I happen to be a mere honest man.”
“Pray, don’t believe I doubted it.”
“Just plain, old-fashioned, vulgar honest,” Brainard continued irascibly. “Neither of you seem to understand that simple fact. You proceed on two false assumptions,—first that I am a crook and second that I am a coward—I might add a third, that I am a fool. So long as these false assumptions remain embedded in your mind, we simply can’t do business together.”
He walked suggestively towards the door. Hollinger also rose, a little wearily, a bored look on his face, and chucked his cigar into the fireplace.
“I am sorry,” he said gently, “that we have succeeded in straining your sense of humor. . . . The trouble with you virtuous people is that you bristle so easily at the least touch. I should think that Virtue would be more self-satisfying to its practitioners. Now I don’t bristle because you assume that I am a petty blackmailer and am trying to get money for Miss Walters in order to share with her. That’s what you think—confess it!”
“It looks that way,” Brainard said.
“If it does, it doesn’t worry me in the least. I don’t waste our time trying to prove to you that I am Honest and Disinterested, that I came here to-night really out of friendly interest in you—to try with the aid of my equable temperament and clear intelligence to avoid the mistakes that are likely to occur when excessive desire meets excessive virtue. But I have failed. You two will have to make up your accounts alone—or with the vulgar assistance of the courts. Good luck to you. And good night!”
He extended one hand to Brainard and the other to Farson.
“I will give myself the pleasure of setting you down at your hotel,” he said to the actress, who was slowly and somewhat regretfully buttoning her fur coat.
When Farson and the actress had left the room, Brainard detained Hollinger and said contritely:
“I’m afraid I did suspect you of collusion with Miss Walters—I’m sorry, for I have always liked you.”
“It’s very natural. You yourself must know how hard it is in this world to be really disinterested without incurring unjust suspicions. However, that’s nothing!”
“The trouble is I can’t understand you—never did!”
“I’m afraid I can’t return the compliment. I flatter myself that I understand you thoroughly.”
“Do you remember that first time I met you—on the train, the Overland Limited, going to California? You were in your compartment reading Paradise Lost with the help of a dictionary.”
The fight-trust man blushed slightly, probably at the mention of the dictionary.
“You mean the occasion when that active young seeker for notoriety, the special district attorney of San Francisco, was trying to put me in state’s prison?”
“You were under bonds then, seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. I remember how awed I was at the size of your bonds!”
“Yes, I recall the occasion now,” the prize ring magnate said with a pleasant smile. “I didn’t remember that was our first meeting—I meet so many people everywhere—nor that I happened to be making the acquaintance also of the famous puritan poet. . . . The trouble with you, my friend, if you will permit me to indulge in a last bit of advice, is that you are so terribly conventional in your judgments of character, in your expectations of what people are to be. That is a very common limitation. You expected to find in me a bloody and brutal bounder, smelling of whisky and dazzling with diamonds. Instead you found an intelligent gentleman, interested in literature and life. The prize ring, Mr. Brainard, is as much an arena of Art in its way as the popular theater to which you are devoting so much effort and such large sums of money. And I was engaged in it as a business, as I am now engaged in the theatrical business. A financier, even of the prize ring, is not obliged to dirty himself with vulgar contacts. That explains the lofty idealism of some of our most prominent citizens. You plan and dream from above—the degrading associations are left to others, as doubtless you have already learned in the management of your own properties. . . . Well, I must not keep Miss Walters waiting below. Good night, my foolish Idealist! Good luck and more wisdom to you before our next meeting.”
They descended to the hall which they found empty. Farson was getting the actress a last cigarette. As they waited, Hollinger observed musingly:
“You doubtless know about the marriage laws in California?”
“No, I don’t.”
“They are extremely,—what shall I say? Lax—liberal. You see our people out there are so unconventional and accidental in their habit of life, that the courts are forced to take the most liberal view of these personal matters. And we are as a people chivalrous towards women—much more so than you are here. So the courts are inclined to decide the question of marriage largely on whether the woman ought to have been married, rather than on the mere fact of the ceremony. That accounts for the large number of posthumous wives and their claims that turn up after the death of a rich man on the Coast.”
“Am I to regard this as a threat?” Brainard inquired.
“Bless you, my dear boy, don’t be so sensitive! Advice, just impertinent, uncalled-for advice, which I am so fond of giving. I should have left all that to Miss Lorilla’s lawyers—they are the proper persons to expound the California statutes.”
“You don’t believe for one instant that Miss Walters was really married to old Krutzmacht?” Hollinger shrugged his shoulders.
“Quien sabe? as the Mexicans say. I have no doubt she ought to have been.”
“That is a very different matter.”
Hollinger again shrugged his shoulders. In the pause that followed, Hollinger began to muse aloud softly, as if he were presenting a case to himself:
“Her life has been typical. Born on a dreary little ranch, educated for a few years in one of our national institutions for the stultifying of youth, then deserted by her worthless father and forced to do something for herself and her useless mother,—what is the answer to that? Chorus girl. Twelve dollars a week and mother to support as well as herself and no special talent or exceptional looks,—what is the answer to that? Man.”
“Whom the girl in her gratitude tried to sell out when he was in a tight place. No, I am afraid you can’t make out a very good case for charity!”
“Just what had Krutzmacht done for her? . . . Changed her job from a dubiously respectable one to an undoubtedly disreputable one—and made her work in his office besides. No, the balance is on her side of the ledger. . . . Now she has matured,—oh, very much matured; has no protector, and mother still to support as well as herself,—what is the answer to that?”
“If you put your claim on the ground of social service, pure and simple,” Brainard replied, “it might be considered, I suppose. But I don’t think Miss Walters would accept charity.”
“Charity—justice—prudence? What’s the use of finding the right name? In the last analysis they are all meaningless.”
“You forget they mean something to me.”
“She hungers for some of life’s goodies.” Hollinger resumed his musing, ignoring Brainard’s reply. “But comparatively little would satisfy her—a secure home somewhere in southern California for herself and that tough relic of a parent, a little income, enough to assure permanent idleness. Consider what a boon that would be to the stage in itself! Possibly matrimony later on, why not? . . . As Krutzmacht’s residuary—er, trustee,—that’s what you called it, I believe, you ought to provide decently for his emotional lapses. . . . I put it to you now as a Sentimentalist, Idealist, Lover of Great Ideas.”
“You would talk me into giving her everything I have,” Brainard laughed, “if I could only once bring myself to accept your point of view.”
“That life is merely a juggle of words.”
“Ah, you are too young. One cannot fight successfully against youth, even with ideas!”
Miss Walters appeared, followed by Farson, and the conversation was at an end. The actress looked at Brainard from beneath her flaring hat, and her eyes had an unpleasant luster in them. No, mere charity would not satisfy that “thirst for vengeance upon life!”
“Well, Mr. Wilkins,” she began with a heavy effort at irony, “it is always sad for old friends to part. But in this case we may hope to meet again before long.”
“I hope so!” Brainard replied politely. “Let me put you into the cab.”
Hollinger followed them slowly down the steps. At the very door of the cab he lingered.
“In that brief visit which you made to the Coast did you ever come across a rattler in operation? No! It makes a slight, but perfectly clear noise first by way of warning—and then it strikes! Some women resemble the rattler. Look out for the sting!”
“Thanks! I shall.”
“Oh!” the prize ring magnate sighed in farewell, “my poor Idealist, what a lot of useless trouble you make for yourself and others!”
XII
Brainard carefully put out all the lights on the lower floor and then mounted the stairs to the room above. There he found Farson smoking a cigarette before the open fire and staring straight before him, as if his mind was occupied with a novel set of ideas. At sight of Brainard a curious smile crossed his face, and he looked interrogatively at his employer.
“Well?” he murmured.
“They are a pretty pair of—I was going to say crooks. But I don’t think my friend Hollinger is exactly that—I hope not.”
“He used to have the reputation of being the squarest man in his profession—the very soul of honor in the fight business. That was what gave him his prestige with the politicians, until the district attorney got after him.”
“I can’t make him out!”
“It’s not hard to make her out,” Farson commented.
“Her methods are only too obvious!”
“Did I ever tell you just what happened that evening in San Francisco after I saw you off on the ferry with your bag?”
“The last I saw of you,” Brainard replied, “you were on the run to the telephone booth to get your beat about me and Krutzmacht to your paper!”
“Well, after I ’phoned the story I streaked it back to Krutzmacht’s office. I fancied there might be something doing there after the woman got loose from the safe. There was! She had the marshal’s office and the police department—I don’t know but the fire brigade too—all up there buzzing, and she was trying to raise Crane,—you know the big railroad gun on the other side? She’d kept that telephone working ever since Peters threw the combination. If you had seen the temper she was in, you might have left her in that safe somewhat longer to cool off.... She seems to have quieted down a good deal. But I could see signs of her old temper this evening. I don’t believe adversity has improved it materially.”
“Probably not!” Brainard remarked, yawning and looking at his watch. “Three o’clock! Our friends made the time pass quickly.”
Farson did not move from his position before the dying fire. The late hour made no impression upon him, and Brainard did not seem anxious to get to bed.
“What are you going to do?” the young man asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!” Farson exclaimed in surprise. “You don’t mean to say—”
“I will let Lorilla make the next move—it’s up to her.”
“You won’t take Hollinger’s hint?”
“Buy her off? It would take too much, if we began that game. Besides, why should I?”
The young man was evidently puzzled.
“The only thing she can do,” Brainard explained, “is to produce a wife or heirs to Krutzmacht. I don’t believe she can do that successfully. If she does, I am quite ready to resign without a fight. But,” he repeated musingly, “I don’t believe she can prove that she was his wife.”
“There would be harder things to prove,” the secretary ventured, “especially in a California court!”
Brainard smiled. He knew that Farson thought him a fool to run the risk of a law suit and possibly failure in exposing fraudulent claims to the property that he held on such slight legal authority.
“I believe I never told you the whole story,” he said. “You probably think, if you think about it at all—just as Hollinger thinks—that I am a lucky and none-too-scrupulous adventurer, who had a fortune dropped into his hands by a peculiar accident and have enjoyed its possession undisturbed by any claimants up to this moment. But it isn’t quite like that. And there’s rather more drama in the true story of Krutzmacht’s fortune than anything we have yet offered at the People’s Theater!”
He took another cigar, remade the fire, and told Farson all the details of his hunt for the vague Melody ever since he had first found positive indications of her existence in the deserted house above Monument.
“Latterly,” he concluded, “Melody has grown somewhat dim in my mind. Perhaps the theater has taken her place as reality and as mistress; for I have always thought of myself as doing it with her money! But to-night when that woman turned up here with her vulgar, brazen air and tried to hold me up in a blackmailing way, something made me feel that Melody is still alive, in spite of all the chances that she isn’t, and that she will turn up in time to get her own.”
“She will have to appear soon!” Farson exclaimed.
“I felt in talking to Lorilla that she was perfectly conscious she has no legal right to the money—knew all along that Krutzmacht was married and had an heir or had made a will—”
“Did you ever get hold of that trunk, the one I checked for you to Chicago when you were telephoning Krutzmacht’s office to inquire about Lorilla’s health?”
“It had disappeared before I was able to claim it. I suppose it went in the unclaimed baggage sale.”
“Never—it was too soon. She’s got it!”
“I don’t believe there was anything in it except some ledgers and letter files that might interest the railroad people.”
“A will?”
“Perhaps. But I doubt it. She would have used it before this!”
The secretary seemed more concerned over the situation than did Brainard. The latter said musingly as he dropped his cigar into the ashes:
“Of course, if there is no Melody, or if I can’t find her, which amounts to the same thing, that woman might as well have the money as anybody else. At least, a reasonable amount. Krutzmacht probably owed her liberal compensation.... But I shan’t give up my belief in Melody until the courts compel me to!”
“You don’t mean that you would let that Walters woman have the money?” the younger man demanded in astonishment.
“Farson, you don’t understand. I suppose it seems absurd to you—it does to me at times. But I have never for one moment considered myself the owner of Krutzmacht’s millions—never! I suppose that has given me my freedom of action, my feeling that I could do things like this theater,—not for myself. In my own mind I was always acting for some one else. It may be all imagination, but if it is, Melody just as an idea has helped me tremendously,—to keep my hands clear, not to be corrupted by the large sums of money at my disposal,—to make a man of me! It’s a mighty helpful thing to be in the position of trustee to some unknown person. It might solve some of our hardest economic problems if more of our wealth was held on the same terms. I can’t explain it all, but it makes you free really not to have a cent of your own!”
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!”
“After my settlement in Paris with the bankers,” Brainard explained, “I felt that it was of the first importance to go to Monument as soon as possible; and by the time I turned up at the Chicago railroad station, the trunk had disappeared.”
“If no heir can be found, there is not much danger of trouble; but if they should happen to get hold of this girl you call Melody, it might be awkward.”
“I should be only too glad if she could be found, by them or any one else!” Brainard exclaimed with sincerity. “I could then wash my hands of the whole matter.”
The lawyer looked at him uncomprehendingly, then resumed:
“Assuming that no heir of the old man is forthcoming, the only harm that these persons could do you would be to stir up the attorney-general to take action to recover the lands for the Territory. They would have to move quickly to get their action before the courts, and the proper representations at Washington would discourage any such litigation.”
“That doesn’t worry me. But that woman! She’s perfectly capable of becoming Krutzmacht’s widow and providing a whole brood of children.”
“You mean fraudulent?”
“Or left-handed,” Brainard suggested. “I believe she’s training them now!”
“We shall have to wait until she produces them in court, then,” his counsel remarked with a grin.