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At last he rose and with uncertain steps sought his own suite, above-stairs. Billionaire and world-master though he was, that night he knew his heart lay dead within him. He realized that all the fruits of life were Dead Sea fruits, withered to dust and ashes on his pale and quivering lips. He was aroused from this bitter revery by a rapping at the door. Opening, he admitted Slawson, his valet.
At first he went about in the corridors, to the library, to the restaurant, to the Salle des Conférences, like the others, overjoyed to leave his footprints in every corner of that majestic labyrinth; but, being a stranger to the majority, cut by some members of the club on Rue Royale, who avoided him, detested by the whole clerical coterie, of which Le Merquier was the leader, and by the financial clique, naturally hostile to that billionaire, with his power to cause a rise or fall in stocks, like the vessels of large tonnage which divert the channel in a harbor, his isolation was simply emphasized by change of locality, and the same hostility accompanied him everywhere.
Staggered by the very immensity of the bold thought, so vast that for a moment he could not realize it in its entirety, the Billionaire fell to pacing the floor of his office. His cigar now hung dead and unnoticed between his thinly cruel lips.
Through the rotted plank shutters, that hung drunkenly awry from rust-eaten hinges, long spears of sunlight wanly illuminated the wreck of all that had once been the lavish home of a billionaire. Rugs, paintings, furniture, bibelots, treasures of all kinds now lay commingled in mournful decay.
Even if any difficulty could possibly be expected from these sources, just imagine how quickly we could nip it in the bud!" "Quickly isn't the word, Wally," answered the Billionaire. "I tell you, old man, the world lies in our hands, today. And we have only to close our fingers, in order to possess it!"
Your book will turn up all right; and even if it doesn't there's no cause for alarm. It would take a man of extraordinary acumen to read your hieroglyphics! Cheer up, Flint. There's really nothing to excite you." The Billionaire thus adjured, sat down and tried to calm his agitation. "Rotten luck, eh?" he queried. "But after all, Herzog is likely to find the book.
His face was now tinged with unusual color, and his heart, too, was thumping strangely. "Oxygen!" shouted Waldron, shaking him by the shoulder. "It it's leaking in, here, somewhere! If we can't stop it we're dead men!" "Eh? What?" stammered the Billionaire, staring at him with eyes of half-intoxicated fear. "What d'you mean, the oxygen? In in here?"
"Drunk yourself!" retorted the Billionaire, half starting from his chair, his fist clenched in sudden passion. "How dare you ?" "Dare? I dare anything!" exclaimed Waldron. "Yes, I admit it I am half seas over. That ozone God! what a stimulant! Must be some wonderfully powerful form. If we could market it " Flint sank back in his chair, waving an extravagant hand. "Market it?" he answered.
"How not to do it," is the lesson of all the books and treatises. Geber and Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon and Raymond Lully, and the whole crew of "pauperes alcumistae," all give the most elaborate directions showing their student how to fail in transmuting Saturn into Luna and Sol and making a billionaire of himself.
She had lulled the manager into such a feeling of security that he had run up to Scotland to undertake an important contract. An American billionaire, having rented the Trossachs for the season, had engaged him to superintend his arrangements.
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