Part 8 (2/2)

And in the morning the palace and all its visions fell tumbling about their heads in sudden and awful catastrophe. For with Tomlinson's first descent to the rotunda it broke. The whole great s.p.a.ce seemed filled with the bulletins and the broadside sheets of the morning papers, the crowd surging to and fro buying the papers, men reading them as they stood, and everywhere in great letters there met his eye:

COLLAPSE OF THE ERIE AURIFEROUS

THE GREAT GOLD SWINDLE

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON EXPECTED THIS MORNING So stood the Wizard of Finance beside a pillar, the paper fluttering in his hand, his eyes fixed, while about him a thousand eager eyes and rus.h.i.+ng tongues sent shame into his stricken heart.

And there his boy Fred, sent from upstairs, found him; and at the sight of the seething crowd and his father's stricken face, aged as it seemed all in a moment, the boy's soul woke within him. What had happened he could not tell, only that his father stood there, dazed, beaten, and staring at him on every side in giant letters:

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON ”Come, father come upstairs,” he said, and took him by the arm, dragging him through the crowd.

In the next half-hour as they sat and waited for the arrest in the false grandeur of the thousand-dollar suite-Tomlinson, his wife, and Fred-the boy learnt more than all the teaching of the industrial faculty of Plutoria University could have taught him in a decade. Adversity laid its hand upon him, and at its touch his adolescent heart turned to finer stuff than the salted gold of the Erie Auriferous. As he looked upon his father's broken figure waiting meekly for arrest, and his mother's blubbered face, a great wrath burned itself into his soul.

”When the sheriff comes-” said Tomlinson, and his lip trembled as he spoke. He had no other picture of arrest than that.

”They can't arrest you, father,” broke out the boy. ”You've done nothing. You never swindled them. I tell you, if they try to arrest you, I'll-” and his voice broke and stopped upon a sob, and his hands clenched in pa.s.sion.

”You stay here, you and mother. I'll go down. Give me your money and I'll go and pay them and we'll get out of this and go home. They can't stop us; there's nothing to arrest you for.”

Nor was there. Fred paid the bill unmolested, save for the prying eyes and babbling tongues of the rotunda.

And a few hours from that, while the town was still ringing with news of his downfall, the Wizard with his wife and son walked down from their thousand-dollar suite into the corridor, their hands burdened with their satchels. A waiter, with something between a sneer and an obsequious smile upon his face, reached out for the valises, wondering if it was still worth while.

”You get to h.e.l.l out of that!” said Fred. He had put on again his rough store suit in which he had come from Cahoga County, and there was a dangerous look about his big shoulders and his set jaw. And the waiter slunk back.

So did they pa.s.s, unarrested and unhindered, through corridor and rotunda to the outer portals of the great hotel.

Beside the door of the Palaver as they pa.s.sed out was a tall official with a uniform and a round hat. He was called by the authorities a cha.s.seur or a commissionaire, or some foreign name to mean that he did nothing.

At the sight of him the Wizard's face flushed for a moment, with a look of his old perplexity.

”I wonder,” he began to murmur, ”how much I ought-”

”Not a d.a.m.n cent, father,” said Fred, as he shouldered past the magnificent cha.s.seur; ”let him work.”

With which admirable doctrine the Wizard and his son pa.s.sed from the portals of the Grand Palaver.

Nor was there any arrest either then or later. In spite of the expectations of the rotunda and the announcements of the Financial Undertone, the ”man Tomlinson” was not arrested, neither as he left the Grand Palaver nor as he stood waiting at the railroad station with Fred and mother for the outgoing train for Cahoga County.

There was nothing to arrest him for. That was not the least strange part of the career of the Wizard of Finance. For when all the affairs of the Erie Auriferous Consolidated were presently calculated up by the labours of Skinyer and Beatem and the legal representatives of the Orphans and the Idiots and the Deaf-mutes they resolved themselves into the most beautiful and complete cipher conceivable. The salted gold about paid for the cost of the incorporation certificate: the development capital had disappeared, and those who lost most preferred to say the least about it; and as for Tomlinson, if one added up his gains on the stock market before the fall and subtracted his bill at the Grand Palaver and the thousand dollars which he gave to Skinyer and Beatem to recover his freehold on the lower half of his farm, and the cost of three tickets to Cahoga station, the debit and credit account balanced to a hair.

Thus did the whole fortune of Tomlinson vanish in a night, even as the golden palace seen in the mirage of a desert sunset may fade before the eyes of the beholder, and leave no trace behind.

It was some months after the collapse of the Erie Auriferous that the university conferred upon Tomlinson the degree of Doctor of Letters in absentia. A university must keep its word, and Dean Elderberry Foible, who was honesty itself, had stubbornly maintained that a vote of the faculty of arts once taken and written in the minute book became as irrefragable as the Devonian rock itself.

So the degree was conferred. And Dean Elderberry Foible, standing in a long red gown before Dr. Boomer, seated in a long blue gown, read out after the ancient custom of the college the Latin statement of the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, ”Eduardus Tomlinsonius, vir clarrisimus, doctissimus, praestissimus,” and a great many other things all ending in issimus.

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