y build up his
own fortune had a gift which could be used to advantage. A man who
could be so subterranean in his own affairs would no doubt be equally
secluded in their business. Selfishness would make him silent. And so
it was that "the dude" of the camp and the kraal, the factotum, who in
his time had brushed Rhodes' clothes when he brushed his own, after the
Kaffir servant had messed them about, came to be a millionaire and one
of the Partners. For him South Africa had no charms. He was happy in
London, or at his country-seat in Leicestershire, where he followed the
hounds with a temerity which was at base vanity; where he gave the
county the best food to be got outside St. Petersburg or Paris; where
his so-called bachelor establishment was cared for by a coarse,
gray-haired housekeeper who, the initiated said, was De Lancy's South
African wife, with a rooted objection to being a lady or "moving in
social circles"; whose pleasure lay in managing this big household
under De Lancy's guidance. There were those who said they had seen her
brush a speck of dust from De Lancy's coat-collar, as she emerged from
her morning interview with him; and others who said they had seen her
hidden in the shrubbery listening to the rather flaccid conversation of
her splendid poodle of a master.

There were others who had climbed to success in their own way, some by
happy accident, some by a force which disregarded anything in their
way, and some by sheer honest rough merit, through which the soul of
the true pioneer shone.

There was also Barry Whalen, who had been educated as a doctor, and,
with a rare Irish sense of adaptability and amazing Celtic cleverness,
had also become a mining engineer, in the days when the Transvaal was
emerging from its pioneer obscurity into the golden light of mining
prosperity. Abrupt, obstinately honest, and sincere; always protesting
against this and against that, always the critic of authority, whether
the authority was friend or foe; always smothering his own views in the
moment when the test of loyalty came; always with a voice like a young
bull and a heart which would have suited a Goliath, there was no one
but trusted Barry, none that had not hurried to him in a difficulty;
not because he was so wise, but because he was so true. He would never
have made money, in spite of the fact that his prescience, his mining
sense, his diagnosis of the case of a mine, as Byng called it, had been
a great sourc