The contrast in personal appearance between the two men, having regard to their relative positions, was a significant thing. The caller, who had just been summoned from the waiting-room, and was standing before the other's table, hat in hand, a little shabby, with ill-brushed hair and doubtful collar, bore in his countenance many traces of the wild and irregular life which had reduced him at this moment to the position of suppliant. His complexion was pale almost to ghastliness, and in his deep-set, sunken eyes there was more than a suggestion of recklessness. He was so nervous that his face twitched as he stood there waiting, and the fingers which held his hat trembled. His lips were a little parted, his breathing was scarcely healthy. There was something about his whole appearance indicative of failure. The writing upon his forehead was the writing of despair.

The man before whom he stood was of an altogether different type. His features were strong and regular, his complexion slightly bronzed, as though from exposure to the sun and wind. He had closely-cropped black hair, keen gray eyes, and a determined chin. He sat before a table on which were all the modern appurtenances of a business man in close touch with passing events. A telephone was at his elbow, his secretary was busy at a smaller table in the corner of the room, a typist was waiting respectfully in the background. His confidential clerk was leaning over his chair, notebook in hand, receiving in a few terse sentences instructions for the morrow's operations. Stirling Deane, although he was barely forty years old, was at the head of a great mining corporation. He had been the one man selected for the position when the most important and far-reaching amalgamation of recent days had taken place. And this although he came of a family whose devotion to business had always been blended with a singular aptitude for and preëminence in sports. Deane himself, until the last few years, had played cricket for his county, had hunted two days a week, and had by no means shown that whole-hearted passion for money-making which was rife enough in the circles amid which he moved.

He wound up his instructions, and dismissed his clerk with a few curt and final words. Then he turned round in his chair and faced his visitor.

"I am sorry to have kept you, Rowan," he said. "This is always rather a busy day in the city, and a busy time."

His visitor, who had been waiting for an hour in an ante-room, and was then esteemed fortunate to be accorded an interview, looked around him with a little smile.

"So you've prospered, Deane," he said.

"Naturally," the other answered. "I always meant to. And you, Rowan?"

The visitor shook his head. "I have tried many things," he said; "all failures,—disposition or luck, I suppose. What is it, I wonder, that keeps some men down while others climb?"

Deane shrugged his shoulders. "Disposition," he said, "is only an appendage, and luck doesn't exist. In nine cases out of ten, if a man's will is strong enough, he climbs."

Rowan

Скачать книгу

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

A LIFE FOR SALE