The Faith Doctor. Eggleston Edward
you don't expect me to offer serious opposition to that proposal." Then he could not refrain from adding, "I believe Mr. Farnsworth and Meadows have also reached that conclusion."
There was no opportunity to reply to this; Farnsworth was heard wheezing outside the door.
Masters thought rapidly that afternoon. He admitted to himself, as he had hardly done before, that he was growing old and that a successful bank ought to have some more vigorous man than he in its management; some man of ideas more liberal than Farnsworth's, and of more age and experience than this young Millard. His mind turned to Hilbrough, the real-estate agent in Montague Street, Brooklyn. First a poor clerk, then a small collector of tenement-house rents, then a prosperous real-estate agent and operator on his own account, he had come by shrewd investment to be a rich man. He was accustomed to make call loans to a large amount on collateral security, and his business was even now almost that of a private banker. A director in the Bank of Manhadoes from its beginning and one of its largest stockholders, he was the most eligible man to succeed Masters in the active management of its affairs, and the only man whose election once proposed would certainly command the support of the directors against the scheme of Farnsworth. He was the one possible man who would prove quite too large for Farnsworth's domineering. It was with a pang that Masters reflected that he too would be effaced in a measure by the advent of a man so vital as Warren Hilbrough; but there was for him only the choice between being effaced by Hilbrough's superior personality and being officially put out of the way by Farnsworth's process of slow torture. He saw, too, that a bank with four high-grade officers would have a more stable official equilibrium than one where the power is shared between two. The head of such an institution is sheltered from adverse intrigues by the counterpoise of the several officers to one another.
If Masters had needed any stimulus to his resolution to contravene the ambitious plans of the cashier, Mrs. Masters would have supplied it. When she heard of Farnsworth's scheme, she raised again her old cry of Carthago delenda est, Farnsworth must be put out. In her opinion nothing else would meet the requirement of poetic justice; but she despaired of persuading Masters to a measure so extreme. It was always the way. Mr. Masters was too meek for anything; he would let people run over him.
But Masters had no notion of being run over. He went to the office every day, and from the office he went to his country-place in New Jersey every afternoon. There was nothing in his actions to excite the suspicion of the cashier, who could not know that negotiations with Hilbrough, and the private submission of the proposition to certain directors, had all been intrusted to the tact of Charley Millard. It was rather hard on Millard, too; for though he enjoyed his success in an undertaking so delicate, he regretted two dinner parties and one desirable reception that he was compelled to forego in order to carry on his negotiations out of bank hours.
The day before the directors met, Farnsworth confided to Millard his intention to have him made assistant cashier. Millard said that if Mr. Masters and the directors should agree to that he would be very well pleased. Considering his evident loyalty to Masters, Farnsworth did not think it wise to tell Millard anything further.
In the board of directors Meadows sat with a more than usually defiant face—with a face which showed premonitions of exultation. Farnsworth felt sure of his game, but he found breathing so laborious that he did not show any emotion. Masters thought it best to soften the humiliation of his associate as much as possible by forestalling his proposition. So at the first moment he suggested to the directors that the bank needed new force, on account both of his own advancing years and of Mr. Farnsworth's ill-health, much aggravated by his excessive industry. He therefore proposed to have Mr. Hilbrough made vice-president with the same salary as that paid to the president, to add a thousand to the cashier's salary, and to promote Mr. Millard to be assistant cashier on a salary of five thousand a year. He said that the prosperity of the bank justified the increased expense, and that the money would be well invested.
Meadows opposed this plan as extravagant. He favored the promotion of Mr. Millard, and the promotion of Mr. Farnsworth to be vice-president, leaving the cashiership vacant for a while. But the directors, accustomed to follow the lead of Masters and Hilbrough, and suspicious of Meadows as habitually factious, voted the president's proposition.
Farnsworth went home and to bed. Then he asked for a vacation and went South. The bank officers sent him a handsome bouquet when he sailed away on the Savannah steamer; for commerce by the very rudeness of its encounters makes men forgiving. In business it is unprofitable to cherish animosities, and contact with a great variety of character makes business men usually more tolerant than men of secluded lives. Farnsworth, for his part, was as pleased as a child might have been with the attention paid him on his departure, and Mrs. Farnsworth was delighted that her husband had consented to take rest, and "make the others do their share of the work."
V.
THE ARRIVAL OF THE HILBROUGHS.
Of course there is a small set who affect not to mingle freely with newly prosperous people like the Hilbroughs. These are they in whose estimation wealth and distinction only gain their proper flavor—their bouquet, so to speak—by resting stagnant for three generations, for gentility, like game, acquires an admirable highness by the lapse of time. Descendants of the Lord knows whom, with fortunes made the devil knows how, fondly imagine that a village storekeeper who has risen to affluence is somehow inferior to the grandson of a Dutch sailor who amassed a fortune by illicit trade with the Madagascar pirates, or a worse trade in rum and blackamoors on the Guinea coast, and that a quondam bookkeeper who has fairly won position and money by his own shrewdness is lower down than the lineal descendant of an Indian trader who waxed great by first treating and then cheating shivering Mohawks. Which only shows that we are prone to plant ourselves on the sound traditions of ancestors; for where is the aristocracy which does not regard wealth won by ancient thievery as better than money modernly earned in a commonplace way? But among a gentry so numerous and so democratic, in spite of itself, as that of our American Babel, exclusiveness works discomfort mainly to the exclusive. The Hilbroughs are agreeable Americans, their suppers are provided by the best caterers, their house has been rendered attractive by boughten taste, and the company one sees there is not more stupid than that in other miscellaneous assemblies.
People who are Livingstons of the manor on their great-grandmother's side, and Van Something-or-others on the side of a great-great-uncle by his second marriage, and who perhaps have never chanced to be asked to the Hilbroughs' receptions, shrug their shoulders, and tell you that they do not know them. But Mrs. Hilbrough does not slight such families because of the colonialness of their ancestry. Her own progenitors came to America in some capacity long before the disagreement about the Stamp Act, though they were not brilliant enough to buy small kingdoms from the Hudson River Indians with jews'-harps and cast-iron hatchets, nor supple enough to get manor lordships by bribes to royal governors.
I suppose the advent of the Hilbroughs in society might be dated from the first reception they gave in New York, though, for that matter, the Hilbroughs do not take pains to date it at all. For it is a rule of good society that as soon as you arrive you affect to have always been there. Of other ascents men boast; of social success, rarely. Your millionaire, for example—and millionairism is getting so common as to be almost vulgar—your millionaire never tires of telling you how he worked the multiplication table until cents became dimes, and dimes well sown blossomed presently into dollars, till hundreds swelled to hundreds of thousands, and the man who had been a blithe youth but twenty years before became the possessor of an uneasy tumor he calls a fortune. Once this narrative is begun no matter that you beat your breast with reluctance to hear out the tedious tale, while loud bassoons perchance are calling you to wedding feasts. Pray hear the modern Whittington with patience, good reader! The recital of this story is his main consolation for the boredom of complicated possession in which his life is inextricably involved—his recoupment for the irksome vigilance with which he must defend his hoard against the incessant attacks of cheats and beggars, subscription papers and poor relations. But the man who has won his way in that illusive sphere we call society sends to swift oblivion all his