A Change in the Cabinet

by Hilaire Belloc

The two were forcibly introduced—I mean the boy and the girl—they understood from the first what their destiny was to be. She could find no fault in the society which swam round her and to which such a marriage would introduce her activities; he saw no drawback to the alliance save one or two mannerisms in his prospective father-in-law, which time might modify—or on the other hand, might not.

Ole Man Benson, to give him once more the name by which he was known and hated in another sphere, from the first ten thousand[1] which by the age of forty-three he had laboriously accumulated in shredded codfish, had dealt not with things, as do lesser men, but with figures. He had gone boldly forward like a young Napoleon, using, it must be remembered, not only the money of others but very often his own as well.

He had been born of Scotch-Irish parents, probably of the name of Benson, and certainly married in the First Baptist Church of Cincinnati not quite three-quarters of a century ago. He was the youngest child of a numerous family, and was baptized or named after the poet Theocritus, with a second or middle name of Chepstow, which in his signature he commonly reduced to its initial letter.

Theocritus C. Benson, now familiar to the whole Anglo-Saxon race of every colour and clime, was of that type always rare but now, though rare, conspicuous, which can so organise and direct the acts of others as to bring order out of chaos, chaos out of order, and alternately accumulate and disperse fortunes hitherto unprecedented in the history of the world.

He was accustomed (in the interviews which he was proud to grant to the newspapers of England, America and the Colonies) to ascribe his great position to unwearied industry and to an abhorrence of all excess (notably in the consumption of fermented liquors) and particularly of the horrid practice of gambling. His puritan upbringing, which had taught him to look upon cards as the Devil’s picture-book, and upon racing as akin to the drama in its spiritual blight, was, he would constantly assert, the key to all that he had done since he left his father’s home. But in this manly self-judgment the Hon. Mr. Benson did himself an injustice. These high qualities are to be discovered in many million of his fellow-citizens, and he might as well have pointed, as sometimes he did point with pride, to the number of his Lodge or to his ignorance of foreign languages as the causes of his repeated triumphs.

There was more: To his hatred of hazard and to his stern sense of duty and unbending industry, he added something of that daring which has made for the greatness of the blood in all its adventures Overseas, and for no branch more than for the Scotch-Irish.

He would boldly advance sums in blind confidence of the future, the mere total of which would have appalled a lesser man, and he would as boldly withdraw them to the ruin of prosperous concerns, where another would have been content to let production take its own course. And this fine command of cash and of credit which he used as a General uses an army, had in it something of personal courage; for towards the latter part of his life, when he had come to control a vast private fortune, it was imperative that in many a bold conception he himself should stand to lose or gain.

At the moment when his only daughter left her happy Belgian convent to be presented at the Court of St. James, he was, though at the height of his fortunes, a lonely and to some extent an embittered man.

His wife had married another: their only child he had not seen for three years, and though he knew that her robust common sense would stand against the religious environment of the gentle nuns who had been entrusted with her upbringing, yet he could not but feel that she had passed the most formative years of her life in an alien air, and under influences quite other than those of the Ohio Valley.

He had therefore determined to decline numerous and advantageous offers and to be present himself in London during the season which saw her introduction to the world, and there, in spite of his unfamiliarity with English ways, he soon appreciated the central position of Mary Smith whose late husband indeed he had come across a quarter of a century before when he was freezing the Topekas off the Pit.