OHN FIELD'S father had been a man of considerable business acumen, a forceful, wide-grasping figure, one of the most noticeable of his time in Capel Court. It will be admitted, I suppose, that luck is a foremost factor in the success of a stockbroker; but why do some men habitually command it and others fail to? Putting aside the Buddhistic theory of pre-existence, with its demised rewards and atonements, it would seem as if luck were no other than the definite sum in certain human entities of a multitude of inherited qualities. One is not lucky because one is virtuous, or has been virtuous in a former life, but because there happens to have come together in one a cluster of ancestral propensities, each congenial to each, and all together forming the character most apt to command luck.
It is not for me or for anyone to analyse these constituents; yet somehow, I think, we are instinctively conscious of the lucky man when we meet him. Maybe it is that same instinctive recognition which partly makes for the lucky man's luck, inasmuch as we are naturally inclined to invest our trust in such a child of Fortune; so that after all, perhaps, it is not so much his definite qualities that we are to search for the reason of his success as our own confident sympathies towards that in him which virtually ensures success.
Anyhow, John Field the elder did possess the indefinable something, and he prospered greatly on the strength of it. He was physically big and strong enough to have illustrated the Spanish proverb that 'Good luck gets on by elbowing'; but indeed, though a certain genial arrogance characterised his operations, his effective strength lay much more in an infinite foresight and grasp of opportunity.
He lived well and long and died without fuss, leaving his fortune and his business to his only son and partner, John Field the younger.
Now this John was a man of a very different constitution. With no congenital equipment like his father's, he was yet not so much a fool as a failure. While existing and surviving within that protective shadow, he had had no particular reason to suspect the fact; it was only when he succeeded to his inheritance that certain doubts in him grew gradually from misgiving to conviction.
He was already a man of forty-seven when left alone in the world, by temperament a sybarite and a confirmed bachelor. He was rather a retiring soul, home-loving, and inclined to the solitary discussion of costly wines and meats. Gastronomy, indeed, may have been called his favourite study, though he indulged it with the secrecy of a shy man. So long as his father lived he had accepted unquestioningly, or without apparent criticism, the provisions of an abounding table; when committed to his own resources, he began to experiment, tentatively and timidly at first, on the fruits of his private observation. He had unobtrusively accumulated in his time quite a little Epicurean library, from The Cook's Oracle of Dr. Kitchener to the Please'm the Butcher of our own day, and this he now disinterred from its omnigenous lurking-holes, and allotted the dusk end of a shelf in the dining-room bookcase. With some nervous diffidence, also, he effected a reform in his menage, and substituted for the capable cook of his father's reign a veritable chef de cuisine—an artist trained in the dietetic studios, so to speak, of Voisin's and the Bœuf à la Mode. These temples of gastronomy, with others of their distinguished kind, had always been among John junior's most quietly favoured resorts during his rare trips abroad.
John Field had been well educated. Perhaps, after all, since some sort of mental employment is almost imposed upon one who has been, he simply developed, in cultivating the art of the palate, along his line of least resistance. Education makes us aspire, but it fails in teaching us to what. That, in order to the satisfaction of a vague intellectual hunger, we must find out for ourselves. Some resolve the problem through the eyes, and collect pictures; some through the ears, and study Wagner; others through the nose, and grow carnations. There is food for taste in each of these, and surely there is also food for taste in a taste for food. Indeed, epicurism may be said to command all tastes, since a good dinner enhances the aesthetic values of all art, whether musical, spectacular, or literary. In the respect of his hobby, therefore, John Field might have claimed distinction as a virtuoso. He had as fine a collection of cooking recipes as anyone in the kingdom.