Cashel Byron's Profession: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Wiltstoken Castle was a square building with circular bastions at
the corners, each bastion terminating skyward in a Turkish minaret.
The southwest face was the front, and was pierced by a Moorish arch
fitted with glass doors, which could be secured on occasion by gates
of fantastically hammered iron. The arch was enshrined by a
Palladian portico, which rose to the roof, and was surmounted by an
open pediment, in the cleft of which stood a black-marble figure of
an Egyptian, erect, and gazing steadfastly at the midday sun. On the
ground beneath was an Italian terrace with two great stone elephants
at the ends of the balustrade. The windows on the upper story were,
like the entrance, Moorish; but the principal ones below were square
bays, mullioned. The castle was considered grand by the illiterate;
but architects and readers of books on architecture condemned it as
a nondescript mixture of styles in the worst possible taste. It
stood on an eminence surrounded by hilly woodland, thirty acres of
which were enclosed as Wiltstoken Park. Half a mile south was the
little town of Wiltstoken, accessible by rail from London in about
two hours.

Most of the inhabitants of Wiltstoken were Conservatives. They stood
in awe of the castle; and some of them would at any time have cut
half a dozen of their oldest friends to obtain an invitation to
dinner, or oven a bow in public, from Miss Lydia Carew, its orphan
mistress. This Miss Carew was a remarkable person. She had inherited
the castle and park from her aunt, who had considered her niece's
large fortune in railways and mines incomplete without land. So many
other legacies had Lydia received from kinsfolk who hated poor
relations, that she was now, in her twenty-fifth year, the
independent possessor of an annual income equal to the year's
earnings of five hundred workmen, and under no external compulsion
to do anything in return for it. In addition to the advantage of
being a single woman in unusually easy circumstances, she enjoyed a
reputation for vast learning and exquisite culture. It was said in
Wiltstoken that she knew forty-eight living languages and all dead
ones; could play on every known musical instrument; was an
accomplished painter, and had written poetry. All this might as well
have been true as far as the Wiltstokeners were concerned, since she
knew more than they. She had spent her life travelling with her
father, a man of active mind and bad digestion, with a taste for
sociology, science in general, and the fine arts. On these subjects
he had written books, by which he had earned a considerable
reputation as a critic and philosopher. They were the outcome of
much reading, observation of men and cities, sight-seeing, and
theatre-going, of which his daughter had done her share, and indeed,
as she grew more competent and he weaker and older, more than her
share. He had had to combine health-hunting with pleasure-seeking;
and, being very irritable and fastidious, had schooled her in
self-control and endurance by harder lessons than those which had
made her acquainted with the works of Greek and German philosophers
long before she understood the English into which she translated
them.

When Lydia was in her twenty-first year her father's health failed
seriously. He became more dependent on her; and she anticipated that
he would also become more exacting in his demands on her time. The
contrary occurred. One day, at Naples, she had arranged to go riding
with an English party that was staying there. Shortly before the
appointed hour he asked her to make a translation of a long extract
from Lessing. Lydia, in whom self-questionings as to the justice of
her father's yoke had been for some time stirring, paused
thoughtfully for perhaps two seconds before she consented. Carew
said nothing, but he presently intercepted a servant who was bearing
an apology to the English party, read the note, and went back to his
daughter, who was already busy at Lessing.

"Lydia," he said, with a certain hesitation, which she would have
ascribed to shyness had that been at all credible of her father when
addressing her, "I wish you never to postpone your business to
literary trifling."

She looked at him with the vague fear that accompanies a new and
doubtful experience; and he, dissatisfied with his way of putting
the case, added, "It is of greater importance that you should enjoy
yourself for an hour than that my book should be advanced. Far
greater!"

Lydia, after some consideration, put down her pen and said, "I shall
not enjoy riding if there is anything else left undone."

"I shall not enjoy your writing if your excursion is given up for
it," he said. "I prefer your going."

Lydia obeyed silently. An odd thought struck her that she might end
the matter gracefully by kissing him. But as they were unaccustomed
to make demonstrations of this kind, nothing came of the impulse.
She spent the day on horseback, reconsidered her late rebellious
thoughts, and made the translation in the evening.

Thenceforth Lydia had a growing sense of the power she had
unwittingly been acquiring during her long subordination. Timidly at
first, and more boldly as she became used to dispense with the
parental leading-strings, she began to follow her own bent in
selecting subjects for study, and even to defend certain recent
developments of art against her father's conservatism. He approved
of this independent mental activity on her part, and repeatedly
warned her not to pin her faith more on him than on any other
critic. She once told him that one of her incentives to disagree
with him was the pleasure it gave her to find out ultimately that he
was right. He replied gravely:

"That pleases me, Lydia, because I believe you. But such things are
better left unsaid. They seem to belong to the art of pleasing,
which you will perhaps soon be tempted to practise, because it seems
to ail young people easy, well paid, amiable, and a mark of good
breeding. In truth it is vulgar, cowardly, egotistical, and
insincere: a virtue in a shopman; a vice in a free woman. It is
better to leave genuine praise unspoken than to expose yourself to
the suspicion of flattery."

Shortly after this, at his desire, she spent a season in London, and
went into English polite society, which she found to be in the main
a temple for the worship of wealth and a market for the sale of
virgins. Having become familiar with both the cult and the trade
elsewhere, she found nothing to interest her except the English
manner of conducting them; and the novelty of this soon wore off.
She was also incommoded by her involuntary power of inspiring
affection in her own sex. Impulsive girls she could keep in awe; but
old women, notably two aunts who had never paid her any attention
during her childhood, now persecuted her with slavish fondness, and
tempted her by mingled entreaties and bribes to desert her father
and live with them for the remainder of their lives. Her reserve
fanned their longing to have her for a pet; and, to escape them, she
returned to the Continent with her father, and ceased to hold any
correspondence with London. Her aunts declared themselves deeply
hurt, and Lydia was held to have treated them very injudiciously;
but when they died, and their wills became public, it was found that
they had vied with one another in enriching her.

When she was twenty-five years old the first startling event of her
life took place. This was the death of her father at Avignon. No
endearments passed between them even on that occasion. She was
sitting opposite to him at the fireside one evening, reading aloud,
when he suddenly said, "My heart has stopped, Lydia. Good-bye!" and
immediately died. She had some difficulty in quelling the tumult
that arose when the bell was answered. The whole household felt
bound to be overwhelmed, and took it rather ill that she seemed
neither grateful to them nor disposed to imitate their behavior.

Carew's relatives agreed that he had made a most unbecoming will. It
was a brief document, dated five years before his death, and was to
the effect that he bequeathed to his dear daughter Lydia all he
possessed. He had, however, left her certain private instructions.
One of these, which excited great indignation in his family, was
that his body should be conveyed to Milan, and there cremated.
Having disposed of her father's remains as he had directed, she came
to set her affairs in order in England, where she inspired much
hopeless passion in the toilers in Lincoln's Inn Fields and Chancery
Lane, and agreeably surprised her solicitors by evincing a capacity
for business, and a patience with the law's delay, that seemed
incompatible with her age and sex. When all was arranged, and she
was once more able to enjoy perfect tranquillity, she returned to
Avignon, and there discharged her last duty to her father. This was
to open a letter she had found in his desk, inscribed by his hand:
"For Lydia. To be read by her at leisure when I and my affairs shall
be finally disposed of." The letter ran thus:

"MY DEAR LYDIA,--I belong to the great company of disappointed men.
But for you, I should now write myself down a failure like the rest.
It is only a few years since it first struck me that although I had
failed in many ambitions with which (having failed) I need not
trouble you now, I had achieved some success as a father. I had no
sooner made this discovery than it began to stick in my thoughts
that you could draw no other conclusion from the course of our life
together than that I have, with entire selfishness, used you
throughout as my mere amanuensis and clerk, and that you are under
no more obligation to me for your attainments than a slave is to his
master for the strength which enforced labor has given to his
muscles. Lest I should leave you suffering from so mischievous and
oppressive an influence as a sense of injustice, I now justify
myself to you.

"I have never asked you whether you remember your mother. Had you at
any time broached the subject, I should have spoken quite freely to
you on it; but as some wise instinct led you to avoid it, I was
content to let it rest until circumstances such as the present
should render further reserve unnecessary. If any regret at having
known so little of the woman who gave you birth troubles you, shake
it off without remorse. She was the most disagreeable person I ever
knew. I speak dispassionately. All my bitter personal feeling
against her is as dead while I write as it will be when you read. I
have even come to cherish tenderly certain of her characteristics
which you have inherited, so that I confidently say that I never,
since the perishing of the infatuation in which I married, felt more
kindly toward her than I do now. I made the best, and she the worst,
of our union for six years; and then we parted. I permitted her to
give what account of the separation she pleased, and allowed her
about five times as much money as she had any right to expect. By
these means I induced her to leave me in undisturbed possession of
you, whom I had already, as a measure of precaution, carried off to
Belgium. The reason why we never visited England during her lifetime
was that she could, and probably would, have made my previous
conduct and my hostility to popular religion an excuse for wresting
you from me. I need say no more of her, and am sorry it was
necessary to mention her at all.

"I will now tell you what induced me to secure you for myself. It
was not natural affection; I did not love you then, and I knew that
you would be a serious encumbrance to me. But, having brought you
into the world, and then broken through my engagements with your
mother, I felt bound to see that you should not suffer for my
mistake. Gladly would I have persuaded myself that she was (as the
gossips said) the fittest person to have charge of you; but I knew
better, and made up my mind to discharge my responsibility as well
as I could. In course of time you became useful to me; and, as you
know, I made use of you without scruple, but never without regard to
your own advantage. I always kept a secretary to do whatever I
considered mere copyist's work. Much as you did for me, I think I
may say with truth that I never imposed a task of absolutely no
educational value on you. I fear you found the hours you spent over
my money affairs very irksome; but I need not apologize for that
now: you must already know by experience how necessary a knowledge
of business is to the possessor of a large fortune.

"I did not think, when I undertook your education, that I was laying
the foundation of any comfort for myself. For a long time you were
only a good girl, and what ignorant people called a prodigy of
learning. In your circumstances a commonplace child might have been
both. I subsequently came to contemplate your existence with a
pleasure which I never derived from the contemplation of my own. I
have not succeeded, and shall not succeed in expressing the
affection I feel for you, or the triumph with which I find that what
I undertook as a distasteful and thankless duty has rescued my life
and labor from waste. My literary travail, seriously as it has
occupied us both, I now value only for the share it has had in
educating you; and you will be guilty of no disloyalty to me when
you come to see that though I sifted as much sand as most men, I
found no gold. I ask you to remember, then, that I did my duty to
you long before it became pleasurable or even hopeful. And, when you
are older and have learned from your mother's friends how I failed
in my duty to her, you will perhaps give me some credit for having
conciliated the world for your sake by abandoning habits and
acquaintances which, whatever others may have thought of them, did
much while they lasted to make life endurable to me.

"Although your future will not concern me, I often find myself
thinking of it. I fear you will soon find that the world has not yet
provided a place and a sphere of action for wise and well-instructed
women. In my younger days, when the companionship of my fellows was
a necessity to me, I voluntarily set aside my culture, relaxed my
principles, and acquired common tastes, in order to fit myself for
the society of the only men within my reach; for, if I had to live
among bears, I had rather be a bear than a man. Let me warn you
against this. Never attempt to accommodate yourself to the world by
self-degradation. Be patient; and you will enjoy frivolity all the
more because you are not frivolous: much as the world will respect
your knowledge all the more because of its own ignorance.

"Some day, I expect and hope, you will marry. You will then have an
opportunity of making an irremediable mistake, against the
possibility of which no advice of mine or subtlety of yours can
guard you. I think you will not easily find a man able to satisfy in
you that desire to be relieved of the responsibility of thinking out
and ordering our course of life that makes us each long for a guide
whom we can thoroughly trust. If you fail, remember that your
father, after suffering a bitter and complete disappointment in his
wife, yet came to regard his marriage as the happiest event in his
career. Let me remind you also, since you are so rich, that it would
he a great folly for you to be jealous of your own income, and to
limit your choice of a husband to those already too rich to marry
for money. No vulgar adventurer will be able to recommend himself to
you; and better men will be at least as much frightened as attracted
by your wealth. The only class against which I need warn you is that
to which I myself am supposed to belong. Never think that a man must
prove a suitable and satisfying friend for you merely because he has
read much criticism; that he must feel the influences of art as you
do because he knows and adopts the classification of names and
schools with which you are familiar; or that because he agrees with
your favorite authors he must necessarily interpret their words to
himself as you understand them. Beware of men who have read more
than they have worked, or who love to read better than to work.
Beware of painters, poets, musicians, and artists of all sorts,
except very great artists: beware even of them as husbands and
fathers. Self-satisfied workmen who have learned their business
well, whether they be chancellors of the exchequer or farmers, I
recommend to you as, on the whole, the most tolerable class of men I
have met.

"I shall make no further attempt to advise you. As fast as my
counsels rise to my mind follow reflections that convince me of
their futility.

"You may perhaps wonder why I never said to you what I have written
down here. I have tried to do so and failed. If I understand myself
aright, I have written these lines mainly to relieve a craving to
express my affection for you. The awkwardness which an
over-civilized man experiences in admitting that he is something
more than an educated stone prevented me from confusing you by
demonstrations of a kind I had never accustomed you to. Besides, I
wish this assurance of my love--my last word--to reach you when no
further commonplaces to blur the impressiveness of its simple truth
are possible.

"I know I have said too much; and I feel that I have not said
enough. But the writing of this letter has been a difficult task.
Practised as I am with my pen, I have never, even in my earliest
efforts, composed with such labor and sense of inadequacy----"

Here the manuscript broke off. The letter had never been finished.

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