Cashel Byron's Profession

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.