Cashel Byron's Profession

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.