Cashel Byron's Profession

"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.