‘Not entirely. I wished my son to be an English gentleman. I wanted, if possible, to eradicate the South American element, which had already exhibited itself in violent passions and an inordinate love of pleasure. One talent, and one only, he had displayed to any great extent; and that was a talent, or, as his mother and her few friends declared, a genius for music. From five years old his chief delight was scraping a fiddle or strumming on his mother’s piano. Now, for my own part,’ added Mr. Sivewright candidly, ‘I hate music.’ ‘And I have loved it,’ said Lucius thoughtfully. ‘Yet it is strange that the darkest memories of my life are associated with music.’ ‘I didn’t want the son for whom I had toiled, and was willing to go on toiling for the rest of my days, to become a fiddler. I told him as much in the plainest words, and sent him to a private tutor; in that manner beginning an education which was to cost me as much as if I had been a man of wealth and position. I hoped that education might cure the vices of his childhood, and make him a good man. From the tutor he went to Harrow, from Harrow to Oxford, your own college, Balliol. But before this period of his life his mother ran away from me for the last time. I declined to go through the usual business of bringing her home again, but gave her a small allowance and requested her to remain away. She stayed with the South American widow in Thistle-grove; spent her allowance, I fear, chiefly upon brandy, and died in less than a year after she left me. My son went to see her when she was dying; heard her last counsel, which doubtless advised him to hate me; and went back to Harrow, a boy, with the passions of a man.’ There was a pause, and once more the old man’s chin sunk upon his breast, the cold gray eyes fixed themselves with that far-off gaze which sees the things that are no more. Then rousing himself with an impatient sigh he went on. ‘I needn’t trouble you with the details of his University life. Enough that he contrived to make it an epitome of the vices. He assented sullenly to adopt a profession—the law; skulked; spent his days and nights in dissipation; wasted my money; and compelled me at last to say, “Shut up your books, if you have ever opened them. Nature never meant you for a lawyer. But you have all the sharpness of your mother’s wily race. Come home, and in my petty business learn the science of commerce. You may be a great merchant by and by.”’ ‘You must have loved him in those days, or you would hardly have been so lenient,’ said Lucius.