My father, who disliked all women except my mother, and, Catholic as he was, had scant respect for the mendicant orders, hated this dream, hated to be reminded of it, hated the name which he had been persuaded into giving me, and, as a consequence, I believe, never loved me.  For unnumbered generations of our family we had been Antonys, Gerards, Ralphs, Martins; the name of Francis was unknown to the tree; he never ceased to inveigh against it, and foretold the time when it would stand out like a parasite upon its topmost shoot.  “Your Italian ecstatic,” he told my mother, “began life by running away from his father and only came back for the purpose of robbing him.  He taught more people to live by singing hymns than ever were taught before, and preached the virtues of poverty, by which he intended the comfort it was for the blessed poor to be kept snugly idle by the accursed rich.  It never occurred to him to reflect that, if everybody had been of his opinion, everybody would have starved, the world would have stood still, and neither St. Ferdinand of Spain, nor St. Edward the Confessor, nor Don John of Austria could have become famous.  As for your women and apples, the conjunction is detestable.  Cain was the result of one woman’s desire for an apple, and the siege of Troy that of another’s.  I don’t wish this boy to grow up either murderer or pretty Paris.”

The like of this speech, often repeated—­indeed, never omitted when so I happened to fall into some childish disgrace—­may be imagined.  It made an outcast of me, an exile from my nursery days.  I grew up lonely, sullen, moody.  I could not meet my father with any comfort to either of us; and though I loved my mother, and she me, that cold shadow of his prejudice seemed to be over my intercourse with her, to chill and check those emotions which should glow naturally when a son stands in the presence of his mother.  To be brief, I was an unhappy, solitary lad, with sisters much older and brothers much younger than himself; cut off, too, by reason of religion, from the society of neighbours, from school and college.  Such companions as I could have were far below me in station, and either so servile as to foster pride, or so insolent as to inflame it.  There was Father Danvers, it’s true, that excellent Jesuit and our chaplain; and there were books.  I was by nature a strong, healthy, active boy, but was driven by sheer solitariness to be studious.  If it had not turned out so, I know not what might have become of me, at what untimely age I might have been driven to violence, crime, God knows what.  That there was danger of some such disaster Father Danvers was well aware.  My faults, as he did not fail to remind me week by week, were obstinacy and pride of intellect; my weaknesses, lack of proportion and what he was pleased to call perversity, by which I suppose he meant a disposition to accept the consequences of my own acts.  I freely admit a personal trait which will be obvious as I proceed.