Barry Lyndon

by William Makepeace Thackeray

  In fact, the doctors tinkered him up for a year. 'It's my usual luck,' I could not help saying to my uncle, who was my confidential and most excellent adviser in all matters of the heart. 'I've been wasting the treasures of my affections upon that flirt of a countess, and here's her husband restored to health and likely to live I don't know how many years!' And, as if to add to my mortification, there came just at this period to Spa an English tallow-chandler's heiress, with a plum to her fortune; and Madame Cornu, the widow of a Norman cattle-dealer and farmer-general, with a dropsy and two hundred thousand livres a year.

  'What's the use of my following the Lyndons to England,' says I, 'if the knight won't die?'

  'Don't follow them, my dear simple child,' replied my uncle. 'Stop here and pay court to the new arrivals.'

  'Yes, and lose Calista for ever, and the greatest estate in all England.'

  'Pooh, pooh! youths like you easily fire and easily despond. Keep up a correspondence with Lady Lyndon. You know there's nothing she likes so much. There's the Irish abbe, who will write you the most charming letters for a crown apiece. Let her go; write to her, and meanwhile look out for anything else which may turn up. Who knows? you might marry the Norman widow, bury her, take her money, and be ready for the Countess against the knight's death.'

  And so, with vows of the most profound respectful attachment, and having given twenty louis to Lady Lyndon's waiting-woman for a lock of her hair (of which fact, of course, the woman informed her mistress), I took leave of the Countess, when it became necessary for her return to her estates in England; swearing I would follow her as soon as an affair of honour I had on my hands could be brought to an end.

  I shall pass over the events of the year that ensued before I again saw her. She wrote to me according to promise; with much regularity at first, with somewhat less frequency afterwards. My affairs, meanwhile, at the play-table went on not unprosperously, and I was just on the point of marrying the widow Cornu (we were at Brussels by this time, and the poor soul was madly in love with me,) when the London Gazette was put into my hands, and I read the following announcement:—

  'Died at Castle-Lyndon, in the kingdom of Ireland, the Right Honourable Sir Charles Lyndon, Knight of the Bath, member of Parliament for Lyndon in Devonshire, and many years His Majesty's representative at various European Courts. He hath left behind him a name which is endeared to all his friends for his manifold virtues and talents, a reputation justly acquired in the service of His Majesty, and an inconsolable widow to deplore his loss. Her Ladyship, the bereaved Countess of Lyndon, was at the Bath when the horrid intelligence reached her of her husband's demise, and hastened to Ireland immediately in order to pay her last sad duties to his beloved remains.'

  That very night I ordered my chariot and posted to Ostend, whence I freighted a vessel to Dover, and travelling rapidly into the West, reached Bristol; from which port I embarked for Waterford, and found myself, after an absence of eleven years, in my native country.

  Chapter XIV. I Return To Ireland, And Exhibit My Splendour And Generosity In That Kingdom

  How were times changed with me now! I had left my country a poor penniless boy—a private soldier in a miserable marching regiment. I returned an accomplished man, with property to the amount of five thousand guineas in my possession, with a splendid wardrobe and jewel-case worth two thousand more; having mingled in all the scenes of life a not undistinguished actor in them; having shared in war and in love; having by my own genius and energy won my way from poverty and obscurity to competence and splendour. As I looked out from my chariot windows as it rolled along over the bleak bare roads, by the miserable cabins of the peasantry, who came out in their rags to stare as the splendid equipage passed, and huzza'd for his Lordship's honour as they saw the magnificent stranger in the superb gilded vehicle, my huge body-servant Fritz lolling behind with curling moustaches and long queue, his green livery barred with silver lace, I could not help thinking of myself with considerable complacency, and thanking my stars that had endowed me with so many good qualities. But for my own merits I should have been a raw Irish squireen such as those I saw swaggering about the wretched towns through which my chariot passed on its road to Dublin. I might have married Nora Brady (and though, thank Heaven, I did not, I have never thought of that girl but with kindness, and even remember the bitterness of losing her more clearly at this moment than any other incident of my life); I might have been the father of ten children by this time, or a farmer on my own account, or an agent to a squire, or a gauger, or an attorney; and here I was one of the most famous gentlemen of Europe! I bade my fellow get a bag of copper money and throw it among the crowd as we changed horses; and I warrant me there was as much shouting set up in praise of my honour as if my Lord Townshend, the Lord Lieutenant himself, had been passing.

  My second day's journey—for the Irish roads were rough in those days, and the progress of a gentleman's chariot terribly slow— brought me to Carlow, where I put up at the very inn which I had used eleven years back, when flying from home after the supposed murder of Quin in the duel. How well I remember every moment of the scene! The old landlord was gone who had served me; the inn that I then thought so comfortable looked wretched and dismantled; but the claret was as good as in the old days, and I had the host to partake of a jug of it and hear the news of the country.

  He was as communicative as hosts usually are: the crops and the markets, the price of beasts at last Castle Dermot fair, the last story about the vicar, and the last joke of Father Hogan the priest; how the Whiteboys had burned Squire Scanlan's ricks, and the highwaymen had been beaten off in their attack upon Sir Thomas's house; who was to hunt the Kilkenny hounds next season, and the wonderful run entirely they had last March; what troops were in the town, and how Miss Biddy Toole had run off with Ensign Mullins: all the news of sport, assize, and quarter-sessions were detailed by this worthy chronicler of small-beer, who wondered that my honour hadn't heard of them in England, or in foreign parts, where he seemed to think the world was as interested as he was about the doings of Kilkenny and Carlow. I listened to these tales with, I own, a considerable pleasure; for every now and then a name would come up in the conversation which I remembered in old days, and bring with it a hundred associations connected with them.

  I had received many letters from my mother, which informed me of the doings of the Brady's Town family. My uncle was dead, and Mick, his eldest son, had followed him too to the grave. The Brady girls had separated from their paternal roof as soon as their elder brother came to rule over it. Some were married, some gone to settle with their odious old mother in out-of-the-way watering-places. Ulick, though he had succeeded to the estate, had come in for a bankrupt property, and Castle Brady was now inhabited only by the bats and owls, and the old gamekeeper. My mother, Mrs. Harry Barry, had gone to live at Bray, to sit under Mr. Jowls, her favourite preacher, who had a chapel there; and, finally, the landlord told me, that Mrs. Barry's son had gone to foreign parts, enlisted in the Prussian service, and had been shot there as a deserter.

  I don't care to own that I hired a stout nag from the landlord's stable after dinner, and rode back at nightfall twenty miles to my old home. My heart beat to see it. Barryville had got a pestle and mortar over the door, and was called 'The Esculapian Repository,' by Doctor Macshane; a red-headed lad was spreading a plaster in the old parlour; the little window of my room, once so neat and bright, was cracked in many places, and stuffed with rags here and there; the flowers had disappeared from the trim garden-beds which my good orderly mother tended. In the churchyard there were two more names put into the stone over the family vault of the Bradys: they were those of my cousin, for whom my regard was small, and my uncle, whom I had always loved. I asked my old companion the blacksmith, who had beaten me so often in old days, to give my horse a feed and a litter: he was a worn weary-looking man now, with a dozen dirty ragged children paddling about his smithy, and had no recollection of the fine gentleman who stood before hi
m. I did not seek to recall my-self to his memory till the next day, when I put ten guineas into his hand, and bade him drink the health of English Redmond.

  As for Castle Brady, the gates of the park were still there; but the old trees were cut down in the avenue, a black stump jutting out here and there, and casting long shadows as I passed in the moonlight over the worn grass-grown old road. A few cows were at pasture there. The garden-gate was gone, and the place a tangled wilderness. I sat down on the old bench, where I had sat on the day when Nora jilted me; and I do believe my feelings were as strong then as they had been when I was a boy, eleven years before; and I caught myself almost crying again, to think that Nora Brady had deserted me. I believe a man forgets nothing. I've seen a flower, or heard some trivial word or two, which have awakened recollections that somehow had lain dormant for scores of years; and when I entered the house in Clarges Street, where I was born (it was used as a gambling-house when I first visited London), all of a sudden the memory of my childhood came back to me—of my actual infancy: I recollected my father in green and gold, holding me up to look at a gilt coach which stood at the door, and my mother in a flowered sack, with patches on her face. Some day, I wonder, will everything we have seen and thought and done come and flash across our minds in this way? I had rather not. I felt so as I sat upon the bench at Castle Brady, and thought of the bygone times.

  The hall-door was open—it was always so at that house; the moon was flaring in at the long old windows, and throwing ghastly chequers upon the floors; and the stars were looking in on the other side, in the blue of the yawning window over the great stair: from it you could see the old stable-clock, with the letters glistening on it still. There had been jolly horses in those stables once; and I could see my uncle's honest face, and hear him talking to his dogs as they came jumping and whining and barking round about him of a gay winter morning. We used to mount there; and the girls looked out at us from the hall-window, where I stood and looked at the sad, mouldy, lonely old place. There was a red light shining through the crevices of a door at one corner of the building, and a dog presently came out baying loudly, and a limping man followed with a fowling-piece.

  'Who's there?' said the old man.

  'Phil PurcelL, don't you know me?' shouted I; 'it's Redmond Barry.'

  I thought the old man would have fired his piece at me at first, for he pointed it at the window; but I called to him to hold his hand, and came down and embraced him.... Psha! I don't care to tell the rest: Phil and I had a long night, and talked over a thousand foolish old things that have no interest for any soul alive now: for what soul is there alive that cares for Barry Lyndon?

  I settled a hundred guineas on the old man when I got to Dublin, and made him an annuity which enabled him to pass his old days in comfort.

  Poor Phil Purcell was amusing himself at a game of exceedingly dirty cards with an old acquaintance of mine; no other than Tim, who was called my 'valet' in the days of yore, and whom the reader may remember as clad in my father's old liveries. They used to hang about him in those times, and lap over his wrists and down to his heels; but Tim, though he protested he had nigh killed himself with grief when I went away, had managed to grow enormously fat in my absence, and would have fitted almost into Daniel Lambert's coat, or that of the vicar of Castle Brady, whom he served in the capacity of clerk. I would have engaged the fellow in my service but for his monstrous size, which rendered him quite unfit to be the attendant of any gentleman of condition; and so I presented him with a handsome gratuity, and promised to stand godfather to his next child: the eleventh since my absence. There is no country in the world where the work of multiplying is carried on so prosperously as in my native island. Mr. Tim had married the girls' waiting-maid, who had been a kind friend of mine in the early times; and I had to go salute poor Molly next day, and found her a slatternly wench in a mud hut, surrounded by a brood of children almost as ragged as those of my friend the blacksmith.

  From Tim and Phil Purcell, thus met fortuitously together, I got the very last news respecting my family. My mother was well.

  ''Faith sir,' says Tim, 'and you're come in time, mayhap, for preventing an addition to your family.'

  'Sir!' exclaimed I, in a fit of indignation.

  'In the shape of father-in-law, I mane, sir,' says Tim: 'the misthress is going to take on with Mister Jowls the praacher.'

  Poor Nora, he added, had made many additions to the illustrious race of Quin; and my cousin Ulick was in Dublin, coming to little good, both my informants feared, and having managed to run through the small available remains of property which my good old uncle had left behind him.

  I saw I should have no small family to provide for; and then, to conclude the evening, Phil, Tim, and I, had a bottle of usquebaugh, the taste of which I had remembered for eleven good years, and did not part except with the warmest terms of fellowship, and until the sun had been some time in the sky. I am exceedingly affable; that has always been one of my characteristics. I have no false pride, as many men of high lineage like my own have, and, in default of better company, will hob and nob with a ploughboy or a private soldier just as readily as with the first noble in the land.

  I went back to the village in the morning, and found a pretext for visiting Barryville under a device of purchasing drugs. The hooks were still in the wall where my silver-hiked sword used to hang; a blister was lying on the window-sill, where my mother's 'Whole Duty of Man' had its place; and the odious Doctor Macshane had found out who I was (my countrymen find out everything, and a great deal more besides), and sniggering, asked me how I left the King of Prussia, and whether my friend the Emperor Joseph was as much liked as the Empress Maria Theresa had been. The bell-ringers would have had a ring of bells for me, but there was but one, Tim, who was too fat to pull; and I rode off before the vicar, Doctor Bolter (who had succeeded old Mr. Texter, who had the living in my time), had time to come out to compliment me; but the rapscallions of the beggarly village had assembled in a dirty army to welcome me, and cheered 'Hurrah for Masther Redmond!' as I rode away.

  My people were not a little anxious regarding me, by the time I returned to Carlow, and the landlord was very much afraid, he said, that the highwaymen had gotten hold of me. There, too, my name and station had been learned from my servant Fritz: who had not spared his praises of his master, and had invented some magnificent histories concerning me. He said it was the truth that I was intimate with half the sovereigns of Europe, and the prime favourite with most of them. Indeed I had made my uncle's order of the Spur hereditary, and travelled under the name of the Chevalier Barry, chamberlain to the Duke of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.

  They gave me the best horses the stable possessed to carry me on my road to Dublin, and the strongest ropes for harness; and we got on pretty well, and there was no rencontre between the highwaymen and the pistols with which Fritz and I were provided. We lay that night at Kilcullen, and the next day I made my entry into the city of Dublin, with four horses to my carriage, five thousand guineas in my purse, and one of the most brilliant reputations in Europe, having quitted the city a beggarly boy, eleven years before.

  The citizens of Dublin have as great and laudable a desire for knowing their neighbours' concerns as the country people have; and it is impossible for a gentleman, however modest his desires may be (and such mine have notoriously been through life), to enter the capital without having his name printed in every newspaper and mentioned in a number of societies. My name and titles were all over the town the day after my arrival. A great number of polite persons did me the honour to call at my lodgings, when I selected them; and this was a point very necessarily of immediate care, for the hotels in the town were but vulgar holes, unfit for a nobleman of my fashion and elegance. I had been informed of the fact by travellers on the Continent; and determining to fix on a lodging at once, I bade the drivers go slowly up and down the streets with my chariot, until I had selected a place suitable to my rank. This proceeding, and the uncout
h questions and behaviour of my German Fritz, who was instructed to make inquiries at the different houses until convenient apartments could be lighted upon, brought an immense mob round my coach; and by the time the rooms were chosen you might have supposed I was the new General of the Forces, so great was the multitude following us.

  I fixed at length upon a handsome suite of apartments in Capel Street, paid the ragged postilions who had driven me a splendid gratuity, and establishing myself in the rooms with my baggage and Fritz, desired the landlord to engage me a second fellow to wear my liveries, a couple of stout reputable chairmen and their machine, and a coachman who had handsome job-horses to hire for my chariot, and serviceable riding-horses to sell. I gave him a handsome sum in advance; and I promise you the effect of my advertisement was such, that next day I had a regular levee in my antechamber: grooms, valets, and maitres-d'hotel offered themselves without number; I had proposals for the purchase of horses sufficient to mount a regiment, both from dealers and gentlemen of the first fashion. Sir Lawler Gawler came to propose to me the most elegant bay-mare ever stepped; my Lord Dundoodle had a team of four that wouldn't disgrace my friend the Emperor; and the Marquess of Ballyragget sent his gentleman and his compliments, stating that if I would step up to his stables, or do him the honour of breakfasting with him previously, he would show me the two finest greys in Europe. I determined to accept the invitations of Dundoodle and Ballyragget, but to purchase my horses from the dealers. It is always the best way. Besides, in those days, in Ireland, if a gentleman warranted his horse, and it was not sound, or a dispute arose, the remedy you had was the offer of a bullet in your waistcoat. I had played at the bullet game too much in earnest to make use of it heedlessly: and I may say, proudly for myself, that I never engaged in a duel unless I had a real, available, and prudent reason for it.