Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray (robert munsch read aloud txt) 📕

to see women, as base and low-born as yourself’—

‘For Heaven’s sake, be calm!’ cries the lawyer; and then bounded back behind the constables, seeing a threatening look in my eye which the rascal did not like. Indeed. I could have torn him to pieces, had he come near me. Meanwhile, my Lady continued in a strain of incoherent fury; screaming against me, and against my mother especially, upon whom she heaped abuse worthy of Billingsgate, and always beginning and ending the sentence with the word fool.

‘You don’t tell all, my Lady,’ says I bitterly; ‘I said OLD fool.’

‘I have no doubt you said and did, sir, everything that a blackguard could say or do,’ interposed little Poynings. ‘This lady is now safe under the protection of her relations and the law, and need fear your infamous persecutions no longer.’

‘But YOU are not safe,’ roared I; ‘and, as sure as I am a man of honour, and have tasted your blood once, I will have your heart’s blood now.’

‘Take down his words, constables: swear the peace against him!’ screamed the little lawyer, from behind his tipstaffs.

‘I would not sully my sword with the blood of such a ruffian,’ cried my Lord, relying on the same doughty protection. ‘If the scoundrel remains in London another day, he will be seized as a common swindler.’ And this threat indeed made me wince; for I knew that there were scores of writs out against me in town, and that once in prison my case was hopeless.

‘Where’s the man will seize me!’ shouted I, drawing my sword, and placing my back to the door. ‘Let the scoundrel come. You—you cowardly braggart, come first, if you have the soul of a man!’

‘We’re not going to seize you!’ said the lawyer; my Ladyship, her aunt, and a division of the bailiffs moving off as he spoke. ‘My dear sir, we don’t wish to seize you: we will give you a handsome sum to leave the country; only leave her Ladyship in peace!’

‘And the country will be well rid of such a villain!’ says my Lord, retreating too, and not sorry to get out of my reach: and the scoundrel of a lawyer followed him, leaving me in possession of the apartment, and in company of the bullies from the police-office, who were all armed to the teeth. I was no longer the man I was at twenty, when I should have charged the ruffians sword in hand, and have sent at least one of them to his account. I was broken in spirit; regularly caught in the toils: utterly baffled and beaten by that woman. Was she relenting at the door, when she paused and begged me turn back? Had she not a lingering love for me still? Her conduct showed it, as I came to reflect on it. It was my only chance now left in the world, so I put down my sword upon the lawyer’s desk.

‘Gentlemen,’ said I, ‘I shall use no violence; you may tell Mr. Tapewell I am quite ready to speak with him when he is at leisure!’ and I sat down and folded my arms quite peaceably. What a change from the Barry Lyndon of old days! but, as I have read in an old book about Hannibal the Carthaginian general, when he invaded the Romans, his troops, which were the most gallant in the world, and carried all before them, went into cantonments in some city where they were so sated with the luxuries and pleasures of life, that they were easily beaten in the next campaign. It was so with me now. My strength of mind and body were no longer those of the brave youth who shot his man at fifteen, and fought a score of battles within six years afterwards. Now, in the Fleet Prison, where I write this, there is a small man who is always jeering me and making game of me; who asks me to fight, and I haven’t the courage to touch him. But I am anticipating the gloomy and wretched events of my history of humiliation, and had better proceed in order.

I took a lodging in a coffee-house near Gray’s Inn; taking care to inform Mr. Tapewell of my whereabouts, and anxiously expecting a visit from him. He came and brought me the terms which Lady Lyndon’s friends proposed-a paltry annuity of L300 a year; to be paid on the condition of my remaining abroad out of the three kingdoms, and to be stopped on the instant of my return. He told me what I very well knew, that my stay in London would infallibly plunge me in gaol; that there were writs innumerable taken out against me here, and in the West of England; that my credit was so blown upon that I could not hope to raise a shilling; and he left me a night to consider of his proposal; saying that, if I refused it, the family would proceed: if I acceded, a quarter’s salary should be paid to me at any foreign port I should prefer.

What was the poor, lonely, and broken-hearted man to do? I took the annuity, and was declared outlaw in the course of next week. The rascal Quin had, I found, been, after all, the cause of my undoing. It was he devised the scheme for bringing me up to London; sealing the attorney’s letter with a seal which had been agreed upon between him and the Countess formerly: indeed he had always been for trying the plan, and had proposed it at first; but her Ladyship, with her inordinate love of romance, preferred the project of elopement. Of these points my mother wrote me word in my lonely exile, offering at the same time to come over and share it with me; which proposal I declined. She left Castle Lyndon a very short time after I had quitted it; and there was silence in that hall where, under my authority, had been exhibited so much hospitality and splendour. She thought she would never see me again, and bitterly reproached me for neglecting her; but she was mistaken in that, and in her estimate of me. She is very old, and is sitting by my side at this moment in the prison, working: she has a bedroom in Fleet Market over the way; and, with the fifty-pound annuity, which she has kept with a wise prudence, we manage to eke out a miserable existence, quite unworthy of the famous and fashionable Barry Lyndon. Mr. Barry Lyndon’s personal narrative finishes here, for the hand of death interrupted the ingenious author soon after the period at which the Memoir was compiled; after he had lived nineteen years an inmate of the Fleet Prison, where the prison records state he died of delirium tremens. His mother attained a prodigious old age, and the inhabitants of the place in her time can record with accuracy the daily disputes which used to take place between mother and son; until the latter, from habits of intoxication, falling into a state of almost imbecility, was tended by his tough old parent as a baby almost, and would cry if deprived of his necessary glass of brandy.

His life on the Continent we have not the means of following accurately; but he appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler, without his former success.

He returned secretly to England, after some time, and made an abortive attempt to extort money from Lord George Poynings, under a threat of publishing his correspondence with Lady Lyndon, and so preventing his Lordship’s match with Miss Driver, a great heiress, of strict principles, and immense property in slaves in the West Indies. Barry narrowly escaped being taken prisoner by the bailiffs who were despatched after him by his lordship, who would have stopped his pension; but Lady Lyndon would never consent to that act of justice, and, indeed, broke with my Lord George the very moment he married the West India lady.

The fact is, the old Countess thought her charms were perennial, and was never out of love with her husband. She was living at Bath; her property being carefully nursed by her noble relatives the Tiptoffs, who were to succeed to it in default of direct heirs: and such was the address of Barry, and the sway he still held over the woman, that he actually had almost persuaded her to go and live with him again; when his plan and hers was interrupted by the appearance of a person who had been deemed dead for several years.

This was no other than Viscount Bullingdon, who started up to the surprise