The Luck of Barry Lyndon, William Makepeace Thackeray [best ereader under 100 .txt] 📗

“Even my poor child, who perished untimely on this sad anniversary, the tyrant who governs me had taught to despise and dislike me. ’Twas in disobedience to my orders, my prayers, that he went on the fatal journey. What sufferings, what humiliations have I had to endure since then! I am a prisoner in my own halls. I should fear poison, but that I know the wretch has a sordid interest in keeping me alive, and that my death would be the signal for his ruin. But I dare not stir without my odious, hideous, vulgar gaoler, the horrid Irishwoman, who pursues my every step. I am locked into my chamber at night, like a felon, and only suffered to leave it when ordered into the presence of my lord (I ordered!), to be present at his orgies with his boon companions, and to hear his odious converse as he lapses into the disgusting madness of intoxication! He has given up even the semblance of constancy⁠—he, who swore that I alone could attach or charm him! And now he brings his vulgar mistresses before my very eyes, and would have had me acknowledge, as heir to my own property, his child by another!

“No, I never will submit! Thou, and thou only, my George, my early friend, shalt be heir to the estates of Lyndon. Why did not Fate join me to thee, instead of to the odious man who holds me under his sway, and make the poor Calista happy?”

So the letters would run on for sheets upon sheets, in the closest cramped handwriting; and I leave any unprejudiced reader to say whether the writer of such documents must not have been as silly and vain a creature as ever lived, and whether she did not want being taken care of? I could copy out yards of rhapsody to Lord George Poynings, her old flame, in which she addressed him by the most affectionate names, and implored him to find a refuge for her against her oppressors; but they would fatigue the reader to peruse, as they would me to copy. The fact is, that this unlucky lady had the knack of writing a great deal more than she meant. She was always reading novels and trash; putting herself into imaginary characters and flying off into heroics and sentimentalities with as little heart as any woman I ever knew; yet showing the most violent disposition to be in love. She wrote always as if she was in a flame of passion. I have an elegy on her lapdog, the most tender and pathetic piece she ever wrote; and most tender notes of remonstrance to Betty, her favourite maid; to her housekeeper, on quarrelling with her; to half-a-dozen acquaintances, each of whom she addressed as the dearest friend in the world, and forgot the very moment she took up another fancy. As for her love for her children, the above passage will show how much she was capable of true maternal feeling: the very sentence in which she records the death of one child serves to betray her egotisms, and to wreak her spleen against myself; and she only wishes to recall another from the grave, in order that he may be of some personal advantage to her. If I did deal severely with this woman, keeping her from her flatterers who would have bred discord between us, and locking her up out of mischief, who shall say that I was wrong? If any woman deserved a strait-waistcoat⁠—it was my Lady Lyndon; and I have known people in my time manacled, and with their heads shaved, in the straw, who had not committed half the follies of that foolish, vain, infatuated creature.

My mother was so enraged by the charges against me and herself which these letters contained, that it was with the utmost difficulty I could keep her from discovering our knowledge of them to Lady Lyndon; whom it was, of course, my object to keep in ignorance of our knowledge of her designs: for I was anxious to know how far they went, and to what pitch of artifice she would go. The letters increased in interest (as they say of the novels) as they proceeded. Pictures were drawn of my treatment of her which would make your heart throb. I don’t know of what monstrosities she did not accuse me, and what miseries and starvation she did not profess herself to undergo; all the while she was living exceedingly fat and contented, to outward appearances, at our house at Castle Lyndon. Novel-reading and vanity had turned her brain. I could not say a rough word to her (and she merited many thousands a day, I can tell you), but she declared I was putting her to the torture; and my mother could not remonstrate with her but she went off into a fit of hysterics, of which she would declare the worthy old lady was the cause.

At last she began to threaten to kill herself; and though I by no means kept the cutlery out of the way, did not stint her in garters, and left her doctor’s shop at her entire service⁠—knowing her character full well, and that there was no woman in Christendom less likely to lay hands on her precious life than herself; yet these threats had an effect, evidently, in the quarter to which they were addressed; for the milliner’s packets now began to arrive with great frequency, and the bills sent to her contained assurances of coming aid. The chivalrous Lord George Poynings was coming to his cousin’s rescue, and did me the compliment to say that he hoped to free his dear cousin from the clutches of the most atrocious villain that ever disgraced humanity; and that, when she was free, measures should be taken for a divorce, on the ground of cruelty and every species of ill-usage on my part.

I had copies of all these