link which had kept me and my Lady Lyndon
together. 'Oh, Redmond,' said she, kneeling by the sweet child's body,
'do, do let us listen to the truth out of his blessed mouth: and do you
amend your life, and treat your poor loving fond wife as her dying child
bade you.' And I said I would: but there are promises which it is out of
a man's power to keep; especially with such a woman as her. But we
drew together after that sad event, and were for several months better
friends.

I won't tell you with what splendour we buried him. Of what avail are
undertakers' feathers and heralds' trumpery? I went out and shot the
fatal black horse that had killed him, at the door of the vault where we
laid my boy. I was so wild, that I could have shot myself too. But for
the crime, it would have been better that I should, perhaps; for what
has my life been since that sweet flower was taken out of my bosom?
A succession of miseries, wrongs, disasters, and mental and bodily
sufferings which never fell to the lot of any other man in Christendom.

Lady Lyndon, always vapourish and nervous, after our blessed boy's
catastrophe became more agitated than ever, and plunged into devotion
with so much fervour, that you would have fancied her almost distracted
at times. She imagined she saw visions. She said an angel from heaven
had told her that Bryan's death was as a punishment to her for her
neglect of her first-born. Then she would declare Bullingdon was alive;
she had seen him in a dream. Then again she would fall into fits of
sorrow about his death, and grieve for him as violently as if he had
been the last of her sons who had died, and not our darling Bryan; who,
compared to Bullingdon, was what a diamond is to a vulgar stone. Her
freaks were painful to witness, and difficult to control. It began to
be said in the country that the Countess was going mad. My scoundrelly
enemies did not fail to confirm and magnify the rumour, and would add
that I was the cause of her insanity: I had driven her to distraction, I
had killed Bullingdon, I had murdered my own son; I don't know what else
they laid to my charge. Even in Ireland their hateful calumnies reached
me: my friends fell away from me. They began to desert my hunt, as they
did in England, and when I went to race or market found sudden reasons
for getting out of my neighbourhood. I got the name of Wicked Barry,
Devil Lyndon, which you please: the country-folk used to make marvellous
legends abou