t me: the priests said I had massacred I don't know how
many German nuns in the Seven Years' War; that the ghost of the murdered
Bullingdon haunted my house. Once at a fair in a town hard by, when I
had a mind to buy a waistcoat for one of my people, a fellow standing by
said, ''Tis a strait-waistcoat he's buying for my Lady Lyndon.' And
from this circumstance arose a legend of my cruelty to my wife; and many
circumstantial details were narrated regarding my manner and ingenuity
of torturing her.

The loss of my dear boy pressed not only on my heart as a father, but
injured my individual interests in a very considerable degree; for as
there was now no direct heir to the estate, and Lady Lyndon was of a
weak health, and supposed to be quite unlikely to leave a family, the
next in succession-that detestable family of Tiptoff--began to exert
themselves in a hundred ways to annoy me, and were at the head of
the party of enemies who were raising reports to my discredit. They
interposed between me and my management of the property in a hundred
different ways; making an outcry if I cut a stick, sunk a shaft, sold a
picture, or sent a few ounces of plate to be remodelled. They harassed
me with ceaseless lawsuits, got injunctions from Chancery, hampered my
agents in the execution of their work; so much so that you would have
fancied my own was not my own, but theirs, to do as they liked with.
What is worse, as I have reason to believe, they had tamperings and
dealings with my own domestics under my own roof; for I could not have
a word with Lady Lyndon but it somehow got abroad, and I could not be
drunk with my chaplain and friends but some sanctified rascals would
get hold of the news, and reckon up all the bottles I drank and all the
oaths I swore. That these were not few, I acknowledge. I am of the old
school; was always a free liver and speaker; and, at least, if I did and
said what I liked, was not so bad as many a canting scoundrel I know of
who covers his foibles and sins, unsuspected, with a mask of holiness.
As I am making a clean breast of it, and am no hypocrite, I may as well
confess now that I endeavoured to ward off the devices of my enemies
by an artifice which was not, perhaps, strictly justifiable. Everything
depended on my having an heir to the estate; for if Lady Lyndon, who
was of weakly health, had died, the next day I was a beggar: all my
sacrifices of money, &c., on the estate would not have been held in a