At last, after two days, he died.  There he lay, the hope of my family, the pride of my manhood, the 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 about 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.