me up to public odium as a ‘child-forger,’ as they called me.  Of course I denied the charge—­I could do no otherwise, and offered to meet any one of the Tiptoffs on the field of honour, and prove him a scoundrel and a liar:  as he was; though, perhaps, not in this instance.  But they contented themselves by answering me by a lawyer, and declined an invitation which any man of spirit would have accepted.  My hopes of having an heir were thus blighted completely:  indeed, Lady Lyndon (though, as I have said, I take her opposition for nothing) had resisted the proposal with as much energy as a woman of her weakness could manifest; and said she had committed one great crime in consequence of me, but would rather die than perform another.  I could easily have brought her Ladyship to her senses, however:  but my scheme had taken wind, and it was now in vain to attempt it.  We might have had a dozen children in honest wedlock, and people would have said they were false.

As for raising money on annuities, I may say I had used her life interest up.  There were but few of those assurance societies in my time which have since sprung up in the city of London; underwriters did the business, and my wife’s life was as well known among them as, I do believe, that of any woman in Christendom.  Latterly, when I wanted to get a sum against her life, the rascals had the impudence to say my treatment of her did not render it worth a year’s purchase,—­as if my interest lay in killing her!  Had my boy lived, it would have been a different thing; he and his mother might have cut off the entail of a good part of the property between them, and my affairs have been put in better order.  Now they were in a bad condition indeed.  All my schemes had turned out failures; my lands, which I had purchased with borrowed money, made me no return, and I was obliged to pay ruinous interest for the sums with which I had purchased them.  My income, though very large, was saddled with hundreds of annuities, and thousands of lawyers’ charges; and I felt the net drawing closer and closer round me, and no means to extricate myself from its toils.

To add to all my perplexities, two years after my poor child’s death, my wife, whose vagaries of temper and wayward follies I had borne with for twelve years, wanted to leave me, and absolutely made attempts at what she called escaping from my tyranny.

My mother, who was the only person that, in my misfortunes, remained faithful to me (indeed, she has always spoken of me in my true light, as a martyr to the rascality of others and a victim of my own generous and confiding temper), found out the first scheme that was going on; and of which those artful and malicious Tiptoffs were, as usual, the main promoters.  Mrs. Barry, indeed, though her temper was violent and her ways singular, was an invaluable person to me in my house; which would have been at rack and ruin long before, but for her spirit of order and management, and for her excellent economy in the government of my numerous family.  As for my Lady Lyndon, she, poor soul! was much too fine a lady to attend to household matters—­ passed her days with her doctor, or her books of piety, and never appeared among us except at my compulsion; when she and my mother would be sure to have a quarrel.