Barry Lyndon
by William Makepeace Thackeray · English · Gutenberg #4558 · 714,233 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Barry Lyndon
Author: William Makepeace Thackeray
Release date: October 1, 2003 [eBook #4558]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2026
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BARRY LYNDON ***
BARRY LYNDON
By William Makepeace Thackeray
From The Works Of William Makepeace Thackeray
Edited By Walter Jerrold
CONTENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
I.--MY PEDIGREE AND FAMILY--UNDERGO THE INFLUENCE OF THE TENDER
PASSION
II.--IN WHICH I SHOW MYSELF TO BE A MAN OF SPIRIT
III.--I MAKE A FALSE START IN THE GENTEEL WORLD
IV.--IN WHICH BARRY TAKES A NEAR VIEW OF MILITARY GLORY
V.--IN WHICH BARRY TRIES TO REMOVE AS FAR FROM MILITARY GLORY AS
POSSIBLE
VI.--THE CRIMP WAGGON--MILITARY EPISODES
VII.--BARRY LEADS A GARRISON LIFE, AND FINDS MANY FRIENDS THERE
VIII.--BARRY BIDS ADIEU TO THE MILITARY PROFESSION
IX.--I APPEAR IN A MANNER BECOMING MY NAME AND LINEAGE
X.--MORE RUNS OF LUCK
XI.--IN WHICH THE LUCK GOES AGAINST BARRY
XII.--CONTAINS THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF THE PRINCESS OF X-----
XIII.--I CONTINUE MY CAREER AS A MAN OF FASHION
XIV.--I RETURN TO IRELAND, AND EXHIBIT MY SPLENDOUR AND GENEROSITY
IN THAT KINGDOM
XV.--I PAY COURT TO MY LADY LYNDON
XVI.--I PROVIDE NOBLY FOR MY FAMILY, AND ATTAIN THE HEIGHT OF MY
(SEEMING) GOOD FORTUNE
XVII.--I APPEAR AS AN ORNAMENT OF ENGLISH SOCIETY
XVIII.--IN WHICH MY GOOD FORTUNE BEGINS TO WAVER
XIX.--CONCLUSION
BARRY LYNDON
A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Barry Lyndon--far from the best known, but by some critics acclaimed as
the finest, of Thackeray’s works--appeared originally as a serial a few
years before VANITY FAIR was written; yet it was not published in book
form, and then not by itself, until after the publication of VANITY
FAIR, PENDENNIS, ESMOND and THE NEWCOMES had placed its author in the
forefront of the literary men of the day. So many years after the event
we cannot help wondering why the story was not earlier put in book form;
for in its delineation of the character of an adventurer it is as great
as VANITY FAIR, while for the local colour of history, if I may put it
so, it is no undistinguished precursor of ESMOND.
In the number of FRASER’S MAGAZINE for January 1844 appeared the first
instalment of ‘THE LUCK OF BARRY LYNDON, ESQ., A ROMANCE OF THE LAST
CENTURY, by FitzBoodle,’ and the story continued to appear month by
month--with the exception of October--up to the end of the year, when
the concluding portion was signed ‘G. S. FitzBoodle.’ FITZBOODLE’S
CONFESSIONS, it should be added, had appeared occasionally in the
magazine during the years immediately precedent, so that the pseudonym
was familiar to FRASER’S readers. The story was written, according to
its author’s own words, ‘with a great deal of dulness, unwillingness and
labour,’ and was evidently done as the instalments were required, for in
August he wrote ‘read for “B. L.” all the morning at the club,’ and four
days later of ‘“B. L.” lying like a nightmare on my mind.’ The journey
to the East--which was to give us in literary results NOTES OF A
JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL TO GRAND CAIRO--was begun with BARRY LYNDON yet
unfinished, for at Malta the author noted on the first three days of
November--‘Wrote Barry but slowly and with great difficulty.’ ‘Wrote
Barry with no more success than yesterday.’ ‘Finished Barry after great
throes late at night.’ In the number of Fraser’s for the following
month, as I have said, the conclusion appeared. A dozen years later, in
1856, the story formed the first part of the third volume of Thackeray’s
MISCELLANIES, when it was called MEMOIRS OF BARRY LYNDON, ESQ., WRITTEN
BY HIMSELF. Since then, it has nearly always been issued with other
matter, as though it were not strong enough to stand alone, or as though
the importance of a work was mainly to be gauged by the number of
pages to be crowded into one cover. The scheme of the present edition
fortunately allows fitting honour to be done to the memoirs of the great
adventurer.
To come from the story as a whole to the personality of the eponymous
hero. Three widely-differing historical individuals are suggested as
having contributed to the composite portrait. Best known of these was
that very prince among adventurers, G. J. Casanova de Seingalt, a man
who in the latter half of the eighteenth century played the part of
adventurer--and generally that of the successful adventurer--in most of
the European capitals; who within the first five-and-twenty years of
his life had been ‘abbe, secretary to Cardinal Aquaviva, ensign, and
violinist, at Rome, Constantinople, Corfu, and his own birthplace
(Venice), where he cured a senator of apoplexy.’ His autobiography,
MEMOIRES ECRIT PAR LUI MEME (in twelve volumes), has been described
as ‘unmatched as a self-revelation of scoundrelism.’ It has also
been suggested, with I think far less colour of probability, that the
original of Barry was the diplomatist and satiric poet Sir Charles
Hanbury Williams, whom Dr Johnson described as ‘our lively and elegant
though too licentious lyrick bard.’ The third original, and one who,
there cannot be the slightest doubt, contributed features to the great
portrait, is a certain Andrew Robinson Stoney, afterwards Stoney-Bowes.
The original of the Countess Lyndon was Mary Eleanor Bowes, Dowager
Countess of Strathmore, and heiress of a very wealthy Durham family.
This lady had many suitors, but in 1777 Stoney, a bankrupt lieutenant on
half pay, who had fought a duel on her behalf, induced her to marry him,
and subsequently hyphenated her name with his own. He became member
of Parliament, and ran such extravagant courses as does Barry Lyndon,
treated his wife with similar barbarity, abducted her when she had
escaped from him, and then, after being divorced, found his way to
a debtors’ prison. There are similarities here which no seeker after
originals can overlook. Mrs Ritchie says that her father had a friend
at Paris, ‘a Mr Bowes, who may have first told him this history of which
the details are almost incredible, as quoted from the papers of the
time.’ The name of Thackeray’s friend is a curious coincidence, unless,
as may well have been the case, he was a connection of the family into
which the notorious adventurer had married. It is not unlikely
that Thackeray had seen the work published in 1810--the year of
Stoney-Bowes’s death--in which the whole unhappy romance was set forth.
This was ‘THE LIVES OF ANDREW ROBINSON BOWES ESQ., and THE COUNTESS OF
STRATHMORE. Written from thirty-three years’ Professional Attendance,
from letters and other well authenticated Documents by Jesse Foot,
Surgeon.’ In this book we find several incidents similar to ones in
the story. Bowes cut down all the timber on his wife’s estate, but
‘the neighbours would not buy it.’ Such practical jokes as Barry Lyndon
played upon his son’s tutor were played by Bowes on his chaplain. The
story of Stoney and his marriage will be found briefly given in the
notice of the Countess’s life in the DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY.
Whence that part of the romantic interlude dealing with the stay in
the Duchy of X----, dealt with in chapter x., etc., was inspired,
Thackeray’s own note\books (as quoted by Mrs Ritchie) conclusively show:
‘January 4,1844. Read in a silly book called L’EMPIRE, a good story
about the first K. of Wurtemberg’s wife; killed by her husband for
adultery. Frederic William, born in 1734 (?), m. in 1780 the Princess
Caroline of Brunswick Wolfenbuttel, who died the 27th September 1788.
For the rest of the story see L’EMPIRE, OU DIX ANS SOUS NAPOLEON, PAR UN
CHAMBELLAN: Paris, Allardin, 1836; vol. i. 220.’ The ‘Captain Freny’ to
whom Barry owed his adventures on his journey to Dublin (chapter iii.)
was a notorious highwayman, on whose doings Thackeray had enlarged in
the fifteenth chapter of his IRISH SKETCH BOOK.
Despite the slowness with which it was written, and the seeming neglect
with which it was permitted to remain unreprinted, BARRY LYNDON was
to be hailed by competent critics as one of Thackeray’s finest
performances, though the author himself seems to have had no strong
regard for the story. His daughter has recorded, ‘My father once said
to me when I was a girl: “You needn’t read BARRY LYNDON, you won’t like
it.” Indeed, it is scarcely a book to LIKE, but one to admire and to
wonder at for its consummate power and mastery.’ Another novelist,
Anthony Trollope, has said of it: ‘In imagination, language,
construction, and general literary capacity, Thackeray never did
anything more remarkable than BARRY LYNDON.’ Mr Leslie Stephen says:
‘All later critics have recognised in this book one of his most powerful
performances. In directness and vigour he never surpassed it.’
W.J.
THE MEMOIRES OF BARRY LYNDON, ESQ.
CHAPTER I. MY PEDIGREE AND FAMILY--UNDERGO THE INFLUENCE OF THE TENDER
PASSION
Since the days of Adam, there has been hardly a mischief done in this
world but a woman has been at the bottom of it. Ever since ours was
a family (and that must be very NEAR Adam’s time,--so old, noble, and
illustrious are the Barrys, as everybody knows) women have played a
mighty part with the destinies of our race.
I presume that there is no gentleman in Europe that has not heard of
the house of Barry of Barryogue, of the kingdom of Ireland, than which a
more famous name is not to be found in Gwillim or D’Hozier; and though,
as a man of the world, I have learned to despise heartily the claims
of some PRETENDERS to high birth who have no more genealogy than the
lacquey who cleans my boots, and though I laugh to utter scorn the
boasting of many of my countrymen, who are all for descending from kings
of Ireland, and talk of a domain no bigger than would feed a pig as if
it were a principality; yet truth compels me to assert that my family
was the noblest of the island, and, perhaps, of the universal world;
while their possessions, now insignificant and torn from us by war, by
treachery, by the loss of time, by ancestral extravagance, by adhesion
to the old faith and monarch, were formerly prodigious, and embraced
many counties, at a time when Ireland was vastly more prosperous than
now. I would assume the Irish crown over my coat-of-arms, but that there
are so many silly pretenders to that distinction who bear it and render
it common.
Who knows, but for the fault of a woman, I might have been wearing
it now? You start with incredulity. I say, why not? Had there been a
gallant chief to lead my countrymen, instead or puling knaves who bent
the knee to King Richard II., they might have been freemen; had there
been a resolute leader to meet the murderous ruffian Oliver Cromwell, we
should have shaken off the English for ever. But there was no Barry in
the field against the usurper; on the contrary, my ancestor, Simon de
Bary, came over with the first-named monarch, and married the daughter
of the then King of Munster, whose sons in battle he pitilessly slew.
In Oliver’s time it was too late for a chief of the name of Barry
to lift up his war-cry against that of the murderous brewer. We were
princes of the land no longer; our unhappy race had lost its possessions
a century previously, and by the most shameful treason. This I know to
be the fact, for my mother has often told me the story, and besides had
worked it in a worsted pedigree which hung up in the yellow saloon at
Barryville where we lived.
That very estate which the Lyndons now possess in Ireland was once the
property of my race. Rory Barry of Barryogue owned it in Elizabeth’s
time, and half Munster beside. The Barry was always in feud with the
O’Mahonys in those times; and, as it happened, a certain English colonel
passed through the former’s country with a body of men-at-arms, on the
very day when the O’Mahonys had made an inroad upon our territories, and
carried off a frightful plunder of our flocks and herds.
This young Englishman, whose name was Roger Lyndon, Linden, or Lyndaine,
having been most hospitably received by the Barry, and finding him just
on the point of carrying an inroad into the O’Mahonys’ land, offered
the aid of himself and his lances, and behaved himself so well, as it
appeared, that the O’Mahonys were entirely overcome, all the Barrys’
property restored, and with it, says the old chronicle, twice as much of
the O’Mahonys’ goods and cattle.
It was the setting in of the winter season, and the young soldier was
pressed by the Barry not to quit his house of Barryogue, and remained
there during several months, his men being quartered with Barry’s own
gallowglasses, man by man in the cottages round about. They conducted
themselves, as is their wont, with the most intolerable insolence
towards the Irish; so much so, that fights and murders continually
ensued, and the people vowed to destroy them.
The Barry’s son (from whom I descend) was as hostile to the English as
any other man on his domain; and, as they would not go when bidden, he
and his friends consulted together and determined on destroying these
English to a man.
But they had let a woman into their plot, and this was the Barry’s
daughter. She was in love with the English Lyndon, and broke the whole
secret to him; and the dastardly English prevented the just massacre of
themselves by falling on the Irish, and destroying Phaudrig Barry, my
ancestor, and many hundreds of his men. The cross at Barrycross near
Carrignadihioul is the spot where the odious butchery took place.
Lyndon married the daughter of Roderick Barry, and claimed the estate
which he left: and though the descendants of Phaudrig were alive, as
indeed they are in my person,[Footnote: As we have never been able to
find proofs of the marriage of my ancestor Phaudrig with his wife,
I make no doubt that Lyndon destroyed the contract, and murdered the
priest and witnesses of the marriage.--B. L.] on appealing to the
English courts, the estate was awarded to the Englishman, as has ever
been the case where English and Irish were concerned.
Thus, had it not been for the weakness of a woman, I should have been
born to the possession of those very estates which afterwards came to me
by merit, as you shall hear. But to proceed with my family, history.
My father was well known to the best circles in this kingdom, as in that
of Ireland, under the name of Roaring Harry Barry. He was bred like many
other young sons of genteel families to the profession of the law, being
articled to a celebrated attorney of Sackville Street in the city of
Dublin; and, from his great genius and aptitude for learning, there is
no doubt he would have made an eminent figure in his profession, had not
his social qualities, love of field-sports, and extraordinary graces
of manner, marked him out for a higher sphere. While he was attorney’s
clerk he kept seven race-horses, and hunted regularly both with the
Kildare and Wicklow hunts; and rode on his grey horse Endymion that
famous match against Captain Punter, which is still remembered by lovers
of the sport, and of which I caused a splendid picture to be made and
hung over my dining-hall mantelpiece at Castle Lyndon. A year afterwards
he had the honour of riding that very horse Endymion before his late
Majesty King George II. at New-market, and won the plate there and the
attention of the august sovereign.
Although he was only the second son of our family, my dear father came
naturally into the estate (now miserably reduced to L400 a year); for my
grandfather’s eldest son Cornelius Barry (called the Chevalier Borgne,
from a wound which he received in Germany) remained constant to the old
religion in which our family was educated, and not only served abroad
with credit, but against His Most Sacred Majesty George II. in the
unhappy Scotch disturbances in ‘45. We shall hear more of the Chevalier
hereafter.
For the conversion of my father I have to thank my dear mother, Miss
Bell Brady, daughter of Ulysses Brady of Castle Brady, county Kerry,
Esquire and J.P. She was the most beautiful woman of her day in Dublin,
and universally called the Dasher there. Seeing her at the assembly,
my father became passionately attached to her; but her soul was above
marrying a Papist or an attorney’s clerk; and so, for the love of her,
the good old laws being then in force, my dear father slipped into my
uncle Cornelius’s shoes and took the family estate. Besides the force of
my mother’s bright eyes, several persons, and of the genteelest society
too, contributed to this happy change; and I have often heard my mother
laughingly tell the story of my father’s recantation, which was solemnly
pronounced at the tavern in the company of Sir Dick Ringwood, Lord
Bagwig, Captain Punter, and two or three other young sparks of the
town. Roaring Harry won 300 pieces that very night at faro, and laid
the necessary information the next morning against his brother; but his
conversion caused a coolness between him and my uncle Corney, who joined
the rebels in consequence.
This great difficulty being settled, my Lord Bagwig lent my father his
own yacht, then lying at the Pigeon House, and the handsome Bell Brady
was induced to run away with him to England, although her parents
were against the match, and her lovers (as I have heard her tell many
thousands of times) were among the most numerous and the most wealthy
in all the kingdom of Ireland. They were married at the Savoy, and my
grandfather dying very soon, Harry Barry, Esquire, took possession of
his paternal property and supported our illustrious name with credit in
London. He pinked the famous Count Tiercelin behind Montague House, he
was a member of ‘White’s,’ and a frequenter of all the chocolate-houses;
and my mother, likewise, made no small figure. At length, after his
great day of triumph before His Sacred Majesty at Newmarket, Harry’s
fortune was just on the point of being made, for the gracious monarch
promised to provide for him. But alas! he was taken in charge by another
monarch, whose will have no delay or denial,--by Death, namely, who
seized upon my father at Chester races, leaving me a helpless orphan.
Peace be to his ashes! He was not faultless, and dissipated all our
princely family property; but he was as brave a fellow as ever tossed
a bumper or called a main, and he drove his coach-and-six like a man of
fashion.
I do not know whether His gracious Majesty was much affected by this
sudden demise of my father, though my mother says he shed some royal
tears on the occasion. But they helped us to nothing: and all that was
found in the house for the wife and creditors was a purse of ninety
guineas, which my dear mother naturally took, with the family plate, and
my father’s wardrobe and her own; and putting them into our great coach,
drove off to Holyhead, whence she took shipping for Ireland. My father’s
body accompanied us in the finest hearse and plumes money could buy; for
though the husband and wife had quarrelled repeatedly in life, yet at my
father’s death his high-spirited widow forgot all her differences, gave
him the grandest funeral that had been seen for many a day, and erected
a monument over his remains (for which I subsequently paid), which
declared him to be the wisest, purest, and most affectionate of men.
In performing these sad duties over her deceased lord, the widow spent
almost every guinea she had, and, indeed, would have spent a great deal
more, had she discharged one-third of the demands which the ceremonies
occasioned. But the people around our old house of Barryogue, although
they did not like my father for his change of faith, yet stood by him at
this moment, and were for exterminating the mutes sent by Mr. Plumer of
London with the lamented remains. The monument and vault in the church
were then, alas! all that remained of my vast possessions; for my father
had sold every stick of the property to one Notley, an attorney, and we
received but a cold welcome in his house--a miserable old tumble-down
place it was. [Footnote: In another part of his memoir Mr. Barry will
be found to describe this mansion as one of the most splendid palaces
in Europe; but this is a practice not unusual with his nation; and with
respect to the Irish principality claimed by him, it is known that Mr.
Barry’s grandfather was an attorney and maker of his own fortune.]
The splendour of the funeral did not fail to increase the widow Barry’s
reputation as a woman of spirit and fashion; and when she wrote to her
brother Michael Brady, that worthy gentleman immediately rode across the
country to fling himself in her arms, and to invite her in his wife’s
name to Castle Brady.
Mick and Barry had quarrelled, as all men will, and very high words had
passed between them during Barry’s courtship of Miss Bell. When he took
her off, Brady swore he would never forgive Barry or Bell; but coming
to London in the year ‘46, he fell in once more with Roaring Harry, and
lived in his fine house in Clarges Street, and lost a few pieces to
him at play, and broke a watchman’s head or two in his company,--all
of which reminiscences endeared Bell and her son very much to the
good-hearted gentleman, and he received us both with open arms. Mrs.
Barry did not, perhaps wisely, at first make known to her friends what
was her condition; but arriving in a huge gilt coach with enormous
armorial bearings, was taken by her sister-in-law and the rest of the
county for a person of considerable property and distinction. For a
time, then, and as was right and proper, Mrs. Barry gave the law at
Castle Brady. She ordered the servants to and fro, and taught them,
what indeed they much wanted, a little London neatness; and ‘English
Redmond,’ as I was called, was treated like a little lord, and had a
maid and a footman to himself; and honest Mick paid their wages,--which
was much more than he was used to do for his own domestics,--doing
all in his power to make his sister decently comfortable under her
afflictions. Mamma, in return, determined that, when her affairs were
arranged, she would make her kind brother a handsome allowance for
her son’s maintenance and her own; and promised to have her handsome
furniture brought over from Clarges Street to adorn the somewhat
dilapidated rooms of Castle Brady.
But it turned out that the rascally landlord seized upon every chair and
table that ought by rights to have belonged to the widow. The estate to
which I was heir was in the hands of rapacious creditors; and the only
means of subsistence remaining to the widow and child was a rent-charge
of L50 upon my Lord Bagwig’s property, who had many turf-dealings with
the deceased. And so my dear mother’s liberal intentions towards her
brother were of course never fulfilled.
It must be confessed, very much to the discredit of Mrs. Brady of Castle
Brady, that when her sister-in-law’s poverty was thus made manifest,
she forgot all the respect which she had been accustomed to pay her,
instantly turned my maid and man-servant out of doors, and told Mrs.
Barry that she might follow them as soon as she chose. Mrs. Mick was of
a low family, and a sordid way of thinking; and after about a couple
of years (during which she had saved almost all her little income) the
widow complied with Madam Brady’s desire. At the same time, giving way
to a just though prudently dissimulated resentment, she made a vow that
she would never enter the gates of Castle Brady while the lady of the
house remained alive within them.
She fitted up her new abode with much economy and considerable taste,
and never, for all her poverty, abated a jot of the dignity which was
her due and which all the neighbourhood awarded to her. How, indeed,
could they refuse respect to a lady who had lived in London, frequented
the most fashionable society there, and had been presented (as she
solemnly declared) at Court? These advantages gave her a right which
seems to be pretty unsparingly exercised in Ireland by those natives who
have it,--the right of looking down with scorn upon all persons who have
not had the opportunity of quitting the mother-country and inhabiting
England for a while. Thus, whenever Madam Brady appeared abroad in a
new dress, her sister-in-law would say, ‘Poor creature! how can it
be expected that she should know anything of the fashion?’ And though
pleased to be called the handsome widow, as she was, Mrs. Barry was
still better pleased to be called the English widow.
Mrs. Brady, for her part, was not slow to reply: she used to say
that the defunct Barry was a bankrupt and a beggar; and as for the
fashionable society which he saw, he saw it from my Lord Bagwig’s
side-table, whose flatterer and hanger-on he was known to be. Regarding
Mrs. Barry, the lady of Castle Brady would make insinuations still more
painful. However, why should we allude to these charges, or rake up
private scandal of a hundred years old? It was in the reign of George
II that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad,
handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now; and do not the
Sunday papers and the courts of law supply us every week with more novel
and interesting slander?
At any rate, it must be allowed that Mrs. Barry, after her husband’s
death and her retirement, lived in such a way as to defy slander. For
whereas Bell Brady had been the gayest girl in the whole county of
Wexford, with half the bachelors at her feet, and plenty of smiles and
encouragement for every one of them, Bell Barry adopted a dignified
reserve that almost amounted to pomposity, and was as starch as any
Quakeress. Many a man renewed his offers to the widow, who had been
smitten by the charms of the spinster; but Mrs. Barry refused all offers
of marriage, declaring that she lived now for her son only, and for the
memory of her departed saint.
‘Saint forsooth!’ said ill-natured Mrs. Brady.
‘Harry Barry was as big a sinner as ever was known; and ‘tis notorious
that he and Bell hated each other. If she won’t marry now, depend on it,
the artful woman has a husband in her eye for all that, and only waits
until Lord Bagwig is a widower.’
And suppose she did, what then? Was not the widow of a Barry fit to
marry with any lord of England? and was it not always said that a woman
was to restore the fortunes of the Barry family? If my mother fancied
that SHE was to be that woman, I think it was a perfectly justifiable
notion on her part; for the Earl (my godfather) was always most
attentive to her: I never knew how deeply this notion of advancing my
interests in the world had taken possession of mamma’s mind, until
his Lordship’s marriage in the year ‘57 with Miss Goldmore, the Indian
nabob’s rich daughter.
Meanwhile we continued to reside at Barryville, and, considering the
smallness of our income, kept up a wonderful state. Of the half-dozen
families that formed the congregation at Brady’s Town, there was not a
single person whose appearance was so respectable as that of the widow,
who, though she always dressed in mourning, in memory of her deceased
husband, took care that her garments should be made so as to set off her
handsome person to the greatest advantage; and, indeed, I think,
spent six hours out of every day in the week in cutting, trimming,
and altering them to the fashion. She had the largest of hoops and the
handsomest of furbelows, and once a month (under my Lord Bagwig’s cover)
would come a letter from London containing the newest accounts of the
fashions there. Her complexion was so brilliant that she had no call to
use rouge, as was the mode in those days. No, she left red and white,
she said (and hence the reader may imagine how the two ladies hated each
other) to Madam Brady, whose yellow complexion no plaster could alter.
In a word, she was so accomplished a beauty, that all the women in the
country took pattern by her, and the young fellows from ten miles round
would ride over to Castle Brady church to have the sight of her.
But if (like every other woman that ever I saw or read of) she was proud
of her beauty, to do her justice she was still more proud of her son,
and has said a thousand times to me that I was the handsomest young
fellow in the world. This is a matter of taste. A man of sixty may,
however, say what he was at fourteen without much vanity, and I must say
I think there was some cause for my mother’s opinion. The good soul’s
pleasure was to dress me; and on Sundays and holidays I turned out in a
velvet coat with a silver-hilted sword by my side and a gold garter at
my knee, as fine as any lord in the land. My mother worked me several
most splendid waistcoats, and I had plenty of lace for my ruffles, and
a fresh riband to my hair, and as we walked to church on Sundays, even
envious Mrs. Brady was found to allow that there was not a prettier pair
in the kingdom.
Of course, too, the lady of Castle Brady used to sneer, because on these
occasions a certain Tim, who used to be called my valet, followed me and
my mother to church, carrying a huge prayer-book and a cane, and dressed
in the livery of one of our own fine footmen from Clarges Street, which,
as Tim was a bandy-shanked little fellow, did not exactly become him.
But, though poor, we were gentlefolks, and not to be sneered out of
these becoming appendages to our rank; and so would march up the aisle
to our pew with as much state and gravity as the Lord Lieutenant’s lady
and son might do. When there, my mother would give the responses and
amens in a loud dignified voice that was delightful to hear, and,
besides, had a fine loud voice for singing, which art she had perfected
in London under a fashionable teacher; and she would exercise her talent
in such a way that you would hardly hear any other voice of the little
congregation which chose to join in the psalm. In fact, my mother had
great gifts in every way, and believed herself to be one of the most
beautiful, accomplished, and meritorious persons in the world. Often and
often has she talked to me and the neighbours regarding her own humility
and piety, pointing them out in such a way that I would defy the most
obstinate to disbelieve her.
When we left Castle Brady we came to occupy a house in Brady’s town,
which mamma christened Barryville. I confess it was but a small place,
but, indeed, we made the most of it. I have mentioned the family
pedigree which hung up in the drawingroom, which mamma called the yellow
saloon, and my bedroom was called the pink bedroom, and hers the orange
tawny apartment (how well I remember them all!); and at dinner-time Tim
regularly rang a great bell, and we each had a silver tankard to drink
from, and mother boasted with justice that I had as good a bottle of
claret by my side as any squire of the land. So indeed I had, but I was
not, of course, allowed at my tender years to drink any of the wine;
which thus attained a considerable age, even in the decanter.
Uncle Brady (in spite of the family quarrel) found out the above fact
one day by calling at Barryville at dinner-time, and unluckily tasting
the liquor. You should have seen how he sputtered and made faces! But
the honest gentleman was not particular about his wine, or the company
in which he drank it. He would get drunk, indeed, with the parson or the
priest indifferently; with the latter, much to my mother’s indignation,
for, as a true blue Nassauite, she heartily despised all those of the
old faith, and would scarcely sit down in the room with a benighted
Papist. But the squire had no such scruples; he was, indeed, one of the
easiest, idlest, and best-natured fellows that ever lived, and many
an hour would he pass with the lonely widow when he was tired of Madam
Brady at home. He liked me, he said, as much as one of his own sons,
and at length, after the widow had held out for a couple of years, she
agreed to allow me to return to the castle; though, for herself,
she resolutely kept the oath which she had made with regard to her
sister-in-law.
The very first day I returned to Castle Brady my trials may be said,
in a manner, to have begun. My cousin, Master Mick, a huge monster of
nineteen (who hated me, and I promise you I returned the compliment),
insulted me at dinner about my mother’s poverty, and made all the girls
of the family titter. So when we went to the stables, whither Mick
always went for his pipe of tobacco after dinner, I told him a piece of
my mind, and there was a fight for at least ten minutes, during which I
stood to him like a man, and blacked his left eye, though I was myself
only twelve years old at the time. Of course he beat me, but a beating
makes only a small impression on a lad of that tender age, as I had
proved many times in battles with the ragged Brady’s Town boys before,
not one of whom, at my time of life, was my match. My uncle was very
much pleased when he heard of my gallantry; my cousin Nora brought brown
paper and vinegar for my nose, and I went home that night with a pint of
claret under my girdle, not a little proud, let me tell you, at having
held my own against Mick so long.
And though he persisted in his bad treatment of me, and used to cane
me whenever I fell in his way, yet I was very happy now at Castle
Brady with the company there, and my cousins, or some of them, and the
kindness of my uncle, with whom I became a prodigious favourite. He
bought a colt for me, and taught me to ride. He took me out coursing and
fowling, and instructed me to shoot flying. And at length I was released
from Mick’s persecution, for his brother, Master Ulick, returning from
Trinity College, and hating his elder brother, as is mostly the way in
families of fashion, took me under his protection; and from that time,
as Ulick was a deal bigger and stronger than Mick, I, English Redmond,
as I was called, was left alone; except when the former thought fit to
thrash me, which he did whenever he thought proper.
Nor was my learning neglected in the ornamental parts, for I had
an uncommon natural genius for many things, and soon topped in
accomplishments most of the persons around me. I had a quick ear and a
fine voice, which my mother cultivated to the best of her power, and
she taught me to step a minuet gravely and gracefully, and thus laid
the foundation of my future success in life. The common dances I learned
(as, perhaps, I ought not to confess) in the servants’ hall, which,
you may be sure, was never without a piper, and where I was considered
unrivalled both at a hornpipe and a jig.
In the matter of book-learning, I had always an uncommon taste for
reading plays and novels, as the best part of a gentleman’s polite
education, and never let a pedlar pass the village, if I had a penny,
without having a ballad or two from him. As for your dull grammar,
and Greek and Latin and stuff, I have always hated them from my youth
upwards, and said, very unmistakably, I would have none of them.
This I proved pretty clearly at the age of thirteen, when my aunt Biddy
Brady’s legacy of L100 came in to mamma, who thought to employ the sum
on my education, and sent me to Doctor Tobias Tickler’s famous academy
at Ballywhacket--Backwhacket, as my uncle used to call it. But six
weeks after I had been consigned to his reverence, I suddenly made my
appearance again at Castle Brady, having walked forty miles from the
odious place, and left the Doctor in a state near upon apoplexy. The
fact was, that at taw, prison-bars, or boxing, I was at the head of the
school, but could not be brought to excel in the classics; and after
having been flogged seven times, without its doing me the least good
in my Latin, I refused to submit altogether (finding it useless) to an
eighth application of the rod. ‘Try some other way, sir,’ said I, when
he was for horsing me once more; but he wouldn’t; whereon, and to defend
myself, I flung a slate at him, and knocked down a Scotch usher with a
leaden inkstand. All the lads huzza’d at this, and some or the servants
wanted to stop me; but taking out a large clasp-knife that my cousin
Nora had given me, I swore I would plunge it into the waistcoat of the
first man who dared to balk me, and faith they let me pass on. I slept
that night twenty miles off Ballywhacket, at the house of a cottier, who
gave me potatoes and milk, and to whom I gave a hundred guineas after,
when I came to visit Ireland in my days of greatness. I wish I had the
money now. But what’s the use of regret? I have had many a harder bed
than that I shall sleep on to-night, and many a scantier meal than
honest Phil Murphy gave me on the evening I ran away from school. So six
weeks’ was all the schooling I ever got. And I say this to let parents
know the value of it; for though I have met more learned book-worms in
the world, especially a great hulking, clumsy, blear-eyed old doctor,
whom they called Johnson, and who lived in a court off Fleet Street,
in London, yet I pretty soon silenced him in an argument (at ‘Button’s
Coffeehouse’); and in that, and in poetry, and what I call natural
philosophy, or the science of life, and in riding, music, leaping,
the small-sword, the knowledge of a horse, or a main of cocks, and the
manners of an accomplished gentleman and a man of fashion, I may say for
myself that Redmond Barry has seldom found his equal. ‘Sir,’ said I to
Mr. Johnson, on the occasion I allude to--he was accompanied by a Mr.
Buswell of Scotland, and I was presented to the club by a Mr. Goldsmith,
a countryman of my own--‘Sir,’ said I, in reply to the schoolmaster’s
great thundering quotation in Greek, ‘you fancy you know a great deal
more than me, because you quote your Aristotle and your Pluto; but can
you tell me which horse will win at Epsom Downs next week?--Can you run
six miles without breathing?--Can you shoot the ace of spades ten times
without missing? If so, talk about Aristotle and Pluto to me.’
‘D’ye knaw who ye’re speaking to?’ roared out the Scotch gentleman, Mr.
Boswell, at this.
‘Hold your tongue, Mr. Boswell,’ said the old schoolmaster. ‘I had no
right to brag of my Greek to the gentleman, and he has answered me very
well.’
‘Doctor,’ says I, looking waggishly at him, ‘do you know ever a rhyme
for ArisTOTLE?’
‘Port, if you plaise,’ says Mr. Goldsmith, laughing. And we had SIX
RHYMES FOR ARISTOTLE before we left the coffee-house that evening. It
became a regular joke afterwards when I told the story, and at ‘White’s’
or the ‘Cocoa-tree’ you would hear the wags say, ‘Waiter, bring me one
of Captain Barry’s rhymes for Aristotle.’ Once, when I was in liquor at
the latter place, young Dick Sheridan called me a great Staggerite, a
joke which I could never understand. But I am wandering from my story,
and must get back to home, and dear old Ireland again.
I have made acquaintance with the best in the land since, and my
manners are such, I have said, as to make me the equal of them all; and,
perhaps, you will wonder how a country boy, as I was, educated amongst
Irish squires, and their dependants of the stable and farm, should
arrive at possessing such elegant manners as I was indisputably allowed
to have. I had, the fact is, a very valuable instructor in the person of
an old gamekeeper, who had served the French king at Fontenoy, and who
taught me the dances and customs, and a smattering of the language of
that country, with the use of the sword, both small and broad. Many
and many a long mile I have trudged by his side as a lad, he telling me
wonderful stories of the French king, and the Irish brigade, and Marshal
Saxe, and the opera-dancers; he knew my uncle, too, the Chevalier
Borgne, and indeed had a thousand accomplishments which he taught me in
secret. I never knew a man like him for making or throwing a fly, for
physicking a horse, or breaking, or choosing one; he taught me manly
sports, from birds’-nesting upwards, and I always shall consider Phil
Purcell as the very best tutor I could have had. His fault was drink,
but for that I have always had a blind eye; and he hated my cousin Mick
like poison; but I could excuse him that too.
With Phil, and at the age of fifteen, I was a more accomplished man than
either of my cousins; and I think Nature had been also more bountiful to
me in the matter of person. Some of the Castle Brady girls (as you shall
hear presently) adored me. At fairs and races many of the prettiest
lasses present said they would like to have me for their bachelor; and
yet somehow, it must be confessed, I was not popular.
In the first place, every one knew I was bitter poor; and I think,
perhaps, it was my good mother’s fault that I was bitter proud too. I
had a habit of boasting in company of my birth, and the splendour of my
carriages, gardens, cellars, and domestics, and this before people who
were perfectly aware of my real circumstances. If it was boys, and they
ventured to sneer, I would beat them, or die for it; and many’s the time
I’ve been brought home well-nigh killed by one or more of them, on what,
when my mother asked me, I would say was ‘a family quarrel.’ ‘Support
your name with your blood, Reddy my boy,’ would that saint say, with the
tears in her eyes; and so would she herself have done with her voice,
ay, and her teeth and nails.
Thus, at fifteen, there was scarce a lad of twenty, for half-a-dozen
miles round, that I had not beat for one cause or other. There were the
vicar’s two sons of Castle Brady--in course I could not associate with
such beggarly brats as them, and many a battle did we have as to
who should take the wall in Brady’s Town; there was Pat Lurgan, the
blacksmith’s son, who had the better of me four times before we came
to the crowning fight, when I overcame him; and I could mention a score
more of my deeds of prowess in that way, but that fisticuff facts are
dull subjects to talk of, and to discuss before high-bred gentlemen and
ladies.
However, there is another subject, ladies, on which I must discourse,
and THAT is never out of place. Day and night you like to hear of it:
young and old, you dream and think of it. Handsome and ugly (and, faith,
before fifty, I never saw such a thing as a plain woman), it’s the
subject next to the hearts of all of you; and I think you guess my
riddle without more trouble. LOVE! sure the word is formed on purpose
out of the prettiest soft vowels and consonants in the language, and
he or she who does not care to read about it is not worth a fig, to my
thinking.
My uncle’s family consisted of ten children; who, as is the custom in
such large families, were divided into two camps, or parties; the one
siding with their mamma, the other taking the part of my uncle in all
the numerous quarrels which arose between that gentleman and his lady.
Mrs. Brady’s faction was headed by Mick, the eldest son, who hated me
so, and disliked his father for keeping him out of his property: while
Ulick, the second brother, was his father’s own boy; and, in revenge,
Master Mick was desperately afraid of him. I need not mention the girls’
names; I had plague enough with them in after-life, Heaven knows; and
one of them was the cause of all my early troubles: this was (though to
be sure all her sisters denied it) the belle of the family, Miss Honoria
Brady by name.
She said she was only nineteen at the time; but I could read the
fly-leaf in the family Bible as well as another (it was one of the three
books which, with the backgammon-board, formed my uncle’s library), and
know that she was born in the year ‘37, and christened by Doctor Swift,
Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin: hence she was three-and-twenty years old
at the time she and I were so much together.
When I come to think about her now, I know she never could have been
handsome; for her figure was rather of the fattest, and her mouth of the
widest; she was freckled over like a partridge’s egg, and her hair was
the colour of a certain vegetable which we eat with boiled beef, to
use the mildest term. Often and often would my dear mother make these
remarks concerning her; but I did not believe them then, and somehow
had gotten to think Honoria an angelical being, far above all the other
angels of her sex.
And as we know very well that a lady who is skilled in dancing or
singing never can perfect herself without a deal of study in private,
and that the song or the minuet which is performed with so much graceful
ease in the assembly-room has not been acquired without vast labour
and perseverance in private; so it is with the dear creatures who are
skilled in coquetting. Honoria, for instance, was always practising,
and she would take poor me to rehearse her accomplishment upon; or the
exciseman, when he came his rounds, or the steward, or the poor curate,
or the young apothecary’s lad from Brady’s Town: whom I recollect
beating once for that very reason. If he is alive now I make him my
apologies. Poor fellow! as if it was HIS fault that he should be a
victim to the wiles of one of the greatest coquettes (considering her
obscure life and rustic breeding) in the world.
If the truth must be told--and every word of this narrative of my life
is of the most sacred veracity--my passion for Nora began in a very
vulgar and unromantic way. I did not save her life; on the contrary, I
once very nearly killed her, as you shall hear. I did not behold her
by moonlight playing on the guitar, or rescue her from the hands of
ruffians, as Alfonso does Lindamira in the novel; but one day, after
dinner at Brady’s Town, in summer, going into the garden to pull
gooseberries for my dessert, and thinking only of gooseberries, I pledge
my honour, I came upon Miss Nora and one of her sisters, with whom
she was friends at the time, who were both engaged in the very same
amusement.
‘What’s the Latin for gooseberry, Redmond?’ says she. She was always
‘poking her fun,’ as the Irish phrase it.
‘I know the Latin for goose,’ says I.
‘And what’s that?’ cries Miss Mysie, as pert as a peacock.
‘Bo to you!’ says I (for I had never a want of wit); and so we fell to
work at the gooseberry-bush, laughing and talking as happy as might be.
In the course of our diversion Nora managed to scratch her arm, and it
bled, and she screamed, and it was mighty round and white, and I tied it
up, and I believe was permitted to kiss her hand; and though it was as
big and clumsy a hand as ever you saw, yet I thought the favour the
most ravishing one that was ever conferred upon me, and went home in a
rapture.
I was much too simple a fellow to disguise any sentiment I chanced to
feel in those days; and not one of the eight Castle Brady girls but
was soon aware of my passion, and joked and complimented Nora about her
bachelor.
The torments of jealousy the cruel coquette made me endure were
horrible. Sometimes she would treat me as a child, sometimes as a man.
She would always leave me if ever there came a stranger to the house.
‘For after all, Redmond,’ she would say, ‘you are but fifteen, and you
haven’t a guinea in the world.’ At which I would swear that I would
become the greatest hero ever known out of Ireland, and vow that before
I was twenty I would have money enough to purchase an estate six times
as big as Castle Brady. All which vain promises, of course, I did not
keep; but I make no doubt they influenced me in my very early life, and
caused me to do those great actions for which I have been celebrated,
and which shall be narrated presently in order.
I must tell one of them, just that my dear young lady readers may
know what sort of a fellow Redmond Barry was, and what a courage and
undaunted passion he had. I question whether any of the jenny-jessamines
of the present day would do half as much in the face of danger.
About this time, it must be premised, the United Kingdom was in a state
of great excitement from the threat generally credited of a French
invasion. The Pretender was said to be in high favour at Versailles,
a descent upon Ireland was especially looked to, and the noblemen and
people of condition in that and all other parts of the kingdom showed
their loyalty by raising regiments of horse and foot to resist the
invaders. Brady’s Town sent a company to join the Kilwangan regiment, of
which Master Mick was the captain; and we had a letter from Master
Ulick at Trinity College, stating that the University had also formed a
regiment, in which he had the honour to be a corporal. How I envied
them both! especially that odious Mick as I saw him in his laced scarlet
coat, with a ribbon in his hat, march off at the head of his men. He,
the poor spiritless creature, was a captain, and I nothing,--I who felt
I had as much courage as the Duke of Cumberland himself, and felt, too,
that a red jacket would mightily become me! My mother said I was too
young to join the new regiment; but the fact was, that it was she
herself who was too poor, for the cost of a new uniform would have
swallowed up half her year’s income, and she would only have her boy
appear in a way suitable to his birth, riding the finest of racers,
dressed in the best of clothes, and keeping the genteelest of company.
Well, then, the whole country was alive with war’s alarums, the three
kingdoms ringing with military music, and every man of merit paying his
devoirs at the court of Bellona, whilst poor I was obliged to stay at
home in my fustian jacket and sigh for fame in secret. Mr. Mick came
to and fro from the regiment, and brought numerous of his comrades with
him. Their costume and swaggering airs filled me with grief, and Miss
Nora’s unvarying attentions to them served to make me half wild. No one,
however, thought of attributing this sadness to the young lady’s
score, but rather to my disappointment at not being allowed to join the
military profession.
Once the officers of the Fencibles gave a grand ball at Kilwangan, to
which, as a matter of course, all the ladies of Castle Brady (and a
pretty ugly coachful they were) were invited. I knew to what tortures
the odious little flirt of a Nora would put me with her eternal
coquetries with the officers, and refused for a long time to be one of
the party to the ball. But she had a way of conquering me, against which
all resistance of mine was in vain. She vowed that riding in a coach
always made her ill. ‘And how can I go to the ball,’ said she, ‘unless
you take me on Daisy behind you on the pillion?’ Daisy was a good
blood-mare of my uncle’s, and to such a proposition I could not for my
soul say no; so we rode in safety to Kilwangan, and I felt myself as
proud as any prince when she promised to dance a country-dance with me.
When the dance was ended, the little ungrateful flirt informed me that
she had quite forgotten her engagement; she had actually danced the set
with an Englishman! I have endured torments in my life, but none like
that. She tried to make up for her neglect, but I would not. Some of the
prettiest girls there offered to console me, for I was the best dancer
in the room. I made one attempt, but was too wretched to continue, and
so remained alone all night in a state of agony. I would have played,
but I had no money; only the gold piece that my mother bade me always
keep in my purse as a gentleman should. I did not care for drink, or
know the dreadful comfort of it in those days; but I thought of killing
myself and Nora, and most certainly of making away with Captain Quin!
At last, and at morning, the ball was over. The rest of our ladies went
off in the lumbering creaking old coach; Daisy was brought out, and Miss
Nora took her place behind me, which I let her do without a word. But we
were not half-a-mile out of town when she began to try with her coaxing
and blandishments to dissipate my ill-humour.
‘Sure it’s a bitter night, Redmond dear, and you’ll catch cold without a
handkerchief to your neck.’ To this sympathetic remark from the pillion,
the saddle made no reply.
‘Did you and Miss Clancy have a pleasant evening, Redmond? You were
together, I saw, all night.’ To this the saddle only replied by grinding
his teeth, and giving a lash to Daisy.
‘O mercy! you’ll make Daisy rear and throw me, you careless creature
you: and you know, Redmond, I’m so timid.’ The pillion had by this
got her arm round the saddle’s waist, and perhaps gave it the gentlest
squeeze in the world.
‘I hate Miss Clancy, you know I do!’ answers the saddle; ‘and I only
danced with her because--because--the person with whom I intended to
dance chose to be engaged the whole night.’
‘Sure there were my sisters,’ said the pillion, now laughing outright in
the pride of her conscious superiority; ‘and for me, my dear, I had
not been in the room five minutes before I was engaged for every single
set.’
‘Were you obliged to dance five times with Captain Quin?’ said I; and
oh! strange delicious charm of coquetry, I do believe Miss Nora Brady
at twenty-three years of age felt a pang of delight in thinking that she
had so much power over a guileless lad of fifteen. Of course she replied
that she did not care a fig for Captain Quin: that he danced prettily,
to be sure, and was a pleasant rattle of a man; that he looked well in
his regimentals too; and if he chose to ask her to dance, how could she
refuse him?
‘But you refused me, Nora.’
‘Oh! I can dance with you any day,’ answered Miss Nora, with a toss
of her head; ‘and to dance with your cousin at a ball, looks as if you
could find no other partner. Besides,’ said Nora--and this was a
cruel, unkind cut, which showed what a power she had over me, and how
mercilessly she used it,--‘besides, Redmond, Captain Quin’s a man and
you are only a boy!’
‘If ever I meet him again,’ I roared out with an oath, ‘you shall see
which is the best man of the two. I’ll fight him with sword or with
pistol, captain as he is. A man indeed! I’ll fight any man--every man!
Didn’t I stand up to Mick Brady when I was eleven years old?--Didn’t I
beat Tom Sullivan, the great hulking brute, who is nineteen?--Didn’t I
do for the Scotch usher? O Nora, it’s cruel of you to sneer at me so!’
But Nora was in the sneering mood that night, and pursued her sarcasms;
she pointed out that Captain Quin was already known as a valiant
soldier, famous as a man of fashion in London, and that it was mighty
well of Redmond to talk and boast of beating ushers and farmers’ boys,
but to fight an Englishman was a very different matter.
Then she fell to talk of the invasion, and of military matters
in general; of King Frederick (who was called, in those days, the
Protestant hero), of Monsieur Thurot and his fleet, of Monsieur Conflans
and his squadron, of Minorca, how it was attacked, and where it was; we
both agreed it must be in America, and hoped the French might be soundly
beaten there.
I sighed after a while (for I was beginning to melt), and said how much
I longed to be a soldier; on which Nora recurred to her infallible ‘Ah!
now, would you leave me, then? But, sure, you’re not big enough for
anything more than a little drummer.’ To which I replied, by swearing
that a soldier I would be, and a general too.
As we were chattering in this silly way, we came to a place that has
ever since gone by the name of Redmond’s Leap Bridge. It was an old high
bridge, over a stream sufficiently deep and rocky, and as the mare Daisy
with her double load was crossing this bridge, Miss Nora, giving a loose
to her imagination, and still harping on the military theme (I would lay
a wager that she was thinking of Captain Quin)--Miss Nora said, ‘Suppose
now, Redmond, you, who are such a hero, was passing over the bridge, and
the inimy on the other side?’
‘I’d draw my sword, and cut my way through them.’
‘What, with me on the pillion? Would you kill poor me?’ (This young lady
was perpetually speaking of ‘poor me!’)
‘Well, then, I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d jump Daisy into the river,
and swim you both across, where no enemy could follow us.’
‘Jump twenty feet! you wouldn’t dare to do any such thing on Daisy.
There’s the Captain’s horse, Black George, I’ve heard say that Captain
Qui--’
She never finished the word, for, maddened by the continual recurrence
of that odious monosyllable, I shouted to her to ‘hold tight by my
waist,’ and, giving Daisy the spur, in a minute sprang with Nora over
the parapet into the deep water below. I don’t know why, now--whether
it was I wanted to drown myself and Nora, or to perform an act that
even Captain Quin should crane at, or whether I fancied that the enemy
actually was in front of us, I can’t tell now; but over I went. The
horse sank over his head, the girl screamed as she sank and screamed as
she rose, and I landed her, half fainting, on the shore, where we were
soon found by my uncle’s people, who returned on hearing the screams. I
went home, and was ill speedily of a fever, which kept me to my bed for
six weeks; and I quitted my couch prodigiously increased in stature,
and, at the same time, still more violently in love than I had been even
before. At the commencement of my illness, Miss Nora had been pretty
constant in her attendance at my bedside, forgetting, for the sake of
me, the quarrel between my mother and her family; which my good mother
was likewise pleased, in the most Christian manner, to forget. And, let
me tell you, it was no small mark of goodness in a woman of her haughty
disposition, who, as a rule, never forgave anybody, for my sake to give
up her hostility to Miss Brady, and to receive her kindly. For, like a
mad boy as I was, it was Nora I was always raving about and asking for;
I would only accept medicines from her hand, and would look rudely and
sulkily upon the good mother, who loved me better than anything else
in the world, and gave up even her favourite habits, and proper and
becoming jealousies, to make me happy.
As I got well, I saw that Nora’s visits became daily more rare: ‘Why
don’t she come?’ I would say, peevishly, a dozen times in the day;
in reply to which query, Mrs. Barry would be obliged to make the best
excuses she could find,--such as that Nora had sprained her ankle, or
that they had quarrelled together, or some other answer to soothe me.
And many a time has the good soul left me to go and break her heart in
her own room alone, and come back with a smiling face, so that I should
know nothing of her mortification. Nor, indeed, did I take much pains to
ascertain it: nor should I, I fear, have been very much touched even had
I discovered it; for the commencement of manhood, I think, is the period
of our extremest selfishness. We get such a desire then to take wing
and leave the parent nest, that no tears, entreaties, or feelings
of affection will counter-balance this overpowering longing after
independence. She must have been very sad, that poor mother of
mine--Heaven be good to her!--at that period of my life; and has often
told me since what a pang of the heart it was to her to see all her care
and affection of years forgotten by me in a minute, and for the sake of
a little heartless jilt, who was only playing with me while she could
get no better suitor. For the fact is, that during the last four weeks
of my illness, no other than Captain Quin was staying at Castle Brady,
and making love to Miss Nora in form. My mother did not dare to break
this news to me, and you may be sure that Nora herself kept it a secret:
it was only by chance that I discovered it.
Shall I tell you how? The minx had been to see me one day, as I sat up
in my bed, convalescent; she was in such high spirits, and so gracious
and kind to me, that my heart poured over with joy and gladness, and I
had even for my poor mother a kind word and a kiss that morning. I felt
myself so well that I ate up a whole chicken, and promised my uncle, who
had come to see me, to be ready against partridge-shooting, to accompany
him, as my custom was.
The next day but one was a Sunday, and I had a project for that day
which I determined to realise, in spite of all the doctor’s and my
mother’s injunctions: which were that I was on no account to leave the
house, for the fresh air would be the death of me.
Well, I lay wondrous quiet, composing a copy of verses, the first I ever
made in my life; and I give them here, spelt as I spelt them in those
days when I knew no better. And though they are not so polished and
elegant as ‘Ardelia ease a Love-sick Swain,’ and ‘When Sol bedecks the
Daisied Mead,’ and other lyrical effusions of mine which obtained me
so much reputation in after life, I still think them pretty good for a
humble lad of fifteen:--
THE ROSE OF FLORA.
Sent by a Young Gentleman of Quality to Miss Brady, of Castle Brady.
On Brady’s tower there grows a flower,
It is the loveliest flower that blows,--
At Castle Brady there lives a lady
(And how I love her no one knows):
Her name is Nora, and the goddess Flora
Presents her with this blooming rose.
‘O Lady Nora,’ says the goddess Flora,
‘I’ve many a rich and bright parterre;
In Brady’s towers there’s seven more flowers,
But you’re the fairest lady there:
Not all the county, nor Ireland’s bounty,
Can projuice a treasure that’s half so fair!
What cheek is redder? sure roses fed her!
Her hair is maregolds, and her eye of blew
Beneath her eyelid is like the vi’let,
That darkly glistens with gentle jew?
The lily’s nature is not surely whiter
Than Nora’s neck is,--and her arrums too.
‘Come, gentle Nora,’ says the goddess Flora,
‘My dearest creature, take my advice,
There is a poet, full well you know it,
Who spends his lifetime in heavy sighs,--
Young Redmond Barry, ‘tis him you’ll marry,
If rhyme and raisin you’d choose likewise.’
On Sunday, no sooner was my mother gone to church, than I summoned Phil
the valet, and insisted upon his producing my best suit, in which I
arrayed myself (although I found that I had shot up so in my illness
that the old dress was wofully too small for me), and, with my notable
copy of verses in my hand, ran down towards Castle Brady, bent upon
beholding my beauty. The air was so fresh and bright, and the birds sang
so loud amidst the green trees, that I felt more elated than I had been
for months before, and sprang down the avenue (my uncle had cut down
every stick of the trees, by the way) as brisk as a young fawn. My heart
began to thump as I mounted the grass-grown steps of the terrace, and
passed in by the rickety hall-door. The master and mistress were at
church, Mr. Screw the butler told me (after giving a start back at
seeing my altered appearance, and gaunt lean figure), and so were six of
the young ladies.
‘Was Miss Nora one?’ I asked.
‘No, Miss Nora was not one,’ said Mr. Screw, assuming a very puzzled,
and yet knowing look.
‘Where was she?’ To this question he answered, or rather made believe
to answer, with usual Irish ingenuity, and left me to settle whether she
was gone to Kilwangan on the pillion behind her brother, or whether she
and her sister had gone for a walk, or whether she was ill in her room;
and while I was settling this query, Mr. Screw left me abruptly.
I rushed away to the back court, where the Castle Brady stables stand,
and there I found a dragoon whistling the ‘Roast Beef of Old England,’
as he cleaned down a cavalry horse. ‘Whose horse, fellow, is that?’
cried I.
‘Feller, indeed!’ replied the Englishman: ‘the horse belongs to my
captain, and he’s a better FELLER nor you any day.’
I did not stop to break his bones, as I would on another occasion, for
a horrible suspicion had come across me, and I made for the garden as
quickly as I could.
I knew somehow what I should see there. I saw Captain Quin and Nora
pacing the alley together. Her arm was under his, and the scoundrel was
fondling and squeezing the hand which lay closely nestling against his
odious waistcoat. Some distance beyond them was Captain Fagan of the
Kilwangan regiment, who was paying court to Nora’s sister Mysie.
I am not afraid of any man or ghost; but as I saw that sight my knees
fell a-trembling violently under me, and such a sickness came over me,
that I was fain to sink down on the grass by a tree against which I
leaned, and lost almost all consciousness for a minute or two: then
I gathered myself up, and, advancing towards the couple on the walk,
loosened the blade of the little silver-hilted hanger I always wore in
its scabbard; for I was resolved to pass it through the bodies of the
delinquents, and spit them like two pigeons. I don’t tell what feelings
else besides those of rage were passing through my mind; what bitter
blank disappointment, what mad wild despair, what a sensation as if the
whole world was tumbling from under me; I make no doubt that my reader
hath been jilted by the ladies many times, and so bid him recall his own
sensations when the shock first fell upon him.
‘No, Norelia,’ said the Captain (for it was the fashion of those times
for lovers to call themselves by the most romantic names out of novels),
‘except for you and four others, I vow before all the gods, my heart has
never felt the soft flame!’
‘Ah! you men, you men, Eugenio!’ said she (the beast’s name was John),
‘your passion is not equal to ours. We are like--like some plant I’ve
read of--we bear but one flower and then we die!’
‘Do you mean you never felt an inclination for another?’ said Captain
Quin.
‘Never, my Eugenio, but for thee! How can you ask a blushing nymph such
a question?’
‘Darling Norelia!’ said he, raising her hand to his lips.
I had a knot of cherry-coloured ribands, which she had given me out of
her breast, and which somehow I always wore upon me. I pulled these out
of my bosom, and flung them in Captain Quin’s face, and rushed out with
my little sword drawn, shrieking, ‘She’s a liar--she’s a liar, Captain
Quin! Draw, sir, and defend yourself, if you are a man!’ and with these
words I leapt at the monster, and collared him, while Nora made the air
echo with her screams; at the sound of which the other captain and Mysie
hastened up.
Although I sprang up like a weed in my illness, and was now nearly
attained to my full growth of six feet, yet I was but a lath by the side
of the enormous English captain, who had calves and shoulders such as no
chairman at Bath ever boasted. He turned very red, and then exceedingly
pale at my attack upon him, and slipped back and clutched at his
sword--when Nora, in an agony of terror, flung herself round him,
screaming, ‘Eugenio! Captain Quin, for Heaven’s sake spare the child--he
is but an infant.’
‘And ought to be whipped for his impudence,’ said the Captain; ‘but
never fear, Miss Brady, I shall not touch him; your FAVOURITE is safe
from me.’ So saying, he stooped down and picked up the bunch of ribands
which had fallen at Nora’s feet, and handing it to her, said in a
sarcastic tone, ‘When ladies make presents to gentlemen, it is time for
OTHER gentlemen to retire.’
‘Good heavens, Quin!’ cried the girl; ‘he is but a boy.’
‘I am a man,’ roared I, ‘and will prove it.’
‘And don’t signify any more than my parrot or lap-dog. Mayn’t I give a
bit of riband to my own cousin?’
‘You are perfectly welcome, miss,’ continued the Captain, ‘as many yards
as you like.’
‘Monster!’ exclaimed the dear girl; ‘your father was a tailor, and
you are always thinking of the shop. But I’ll have my revenge, I will!
Reddy, will you see me insulted?’
‘Indeed, Miss Nora,’ says I, ‘I intend to have his blood as sure as my
name’s Redmond.’
‘I’ll send for the usher to cane you, little boy,’ said the Captain,
regaining his self-possession; ‘but as for you, miss, I have the honour
to wish you a good-day.’
He took off his hat with much ceremony, made a low CONGE, and was just
walking off, when Mick, my cousin, came up, whose ear had likewise been
caught by the scream.
‘Hoity-toity! Jack Quin, what’s the matter here?’ says Mick; ‘Nora in
tears, Redmond’s ghost here with his sword drawn, and you making a bow?’
‘I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Brady,’ said the Englishman: ‘I have had
enough of Miss Nora, here, and your Irish ways. I ain’t used to ‘em,
sir.’
‘Well, well! what is it?’ said Mick good-humouredly (for he owed Quin a
great deal of money as it turned out); ‘we’ll make you used to our ways,
or adopt English ones.’
‘It’s not the English way for ladies to have two lovers’ (the ‘Henglish
way,’ as the captain called it), ‘and so, Mr. Brady, I’ll thank you
to pay me the sum you owe me, and I’ll resign all claims to this young
lady. If she has a fancy for schoolboys, let her take ‘em, sir.’
‘Pooh, pooh! Quin, you are joking,’ said Mick.
‘I never was more in earnest,’ replied the other.
‘By Heaven, then, look to yourself!’ shouted Mick. ‘Infamous seducer!
infernal deceiver!--you come and wind your toils round this suffering
angel here--you win her heart and leave her--and fancy her brother won’t
defend her? Draw this minute, you slave! and let me cut the wicked heart
out of your body!’
‘This is regular assassination,’ said Quin, starting back; ‘there’s two
on ‘em on me at once. Fagan, you won’t let ‘em murder me?’
‘Faith!’ said Captain Fagan, who seemed mightily amused, ‘you may settle
your own quarrel, Captain Quin;’ and coming over to me, whispered, ‘At
him again, you little fellow.’
‘As long as Mr. Quin withdraws his claim,’ said I, ‘I, of course, do not
interfere.’
‘I do, sir--I do,’ said Mr. Quin, more and more flustered.
‘Then defend yourself like a man, curse you!’ cried Mick again. ‘Mysie,
lead this poor victim away--Redmond and Fagan will see fair play between
us.’
‘Well now--I don’t--give me time--I’m puzzled--I--I don’t know which way
to look.’
‘Like the donkey betwixt the two bundles of hay,’ said Mr. Fagan drily,
‘and there’s pretty pickings on either side.’
CHAPTER II. I SHOW MYSELF TO BE A MAN OF SPIRIT
During this dispute, my cousin Nora did the only thing that a lady,
under such circumstances, could do, and fainted in due form. I was in
hot altercation with Mick at the time, or I should have, of course,
flown to her assistance, but Captain Fagan (a dry sort of fellow this
Fagan was) prevented me, saying, ‘I advise you to leave the young
lady to herself, Master Redmond, and be sure she will come to.’ And so
indeed, after a while, she did, which has shown me since that Fagan
knew the world pretty well, for many’s the lady I’ve seen in after times
recover in a similar manner. Quin did not offer to help her, you may be
sure, for, in the midst of the diversion, caused by her screaming, the
faithless bully stole away.
‘Which of us is Captain Quin to engage?’ said I to Mick; for it was my
first affair, and I was as proud of it as of a suit of laced velvet. ‘Is
it you or I, Cousin Mick, that is to have the honour of chastising this
insolent Englishman?’ And I held out my hand as I spoke, for my heart
melted towards my cousin under the triumph of the moment.
But he rejected the proffered offer of friendship. ‘You--you!’ said he,
in a towering passion; ‘hang you for a meddling brat: your hand is in
everybody’s pie. What business had you to come brawling and quarrelling
here, with a gentleman who has fifteen hundred a year?’
‘Oh,’ gasped Nora, from the stone bench, ‘I shall die: I know I shall. I
shall never leave this spot.’
‘The Captain’s not gone yet,’ whispered Fagan; on which Nora, giving him
an indignant look, jumped up and walked towards the house.
‘Meanwhile,’ Mick continued, ‘what business have you, you meddling
rascal, to interfere with a daughter of this house?’
‘Rascal yourself!’ roared I: ‘call me another such name, Mick Brady, and
I’ll drive my hanger into your weasand. Recollect, I stood to you when I
was eleven years old. I’m your match now, and, by Jove, provoke me, and
I’ll beat you like--like your younger brother always did.’ That was a
home-cut, and I saw Mick turn blue with fury.
‘This is a pretty way to recommend yourself to the family,’ said Fagan,
in a soothing tone.
‘The girl’s old enough to be his mother,’ growled Mick.
‘Old or not,’ I replied: ‘you listen to this, Mick Brady’ (and I swore a
tremendous oath, that need not be put down here): ‘the man that marries
Nora Brady must first kill me--do you mind that?’
‘Pooh, sir,’ said Mick, turning away, ‘kill you--flog you, you mean!
I’ll send for Nick the huntsman to do it;’ and so he went off.
Captain Fagan now came up, and taking me kindly by the hand, said I was
a gallant lad, and he liked my spirit. ‘But what Brady says is true,’
continued he; ‘it’s a hard thing to give a lad counsel who is in such
a far-gone state as you; but, believe me, I know the world, and if you
will but follow my advice, you won’t regret having taken it. Nora Brady
has not a penny; you are not a whit richer. You are but fifteen, and
she’s four-and-twenty. In ten years, when you’re old enough to marry,
she will be an old woman; and, my poor boy, don’t you see--though it’s a
hard matter to see--that she’s a flirt, and does not care a pin for you
or Quin either?’
But who in love (or in any other point, for the matter of that) listens
to advice? I never did, and I told Captain Fagan fairly, that Nora might
love me or not as she liked, but that Quin should fight me before he
married her--that I swore.
‘Faith,’ says Fagan, ‘I think you are a lad that’s likely to keep your
word;’ and, looking hard at me for a second or two, he walked away
likewise, humming a tune: and I saw he looked back at me as he went
through the old gate out of the garden. When he was gone, and I was
quite alone, I flung myself down on the bench where Nora had made
believe to faint, and had left her handkerchief; and, taking it up, hid
my face in it, and burst into such a passion of tears as I would then
have had nobody see for the world. The crumpled riband which I had flung
at Quin lay in the walk, and I sat there for hours, as wretched as any
man in Ireland, I believe, for the time being. But it’s a changeable
world! When we consider how great our sorrows SEEM, and how small they
ARE; how we think we shall die of grief, and how quickly we forget, I
think we ought to be ashamed of ourselves and our fickle-heartedness.
For, after all, what business has time to bring us consolation? I
have not, perhaps, in the course of my multifarious adventures and
experience, hit upon the right woman; and have forgotten, after a
little, every single creature I adored; but I think, if I could but have
lighted on the right one, I would have loved her for EVER.
I must have sat for some hours bemoaning myself on the garden bench, for
it was morning when I came to Castle Brady, and the dinner-bell
clanged as usual at three o’clock, which wakened me up from my reverie.
Presently I gathered up the handkerchief, and once more took the riband.
As I passed through the offices, I saw the Captain’s saddle was still
hanging up at the stable-door, and saw his odious red-coated brute of
a servant swaggering with the scullion-girls and kitchen-people. ‘The
Englishman’s still there, Master Redmond,’ said one of the maids to me
(a sentimental black-eyed girl, who waited on the young ladies). ‘He’s
there in the parlour, with the sweetest fillet of vale; go in, and don’t
let him browbeat you, Master Redmond.’
And in I went, and took my place at the bottom of the big table, as
usual, and my friend the butler speedily brought me a cover.
‘Hallo, Reddy my boy!’ said my uncle, ‘up and well?--that’s right.’
‘He’d better be home with his mother,’ growled my aunt.
‘Don’t mind her,’ says Uncle Brady; ‘it’s the cold goose she ate at
breakfast didn’t agree with her. Take a glass of spirits, Mrs. Brady, to
Redmond’s health.’ It was evident he did not know of what had happened;
but Mick, who was at dinner too, and Ulick, and almost all the girls,
looked exceedingly black, and the Captain foolish; and Miss Nora, who
was again by his side, ready to cry. Captain Fagan sat smiling; and I
looked on as cold as a stone. I thought the dinner would choke me: but
I was determined to put a good face on it, and when the cloth was drawn,
filled my glass with the rest; and we drank the King and the Church,
as gentlemen should. My uncle was in high good-humour, and especially
always joking with Nora and the Captain. It was, ‘Nora, divide that
merry-thought with the Captain! see who’ll be married first.’ ‘Jack
Quin, my dear boy, never mind a clean glass for the claret, we’re short
of crystal at Castle Brady; take Nora’s and the wine will taste none the
worse;’ and so on. He was in the highest glee,--I did not know why. Had
there been a reconciliation between the faithless girl and her lover
since they had come into the house?
I learned the truth very soon. At the third toast, it was always the
custom for the ladies to withdraw; but my uncle stopped them this time,
in spite of the remonstrances of Nora, who said, ‘Oh, pa! do let us go!’
and said, ‘No, Mrs. Brady and ladies, if you plaise; this is a sort of
toast that is drunk a great dale too seldom in my family, and you’ll
plaise to receive it with all the honours. Here’s CAPTAIN AND MRS.
JOHN QUIN, and long life to them. Kiss her, Jack, you rogue: for ‘faith
you’ve got a treasure!’
‘He has already ‘----I screeched out, springing up.
‘Hold your tongue, you fool--hold your tongue!’ said big Ulick, who sat
by me; but I wouldn’t hear.
‘He has already,’ I screamed, ‘been slapped in the face this morning,
Captain John Quin; he’s already been called coward, Captain John Quin;
and this is the way I’ll drink his health. Here’s your health, Captain
John Quin!’ And I flung a glass of claret into his face. I don’t know
how he looked after it, for the next moment I myself was under the
table, tripped up by Ulick, who hit me a violent cuff on the head as I
went down; and I had hardly leisure to hear the general screaming and
skurrying that was taking place above me, being so fully occupied with
kicks, and thumps, and curses, with which Ulick was belabouring me. ‘You
fool!’ roared he--’ you great blundering marplot--you silly beggarly
brat’ (a thump at each), ‘hold your tongue!’ These blows from Ulick, of
course, I did not care for, for he had always been my friend, and had
been in the habit of thrashing me all my life.
When I got up from under the table all the ladies were gone; and I had
the satisfaction of seeing the Captain’s nose was bleeding, as mine
was--HIS was cut across the bridge, and his beauty spoiled for ever.
Ulick shook himself, sat down quietly, filled a bumper, and pushed the
bottle to me. ‘There, you young donkey,’ said he, ‘sup that; and let’s
hear no more of your braying.’
‘In Heaven’s name, what does all the row mean?’ says my uncle. ‘Is the
boy in the fever again?’
‘It’s all your fault,’ said Mick sulkily: ‘yours and those who brought
him here.’
‘Hold your noise, Mick!’ says Ulick, turning on him; ‘speak civil of my
father and me, and don’t let me be called upon to teach you manners.’
‘It IS your fault,’ repeated Mick. ‘What business has the vagabond here?
If I had my will, I’d have him flogged and turned out.’
‘And so he should be,’ said Captain Quin.
‘You’d best not try it, Quin,’ said Ulick, who was always my champion;
and turning to his father, ‘The fact is, sir, that the young monkey has
fallen in love with Nora, and finding her and the Captain mighty sweet
in the garden to-day, he was for murdering Jack Quin.’
‘Gad, he’s beginning young,’ said my uncle, quite good-humouredly.
‘’Faith, Fagan, that boy’s a Brady, every inch of him.’
‘And I’ll tell you what, Mr. B.,’ cried Quin, bristling up: ‘I’ve been
insulted grossly in this ‘OUSE. I ain’t at all satisfied with these here
ways of going on. I’m an Englishman I am, and a man of property; and
I--I’--‘If you’re insulted, and not satisfied, remember there’s two of
us, Quin,’ said Ulick gruffly. On which the Captain fell to washing his
nose in water, and answered never a word.
‘Mr. Quin,’ said I, in the most dignified tone I could assume, ‘may
also have satisfaction any time he pleases, by calling on Redmond Barry,
Esquire, of Barryville.’ At which speech my uncle burst out a-laughing
(as he did at everything); and in this laugh, Captain Fagan, much to my
mortification, joined. I turned rather smartly upon him, however, and
bade him to understand that as for my cousin Ulick, who had been my best
friend through life, I could put up with rough treatment from him; yet,
though I was a boy, even that sort of treatment I would bear from him
no longer; and any other person who ventured on the like would find me a
man, to their cost. ‘Mr. Quin,’ I added, ‘knows that fact very well; and
if HE’S a man, he’ll know where to find me.’
My uncle now observed that it was getting late, and that my mother would
be anxious about me. ‘One of you had better go home with him,’ said he,
turning to his sons, ‘or the lad may be playing more pranks.’ But Ulick
said, with a nod to his brother, ‘Both of us ride home with Quin here.’
‘I’m not afraid of Freny’s people,’ said the Captain, with a faint
attempt at a laugh; ‘my man is armed, and so am I.’
‘You know the use of arms very well, Quin,’ said Ulick; ‘and no one can
doubt your courage; but Mick and I will see you home for all that.’
‘Why, you’ll not be home till morning, boys. Kilwangan’s a good ten mile
from here.’
‘We’ll sleep at Quin’s quarters,’ replied Ulick: ‘WE’RE GOING TO STOP A
WEEK THERE.’
‘Thank you,’ says Quin, very faint; ‘it’s very kind of you.’
‘You’ll be lonely, you know, without us.’
‘Oh yes, very lonely!’ says Quin.
‘And in ANOTHER WEEK, my boy,’ says Ulick (and here he whispered
something in the Captain’s ear, in which I thought I caught the words
‘marriage,’ ‘parson,’ and felt all my fury returning again).
‘As you please,’ whined out the Captain; and the horses were quickly
brought round, and the three gentlemen rode away.
Fagan stopped, and, at my uncle’s injunction, walked across the old
treeless park with me. He said that after the quarrel at dinner, he
thought I would scarcely want to see the ladies that night, in which
opinion I concurred entirely; and so we went off without an adieu.
‘A pretty day’s work of it you have made, Master Redmond,’ said
he. ‘What! you a friend to the Bradys, and knowing your uncle to be
distressed for money, try and break off a match which will bring fifteen
hundred a year into the family? Quin has promised to pay off the four
thousand pounds which is bothering your uncle so. He takes a girl
without a penny--a girl with no more beauty than yonder bullock.
Well, well, don’t look furious; let’s say she IS handsome--there’s no
accounting for tastes,--a girl that has been flinging herself at the
head of every man in these parts these ten years past, and MISSING them
all. And you, as poor as herself, a boy of fifteen--well, sixteen, if
you insist--and a boy who ought to be attached to your uncle as to your
father’--
‘And so I am,’ said I.
‘And this is the return you make him for his kindness! Didn’t he harbour
you in his house when you were an orphan, and hasn’t he given you
rent-free your fine mansion of Barryville yonder? And now, when his
affairs can be put into order, and a chance offers for his old age to
be made comfortable, who flings himself in the way of him and
competence?--You, of all others; the man in the world most obliged to
him. It’s wicked, ungrateful, unnatural. From a lad of such spirit as
you are, I expect a truer courage.’
‘I am not afraid of any man alive,’ exclaimed I (for this latter part of
the Captain’s argument had rather staggered me, and I wished, of course,
to turn it--as one always should when the enemy’s too strong); ‘and it’s
_I_ am the injured man, Captain Fagan. No man was ever, since the world
began, treated so. Look here--look at this riband. I’ve worn it in
my heart for six months. I’ve had it there all the time of the fever.
Didn’t Nora take it out of her own bosom and give it me? Didn’t she kiss
me when she gave it me, and call me her darling Redmond?’
‘She was PRACTISING,’ replied Mr. Fagan, with a sneer. ‘I know women,
sir. Give them time, and let nobody else come to the house, and they’ll
fall in love with a chimney-sweep. There was a young lady in Fermoy’--
‘A young lady in flames,’ roared I (but I used a still hotter word).
‘Mark this; come what will of it, I swear I’ll fight the man who
pretends to the hand of Nora Brady. I’ll follow him, if it’s into the
church, and meet him there. I’ll have his blood, or he shall have mine;
and this riband shall be found dyed in it. Yes, and if I kill him, I’ll
pin it on his breast, and then she may go and take back her token.’ This
I said because I was very much excited at the time, and because I had
not read novels and romantic plays for nothing.
‘Well,’ says Fagan after a pause, ‘if it must be, it must. For a young
fellow, you are the most blood-thirsty I ever saw. Quin’s a determined
fellow, too.’
‘Will you take my message to him?’ said I, quite eagerly.
‘Hush!’ said Fagan: ‘your mother may be on the look-out. Here we are,
close to Barryville.’
‘Mind! not a word to my mother,’ I said; and went into the house
swelling with pride and exultation to think that I should have a chance
against the Englishman I hated so.
Tim, my servant, had come up from Barryville on my mother’s return from
church; for the good lady was rather alarmed at my absence, and anxious
for my return. But he had seen me go in to dinner, at the invitation of
the sentimental lady’s-maid; and when he had had his own share of the
good things in the kitchen, which was always better furnished than ours
at home, had walked back again to inform his mistress where I was, and,
no doubt, to tell her, in his own fashion, of all the events that had
happened at Castle Brady. In spite of my precautions to secrecy, then,
I half suspected that my mother knew all, from the manner in which she
embraced me on my arrival, and received our guest, Captain Fagan. The
poor soul looked a little anxious and flushed, and every now and then
gazed very hard in the Captain’s face; but she said not a word about the
quarrel, for she had a noble spirit, and would as lief have seen anyone
of her kindred hanged as shirking from the field of honour. What has
become of those gallant feelings nowadays? Sixty years ago a man was a
MAN, in old Ireland, and the sword that was worn by his side was at the
service of any gentleman’s gizzard, upon the slightest difference. But
the good old times and usages are fast fading away. One scarcely every
hears of a fair meeting now, and the use of those cowardly pistols, in
place of the honourable and manly weapon of gentlemen, has introduced
a deal of knavery into the practice of duelling, that cannot be
sufficiently deplored.
When I arrived at home I felt that I was a man in earnest, and welcoming
Captain Fagan to Barryville, and introducing him to my mother, in a
majestic and dignified way, said the Captain must be thirsty after his
walk, and called upon Tim to bring up a bottle of the yellow-sealed
Bordeaux, and cakes and glasses, immediately.
Tim looked at the mistress in great wonderment: and the fact is, that
six hours previous I would as soon have thought of burning the house
down as calling for a bottle of claret on my own account; but I felt I
was a man now, and had a right to command; and my mother felt this too,
for she turned to the fellow and said, sharply, ‘Don’t you hear, you
rascal, what YOUR MASTER says! Go, get the wine, and the cakes and
glasses, directly.’ Then (for you may be sure she did not give Tim the
keys of our little cellar) she went and got the liquor herself; and Tim
brought it in, on the silver tray, in due form. My dear mother poured
out the wine, and drank the Captain welcome; but I observed her hand
shook very much as she performed this courteous duty, and the bottle
went clink, clink, against the glass. When she had tasted her glass,
she said she had a headache, and would go to bed; and so I asked her
blessing, as becomes a dutiful son--(the modern BLOODS have given up the
respectful ceremonies which distinguished a gentleman in my time)--and
she left me and Captain Fagan to talk over our important business.
‘Indeed,’ said the Captain,’ I see now no other way out of the scrape
than a meeting. The fact is, there was a talk of it at Castle Brady,
after your attack upon Quin this afternoon, and he vowed that he would
cut you in pieces: but the tears and supplications of Miss Honoria
induced him, though very unwillingly, to relent. Now, however, matters
have gone too far. No officer, bearing His Majesty’s commission, can
receive a glass of wine on his nose--this claret of yours is very good,
by the way, and by your leave we’ll ring for another bottle--without
resenting the affront. Fight you must; and Quin is a huge strong
fellow.’
‘He’ll give the better mark,’ said I. ‘I am not afraid of him.’
‘In faith,’ said the Captain,’ I believe you are not; for a lad, I never
saw more game in my life.’
‘Look at that sword, sir,’ says I, pointing to an elegant silver-mounted
one, in a white shagreen case, that hung on the mantelpiece, under the
picture of my father, Harry Barry. ‘It was with that sword, sir, that my
father pinked Mohawk O’Driscol, in Dublin, in the year 1740; with that
sword, sir, he met Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone, the Hampshire baronet,
and ran him through the neck. They met on horseback, with sword and
pistol, on Hounslow Heath, as I dare say you have heard tell of, and
those are the pistols’ (they hung on each side of the picture) ‘which
the gallant Barry used. He was quite in the wrong, having insulted Lady
Fuddlestone, when in liquor, at the Brentford assembly. But, like a
gentleman, he scorned to apologise, and Sir Huddlestone received a ball
through his hat, before they engaged with the sword. I am Harry Barry’s
son, sir, and will act as becomes my name and my quality.’
‘Give me a kiss, my dear boy,’ said Fagan, with tears in his eyes.
‘You’re after my own soul. As long as Jack Fagan lives you shall never
want a friend or a second.’
Poor fellow! he was shot six months afterwards, carrying orders to my
Lord George Sackville, at Minden, and I lost thereby a kind friend. But
we don’t know what is in store for us, and that night was a merry one
at least. We had a second bottle, and a third too (I could hear the poor
mother going downstairs for each, but she never came into the parlour
with them, and sent them in by the butler, Mr. Tim): and we parted
at length, he engaging to arrange matters with Mr. Quin’s second that
night, and to bring me news in the morning as to the place where the
meeting should take place. I have often thought since, how different my
fate might have been, had I not fallen in love with Nora at that early
age; and had I not flung the wine in Quin’s face, and so brought on
the duel. I might have settled down in Ireland but for that (for Miss
Quinlan was an heiress, within twenty miles of us, and Peter Burke,
of Kilwangan, left his daughter Judy L700 a year, and I might have had
either of them, had I waited a few years). But it was in my fate to be
a wanderer, and that battle with Quin sent me on my travels at a very
early age: as you shall hear anon.
I never slept sounder in my life, though I woke a little earlier than
usual; and you may be sure my first thought was of the event of the day,
for which I was fully prepared. I had ink and pen in my room--had I not
been writing those verses to Nora but the day previous, like a poor fond
fool as I was? And now I sat down and wrote a couple of letters more:
they might be the last, thought I, that I ever should write in my life.
The first was to my mother:--
‘Honoured Madam’--I wrote--‘This will not be given you unless I fall by
the hand of Captain Quin, whom I meet this day in the field of honour,
with sword and pistol. If I die, it is as a good Christian and a
gentleman,--how should I be otherwise when educated by such a mother as
you? I forgive all my enemies--I beg your blessing as a dutiful son.
I desire that my mare Nora, which my uncle gave me, and which I called
after the most faithless of her sex, may be returned to Castle Brady,
and beg you will give my silver-hiked hanger to Phil Purcell, the
gamekeeper. Present my duty to my uncle and Ulick, and all the girls of
MY party there. And I remain your dutiful son,
‘REDMOND BARRY.’
To Nora I wrote:--
‘This letter will be found in my bosom along with the token you gave me.
It will be dyed in my blood (unless I have Captain Quin’s, whom I
hate, but forgive), and will be a pretty ornament for you on your
marriage-day. Wear it, and think of the poor boy to whom you gave it,
and who died (as he was always ready to do) for your sake.
‘REDMOND.’
These letters being written, and sealed with my father’s great silver
seal of the Barry arms, I went down to breakfast; where my mother was
waiting for me, you may be sure. We did not say a single word about what
was taking place: on the contrary, we talked of anything but that; about
who was at church the day before, and about my wanting new clothes now
I was grown so tall. She said I must have a suit against winter,
if--if--she could afford it. She winced rather at the ‘if,’ Heaven bless
her! I knew what was in her mind. And then she fell to telling me about
the black pig that must be killed, and that she had found the speckled
hen’s nest that morning, whose eggs I liked so, and other such trifling
talk. Some of these eggs were for breakfast, and I ate them with a
good appetite; but in helping myself to salt I spilled it, on which she
started up with a scream. ‘THANK GOD,’ said she, ‘IT’S FALLEN TOWARDS
ME.’ And then, her heart being too full, she left the room. Ah! they
have their faults, those mothers; but are there any other women like
them?
When she was gone I went to take down the sword with which my father had
vanquished the Hampshire baronet, and, would you believe it?--the brave
woman had tied A NEW RIBAND to the hilt: for indeed she had the courage
of a lioness and a Brady united. And then I took down the pistols, which
were always kept bright and well oiled, and put some fresh flints I
had into the locks, and got balls and powder ready against the Captain
should come. There was claret and a cold fowl put ready for him on the
sideboard, and a case-bottle of old brandy too, with a couple of little
glasses on the silver tray with the Barry arms emblazoned. In after
life, and in the midst of my fortune and splendour, I paid thirty-five
guineas, and almost as much more interest, to the London goldsmith who
supplied my father with that very tray. A scoundrel pawnbroker would
only give me sixteen for it afterwards; so little can we trust the
honour of rascally tradesmen!
At eleven o’clock Captain Fagan arrived, on horseback, with a mounted
dragoon after him. He paid his compliments to the collation which my
mother’s care had provided for him, and then said, ‘Look ye, Redmond my
boy; this is a silly business. The girl will marry Quin, mark my words;
and as sure as she does you’ll forget her. You are but a boy. Quin is
willing to consider you as such. Dublin’s a fine place, and if you have
a mind to take a ride thither and see the town for a month, here are
twenty guineas at your service. Make Quin an apology, and be off.’
‘A man of honour, Mr. Fagan,’ says I, ‘dies, but never apologises. I’ll
see the Captain hanged before I apologise.’
‘Then there’s nothing for it but a meeting.’
‘My mare is saddled and ready,’ says I; ‘where’s the meeting, and who’s
the Captain’s second?’
‘Your cousins go out with him,’ answered Mr. Fagan.
‘I’ll ring for my groom to bring my mare round,’ I said, ‘as soon as you
have rested yourself.’ Tim was accordingly despatched for Nora, and I
rode away, but I didn’t take leave of Mrs. Barry. The curtains of
her bedroom windows were down, and they didn’t move as we mounted and
trotted off... BUT TWO HOURS AFTERWARDS, you should have seen her as she
came tottering downstairs, and heard the scream which she gave as she
hugged her boy to her heart, quite unharmed and without a wound in his
body.
What had taken place I may as well tell here. When we got to the ground,
Ulick, Mick, and the Captain were already there: Quin, flaming in red
regimentals, as big a monster as ever led a grenadier company. The party
were laughing together at some joke of one or the other: and I must say
I thought this laughter very unbecoming in my cousins, who were met,
perhaps, to see the death of one of their kindred.
‘I hope to spoil this sport,’ says I to Captain Fagan, in a great rage,
‘and trust to see this sword of mine in yonder big bully’s body.’
‘Oh! it’s with pistols we fight,’ replied Mr. Fagan. ‘You are no match
for Quin with the sword.’
‘I’ll match any man with the sword,’ said I.
‘But swords are to-day impossible; Captain Quin is--is lame. He knocked
his knee against the swinging park-gate last night, as he was riding
home, and can scarce move it now.’
‘Not against Castle Brady gate,’ says I: ‘that has been off the hinges
these ten years.’ On which Fagan said it must have been some other
gate, and repeated what he had said to Mr. Quin and my cousins, when, on
alighting from our horses, we joined and saluted those gentlemen.
‘Oh yes! dead lame,’ said Ulick, coming to shake me by the hand, while
Captain Quin took off his hat and turned extremely red. ‘And very lucky
for you, Redmond my boy,’ continued Ulick; ‘you were a dead man else;
for he is a devil of a fellow--isn’t he, Fagan?’
‘A regular Turk,’ answered Fagan; adding, ‘I never yet knew the man who
stood to Captain Quin.’
‘Hang the business!’ said Ulick; ‘I hate it. I’m ashamed of it. Say
you’re sorry, Redmond: you can easily say that.’
‘If the young FELLER will go to DUBLING, as proposed’--here interposed
Mr. Quin.
‘I am NOT sorry--I’ll NOT apologise--and I’ll as soon go to DUBLING as
to--!’ said I, with a stamp of my foot.
‘There’s nothing else for it,’ said Ulick with a laugh to Fagan. ‘Take
your ground, Fagan,--twelve paces, I suppose?’
‘Ten, sir,’ said Mr. Quin, in a big voice; ‘and make them short ones, do
you hear, Captain Fagan?’
‘Don’t bully, Mr. Quin,’ said Ulick surlily; ‘here are the pistols.’ And
he added, with some emotion, to me, ‘God bless you, my boy; and when I
count three, fire.’
Mr. Fagan put my pistol into my hand,--that is, not one of mine (which
were to serve, if need were, for the next round), but one of Ulick’s.
‘They are all right,’ said he. ‘Never fear: and, Redmond, fire at his
neck--hit him there under the gorget. See how the fool shows himself
open.’ Mick, who had never spoken a word, Ulick, and the Captain retired
to one side, and Ulick gave the signal. It was slowly given, and I had
leisure to cover my man well. I saw him changing colour and trembling as
the numbers were given. At ‘three,’ both our pistols went off. I heard
something whizz by me, and my antagonist, giving a most horrible groan,
staggered backwards and fell.
‘He’s down--he’s down!’ cried the seconds, running towards him. Ulick
lifted him up--Mick took his head.
‘He’s hit here, in the neck,’ said Mick; and laying open his coat, blood
was seen gurgling from under his gorget, at the very spot at which I
aimed.
‘How is it with you?’ said Ulick. ‘Is he really hit?’ said he, looking
hard at him. The unfortunate man did not answer, but when the support
of Ulick’s arm was withdrawn from his back, groaned once more, and fell
backwards.
‘The young fellow has begun well,’ said Mick, with a scowl. ‘You had
better ride off, young sir, before the police are up. They had wind of
the business before we left Kilwangan.’
‘Is he quite dead?’ said I.
‘Quite dead,’ answered Mick.
‘Then the world’s rid of A COWARD,’ said Captain Fagan, giving the huge
prostrate body a scornful kick with his foot. ‘It’s all over with him,
Reddy,--he doesn’t stir.’
‘WE are not cowards, Fagan,’ said Ulick roughly, ‘whatever he was! Let’s
get the boy off as quick as we may. Your man shall go for a cart, and
take away the body of this unhappy gentleman. This has been a sad day’s
work for our family, Redmond Barry: you have robbed us of 1500(pounds) a
year.’
‘It was Nora did it,’ said I; ‘not I.’ And I took the riband she gave me
out of my waistcoat, and the letter, and flung them down on the body of
Captain Quin. ‘There!’ says I--‘take her those ribands. She’ll know what
they mean: and that’s all that’s left to her of two lovers she had and
ruined.’
I did not feel any horror or fear, young as I was, in seeing my enemy
prostrate before me; for I knew that I had met and conquered him
honourably in the field, as became a man of my name and blood.
‘And now, in Heaven’s name, get the youngster out of the way,’ said
Mick.
Ulick said he would ride with me, and off accordingly we galloped, never
drawing bridle till we came to my mother’s door. When there, Ulick told
Tim to feed my mare, as I would have far to ride that day; and I was in
the poor mother’s arms in a minute.
I need not tell how great were her pride and exultation when she heard
from Ulick’s lips the account of my behaviour at the duel. He urged,
however, that I should go into hiding for a short time; and it was
agreed between them that I should drop my name of Barry, and, taking
that of Redmond, go to Dublin, and there wait until matters were blown
over. This arrangement was not come to without some discussion; for why
should I not be as safe at Barryville, she said, as my cousin and Ulick
at Castle Brady?--bailiffs and duns never got near THEM; why should
constables be enabled to come upon me? But Ulick persisted in the
necessity of my instant departure; in which argument, as I was anxious
to see the world, I must confess, I sided with him; and my mother was
brought to see that in our small house at Barryville, in the midst of
the village, and with the guard but of a couple of servants, escape
would be impossible. So the kind soul was forced to yield to my cousin’s
entreaties, who promised her, however, that the affair would soon be
arranged, and that I should be restored to her. Ah! how little did he
know what fortune was in store for me!
My dear mother had some forebodings, I think, that our separation was
to be a long one; for she told me that all night long she had been
consulting the cards regarding my fate in the duel: and that all the
signs betokened a separation; then, taking out a stocking from her
escritoire, the kind soul put twenty guineas in a purse for me (she had
herself but twenty-five), and made up a little valise, to be placed
at the back of my mare, in which were my clothes, linen, and a silver
dressing-case of my father’s. She bade me, too, to keep the sword and
the pistols I had known to use so like a man. She hurried my departure
now (though her heart, I know, was full), and almost in half-an-hour
after my arrival at home I was once more on the road again, with the
wide world as it were before me. I need not tell how Tim and the cook
cried at my departure: and, mayhap, I had a tear or two myself in my
eyes; but no lad of sixteen is VERY sad who has liberty for the first
time, and twenty guineas in his pocket: and I rode away, thinking, I
confess, not so much of the kind mother left alone, and of the home
behind me, as of to-morrow, and all the wonders it would bring.
CHAPTER III. A FALSE START IN THE GENTEEL WORLD
I rode that night as far as Carlow, where I lay at the best inn; and
being asked what was my name by the landlord of the house, gave it as
Mr. Redmond, according to my cousin’s instructions, and said I was of
the Redmonds of Waterford county, and was on my road to Trinity
College, Dublin, to be educated there. Seeing my handsome appearance,
silver-hiked sword, and well-filled valise, my landlord made free to
send up a jug of claret without my asking; and charged, you may be sure,
pretty handsomely for it in the bill. No gentleman in those good old
days went to bed without a good share of liquor to set him sleeping, and
on this my first day’s entrance into the world, I made a point to act
the fine gentleman completely; and, I assure you, succeeded in my part
to admiration. The excitement of the events of the day, the quitting my
home, the meeting with Captain Quin, were enough to set my brains in a
whirl, without the claret; which served to finish me completely. I did
not dream of the death of Quin, as some milksops, perhaps, would have
done; indeed, I have never had any of that foolish remorse consequent
upon any of my affairs of honour: always considering, from the first,
that where a gentleman risks his own life in manly combat, he is a fool
to be ashamed because he wins. I slept at Carlow as sound as man could
sleep; drank a tankard of small beer and a toast to my breakfast; and
exchanged the first of my gold pieces to settle the bill, not forgetting
to pay all the servants liberally, and as a gentleman should. I began
so the first day of my life, and so have continued. No man has been
at greater straits than I, and has borne more pinching poverty and
hardship; but nobody can say of me that, if I had a guinea, I was not
free-handed with it, and did not spend it as well as a lord could do.
I had no doubts of the future: thinking that a man of my person, parts,
and courage, could make his way anywhere. Besides, I had twenty gold
guineas in my pocket; a sum which (although I was mistaken) I calculated
would last me for four months at least, during which time something
would be done towards the making of my fortune. So I rode on, singing
to myself, or chatting with the passers-by; and all the girls along the
road said God save me for a clever gentleman! As for Nora and Castle
Brady, between to-day and yesterday there seemed to be a gap as of
half-a-score of years. I vowed I would never re-enter the place but as a
great man; and I kept my vow too, as you shall hear in due time.
There was much more liveliness and bustle on the king’s highroad in
those times, than in these days of stage-coaches, which carry you from
one end of the kingdom to another in a few score hours. The gentry rode
their own horses or drove in their own coaches, and spent three days
on a journey which now occupies ten hours; so that there was no lack
of company for a person travelling towards Dublin. I made part of
the journey from Carlow towards Naas with a well-armed gentleman from
Kilkenny, dressed in green and a gold cord, with a patch on his eye, and
riding a powerful mare. He asked me the question of the day, and whither
I was bound, and whether my mother was not afraid on account of the
highwaymen to let one so young as myself to travel? But I said, pulling
out one of them from a holster, that I had a pair of good pistols that
had already done execution, and were ready to do it again; and here, a
pock-marked man coming up, he put spurs into his bay mare and left me.
She was a much more powerful animal than mine; and, besides, I did not
wish to fatigue my horse, wishing to enter Dublin that night, and in
reputable condition.
As I rode towards Kilcullen, I saw a crowd of the peasant-people
assembled round a one-horse chair, and my friend in green, as I thought,
making off half a mile up the hill. A footman was howling ‘Stop thief!’
at the top of his voice; but the country fellows were only laughing at
his distress, and making all sorts of jokes at the adventure which had
just befallen.
‘Sure you might have kept him off with your blunderBUSH!’ says one
fellow.
‘Oh, the coward! to let the Captain BATE you; and he only one eye!’
cries another.
‘The next time my Lady travels, she’d better lave you at home!’ said a
third.
‘What is this noise, fellows?’ said I, riding up amongst them, and,
seeing a lady in the carriage very pale and frightened, gave a slash of
my whip, and bade the red-shanked ruffians keep off. ‘What has happened,
madam, to annoy your Ladyship?’ I said, pulling off my hat, and bringing
my mare up in a prance to the chair window.
The lady explained. She was the wife of Captain Fitzsimons, and was
hastening to join the Captain at Dublin. Her chair had been stopped by a
highway-man: the great oaf of a servant-man had fallen down on his knees
armed as he was; and though there were thirty people in the next field
working when the ruffian attacked her, not one of them would help her;
but, on the contrary, wished the Captain, as they called the highwayman,
good luck.
‘Sure he’s the friend of the poor,’ said one fellow, ‘and good luck to
him!’
‘Was it any business of ours?’ asked another. And another told,
grinning, that it was the famous Captain Freny, who, having bribed the
jury to acquit him two days back at Kilkenny assizes, had mounted his
horse at the gaol door, and the very next day had robbed two barristers
who were going the circuit.
I told this pack of rascals to be off to their work, or they should
taste of my thong, and proceeded, as well as I could, to comfort Mrs.
Fitzsimons under her misfortunes. ‘Had she lost much?’ ‘Everything: her
purse, containing upwards of a hundred guineas; her jewels, snuff-boxes,
watches, and a pair of diamond shoe-buckles of the Captain’s.’ These
mishaps I sincerely commiserated; and knowing her by her accent to be
an Englishwoman, deplored the difference that existed between the
two countries, and said that in OUR country (meaning England) such
atrocities were unknown.
‘You, too, are an Englishman?’ said she, with rather a tone of surprise.
On which I said I was proud to be such: as, in fact, I was; and I never
knew a true Tory gentleman of Ireland who did not wish he could say as
much.
I rode by Mrs. Fitzsimon’s chair all the way to Naas; and, as she had
been robbed of her purse, asked permission to lend her a couple of
pieces to pay her expenses at the inn: which sum she was graciously
pleased to accept, and was, at the same time, kind enough to invite
me to share her dinner. To the lady’s questions regarding my birth and
parentage, I replied that I was a young gentleman of large fortune (this
was not true; but what is the use of crying bad fish? my dear mother
instructed me early in this sort of prudence) and good family in the
county of Waterford; that I was going to Dublin for my studies, and that
my mother allowed me five hundred per annum. Mrs. Fitzsimons was equally
communicative. She was the daughter of General Granby Somerset of
Worcestershire, of whom, of course, I had heard (and though I had not,
of course I was too well-bred to say so); and had made, as she must
confess, a runaway match with Ensign Fitzgerald Fitzsimons. Had I been
in Donegal?--No! That was a pity. The Captain’s father possesses a
hundred thousand acres there, and Fitzsimonsburgh Castle’s the finest
mansion in Ireland. Captain Fitzsimons is the eldest son; and, though he
has quarrelled with his father, must inherit the vast property. She went
on to tell me about the balls at Dublin, the banquets at the Castle, the
horse-races at the Phoenix, the ridottos and routs, until I became quite
eager to join in those pleasures; and I only felt grieved to think that
my position would render secrecy necessary, and prevent me from being
presented at the Court, of which the Fitzsimonses were the most elegant
ornaments. How different was her lively rattle to that of the vulgar
wenches at the Kilwangan assemblies! In every sentence she mentioned a
lord or a person of quality. She evidently spoke French and Italian, of
the former of which languages I have said I knew a few words; and, as
for her English accent, why, perhaps I was no judge of that, for, to
say the truth, she was the first REAL English person I had ever met. She
recommended me, further, to be very cautious with regard to the company
I should meet at Dublin, where rogues and adventurers of all countries
abounded; and my delight and gratitude to her may be imagined, when, as
our conversation grew more intimate (as we sat over our dessert), she
kindly offered to accommodate me with lodgings in her own house, where
her Fitzsimons, she said, would welcome with delight her gallant young
preserver.
‘Indeed, madam,’ said I, ‘I have preserved nothing for you.’ Which was
perfectly true; for had I not come up too late after the robbery to
prevent the highwayman from carrying off her money and pearls?
‘And sure, ma’am, them wasn’t much,’ said Sullivan, the blundering
servant, who had been so frightened at Freny’s approach, and was waiting
on us at dinner. ‘Didn’t he return you the thirteenpence in copper, and
the watch, saying it was only pinch-beck?’
But his lady rebuked him for a saucy varlet, and turned him out of the
room at once, saying to me when he had gone, ‘that the fool didn’t
know what was the meaning of a hundred-pound bill, which was in the
pocket-book that Freny took from her.’
Perhaps had I been a little older in the world’s experience, I should
have begun to see that Madam Fitzsimons was not the person of fashion
she pretended to be; but, as it was, I took all her stories for truth,
and, when the landlord brought the bill for dinner, paid it with the air
of a lord. Indeed, she made no motion to produce the two pieces I had
lent to her; and so we rode on slowly towards Dublin, into which city we
made our entrance at nightfall. The rattle and splendour of the coaches,
the flare of the linkboys, the number and magnificence of the houses,
struck me with the greatest wonder; though I was careful to disguise
this feeling, according to my dear mother’s directions, who told me that
it was the mark of a man of fashion never to wonder at anything, and
never to admit that any house, equipage, or company he saw, was more
splendid or genteel than what he had been accustomed to at home.
We stopped, at length, at a house of rather mean appearance, and were
let into a passage by no means so clean as that at Barryville, where
there was a great smell of supper and punch. A stout red-faced man,
without a periwig, and in rather a tattered nightgown and cap, made his
appearance from the parlour, and embraced his lady (for it was Captain
Fitzsimons) with a great deal of cordiality. Indeed, when he saw that a
stranger accompanied her, he embraced her more rapturously than ever.
In introducing me, she persisted in saying that I was her preserver, and
complimented my gallantry as much as if I had killed Freny, instead
of coming up when the robbery was over. The Captain said he knew the
Redmonds of Waterford intimately well: which assertion alarmed me, as I
knew nothing of the family to which I was stated to belong. But I posed
him, by asking WHICH of the Redmonds he knew, for I had never heard his
name in our family. He said he knew the Redmonds of Redmondstown. ‘Oh,’
says I, ‘mine are the Redmonds of Castle Redmond;’ and so I put him off
the scent. I went to see my nag put up at a livery-stable hard by, with
the Captain’s horse and chair, and returned to my entertainer.
Although there were the relics of some mutton-chops and onions on a
cracked dish before him, the Captain said, ‘My love, I wish I had known
of your coming, for Bob Moriarty and I just finished the most delicious
venison pasty, which his Grace the Lord Lieutenant sent us, with a
flask of Sillery from his own cellar. You know the wine, my dear? But as
bygones are bygones, and no help for them, what say ye to a fine lobster
and a bottle of as good claret as any in Ireland? Betty, clear these
things from the table, and make the mistress and our young friend
welcome to our home.’
Not having small change, Mr. Fitzsimons asked me to lend him a
tenpenny-piece to purchase the dish of lobsters; but his lady, handing
out one of the guineas I had given her, bade the girl get the change
for that, and procure the supper; which she did presently, bringing back
only a very few shillings out of the guinea to her mistress, saying that
the fishmonger had kept the remainder for an old account. ‘And the more
great big blundering fool you, for giving the gold piece to him,’ roared
Mr. Fitzsimons. I forget how many hundred guineas he said he had paid
the fellow during the year.
Our supper was seasoned, if not by any great elegance, at least by a
plentiful store of anecdotes, concerning the highest personages of the
city; with whom, according to himself, the Captain lived on terms of
the utmost intimacy. Not to be behindhand with him, I spoke of my own
estates and property as if I was as rich as a duke. I told all the
stories of the nobility I had ever heard from my mother, and some that,
perhaps, I had invented; and ought to have been aware that my host
was an impostor himself, as he did not find out my own blunders and
misstatements. But youth is ever too confident. It was some time
before I knew that I had made no very desirable acquaintance in Captain
Fitzsimons and his lady; and, indeed, went to bed congratulating myself
upon my wonderful good luck in having, at the outset of my adventures,
fallen in with so distinguished a couple.
The appearance of the chamber I occupied might, indeed, have led me to
imagine that the heir of Fitzsimonsburgh Castle, county Donegal, was not
as yet reconciled with his wealthy parents; and, had I been an English
lad, probably my suspicion and distrust would have been aroused
instantly. But perhaps, as the reader knows, we are not so particular in
Ireland on the score of neatness as people are in this precise country;
hence the disorder of my bedchamber did not strike me so much. For were
not all the windows broken and stuffed with rags even at Castle Brady,
my uncle’s superb mansion? Was there ever a lock to the doors there, or
if a lock, a handle to the lock or a hasp to fasten it to? So, though
my bedroom boasted of these inconveniences, and a few more; though my
counterpane was evidently a greased brocade dress of Mrs. Fitzsimons’s,
and my cracked toilet-glass not much bigger than a half-crown, yet I was
used to this sort of ways in Irish houses, and still thought myself in
that of a man of fashion. There was no lock to the drawers, which, when
they DID open, were full of my hostess’s rouge-pots, shoes, stays, and
rags; so I allowed my wardrobe to remain in my valise, but set out my
silver dressing-apparatus upon the ragged cloth on the drawers, where it
shone to great advantage.
When Sullivan appeared in the morning, I asked him about my mare,
which he informed me was doing well. I then bade him bring me hot
shaving-water, in a loud dignified tone.
‘Hot shaving-water!’ says he, bursting out laughing (and I confess not
without reason). ‘Is it yourself you’re going to shave?’ said he. ‘And
maybe when I bring you up the water I’ll bring you up the cat too, and
you can shave her.’ I flung a boot at the scoundrel’s head in reply
to this impertinence, and was soon with my friends in the parlour for
breakfast. There was a hearty welcome, and the same cloth that had
been used the night before: as I recognised by the black mark of the
Irish-stew dish, and the stain left by a pot of porter at supper.
My host greeted me with great cordiality; Mrs. Fitzsimons said I was an
elegant figure for the Phoenix; and indeed, without vanity, I may say of
myself that there were worse-looking fellows in Dublin than I. I had not
the powerful chest and muscular proportion which I have since attained
(to be exchanged, alas! for gouty legs and chalk-stones in my fingers;
but ‘tis the way of mortality), but I had arrived at near my present
growth of six feet, and with my hair in buckle, a handsome lace jabot
and wristbands to my shirt, and a red plush waistcoat, barred with gold,
looked the gentleman I was born. I wore my drab coat with plate
buttons, that was grown too small for me, and quite agreed with Captain
Fitzsimons that I must pay a visit to his tailor, in order to procure
myself a coat more fitting my size.
‘I needn’t ask whether you had a comfortable bed,’ said he. ‘Young Fred
Pimpleton (Lord Pimpleton’s second son) slept in it for seven months,
during which he did me the honour to stay with me, and if HE was
satisfied, I don’t know who else wouldn’t be.’
After breakfast we walked out to see the town, and Mr. Fitzsimons
introduced me to several of his acquaintances whom we met, as his
particular young friend Mr. Redmond, of Waterford county; he also
presented me at his hatter’s and tailor’s as a gentleman of great
expectations and large property; and although I told the latter that I
should not pay him ready cash for more than one coat, which fitted me to
a nicety, yet he insisted upon making me several, which I did not care
to refuse. The Captain, also, who certainly wanted such a renewal of
raiment, told the tailor to send him home a handsome military frock,
which he selected.
Then we went home to Mrs. Fitzsimons, who drove out in her chair to the
Phoenix Park, where a review was, and where numbers of the young gentry
were round about her; to all of whom she presented me as her preserver
of the day before. Indeed, such was her complimentary account of me,
that before half-an-hour I had got to be considered as a young gentleman
of the highest family in the land, related to all the principal
nobility, a cousin of Captain Fitzsimons, and heir to L10,000 a year.
Fitzsimons said he had ridden over every inch of my estate; and
‘faith, as he chose to tell these stories for me, I let him have his
way--indeed, was not a little pleased (as youth is) to be made much of,
and to pass for a great personage. I had little notion then that I
had got among a set of impostors--that Captain Fitzsimons was only an
adventurer, and his lady a person of no credit; but such are the dangers
to which youth is perpetually subject, and hence let young men take
warning by me.
I purposely hurry over the description of my life in which the incidents
were painful, of no great interest except to my unlucky self, and of
which my companions were certainly not of a kind befitting my quality.
The fact was, a young man could hardly have fallen into worse hands than
those in which I now found myself. I have been to Donegal since,
and have never seen the famous Castle of Fitzsimonsburgh, which is,
likewise, unknown to the oldest inhabitants of that county; nor are the
Granby Somersets much better known in Worcestershire. The couple into
whose hands I had fallen were of a sort much more common then than at
present, for the vast wars of later days have rendered it very difficult
for noblemen’s footmen or hangers-on to procure commissions; and such,
in fact, had been the original station of Captain Fitzsimons. Had
I known his origin, of course I would have died rather than have
associated with him: but in those simple days of youth I took his tales
for truth, and fancied myself in high luck at being, at my outset into
life, introduced into such a family. Alas! we are the sport of destiny.
When I consider upon what small circumstances all the great events of my
life have turned, I can hardly believe myself to have been anything
but a puppet in the hands of Fate; which has played its most fantastic
tricks upon me.
The Captain had been a gentleman’s gentleman, and his lady of no higher
rank. The society which this worthy pair kept was at a sort of ordinary
which they held, and at which their friends were always welcome on
payment of a certain moderate sum for their dinner. After dinner, you
may be sure that cards were not wanting, and that the company who played
did not play for love merely. To these parties persons of all sorts
would come: young bloods from the regiments garrisoned in Dublin: young
clerks from the Castle; horse-riding, wine-tippling, watchman-beating
men of fashion about town, such as existed in Dublin in that day more
than in any other city with which I am acquainted in Europe. I never
knew young fellows make such a show, and upon such small means. I never
knew young gentlemen with what I may call such a genius for idleness;
and whereas an Englishman with fifty guineas a year is not able to do
much more than starve, and toil like a slave in a profession, a young
Irish buck with the same sum will keep his horses, and drink his bottle,
and live as lazy as a lord. Here was a doctor who never had a patient,
cheek by jowl with an attorney who never had a client: neither had
a guinea--each had a good horse to ride in the Park, and the best of
clothes to his back. A sporting clergyman without a living; several
young wine-merchants, who consumed much more liquor than they had or
sold; and men of similar character, formed the society at the house
into which, by ill luck, I was thrown. What could happen to a man but
misfortune from associating with such company?--(I have not mentioned
the ladies of the society, who were, perhaps, no better than the
males)--and in a very very short time I became their prey.
As for my poor twenty guineas, in three days I saw, with terror, that
they had dwindled down to eight: theatres and taverns having already
made such cruel inroads in my purse. At play I had lost, it is true, a
couple of pieces; but seeing that every one round about me played upon
honour and gave their bills, I, of course, preferred that medium to the
payment of ready money, and when I lost paid on account.
With the tailors, saddlers, and others, I employed similar means; and
in so far Mr. Fitzsimons’s representation did me good, for the tradesmen
took him at his word regarding my fortune (I have since learned that the
rascal pigeoned several other young men of property), and for a little
time supplied me with any goods I might be pleased to order. At length,
my cash running low, I was compelled to pawn some of the suits with
which the tailor had provided me; for I did not like to part with my
mare, on which I daily rode in the Park, and which I loved as the
gift of my respected uncle. I raised some little money, too, on a few
trinkets which I had purchased of a jeweller who pressed his credit upon
me; and thus was enabled to keep up appearances for yet a little time.
I asked at the post-office repeatedly for letters for Mr. Redmond, but
none such had arrived; and, indeed, I always felt rather relieved when
the answer of ‘No’ was given to me; for I was not very anxious that my
mother should know my proceedings in the extravagant life which I was
leading at Dublin. It could not last very long, however; for when my
cash was quite exhausted, and I paid a second visit to the tailor,
requesting him to make me more clothes, the fellow hummed and ha’d, and
had the impudence to ask payment for those already supplied: on which,
telling him I should withdraw my custom from him, I abruptly left him.
The goldsmith too (a rascal Jew) declined to let me take a gold chain
to which I had a fancy; and I felt now, for the first time, in some
perplexity. To add to it, one of the young gentlemen who frequented Mr.
Fitzsimons’s boarding-house had received from me, in the way of play,
an IOU for eighteen pounds (which I lost to him at piquet), and which,
owing Mr. Curbyn, the livery-stable keeper, a bill, he passed into that
person’s hands. Fancy my rage and astonishment, then, on going for my
mare, to find that he positively refused to let me have her out of the
stable, except under payment of my promissory note! It was in vain that
I offered him his choice of four notes that I had in my pocket--one of
Fitzsimons’s for L20, one of Counsellor Mulligan’s, and so forth; the
dealer, who was a Yorkshireman, shook his head, and laughed at every one
of them; and said, ‘I tell you what, Master Redmond, you appear a young
fellow of birth and fortune, and let me whisper in your ear that you
have fallen into very bad hands--it’s a regular gang of swindlers; and a
gentleman of your rank and quality should never be seen in such company.
Go home: pack up your valise, pay the little trifle to me, mount your
mare, and ride back again to your parents,--it’s the very best thing you
can do.’
In a pretty nest of villains, indeed, was I plunged! It seemed as if
all my misfortunes were to break on me at once; for, on going home and
ascending to my bedroom in a disconsolate way, I found the Captain
and his lady there before me, my valise open, my wardrobe lying on the
ground, and my keys in the possession of the odious Fitzsimons. ‘Whom
have I been harbouring in my house?’ roared he, as I entered the
apartment. ‘Who are you, sirrah?’
‘SIRRAH! Sir,’ said I, ‘I am as good a gentleman as any in Ireland.’
‘You’re an impostor, young man: a schemer, a deceiver!’ shouted the
Captain.
‘Repeat the words again, and I will run you through the body,’ replied
I.
‘Tut, tut! I can play at fencing as well as you, Mr. REDMOND BARRY. Ah!
you change colour, do you--your secret is known, is it? You come like a
viper into the bosom of innocent families; you represent yourself as the
heir of my friends the Redmonds of Castle Redmond; I inthrojuice you to
the nobility and genthry of this methropolis’ (the Captain’s brogue was
large, and his words, by preference, long); ‘I take you to my tradesmen,
who give you credit, and what do I find? That you have pawned the goods
which you took up at their houses.’
‘I have given them my acceptances, sir,’ said I with a dignified air.
‘UNDER WHAT NAME, unhappy boy--under what name?’ screamed Mrs.
Fitzsimons; and then, indeed, I remembered that I had signed the
documents Barry Redmond instead of Redmond Barry: but what else could
I do? Had not my mother desired me to take no other designation? After
uttering a furious tirade against me, in which he spoke of the fatal
discovery of my real name on my linen--of his misplaced confidence of
affection, and the shame with which he should be obliged to meet his
fashionable friends and confess that he had harboured a swindler, he
gathered up the linen, clothes, silver toilet articles, and the rest of
my gear, saying that he should step out that moment for an officer and
give me up to the just revenge of the law.
During the first part of his speech, the thought of the imprudence of
which I had been guilty, and the predicament in which I was plunged, had
so puzzled and confounded me, that I had not uttered a word in reply to
the fellow’s abuse, but had stood quite dumb before him. The sense of
danger, however, at once roused me to action. ‘Hark ye, Mr. Fitzsimons,’
said I; ‘I will tell you why I was obliged to alter my name: which is
Barry, and the best name in Ireland. I changed it, sir, because, on
the day before I came to Dublin, I killed a man in deadly combat--an
Englishman, sir, and a captain in His Majesty’s service; and if you
offer to let or hinder me in the slightest way, the same arm which
destroyed him is ready to punish you; and by Heaven, sir, you or I don’t
leave this room alive!’
So saying, I drew my sword like lightning, and giving a ‘ha! ha!’ and
a stamp with my foot, lunged within an inch of Fitzsimons’s heart, who
started back and turned deadly pale, while his wife, with a scream,
flung herself between us.
‘Dearest Redmond,’ she cried, ‘be pacified. Fitzsimons, you don’t want
the poor child’s blood. Let him escape--in Heaven’s name let him go.’
‘He may go hang for me,’ said Fitzsimons sulkily; ‘and he’d better be
off quickly, too, for the jeweller and the tailor have called once,
and will be here again before long. It was Moses the pawnbroker that
peached: I had the news from him myself.’ By which I conclude that Mr.
Fitzsimons had been with the new laced frock-coat which he procured from
the merchant tailor on the day when the latter first gave me credit.
What was the end of our conversation? Where was now a home for the
descendant of the Barrys? Home was shut to me by my misfortune in the
duel. I was expelled from Dublin by a persecution occasioned, I must
confess, by my own imprudence. I had no time to wait and choose: no
place of refuge to fly to. Fitzsimons, after his abuse of me, left the
room growling, but not hostile; his wife insisted that we should shake
hands, and he promised not to molest me. Indeed, I owed the fellow
nothing; and, on the contrary, had his acceptance actually in my pocket
for money lost at play. As for my friend Mrs. Fitzsimons, she sat down
on the bed and fairly burst out crying. She had her faults, but her
heart was kind; and though she possessed but three shillings in the
world, and fourpence in copper, the poor soul made me take it before
I left her--to go--whither? My mind was made up: there was a score of
recruiting-parties in the town beating up for men to join our gallant
armies in America and Germany; I knew where to find one of these, having
stood by the sergeant at a review in the Phoenix Park, where he pointed
out to me characters on the field, for which I treated him to drink.
I gave one of my shillings to Sullivan the butler of the Fitzsimonses,
and, running into the street, hastened to the little alehouse at which
my acquaintance was quartered, and before ten minutes had accepted His
Majesty’s shilling. I told him frankly that I was a young gentleman in
difficulties; that I had killed an officer in a duel, and was anxious
to get out of the country. But I need not have troubled myself with any
explanations; King George was too much in want of men then to heed from
whence they came, and a fellow of my inches, the sergeant said, was
always welcome. Indeed, I could not, he said, have chosen my time
better. A transport was lying at Dunleary, waiting for a wind, and on
board that ship, to which I marched that night, I made some surprising
discoveries, which shall be told in the next chapter.
CHAPTER IV. IN WHICH BARRY TAKES A NEAR VIEW OF MILITARY GLORY
I never had a taste for anything but genteel company, and hate all
descriptions of low life. Hence my account of the society in which I
at present found myself must of necessity be short; and, indeed,
the recollection of it is profoundly disagreeable to me. Pah! the
reminiscences of the horrid black-hole of a place in which we soldiers
were confined; of the wretched creatures with whom I was now forced to
keep company; of the ploughmen, poachers, pickpockets, who had taken
refuge from poverty, or the law (as, in truth, I had done myself), is
enough to make me ashamed even now, and it calls the blush into my old
cheeks to think I was ever forced to keep such company. I should have
fallen into despair, but that, luckily, events occurred to rouse my
spirits, and in some measure to console me for my misfortunes.
The first of these consolations I had was a good quarrel, which took
place on the day after my entrance into the transport-ship, with a huge
red-haired monster of a fellow--a chairman, who had enlisted to fly from
a vixen of a wife, who, boxer as he was, had been more than a match for
him. As soon as this fellow--Toole, I remember, was his name--got away
from the arms of the washerwoman his lady, his natural courage and
ferocity returned, and he became the tyrant of all round about him.
All recruits, especially, were the object of the brute’s insult and
ill-treatment.
I had no money, as I said, and was sitting very disconsolately over a
platter of rancid bacon and mouldy biscuit, which was served to us at
mess, when it came to my turn to be helped to drink, and I was served,
like the rest, with a dirty tin noggin, containing somewhat more than
half a pint of rum-and-water. The beaker was so greasy and filthy that I
could not help turning round to the messman and saying, ‘Fellow, get me
a glass!’ At which all the wretches round about me burst into a roar of
laughter, the very loudest among them being, of course, Mr. Toole.
‘Get the gentleman a towel for his hands, and serve him a basin of
turtle-soup,’ roared the monster, who was sitting, or rather squatting,
on the deck opposite me; and as he spoke he suddenly seized my beaker of
grog and emptied it, in the midst of another burst of applause.
‘If you want to vex him, ax him about his wife the washerwoman, who
BATES him,’ here whispered in my ear another worthy, a retired link-boy,
who, disgusted with his profession, had adopted the military life.
‘Is it a towel of your wife’s washing, Mr. Toole?’ said I. ‘I’m told she
wiped your face often with one.’
‘Ax him why he wouldn’t see her yesterday, when she came to the ship,’
continued the link-boy. And so I put to him some other foolish jokes
about soapsuds, henpecking, and flat-irons, which set the man into a
fury, and succeeded in raising a quarrel between us. We should have
fallen to at once, but a couple of grinning marines, who kept watch at
the door, for fear we should repent of our bargain and have a fancy to
escape, came forward and interposed between us with fixed bayonets;
but the sergeant coming down the ladder, and hearing the dispute,
condescended to say that we might fight it out like men with FISTES if
we chose, and that the fore-deck should be free to us for that purpose.
But the use of fistes, as the Englishman called them, was not then
general in Ireland, and it was agreed that we should have a pair
of cudgels; with one of which weapons I finished the fellow in four
minutes, giving him a thump across his stupid sconce which laid
him lifeless on the deck, and not receiving myself a single hurt of
consequence.
This victory over the cock of the vile dunghill obtained me respect
among the wretches of whom I formed part, and served to set up my
spirits, which otherwise were flagging; and my position was speedily
made more bearable by the arrival on board our ship of an old friend.
This was no other than my second in the fatal duel which had sent me
thus early out into the world, Captain Fagan. There was a young nobleman
who had a company in our regiment (Gale’s foot), and who, preferring the
delights of the Mall and the clubs to the dangers of a rough campaign,
had given Fagan the opportunity of an exchange; which, as the latter had
no fortune but his sword, he was glad to make. The sergeant was
putting us through our exercise on deck (the seamen and officers of the
transport looking grinning on) when a boat came from the shore bringing
our captain to the ship; and though I started and blushed red as he
recognised me--a descendant of the Barrys--in this degrading posture, I
promise you that the sight of Fagan’s face was most welcome to me, for
it assured me that a friend was near me. Before that I was so melancholy
that I would certainly have deserted had I found the means, and had not
the inevitable marines kept a watch to prevent any such escapes.
Fagan gave me a wink of recognition, but offered no public token of
acquaintance; it was not until two days afterwards, and when we had
bidden adieu to old Ireland and were standing out to sea, that he called
me into his cabin, and then, shaking hands with me cordially, gave me
news, which I much wanted, of my family. ‘I had news of you in Dublin,’
he said. ‘’Faith you’ve begun early, like your father’s son; and I think
you could not do better than as you have done. But why did you not write
home to your poor mother? She has sent a half-dozen letters to you at
Dublin.’
I said I had asked for letters at the post-office, but there were none
for Mr. Redmond. I did not like to add that I had been ashamed, after
the first week, to write to my mother.
‘We must write to her by the pilot,’ said he, ‘who will leave us in
two hours; and you can tell her that you are safe, and married to Brown
Bess.’ I sighed when he talked about being married; on which he said
with a laugh, ‘I see you are thinking of a certain young lady at Brady’s
Town.’
‘Is Miss Brady well?’ said I; and indeed, could hardly utter it, for I
certainly WAS thinking about her: for, though I had forgotten her in
the gaieties of Dublin, I have always found adversity makes man very
affectionate.
‘There’s only seven Miss Bradys now,’ answered Fagan, in a solemn voice.
‘Poor Nora’--
‘Good heavens! what of her?’ I thought grief had killed her.
‘She took on so at your going away that she was obliged to console
herself with a husband. She’s now Mrs. John Quin.’
‘Mrs. John Quin! Was there ANOTHER Mr. John Quin?’ asked I, quite
wonder-stricken.
‘No; the very same one, my boy. He recovered from his wound. The ball
you hit him with was not likely to hurt him. It was only made of tow.
Do you think the Bradys would let you kill fifteen hundred a year out of
the family?’ And then Fagan further told me that, in order to get me out
of the way--for the cowardly Englishman could never be brought to marry
from fear of me--the plan of the duel had been arranged. ‘But hit him
you certainly did, Redmond, and with a fine thick plugget of tow; and
the fellow was so frightened, that he was an hour in coming to. We
told your mother the story afterwards, and a pretty scene she made; she
despatched a half-score of letters to Dublin after you, but I suppose
addressed them to you in your real name, by which you never thought to
ask for them.’
‘The coward!’ said I (though, I confess, my mind was considerably
relieved at the thoughts of not having killed him). ‘And did the Bradys
of Castle Brady consent to admit a poltroon like that into one of the
most ancient and honourable families in the world?’
‘He has paid off your uncle’s mortgage,’ said Fagan; ‘he gives Nora
a coach-and-six; he is to sell out, and Lieutenant Ulick Brady of the
Militia is to purchase his company. That coward of a fellow has been the
making of your uncle’s family. ‘Faith! the business was well done.’ And
then, laughing, he told me how Mick and Ulick had never let him out
of their sight, although he was for deserting to England, until the
marriage was completed and the happy couple off on their road to Dublin.
‘Are you in want of cash, my boy?’ continued the good-natured Captain.
‘You may draw upon me, for I got a couple of hundred out of Master Quin
for my share, and while they last you shall never want.’
And so he bade me sit down and write a letter to my mother, which I did
forthwith in very sincere and repentant terms, stating that I had been
guilty of extravagances, that I had not known until that moment under
what a fatal error I had been labouring, and that I had embarked for
Germany as a volunteer. The letter was scarcely finished when the pilot
sang out that he was going on shore; and he departed, taking with him,
from many an anxious fellow besides myself, our adieux to friends in old
Ireland.
Although I was called Captain Barry for many years of my life, and have
been known as such by the first people of Europe, yet I may as well
confess I had no more claim to the title than many a gentleman who
assumes it, and never had a right to an epaulet, or to any military
decoration higher than a corporal’s stripe of worsted. I was made
corporal by Fagan during our voyage to the Elbe, and my rank was
confirmed on TERRA FIRMA. I was promised a halbert, too, and afterwards,
perhaps, an ensigncy, if I distinguished myself; but Fate did not intend
that I should remain long an English soldier: as shall appear presently.
Meanwhile, our passage was very favourable; my adventures were told
by Fagan to his brother officers, who treated me with kindness; and my
victory over the big chairman procured me respect from my comrades of
the fore-deck. Encouraged and strongly exhorted by Fagan, I did my duty
resolutely; but, though affable and good-humoured with the men, I never
at first condescended to associate with such low fellows: and, indeed,
was called generally amongst them ‘my Lord.’ I believe it was the
ex-link-boy, a facetious knave, who gave me the title; and I felt that I
should become such a rank as well as any peer in the kingdom.
It would require a greater philosopher and historian than I am to
explain the causes of the famous Seven Years’ War in which Europe was
engaged; and, indeed, its origin has always appeared to me to be
so complicated, and the books written about it so amazingly hard to
understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter
than at the beginning, and so shall not trouble my reader with any
personal disquisitions concerning the matter. All I know is, that after
His Majesty’s love of his Hanoverian dominions had rendered him most
unpopular in his English kingdom, with Mr. Pitt at the head of the
anti-German war-party, all of a sudden, Mr. Pitt becoming Minister,
the rest of the empire applauded the war as much as they had hated it
before. The victories of Dettingen and Crefeld were in every-body’s
mouths, and ‘the Protestant hero,’ as we used to call the godless old
Frederick of Prussia, was adored by us as a saint, a very short time
after we had been about to make war against him in alliance with the
Empress-queen. Now, somehow, we were on Frederick’s side: the Empress,
the French, the Swedes, and the Russians, were leagued against us; and
I remember, when the news of the battle of Lissa came even to our remote
quarter of Ireland, we considered it as a triumph for the cause of
Protestantism, and illuminated and bonfired, and had a sermon at church,
and kept the Prussian king’s birthday; on which my uncle would get
drunk: as indeed on any other occasion. Most of the low fellows enlisted
with myself were, of course, Papists (the English army was filled with
such, out of that never-failing country of ours), and these, forsooth,
were fighting the battles of Protestantism with Frederick; who was
belabouring the Protestant Swedes and the Protestant Saxons, as well as
the Russians of the Greek Church, and the Papist troops of the Emperor
and the King of France. It was against these latter that the English
auxiliaries were employed, and we know that, be the quarrel what it may,
an Englishman and a Frenchman are pretty willing to make a fight of it.
We landed at Cuxhaven, and before I had been a month in the Electorate
I was transformed into a tall and proper young soldier, and having a
natural aptitude for military exercise, was soon as accomplished at the
drill as the oldest sergeant in the regiment. It is well, however, to
dream of glorious war in a snug arm-chair at home; ay, or to make it as
an officer, surrounded by gentlemen, gorgeously dressed, and cheered by
chances of promotion. But those chances do not shine on poor fellows in
worsted lace: the rough texture of our red coats made me ashamed when I
saw an officer go by; my soul used to shudder when, on going the rounds,
I would hear their voices as they sat jovially over the mess-table;
my pride revolted at being obliged to plaster my hair with flour and
candle-grease, instead of using the proper pomatum for a gentleman.
Yes, my tastes have always been high and fashionable, and I loathed the
horrid company in which I was fallen. What chances had I of promotion?
None of my relatives had money to buy me a commission, and I became soon
so low-spirited, that I longed for a general action and a ball to finish
me, and vowed that I would take some opportunity to desert.
When I think that I, the descendant of the kings of Ireland, was
threatened with a caning by a young scoundrel who had just joined from
Eton College--when I think that he offered to make me his footman, and
that I did not, on either occasion, murder him! On the first occasion I
burst into tears (I do not care to own it) and had serious thoughts of
committing suicide, so great was my mortification. But my kind friend
Fagan came to my aid in the circumstance, with some very timely
consolation. ‘My poor boy,’ said he, ‘you must not take the matter to
heart so. Caning is only a relative disgrace. Young Ensign Fakenham was
flogged himself at Eton School only a month ago: I would lay a wager
that his scars are not yet healed. You must cheer up, my boy; do your
duty, be a gentleman, and no serious harm can fall on you.’ And I heard
afterwards that my champion had taken Mr. Fakenham very severely to
task for this threat, and said to him that any such proceedings for the
future he should consider as an insult to himself; whereon the young
ensign was, for the moment, civil. As for the sergeants, I told one of
them, that if any man struck me, no matter who he might be, or what
the penalty, I would take his life. And, ‘faith! there was an air of
sincerity in my speech which convinced the whole bevy of them; and as
long as I remained in the English service no rattan was ever laid on the
shoulders of Redmond Barry. Indeed, I was in that savage moody state,
that my mind was quite made up to the point, and I looked to hear my own
dead march played as sure as I was alive. When I was made a corporal,
some of my evils were lessened; I messed with the sergeants by special
favour, and used to treat them to drink, and lose money to the rascals
at play: with which cash my good friend Mr. Fagan punctually supplied
me.
Our regiment, which was quartered about Stade and Luneburg, speedily
got orders to march southwards towards the Rhine, for news came that our
great General, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, had been defeated--no, not
defeated, but foiled in his attack upon the French under the Duke of
Broglio, at Bergen, near Frankfort-on-the-Main, and had been obliged to
fall back. As the allies retreated the French rushed forward, and made
a bold push for the Electorate of our gracious monarch in Hanover,
threatening that they would occupy it; as they had done before, when
D’Estrees beat the hero of Culloden, the gallant Duke of Cumberland, and
caused him to sign the capitulation of Closter Zeven. An advance upon
Hanover always caused a great agitation in the Royal bosom of the King
of England; more troops were sent to join us, convoys of treasure were
passed over to our forces, and to our ally’s the King of Prussia; and
although, in spite of all assistance, the army under Prince Ferdinand
was very much weaker than that of the invading enemy, yet we had the
advantage of better supplies, one of the greatest Generals in the world:
and, I was going to add, of British valour, but the less we say about
THAT the better. My Lord George Sackville did not exactly cover himself
with laurels at Minden; otherwise there might have been won there one of
the greatest victories of modern times.
Throwing himself between the French and the interior of the Electorate,
Prince Ferdinand wisely took possession of the free town of Bremen,
which he made his storehouse and place of arms; and round which he
gathered all his troops, making ready to fight the famous battle of
Minden.
Were these Memoirs not characterised by truth, and did I deign to utter
a single word for which my own personal experience did not give me the
fullest authority, I might easily make myself the hero of some strange
and popular adventures, and, after the fashion of novel-writers,
introduce my reader to the great characters of this remarkable time.
These persons (I mean the romance-writers), if they take a drummer or
a dustman for a hero, somehow manage to bring him in contact with
the greatest lords and most notorious personages of the empire; and
I warrant me there’s not one of them but, in describing the battle
of Minden, would manage to bring Prince Ferdinand, and my Lord George
Sackville, and my Lord Granby, into presence. It would have been easy
for me to have SAID I was present when the orders were brought to Lord
George to charge with the cavalry and finish the rout of the Frenchmen,
and when he refused to do so, and thereby spoiled the great victory. But
the fact is, I was two miles off from the cavalry when his Lordship’s
fatal hesitation took place, and none of us soldiers of the line knew of
what had occurred until we came to talk about the fight over our kettles
in the evening, and repose after the labours of a hard-fought day. I saw
no one of higher rank that day than my colonel and a couple of orderly
officers riding by in the smoke--no one on our side, that is. A poor
corporal (as I then had the disgrace of being) is not generally invited
into the company of commanders and the great; but, in revenge, I saw,
I promise you, some very good company on the FRENCH part, for their
regiments of Lorraine and Royal Cravate were charging us all day; and
in THAT sort of MELEE high and low are pretty equally received. I hate
bragging, but I cannot help saying that I made a very close acquaintance
with the colonel of the Cravates; for I drove my bayonet into his body,
and finished off a poor little ensign, so young, slender, and small,
that a blow from my pigtail would have despatched him, I think, in
place of the butt of my musket, with which I clubbed him down. I killed,
besides, four more officers and men, and in the poor ensign’s pocket
found a purse of fourteen louis-d’or, and a silver box of sugar-plums;
of which the former present was very agreeable to me. If people would
tell their stories of battles in this simple way, I think the cause of
truth would not suffer by it. All I know of this famous fight of Minden
(except from books) is told here above. The ensign’s silver bon-bon box
and his purse of gold; the livid face of the poor fellow as he fell;
the huzzas of the men of my company as I went out under a smart fire
and rifled him; their shouts and curses as we came hand in hand with the
Frenchmen,--these are, in truth, not very dignified recollections, and
had best be passed over briefly. When my kind friend Fagan was shot, a
brother captain, and his very good friend, turned to Lieutenant Rawson
and said, ‘Fagan’s down; Rawson, there’s your company.’ It was all the
epitaph my brave patron got. ‘I should have left you a hundred guineas,
Redmond,’ were his last words to me, ‘but for a cursed run of ill luck
last night at faro.’ And he gave me a faint squeeze of the hand; then,
as the word was given to advance, I left him. When we came back to our
old ground, which we presently did, he was lying there still; but he
was dead. Some of our people had already torn off his epaulets, and,
no doubt, had rifled his purse. Such knaves and ruffians do men in war
become! It is well for gentlemen to talk of the age of chivalry; but
remember the starving brutes whom they lead--men nursed in poverty,
entirely ignorant, made to take a pride in deeds of blood--men who can
have no amusement but in drunkenness, debauch, and plunder. It is with
these shocking instruments that your great warriors and kings have been
doing their murderous work in the world; and while, for instance, we are
at the present moment admiring the ‘Great Frederick,’ as we call him,
and his philosophy, and his liberality, and his military genius, I, who
have served him, and been, as it were, behind the scenes of which that
great spectacle is composed, can only look at it with horror. What
a number of items of human crime, misery, slavery, go to form that
sum-total of glory! I can recollect a certain day about three weeks
after the battle of Minden, and a farmhouse in which some of us entered;
and how the old woman and her daughters served us, trembling, to wine;
and how we got drunk over the wine, and the house was in a flame,
presently; and woe betide the wretched fellow afterwards who came home
to look for his house and his children!
CHAPTER V. BARRY FAR FROM MILITARY GLORY
After the death of my protector, Captain Fagan, I am forced to confess
that I fell into the very worst of courses and company. Being a rough
soldier of fortune himself, he had never been a favourite with the
officers of his regiment; who had a contempt for Irishmen, as Englishmen
sometimes will have, and used to mock his brogue, and his blunt uncouth
manners. I had been insolent to one or two of them, and had only been
screened from punishment by his intercession; especially his successor,
Mr. Rawson, had no liking for me, and put another man into the
sergeant’s place vacant in his company after the battle of Minden.
This act of injustice rendered my service very disagreeable to me; and,
instead of seeking to conquer the dislike of my superiors, and win their
goodwill by good behaviour, I only sought for means to make my situation
easier to me, and grasped at all the amusements in my power. In a
foreign country, with the enemy before us, and the people continually
under contribution from one side or the other, numberless irregularities
were permitted to the troops which would not have been allowed in more
peaceable times. I descended gradually to mix with the sergeants, and to
share their amusements: drinking and gambling were, I am sorry to say,
our principal pastimes; and I fell so readily into their ways, that
though only a young lad of seventeen, I was the master of them all in
daring wickedness; though there were some among them who, I promise you,
were far advanced in the science of every kind of profligacy. I should
have been under the provost-marshal’s hands, for a dead certainty, had
I continued much longer in the army: but an accident occurred which took
me out of the English service in rather a singular manner.
The year in which George II died, our regiment had the honour to be
present at the battle of Warburg (where the Marquis of Granby and his
horse fully retrieved the discredit which had fallen upon the cavalry
since Lord George Sackville’s defalcation at Minden), and where Prince
Ferdinand once more completely defeated the Frenchmen. During the
action, my lieutenant, Mr. Fakenham, of Fakenham, the gentleman who had
threatened me, it may be remembered, with the caning, was struck by a
musket-ball in the side. He had shown no want of courage in this or any
other occasion where he had been called upon to act against the French;
but this was his first wound, and the young gentleman was exceedingly
frightened by it. He offered five guineas to be carried into the town,
which was hard by; and I and another man, taking him up in a cloak,
managed to transport him into a place of decent appearance, where we put
him to bed, and where a young surgeon (who desired nothing better than
to take himself out of the fire of the musketry) went presently to dress
his wound.
In order to get into the house, we had been obliged, it must be
confessed, to fire into the locks with our pieces; which summons brought
an inhabitant of the house to the door, a very pretty and black-eyed
young woman, who lived there with her old half-blind father, a retired
Jagdmeister of the Duke of Cassel, hard by. When the French were in the
town, Meinherr’s house had suffered like those of his neighbours; and
he was at first exceedingly unwilling to accommodate his guests. But the
first knocking at the door had the effect of bringing a speedy answer;
and Mr. Fakenham, taking a couple of guineas out of a very full purse,
speedily convinced the people that they had only to deal with a person
of honour.
Leaving the doctor (who was very glad to stop) with his patient, who
paid me the stipulated reward, I was returning to my regiment with my
other comrade--after having paid, in my German jargon, some deserved
compliments to the black-eyed beauty of Warburg, and thinking, with no
small envy, how comfortable it would be to be billeted there--when the
private who was with me cut short my reveries by suggesting that we
should divide the five guineas the lieutenant had given me.
‘There is your share,’ said I, giving the fellow one piece; which was
plenty, as I was the leader of the expedition. But he swore a dreadful
oath that he would have half; and when I told him to go to a quarter
which I shall not name, the fellow, lifting his musket, hit me a blow
with the butt-end of it, which sent me lifeless to the ground: when I
awoke from my trance, I found myself bleeding with a large wound in the
head, and had barely time to stagger back to the house where I had left
the lieutenant, when I again fell fainting at the door.
Here I must have been discovered by the surgeon on his issuing out; for
when I awoke a second time I found myself in the ground-floor of the
house, supported by the black-eyed girl, while the surgeon was copiously
bleeding me at the arm. There was another bed in the room where the
lieutenant had been laid,--it was that occupied by Gretel, the servant;
while Lischen, as my fair one was called, had, till now, slept in the
couch where the wounded officer lay.
‘Who are you putting into that bed?’ said he languidly, in German; for
the ball had been extracted from his side with much pain and loss of
blood.
They told him it was the corporal who had brought him.
‘A corporal?’ said he, in English; ‘turn him out.’ And you may be sure
I felt highly complimented by the words. But we were both too faint to
compliment or to abuse each other much, and I was put to bed carefully;
and, on being undressed, had an opportunity to find that my pockets
had been rifled by the English soldier after he had knocked me down.
However, I was in good quarters: the young lady who sheltered me
presently brought me a refreshing drink; and, as I took it, I could not
help pressing the kind hand that gave it me; nor, in truth, did this
token of my gratitude seem unwelcome.
This intimacy did not decrease with further acquaintance. I found
Lischen the tenderest of nurses. Whenever any delicacy was to be
provided for the wounded lieutenant, a share was always sent to the
bed opposite his, and to the avaricious man’s no small annoyance. His
illness was long. On the second day the fever declared itself; for some
nights he was delirious; and I remember it was when a commanding
officer was inspecting our quarters, with an intention, very likely, of
billeting himself on the house, that the howling and mad words of the
patient overhead struck him, and he retired rather frightened. I had
been sitting up very comfortably in the lower apartment, for my hurt was
quite subsided; and it was only when the officer asked me, with a
rough voice, why I was not at my regiment, that I began to reflect how
pleasant my quarters were to me, and that I was much better here than
crawling under an odious tent with a parcel of tipsy soldiers, or going
the night-rounds or rising long before daybreak for drill.
The delirium of Mr. Fakenham gave me a hint, and I determined forthwith
to GO MAD. There was a poor fellow about Brady’s Town called ‘Wandering
Billy,’ whose insane pranks I had often mimicked as a lad, and I
again put them in practice. That night I made an attempt upon Lischen,
saluting her with a yell and a grin which frightened her almost out of
her wits; and when anybody came I was raving. The blow on the head had
disordered my brain; the doctor was ready to vouch for this fact. One
night I whispered to him that I was Julius Caesar, and considered him
to be my affianced wife Queen Cleopatra, which convinced him of my
insanity. Indeed, if Her Majesty had been like my Aesculapius, she must
have had a carroty beard, such as is rare in Egypt.
A movement on the part of the French speedily caused an advance on our
part. The town was evacuated, except by a few Prussian troops, whose
surgeons were to visit the wounded in the place; and, when we were well,
we were to be drafted to our regiments. I determined that I never would
join mine again. My intention was to make for Holland, almost the only
neutral country of Europe in those times, and thence to get a passage
somehow to England, and home to dear old Brady’s Town.
If Mr. Fakenham is now alive, I here tender him my apologies for my
conduct to him. He was very rich; he used me very ill. I managed to
frighten away his servant who came to attend him after the affair of
Warburg, and from that time would sometimes condescend to wait upon the
patient, who always treated me with scorn; but it was my object to
have him alone, and I bore his brutality with the utmost civility and
mildness, meditating in my own mind a very pretty return for all his
favours to me. Nor was I the only person in the house to whom the worthy
gentleman was uncivil. He ordered the fair Lischen hither and thither,
made impertinent love to her, abused her soups, quarrelled with her
omelettes, and grudged the money which was laid out for his maintenance;
so that our hostess detested him as much as, I think, without vanity,
she regarded me.
For, if the truth must be told, I had made very deep love to her during
my stay under her roof; as is always my way with women, of whatever
age or degree of beauty. To a man who has to make his way in the world,
these dear girls can always be useful in one fashion or another; never
mind, if they repel your passion; at any rate, they are not offended
with your declaration of it, and only look upon you with more favourable
eyes in consequence of your misfortune. As for Lischen, I told her such
a pathetic story of my life (a tale a great deal more romantic than that
here narrated,--for I did not restrict myself to the exact truth in that
history, as in these pages I am bound to do), that I won the poor girl’s
heart entirely, and, besides, made considerable progress in the
German language under her instruction. Do not think me very cruel and
heartless, ladies; this heart of Lischen’s was like many a town in the
neighbourhood in which she dwelt, and had been stormed and occupied
several times before I came to invest it; now mounting French colours,
now green and yellow Saxon, now black and white Prussian, as the case
may be. A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to
change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.
The German surgeon who attended us after the departure of the English
only condescended to pay our house a visit twice during my residence;
and I took care, for a reason I had, to receive him in a darkened room,
much to the annoyance of Mr. Fakenham, who lay there: but I said the
light affected my eyes dreadfully since my blow on the head; and so I
covered up my head with clothes when the doctor came, and told him that
I was an Egyptian mummy, or talked to him some insane nonsense, in order
to keep up my character.
‘What is that nonsense you were talking about an Egyptian mummy,
fellow?’ asked Mr. Fakenham peevishly.
‘Oh! you’ll know soon, sir,’ said I.
The next time that I expected the doctor to come, instead of receiving
him in a darkened room, with handkerchiefs muffled, I took care to be
in the lower room, and was having a game at cards with Lischen as the
surgeon entered. I had taken possession of a dressing-jacket of the
lieutenant’s, and some other articles of his wardrobe, which fitted me
pretty well; and, I flatter myself, was no ungentlemanlike figure.
‘Good-morrow, Corporal,’ said the doctor, rather gruffly, in reply to my
smiling salute.
‘Corporal! Lieutenant, if you please,’ answered I, giving an arch look
at Lischen, whom I had instructed in my plot.
‘How lieutenant?’ asked the surgeon. ‘I thought the lieutenant was’--
‘Upon my word, you do me great honour,’ cried I, laughing; ‘you mistook
me for the mad corporal upstairs. The fellow has once or twice pretended
to be an officer, but my kind hostess here can answer which is which.’
‘Yesterday he fancied he was Prince Ferdinand,’ said Lischen; ‘the day
you came he said he was an Egyptian mummy.’
‘So he did,’ said the doctor; ‘I remember; but, ha! ha! do you know,
Lieutenant, I have in my notes made a mistake in you two?’
‘Don’t talk to me about his malady; he is calm now.’
Lischen and I laughed at this error as at the most ridiculous thing
in the world; and when the surgeon went up to examine his patient, I
cautioned him not to talk to him about the subject of his malady, for he
was in a very excited state.
The reader will be able to gather from the above conversation what my
design really was. I was determined to escape, and to escape under the
character of Lieutenant Fakenham; taking it from him to his face, as
it were, and making use of it to meet my imperious necessity. It
was forgery and robbery, if you like; for I took all his money and
clothes,--I don’t care to conceal it; but the need was so urgent, that
I would do so again: and I knew I could not effect my escape without his
purse, as well as his name. Hence it became my duty to take possession
of one and the other.
As the lieutenant lay still in bed upstairs, I did not hesitate at
all about assuming his uniform, especially after taking care to inform
myself from the doctor whether any men of ours who might know me were in
the town. But there were none that I could hear of; and so I calmly took
my walks with Madame Lischen, dressed in the lieutenant’s uniform, made
inquiries as to a horse that I wanted to purchase, reported myself to
the commandant of the place as Lieutenant Fakenham, of Gale’s English
regiment of foot, convalescent, and was asked to dine with the officers
of the Prussian regiment at a very sorry mess they had. How Fakenham
would have stormed and raged, had he known the use I was making of his
name!
Whenever that worthy used to inquire about his clothes, which he did
with many oaths and curses that he would have me caned at the regiment
for inattention, I, with a most respectful air, informed him that they
were put away in perfect safety below; and, in fact, had them very
neatly packed, and ready for the day when I proposed to depart. His
papers and money, however, he kept under his pillow; and, as I had
purchased a horse, it became necessary to pay for it.
At a certain hour, then, I ordered the animal to be brought round, when
I would pay the dealer for him. (I shall pass over my adieux with my
kind hostess, which were very tearful indeed). And then, making up my
mind to the great action, walked upstairs to Fakenham’s room attired in
his full regimentals, and with his hat cocked over my left eye.
‘You gWeat scoundWel!’ said he, with a multiplicity of oaths; ‘you
mutinous dog! what do you mean by dWessing yourself in my Wegimentals?
As sure as my name’s Fakenham, when we get back to the Wegiment, I’ll
have your soul cut out of your body.’
‘I’m promoted, Lieutenant,’ said I, with a sneer. ‘I’m come to take my
leave of you;’ and then going up to his bed, I said, ‘I intend to have
your papers and purse.’ With this I put my hand under his pillow; at
which he gave a scream that might have called the whole garrison about
my ears. ‘Hark ye, sir!’ said I, ‘no more noise, or you are a dead
man!’ and taking a handkerchief, I bound it tight around his mouth so
as well-nigh to throttle him, and, pulling forward the sleeves of his
shirt, tied them in a knot together, and so left him; removing the
papers and the purse, you may be sure, and wishing him politely a good
day.
‘It is the mad corporal,’ said I to the people down below who were
attracted by the noise from the sick man’s chamber; and so taking leave
of the old blind Jagdmeister, and an adieu (I will not say how tender)
of his daughter, I mounted my newly purchased animal; and, as I pranced
away, and the sentinels presented arms to me at the town-gates, felt
once more that I was in my proper sphere, and determined never again to
fall from the rank of a gentleman.
I took at first the way towards Bremen, where our army was, and gave out
that I was bringing reports and letters from the Prussian commandant
of Warburg to headquarters; but, as soon as I got out of sight of the
advanced sentinels, I turned bridle and rode into the Hesse-Cassel
territory, which is luckily not very far from Warburg: and I promise you
I was very glad to see the blue-and-red stripes on the barriers, which
showed me that I was out of the land occupied by our countrymen. I rode
to Hof, and the next day to Cassel, giving out that I was the bearer of
despatches to Prince Henry, then on the Lower Rhine, and put up at the
best hotel of the place, where the field-officers of the garrison had
their ordinary. These gentlemen I treated to the best wines that the
house afforded, for I was determined to keep up the character of the
English gentleman, and I talked to them about my English estates with a
fluency that almost made me believe in the stories which I invented. I
was even asked to an assembly at Wilhelmshohe, the Elector’s palace, and
danced a minuet there with the Hofmarshal’s lovely daughter, and lost a
few pieces to his excellency the first huntmaster of his Highness.
At our table at the inn there was a Prussian officer who treated me with
great civility, and asked me a thousand questions about England; which
I answered as best I might. But this best, I am bound to say, was bad
enough. I knew nothing about England, and the Court, and the noble
families there; but, led away by the vaingloriousness of youth (and a
propensity which I possessed in my early days, but of which I have long
since corrected myself, to boast and talk in a manner not altogether
consonant with truth), I invented a thousand stories which I told him;
described the King and the Ministers to him, said the British Ambassador
at Berlin was my uncle, and promised my acquaintance a letter of
recommendation to him. When the officer asked me my uncle’s name, I was
not able to give him the real name, and so said his name was O’Grady: it
is as good a name as any other, and those of Kilballyowen, county
Cork, are as good a family as any in the world, as I have heard. As for
stories about my regiment, of these, of course, I had no lack. I wish my
other histories had been equally authentic.
On the morning I left Cassel, my Prussian friend came to me with an open
smiling countenance, and said he, too, was bound for Dusseldorf, whither
I said my route lay; and so laying our horses’ heads together we jogged
on. The country was desolate beyond description. The prince in whose
dominions we were was known to be the most ruthless seller of men in
Germany. He would sell to any bidder, and during the five years which
the war (afterwards called the Seven Years’ War) had now lasted, had
so exhausted the males of his principality, that the fields remained
untilled: even the children of twelve years old were driven off to the
war, and I saw herds of these wretches marching forwards, attended by
a few troopers, now under the guidance of a red-coated Hanovarian
sergeant, now with a Prussian sub-officer accompanying them; with some
of whom my companion exchanged signs of recognition.
‘It hurts my feelings,’ said he, ‘to be obliged to commune with such
wretches; but the stern necessities of war demand men continually, and
hence these recruiters whom you see market in human flesh. They get
five-and-twenty dollars from our Government for every man they bring
in. For fine men--for men like you,’ he added, laughing, ‘we would go as
high as a hundred. In the old King’s time we would have given a thousand
for you, when he had his giant regiment that our present monarch
disbanded.’
‘I knew one of them,’ said I, ‘who served with you: we used to call him
Morgan Prussia.’
‘Indeed; and who was this Morgan Prussia?’
‘Why, a huge grenadier of ours, who was somehow snapped up in Hanover by
some of your recruiters.’
‘The rascals!’ said my friend: ‘and did they dare take an Englishman?’
‘’Faith this was an Irishman, and a great deal too sharp for them;
as you shall hear. Morgan was taken, then, and drafted into the giant
guard, and was the biggest man almost among all the giants there. Many
of these monsters used to complain of their life, and their caning, and
their long drills, and their small pay; but Morgan was not one of the
grumblers. “It’s a deal better,” said he, “to get fat here in Berlin,
than to starve in rags in Tipperary!”’
‘Where is Tipperary?’ asked my companion.
‘That is exactly what Morgan’s friends asked him. It is a beautiful
district in Ireland, the capital of which is the magnificent city of
Clonmel: a city, let me tell you, sir, only inferior to Dublin and
London, and far more sumptuous than any on the Continent. Well, Morgan
said that his birthplace was near that city, and the only thing which
caused him unhappiness, in his present situation, was the thought that
his brothers were still starving at home, when they might be so much
better off in His Majesty’s service.
‘“‘Faith,” says Morgan to the sergeant, to whom he imparted the
information, “it’s my brother Bin that would make the fine sergeant of
the guards, entirely!”
‘“Is Ben as tall as you are?” asked the sergeant.
‘“As tall as ME, is it? Why, man, I’m the shortest of my family! There’s
six more of us, but Bin’s the biggest of all. Oh! out and out the
biggest. Seven feet in his stockin-FUT, as sure as my name’s Morgan!”
‘“Can’t we send and fetch them over, these brothers of yours?”
‘“Not you. Ever since I was seduced by one of you gentlemen of the cane,
they’ve a mortal aversion to all sergeants,” answered Morgan: “but
it’s a pity they cannot come, too. What a monster Bin would be in a
grenadier’s cap!”
‘He said nothing more at the time regarding his brothers, but only
sighed as if lamenting their hard fate. However, the story was told by
the sergeant to the officers, and by the officers to the King himself;
and His Majesty was so inflamed by curiosity, that he actually consented
to let Morgan go home in order to bring back with him his seven enormous
brothers.’
‘And were they as big as Morgan pretended?’ asked my comrade. I could
not help laughing at his simplicity.
‘Do you suppose,’ cried I, ‘that Morgan ever came back? No, no; once
free, he was too wise for that. He has bought a snug farm in Tipperary
with the money that was given him to secure his brothers; and I fancy
few men of the guards ever profited so much by it.’
The Prussian captain laughed exceedingly at this story, said that the
English were the cleverest nation in the world, and, on my setting him
right, agreed that the Irish were even more so. We rode on very well
pleased with each other; for he had a thousand stories of the war to
tell, of the skill and gallantry of Frederick, and the thousand escapes,
and victories, and defeats scarcely less glorious than victories,
through which the King had passed. Now that I was a gentleman, I could
listen with admiration to these tales: and yet the sentiment recorded
at the end of the last chapter was uppermost in my mind but three weeks
back, when I remembered that it was the great general got the glory, and
the poor soldier only insult and the cane.
‘By the way, to whom are you taking despatches?’ asked the officer.
It was another ugly question, which I determined to answer at
hap-hazard; and so I said ‘To General Rolls.’ I had seen the general
a year before, and gave the first name in my head. My friend was quite
satisfied with it, and we continued our ride until evening came on; and
our horses being weary, it was agreed that we should come to a halt.
‘There is a very good inn,’ said the Captain, as we rode up to what
appeared to me a very lonely-looking place.
‘This may be a very good inn for Germany,’ said I, ‘but it would not
pass in old Ireland. Corbach is only a league off: let us push on for
Corbach.’
‘Do you want to see the loveliest woman in Europe?’ said the officer.
‘Ah! you sly rogue, I see THAT will influence you;’ and, truth to say,
such a proposal WAS always welcome to me, as I don’t care to own. ‘The
people are great farmers,’ said the Captain, ‘as well as innkeepers;’
and, indeed, the place seemed more a farm than an inn yard. We entered
by a great gate into a Court walled round, and at one end of which was
the building, a dingy ruinous place. A couple of covered waggens were in
the court, their horses were littered under a shed hard by, and lounging
about the place were some men and a pair of sergeants in the Prussian
uniform, who both touched their hats to my friend the Captain. This
customary formality struck me as nothing extraordinary, but the aspect
of the inn had something exceedingly chilling and forbidding in it,
and I observed the men shut to the great yard-gates as soon as we were
entered. Parties of French horsemen, the Captain said, were about
the country, and one could not take too many precautions against such
villains.
We went into supper, after the two sergeants had taken charge of our
horses; the Captain, also, ordering one of them to take my valise to my
bedroom. I promised the worthy fellow a glass of schnapps for his pains.
A dish of fried eggs-and-bacon was ordered from a hideous old wench that
came to serve us, in place of the lovely creature I had expected to see;
and the Captain, laughing, said, ‘Well, our meal is a frugal one, but a
soldier has many a time a worse:’ and, taking off his hat, sword-belt,
and gloves, with great ceremony, he sat down to eat. I would not be
behindhand with him in politeness, and put my weapon securely on the old
chest of drawers where his was laid.
The hideous old woman before mentioned brought us in a pot of very sour
wine, at which and at her ugliness I felt a considerable ill-humour.
‘Where’s the beauty you promised me?’ said I, as soon as the old hag had
left the room.
‘Bah!’ said he, laughing, and looking hard at me: ‘it was my joke. I was
tired, and did not care to go farther. There’s no prettier woman here
than that. If she won’t suit your fancy, my friend, you must wait a
while.’
This increased my ill-humour.
‘Upon my word, sir,’ said I sternly, ‘I think you have acted very
coolly!’
‘I have acted as I think fit!’ replied the captain.
‘Sir,’ said I, ‘I’m a British officer!’
‘It’s a lie!’ roared the other, ‘you’re a DESERTER! You’re an impostor,
sir; I have known you for such these three hours. I suspected you
yesterday. My men heard of a man escaping from Warburg, and I thought
you were the man. Your lies and folly have confirmed me. You pretend to
carry despatches to a general who has been dead these ten months: you
have an uncle who is an ambassador, and whose name forsooth you don’t
know. Will you join and take the bounty, sir; or will you be given up?’
‘Neither!’ said I, springing at him like a tiger. But, agile as I was,
he was equally on his guard. He took two pistols out of his pocket,
fired one off, and said, from the other end of the table where he stood
dodging me, as it were,--
‘Advance a step, and I send this bullet into your brains!’ In another
minute the door was flung open, and the two sergeants entered, armed
with musket and bayonet to aid their comrade.
The game was up. I flung down a knife with which I had armed myself; for
the old hag on bringing in the wine had removed my sword.
‘I volunteer,’ said I.
‘That’s my good fellow. What name shall I put on my list?’
‘Write Redmond Barry of Bally Barry,’ said I haughtily; ‘a descendant of
the Irish kings!’
‘I was once with the Irish brigade, Roche’s,’ said the recruiter,
sneering, ‘trying if I could get any likely fellows among the few
countrymen of yours that are in the brigade, and there was scarcely one
of them that was not descended from the kings of Ireland.’
‘Sir,’ said I, ‘king or not, I am a gentleman, as you can see.’
‘Oh! you will find plenty more in our corps,’ answered the Captain,
still in the sneering mood. ‘Give up your papers, Mr. Gentleman, and let
us see who you really are.’
As my pocket-book contained some bank-notes as well as papers of Mr.
Fakenham’s, I was not willing to give up my property; suspecting very
rightly that it was but a scheme on the part of the Captain to get and
keep it.
‘It can matter very little to you,’ said I, ‘what my private papers are:
I am enlisted under the name of Redmond Barry.’
‘Give it up, sirrah!’ said the Captain, seizing his cane.
‘I will not give it up!’ answered I.
‘HOUND! do you mutiny?’ screamed he, and, at the same time, gave me a
lash across the face with the cane, which had the anticipated effect
of producing a struggle. I dashed forward to grapple with him, the two
sergeants flung themselves on me, I was thrown to the ground and
stunned again; being hit on my former wound in the head. It was bleeding
severely when I came to myself, my laced coat was already torn off my
back, my purse and papers gone, and my hands tied behind my back.
The great and illustrious Frederick had scores of these white
slave-dealers all round the frontiers of his kingdom, debauching troops
or kidnapping peasants, and hesitating at no crime to supply those
brilliant regiments of his with food for powder; and I cannot help
telling here, with some satisfaction, the fate which ultimately befell
the atrocious scoundrel who, violating all the rights of friendship and
good-fellowship, had just succeeded in entrapping me. This individual
was a person of high family and known talents and courage, but who had
a propensity to gambling and extravagance, and found his calling as a
recruit-decoy far more profitable to him than his pay of second captain
in the line. The sovereign, too, probably found his services more useful
in the former capacity. His name was Monsieur de Galgenstein, and he was
one of the most successful of the practisers of his rascally trade. He
spoke all languages, and knew all countries, and hence had no difficulty
in finding out the simple braggadocio of a young lad like me.
About 1765, however, he came to his justly merited end. He was at this
time living at Kehl, opposite Strasburg, and used to take his walk upon
the bridge there, and get into conversation with the French advanced
sentinels; to whom he was in the habit of promising ‘mountains and
marvels,’ as the French say, if they would take service in Prussia.
One day there was on the bridge a superb grenadier, whom Galgenstein
accosted, and to whom he promised a company, at least, if he would
enlist under Frederick.
‘Ask my comrade yonder,’ said the grenadier; ‘I can do nothing without
him. We were born and bred together, we are of the same company, sleep
in the same room, and always go in pairs. If he will go and you will
give him a captaincy, I will go too.’
‘Bring your comrade over to Kehl,’ said Galgenstein, delighted. ‘I will
give you the best of dinners, and can promise to satisfy both of you.’
‘Had you not better speak to him on the bridge?’ said the grenadier.
‘I dare not leave my post; but you have but to pass, and talk over the
matter.’
Galgenstein, after a little parley, passed the sentinel; but presently a
panic took him, and he retraced his steps. But the grenadier brought
his bayonet to the Prussian’s breast and bade him stand: that he was his
prisoner.
The Prussian, however, seeing his danger, made a bound across the bridge
and into the Rhine; whither, flinging aside his musket, the intrepid
sentry followed him. The Frenchman was the better swimmer of the two,
seized upon the recruiter, and bore him to the Strasburg side of the
stream, where he gave him up.
‘You deserve to be shot,’ said the general to him, ‘for abandoning your
post and arms; but you merit reward for an act of courage and daring.
The King prefers to reward you,’ and the man received money and
promotion.
As for Galgenstein, he declared his quality as a nobleman and a captain
in the Prussian service, and applications were made to Berlin to know if
his representations were true. But the King, though he employed men of
this stamp (officers to seduce the subjects of his allies) could not
acknowledge his own shame. Letters were written back from Berlin to
say that such a family existed in the kingdom, but that the person
representing himself to belong to it must be an impostor, for
every officer of the name was at his regiment and his post. It was
Galgenstein’s death-warrant, and he was hanged as a spy in Strasburg.
‘Turn him into the cart with the rest,’ said he, as soon as I awoke
from my trance.
CHAPTER VI. THE CRIMP WAGGON--MILITARY EPISODES
The covered waggon to which I was ordered to march was standing, as I
have said, in the courtyard of the farm, with another dismal vehicle
of the same kind hard by it. Each was pretty well filled with a crew of
men, whom the atrocious crimp who had seized upon me, had enlisted under
the banners of the glorious Frederick; and I could see by the lanterns
of the sentinels, as they thrust me into the straw, a dozen dark figures
huddled together in the horrible moving prison where I was now to be
confined. A scream and a curse from my opposite neighbour showed me that
he was most likely wounded, as I myself was; and, during the whole of
the wretched night, the moans and sobs of the poor fellows in similar
captivity kept up a continual painful chorus, which effectually
prevented my getting any relief from my ills in sleep. At midnight
(as far as I could judge) the horses were put to the waggons, and the
creaking lumbering machines were put in motion. A couple of soldiers,
strongly armed, sat on the outer bench of the cart, and their grim faces
peered in with their lanterns every now and then through the canvas
curtains, that they might count the number of their prisoners. The
brutes were half-drunk, and were singing love and war songs, such as ‘O
Gretchen mein Taubchen, mein Herzenstrompet, Mein Kanon, mein Heerpauk
und meine Musket,’ ‘Prinz Eugen der edle Ritter.’ and the like; their
wild whoops and jodels making doleful discord with the groans of us
captives within the waggons. Many a time afterwards have I heard these
ditties sung on the march, or in the barrack-room, or round the fires as
we lay out at night.
I was not near so unhappy, in spite of all, as I had been on my first
enlisting in Ireland. At least, thought I, if I am degraded to be a
private soldier there will be no one of my acquaintance who will witness
my shame; and that is the point which I have always cared for most.
There will be no one to say, ‘There is young Redmond Barry, the
descendant of the Barrys, the fashionable young blood of Dublin,
pipeclaying his belt and carrying his brown Bess.’ Indeed, but for
that opinion of the world, with which it is necessary that every man of
spirit should keep upon equal terms, I, for my part, would have always
been contented with the humblest portion. Now here, to all intents
and purposes, one was as far removed from the world as in the wilds
of Siberia, or in Robinson Crusoe’s Island. And I reasoned with myself
thus:--‘Now you are caught, there is no use in repining: make the best
of your situation, and get all the pleasure you can out of it. There
are a thousand opportunities of plunder, &c., offered to the soldier in
war-time, out of which he can get both pleasure and profit: make use of
these, and be happy. Besides, you are extraordinarily brave, handsome,
and clever: and who knows but you may procure advancement in your new
service?’
In this philosophical way I looked at my misfortunes, determining not
to be cast down by them; and bore woes and my broken head with perfect
magnanimity. The latter was, for the moment, an evil against which it
required no small powers of endurance to contend; for the jolts of the
waggon were dreadful, and every shake caused a throb in my brain which I
thought would have split my skull. As the morning dawned, I saw that the
man next me, a gaunt yellow-haired creature, in black, had a cushion of
straw under his head.
‘Are you wounded, comrade?’ said I.
‘Praised be the Lord,’ said he, ‘I am sore hurt in spirit and body,
and bruised in many members; wounded, however, am I not. And you, poor
youth?’
‘I am wounded in the head,’ said I, ‘and I want your pillow: give
it me--I’ve a clasp-knife in my pocket!’ and with this I gave him a
terrible look, meaning to say (and mean it I did, for look you, A LA
GUERRE C’EST A LA GUERRE, and I am none of your milksops) that, unless
he yielded me the accommodation, I would give him a taste of my steel.
‘I would give it thee without any threat, friend,’ said the
yellow-haired man meekly, and handed me over his little sack of straw.
He then leaned himself back as comfortably as he could against the
cart, and began repeating, ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,’ by which I
concluded that I had got into the company of a parson. With the jolts of
the waggon, and accidents of the journey, various more exclamations and
movements of the passengers showed what a motley company we were. Every
now and then a countryman would burst into tears; a French voice would
be heard to say, ‘O mon Dieu!--mon Dieu!’ a couple more of the same
nation were jabbering oaths and chattering incessantly; and a certain
allusion to his own and everybody else’s eyes, which came from a
stalwart figure at the far corner, told me that there was certainly an
Englishman in our crew.
But I was spared soon the tedium and discomforts of the journey. In
spite of the clergyman’s cushion, my head, which was throbbing with
pain, was brought abruptly in contact with the side of the waggon; it
began to bleed afresh: I became almost light-headed. I only recollect
having a draught of water here and there; once stopping at a fortified
town, where an officer counted us:--all the rest of the journey was
passed in a drowsy stupor, from which, when I awoke, I found myself
lying in a hospital bed, with a nun in a white hood watching over me.
‘They are in sad spiritual darkness,’ said a voice from the bed next to
me, when the nun had finished her kind offices and retired: ‘they are
in the night of error, and yet there is the light of faith in those poor
creatures.’
It was my comrade of the crimp waggon, his huge broad face looming out
from under a white nightcap, and ensconced in the bed beside.
‘What! you there, Herr Pastor?’ said I.
‘Only a candidate, sir,’ answered the white nightcap. ‘But, praised be
Heaven! you have come to. You have had a wild time of it. You have been
talking in the English language (with which I am acquainted) of Ireland,
and a young lady, and Mick, and of another young lady, and of a house on
fire, and of the British Grenadiers, concerning whom you sung us parts
of a ballad, and of a number of other matters appertaining, no doubt, to
your personal history.’
‘It has been a very strange one,’ said I; ‘and, perhaps, there is no man
in the world, of my birth, whose misfortunes can at all be compared to
mine.’
I do not object to own that I am disposed to brag of my birth and
other acquirements; for I have always found that if a man does not give
himself a good word, his friends will not do it for him.
‘Well,’ said my fellow-patient, ‘I have no doubt yours is a strange
tale, and shall be glad to hear it anon; but at present you must not
be permitted to speak much, for your fever has been long, and your
exhaustion great.’
‘Where are we?’ I asked; and the candidate informed me that we were in
the bishopric and town of Fulda, at present occupied by Prince Henry’s
troops. There had been a skirmish with an out-party of French near the
town, in which a shot entering the waggon, the poor candidate had been
wounded.
As the reader knows already my history, I will not take the trouble
to repeat it here, or to give the additions with which I favoured
my comrade in misfortune. But I confess that I told him ours was the
greatest family and finest palace in Ireland, that we were enormously
wealthy, related to all the peerage descended from the ancient kings,
&c.; and, to my surprise, in the course of our conversation, I found
that my interlocutor knew a great deal more about Ireland than I did.
When, for instance, I spoke of my descent,--
‘From which race of kings?’ said he.
‘Oh!’ said I (for my memory for dates was never very accurate), ‘from
the old ancient kings of all.’
‘What! can you trace your origin to the sons Japhet?’ said he.
‘’Faith, I can,’ answered I, ‘and farther too,--Nebuchadnezzar, if you
like.’
‘I see,’ said the candidate, smiling, ‘that you look upon those legends
with incredulity. These Partholans and Nemedians, of whom your writers
fondly make mention, cannot be authentically vouched for in history. Nor
do I believe that we have any more foundation for the tales concerning
them, than for the legends relative to Joseph of Arimathea and King
Bruce which prevailed two centuries back in the sister island.
And then he began a discourse about the Phoenicians, the Scyths or
Goths, the Tuath de Danans, Tacitus, and King MacNeil; which was, to say
the truth, the very first news I had heard of those personages. As for
English, he spoke it as well as I, and had seven more languages, he
said, equally at his command; for, on my quoting the only Latin line
that I knew, that out of the poet Homer, which says,--
‘As in praesenti perfectum fumat in avi,’
he began to speak to me in the Roman tongue; on which I was fain to tell
him that we pronounced it in a different way in Ireland, and so got off
the conversation.
My honest friend’s history was a curious one, and it may be told here in
order to show of what motley materials our levies were composed:--
‘I am,’ said he, ‘a Saxon by birth, my father being pastor of the
village of Pfannkuchen, where I imbibed the first rudiments of
knowledge. At sixteen (I am now twenty-three), having mastered the Greek
and Latin tongues, with the French, English, Arabic, and Hebrew; and
having come into possession of a legacy of a hundred rixdalers, a sum
amply sufficient to defray my University courses, I went to the famous
academy of Gottingen, where I devoted four years to the exact sciences
and theology. Also, I learned what worldly accomplishments I could
command; taking a dancing-tutor at the expense of a groschen a lesson, a
course of fencing from a French practitioner, and attending lectures
on the great horse and the equestrian science at the hippodrome of a
celebrated cavalry professor. My opinion is, that a man should know
everything as far as in his power lies: that he should complete his
cycle of experience; and, one science being as necessary as another, it
behoves him, according to his means, to acquaint himself with all. For
many branches of personal knowledge (as distinguished from spiritual;
though I am not prepared to say that the distinction is a correct
one), I confess I have found myself inapt. I attempted tight-rope
dancing, with a Bohemian artist who appeared at our academy; but in
this I failed, lamentably breaking my nose in the fall which I had. I
also essayed to drive a coach-and-four, which an English student, Herr
Graff Lord von Martingale, drove at the university. In this, too, I
failed; oversetting the chariot at the postern, opposite the Berliner
gate, with his lordship’s friend, Fraulein Miss Kitty Coddlins within.
I had been instructing the young lord in the German language when the
above accident took place, and was dismissed by him in consequence. My
means did not permit me further to pursue this curriculum (you will
pardon me the joke), otherwise, I have no doubt, I should have been
able to take a place in any hippodrome in the world, and to handle the
ribbons (as the high well-born lord used to say) to perfection.
'At the university I delivered a thesis on the quadrature of the
circle, which, I think, would interest you; and held a disputation in
Arabic against Professor Strumpff, in which I was said to have the
advantage. The languages of Southern Europe, of course, I acquired;
and, to a person well grounded in Sanscrit, the Northern idioms offer
no difficulty. If you have ever attempted the Russian you will find it
child’s play; and it will always be a source of regret to me that I
have been enabled to get no knowledge (to speak of) of Chinese; and,
but for the present dilemma, I had intended to pass over into England
for that purpose, and get a passage in one of the English company’s
ships to Canton.
'I am not of a saving turn, hence my little fortune of a hundred
rixdalers, which has served to ke
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