William Thackeray - 3 books to know Anti-heroes

That is my way of fascinating women. Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim. ATTACKING is his only secret. Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb. In those days my spirit was so great, that if I had set my heart upon marrying a princess of the blood, I would have had her!

I told Calista my story, and altered very very little of the truth. My object was to frighten her: to show her that what I wanted, that I dared; that what I dared, that I won; and there were striking passages enough in my history to convince her of my iron will and indomitable courage. ‘Never hope to escape me, madam,’ I would say: ‘offer to marry another man, and he dies upon this sword, which never yet met its master. Fly from me, and I will follow you, though it were to the gates of Hades.’ I promise you this was very different language to that she had been in the habit of hearing from her Jemmy-Jessamy adorers. You should have seen how I scared the fellows from her.

When I said in this energetic way that I would follow Lady Lyndon across the Styx if necessary, of course I meant that I would do so, provided nothing more suitable presented itself in the interim. If Lyndon would not die, where was the use of my pursuing the Countess? And somehow, towards the end of the Spa season, very much to my mortification I do confess, the knight made another rally: it seemed as if nothing would kill him. ‘I am sorry for you, Captain Barry,’ he would say, laughing as usual. ‘I’m grieved to keep you, or any gentleman, waiting. Had you not better arrange with my doctor, or get the cook to flavour my omelette with arsenic? What are the odds, gentlemen,’ he would add, ‘that I don’t live to see Captain Barry hanged yet?’

In fact, the doctors tinkered him up for a year. ‘It’s my usual luck,’ I could not help saying to my uncle, who was my confidential and most excellent adviser in all matters of the heart. ‘I’ve been wasting the treasures of my affections upon that flirt of a countess, and here’s her husband restored to health and likely to live I don’t know how many years!’ And, as if to add to my mortification, there came just at this period to Spa an English tallow-chandler’s heiress, with a plum to her fortune; and Madame Cornu, the widow of a Norman cattle-dealer and farmer-general, with a dropsy and two hundred thousand livres a year.

‘What’s the use of my following the Lyndons to England,’ says I, ‘if the knight won’t die?’

‘Don’t follow them, my dear simple child,’ replied my uncle. ‘Stop here and pay court to the new arrivals.’

‘Yes, and lose Calista for ever, and the greatest estate in all England.’

‘Pooh, pooh! youths like you easily fire and easily despond. Keep up a correspondence with Lady Lyndon. You know there’s nothing she likes so much. There’s the Irish abbe, who will write you the most charming letters for a crown apiece. Let her go; write to her, and meanwhile look out for anything else which may turn up. Who knows? you might marry the Norman widow, bury her, take her money, and be ready for the Countess against the knight’s death.’

And so, with vows of the most profound respectful attachment, and having given twenty louis to Lady Lyndon’s waiting-woman for a lock of her hair (of which fact, of course, the woman informed her mistress), I took leave of the Countess, when it became necessary for her return to her estates in England; swearing I would follow her as soon as an affair of honour I had on my hands could be brought to an end.

I shall pass over the events of the year that ensued before I again saw her. She wrote to me according to promise; with much regularity at first, with somewhat less frequency afterwards. My affairs, meanwhile, at the play-table went on not unprosperously, and I was just on the point of marrying the widow Cornu (we were at Brussels by this time, and the poor soul was madly in love with me,) when the London Gazette was put into my hands, and I read the following announcement:—

‘Died at Castle-Lyndon, in the kingdom of Ireland, the Right Honourable Sir Charles Lyndon, Knight of the Bath, member of Parliament for Lyndon in Devonshire, and many years His Majesty’s representative at various European Courts. He hath left behind him a name which is endeared to all his friends for his manifold virtues and talents, a reputation justly acquired in the service of His Majesty, and an inconsolable widow to deplore his loss. Her Ladyship, the bereaved Countess of Lyndon, was at the Bath when the horrid intelligence reached her of her husband’s demise, and hastened to Ireland immediately in order to pay her last sad duties to his beloved remains.’

That very night I ordered my chariot and posted to Ostend, whence I freighted a vessel to Dover, and travelling rapidly into the West, reached Bristol; from which port I embarked for Waterford, and found myself, after an absence of eleven years, in my native country.

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HOW WERE TIMES CHANGED with me now! I had left my country a poor penniless boy—a private soldier in a miserable marching regiment. I returned an accomplished man, with property to the amount of five thousand guineas in my possession, with a splendid wardrobe and jewel-case worth two thousand more; having mingled in all the scenes of life a not undistinguished actor in them; having shared in war and in love; having by my own genius and energy won my way from poverty and obscurity to competence and splendour. As I looked out from my chariot windows as it rolled along over the bleak bare roads, by the miserable cabins of the peasantry, who came out in their rags to stare as the splendid equipage passed, and huzza’d for his Lordship’s honour as they saw the magnificent stranger in the superb gilded vehicle, my huge body-servant Fritz lolling behind with curling moustaches and long queue, his green livery barred with silver lace, I could not help thinking of myself with considerable complacency, and thanking my stars that had endowed me with so many good qualities. But for my own merits I should have been a raw Irish squireen such as those I saw swaggering about the wretched towns through which my chariot passed on its road to Dublin. I might have married Nora Brady (and though, thank Heaven, I did not, I have never thought of that girl but with kindness, and even remember the bitterness of losing her more clearly at this moment than any other incident of my life); I might have been the father of ten children by this time, or a farmer on my own account, or an agent to a squire, or a gauger, or an attorney; and here I was one of the most famous gentlemen of Europe! I bade my fellow get a bag of copper money and throw it among the crowd as we changed horses; and I warrant me there was as much shouting set up in praise of my honour as if my Lord Townshend, the Lord Lieutenant himself, had been passing.

My second day’s journey—for the Irish roads were rough in those days, and the progress of a gentleman’s chariot terribly slow—brought me to Carlow, where I put up at the very inn which I had used eleven years back, when flying from home after the supposed murder of Quin in the duel. How well I remember every moment of the scene! The old landlord was gone who had served me; the inn that I then thought so comfortable looked wretched and dismantled; but the claret was as good as in the old days, and I had the host to partake of a jug of it and hear the news of the country.

He was as communicative as hosts usually are: the crops and the markets, the price of beasts at last Castle Dermot fair, the last story about the vicar, and the last joke of Father Hogan the priest; how the Whiteboys had burned Squire Scanlan’s ricks, and the highwaymen had been beaten off in their attack upon Sir Thomas’s house; who was to hunt the Kilkenny hounds next season, and the wonderful run entirely they had last March; what troops were in the town, and how Miss Biddy Toole had run off with Ensign Mullins: all the news of sport, assize, and quarter-sessions were detailed by this worthy chronicler of small-beer, who wondered that my honour hadn’t heard of them in England, or in foreign parts, where he seemed to think the world was as interested as he was about the doings of Kilkenny and Carlow. I listened to these tales with, I own, a considerable pleasure; for every now and then a name would come up in the conversation which I remembered in old days, and bring with it a hundred associations connected with them.