From his broken utterances, however, and from what I had known of him in life, I gathered a fair idea of what his wishes were. His fifty years of foreign service had filled him, old pandour that he seemed to have become, with but increased contempt for the people that surrounded him, their ways and customs, while his pride as an Englishman was only equalled by his pride as a Jennico.
“Sell and settle....”
The meaning of the words was clear in the light of the man as I knew him. I was to sell the great property, carry to England the vast hoard of foreign wealth, marry as befitted one of the race, and raise a new and splendid line of Jennicos, to the utter mortification, and everlasting confusion, of the degenerate head of the house.
Now, though I knew it to be in me, and felt it, indeed, not otherwise possible, to live my life as true a Jennico as even my uncle could desire, I by no means deemed it incumbent upon me to set to work and carry out his plans without first employing my liberty and wealth as the humour prompted me. Nor was the old country an overpoweringly attractive place for a young man of my creed and kidney. In Vienna I was, perhaps, for the moment, the most noted figure—the guest most sought after that year. In England, at daggers drawn with my brother, I could only play an everyday part in an unpopular social minority.
It was in full summer weather that, as I have written, already tried by the first stage of my career of wealth, I came to take possession of my landed estates. The beauty and wildness of the scenery, the strangeness of the life in the well-nigh princely position to which this sudden turn of fortune’s wheel had elevated me, the intoxicating sensation of holding sway, as feudal lord of these wide tracts of hill and plain, over so many hundreds of lives—above all, the wholesome reaction brought about by solitude and communion with nature after the turmoil of the last months—in short, everything around me and in me made me less inclined than ever to begin ridding myself of so fair a possession.
And do I wish I had not thus delayed in obeying the injunction that accompanied the bequest? Odds my life! I am a miserable dog this day through my disobedience; and yet, would I now undo the past if I could? A thousand times no! I hate my folly, but hug it, ever closer, ever dearer. The bitter savour of that incomprehensible yearning clings to the place: I would not exchange it for the tameness of peace. Weakling that I am, I would not obliterate, if I could, the memory of those brief, brief days of which I failed to know the price, until the perversity of fate cut their thread for ever—ay, perhaps for ever, after all! And yet, if so, it were wiser to quit these haunted walls for ever also. But, God! how meagre and livid looks wisdom, the ghost, by the side of love’s warm and living line!
And now, on! Since I have put my hand to the task, undertaken to set forth and make clear the actual condition of that vacillating puppet, the new-fledged Lord of Tollendhal, I will not draw it back, cost me what pain it may.
No doubt it was this haunting pride of wealth, waxing every day stronger, even as the pride of birth which my great-uncle had fostered to such good purpose, the overweening conceit which they bred within me, that fogged my better judgment and brought me to this pass. And no doubt, likewise, it is a princely estate that these lords of Tollendhal of old carved for themselves, and rounded ever wider and nurtured—all that it should some day, passing through the distaff, come to swell the pride of Suffolk Jennicos!
My castle rises boldly on the northernmost spur of the Glatzer Mounts, and defiantly overlooks the marches of three kingdoms. Its lands and dependencies, though chiefly Moravian, extend over the Bohemian border as well as into that Silesia they now are able to call Prussian. North and west it is flanked by woods that grow wilder, denser, as they spread inwards towards the Giant Mountains. On the southern slopes are my vineyards, growths of note, as I hear. My territories reach, on the one hand, farther than can be seen under the blue horizon, into the Eastern plains, flat and rich, that stretch with curious suddenness immediately at the foot of the high district; upon the other hand, on the Moravian side, I doubt whether even my head steward himself knows exactly how much of the timber-laden hill-ranges can be claimed as appertaining to the estate. All the peaks I can descry in a fine day from these casements are mine, I believe; on their flanks are forests as rich in game—boar and buck, wolf and bear, not to speak of lesser quarry—as are the plains below in corn and maize and cattle—que sais-je? A goodly heritage indeed!