Now this was precisely what my brother had committed. In the first place he had married a lady who, I hear, is amazingly handsome, and sufficiently wealthy, but about whose lineage it seems altogether unadvisable to seek clear information. Busy as he was in the midst of his last campaign, my great-uncle (who even in the wilds of Bulgaria seemed to keep by some marvellous means in touch with what moves were being played by the family in distant Suffolk) nevertheless had the matter probed. And the account he received was not of a satisfactory nature. I fear me that those around him then did not find the fierceness of his rule softened by the unwelcome news from that distant island of Britain.
The Jennicos, although they had been degraded (so my uncle maintained) by the gift of a paltry baronetcy at the hands of Charles II., as a reward for their bleeding and losses in the Royal cause, were, he declared, of a stock with which blood-royal itself might be allied without derogation. The one great solace of his active life was a recapitulation of the deeds, real or legendary, that, since the landing of the Danes on Saxon soil, had marked the passage through history of those thirty-one authentic generations, the twenty-ninth of which was so worthily represented by himself. The worship of the name was with him an absolute craze.
It is undoubtedly to that craze that I owe my accession of fortune—ay, and my present desolation of heart....
But to resume. When, therefore, already dissatisfied with my brother’s alliance, he heard that the head of the family proposed to engraft upon it a different name—a soi-disant superior title—his wrath was loud and deep:
“Eh quoi! mille millions de Donnerblitzen! what the Teufel idiot think? what you think?”
I was present when the news arrived; it was in his chancellerie on the Josefsplatz at Vienna. I shall not lightly forget the old man’s saffron face.
“Does that Schaffkopf brother of yours not verstand what Jennico to be means? what thinkest thou? would I be what I am, were it not that I have ever known, boy, what I was geborn to when I was Jennico geborn? How comes it that I am what I here am? How is it gecome, thinkest thou, that I have myself risen to the highest honour in the Empire, that I am field-marshal this day, above the heads of your princekins, your grand-dukeleins, highnesses, and serenities? Dummes Vieh!”—with a parenthetical shake of his fist at the open paper on his desk—“how is it gecome that I wedded la belle Héritière des Woschutzski, the most beautiful woman in Silesia, the richest, pardi! the noblest?” And his Excellency (methinks I see him now) turned to me with sudden solemnity: “You will answer me,” he said in an altered voice, “you will answer me (because you are a fool youth), that I have become great general because I am the bravest soldier, the cleverest commander, of all the Imperial troops; that I to myself have won the lady for whom Transparencies had sued in vain because of being the most beautiful man in the whole Kaiserlich service.”
Here the younger Jennico, for all the vexation of spirit which had suggested the labour of his systematic narrative as a distraction, could not help smiling to himself, as, with pen raised towards the standish, he paused for a moment to recall on how many occasions he had heard this explanation of the Field-Marshal’s success in life. Then the grating of the quill began afresh:
When my venerable relative came to this, I, being an irreverent young dog, had much ado to keep myself from a great yell of laughter. He was pleased to remark, latterly, in an approving mood, that I was growing every day into a more living image of what he remembered himself to have been in the good times when he wore a cornet’s uniform. I should therefore have felt delicately flattered, but the fact is that the tough old soldier, if in the divers accidents of war he had gathered much glory, had not come off without a fine assortment of disfiguring wounds. The ball that passed through his cheeks at Leuthen had removed all his most ornamental teeth, and had given the oddest set to the lower part of his countenance. It was after Kolin that, the sight of his left eye being suppressed by the butt end of a lance, he had started that black patch which imparted a peculiar ferocity to his aspect, although it seemed, it is true, to sharpen the piercing qualities of the remaining orb. At Hochkirch, where he culled some of his greenest laurels, a Prussian bullet in his knee forced on him the companionship of a stout staff for ever afterwards. He certainly had been known in former days as le beau Jennico, but of its original cast of feature it is easy to conceive that, after these repeated finishing touches, his countenance bore but little trace.
“But no,” the dear old man would say, baring his desolate lower tusks at me, and fixing me with his wild-boar eye, “it is not to my beauty, Kerl, not to my courage, Kerl, that I owe success, but because I am geborn Jennico. When man Jennico geborn is, man is geborn to all the rest—to the beauty, to the bravery. When I wooed your late dead tante, they, mere ignorant Poles, said to me: ’It is well. You are honoured. We know you honourable; but are you born? To wed a Countess Woschutzski one must be born, one must show, honoured sir,’ they said, ’at least seize quartiers, attested in due proper form.’