“‘Eh!’ said I, ’is that all? See you, you shall have sixteen quarterings. Sixteen quarterings? Bah! You shall have sixteen quarterings beyond that, and then sixteen again; and you shall then learn what it is called to be called Jennico!’—Potztausend!—And I simply wrote to the Office of Heralds in London, what man calls College of Arms, for them to look up the records of Jennico and draw out a right proper pedigree of the familie, spare no cost, right up to the date of King Knut! Eh? Oh, ei, ei! Kerlchen! You should have seen the roll of parchment that was in time gesendt—Teremtété! and les yeux que fit monsieur mon beau-père [my excellent great-uncle said mon peau-bère] when they were geopened to what it means to be well-born English! A well-born man never knows his blood as he should, until he sets himself to trace it through all the veins. Blood-royal, yunker, blood-royal! Once Danish, two times Plantagenet, and once Stuart, but that a strong dose—he-he, ei, ei! The Merry Monarch, as the school-books say, had wide paternity, though—verstehts sich—his daughter (who my grossmutter became) was noble also by her mother. Up it goes high, weit. Thou shalt see for thyself when thou comest to Tollendhal. Na, ya, and thou shalt study it too—it all runs in thine veins also. Forget it not!... And of all her treasures, your aunt would always tell me there was none she prized more than that document relating to our family. She had it unrolled upon her bed when she could no longer use her limbs, and she used to trace out, crying now and then, the poor soul, what her boy would have carried of honour if he had lived. Ah, ’twas a million pities she never bore me another!—’tis the only reproach that darf be made her.... I have consoled myself hitherto with the thought of my nephew’s youthling; but, Potzblitz, this Edmund, now the head of our family—ach, the verdamned hound! Tausend Donnern and Bomben!”—and my great-uncle’s guttural voice would come rumbling, like gathering thunder indeed, and rise to a frightful bellow—“to barter his fine old name for the verdamned mummery of a Baron Rainswick—Rainswick?—pooh! A creation of this Hanover dog! And what does he give on his side to drive this fine bargain? Na, na, sprech to me not: I mislike it; nephew, I tell thee, I doubt me but there is something hinter it yet.
“Nephew Basil,” he then went on, this day I speak of, “if I were not seventy-three years old I would marry again—I would, to have an heir, by Heaven! that the true race might not die out!”
And despite his wall-eye, his jaw, his game leg, his generally disastrous aspect, I believe he might have been as good as his threat, his seventy-and-three years notwithstanding. But what really deterred him from such a rash step was his belief (although he would not gratify me by saying so) that there was at hand as good a Jennico as he could wish for, and that one, myself, Basil. And he saw in me a purer sproutling of that noble island race of the north that he was so fiercely proud of, than he could have produced by a marriage with a foreigner. For, thorough “Imperial” as he now was, and notwithstanding his early foreign education (which had begun in the Stuart regiments of the French king), the dominant thought in the old warrior’s brain was that a very law of nature required the gentle-born sons of such a country to be honoured as leaders among foreign men. And great was the array of names he could summon, should any one be rash enough to challenge the assertion. Butlers and Lallys, Brownes and Jerninghams, by Gad! Keiths and Dillons and Berwicks, morbleu! Fermors, Loudons, and Lacys, and how many more if necessary; ay, and Jennicos not the least of them, I should hope, teremtété!
I did not think that my brother had bettered himself by the change, and still less could I concur in the turn-coat policy he had thought fit to adopt in order to buy from a Hanoverian King and a bigoted House of Lords this accession of honour. For my uncle was not far wrong in his suspicions, and in truth it did not require any strong perspicacity to realise that it was not for nothing my brother was thus distinguished. I mean not for his merits—which amounts to the same thing. I made strong efforts to keep the tidings of his cowardly defection from my uncle. But family matters were not, as I have said, to be hidden from Feldmarschall Edmund von Jennico. I believe the news hastened his dissolution. Repeated fits of anger are pernicious to gouty veterans of explosive temper. It was barely three weeks after the arrival of the tidings of my brother having taken the oaths and his seat in the House of Lords that I was summoned by a messenger, hot foot, from the little frontier town where I was quartered with my squadron, to attend my great-uncle’s death-bed. It was a sixteen-hours’ ride through the snow. I reached this frowning old stronghouse late at night, hastened by a reminder at each relay ready prepared for me; hastened by the servants stationed at the gate; hastened on the stairs, at his very door, the door of this room. I found him sitting in his armchair, almost a corpse already, fully conscious, grimly triumphant.
“Thou shalt have it all,” was the first thing he whispered to me as I knelt by his side. His voice was so low that I had to bend my ear to his mouth. But the pride of race had never seemed to burn with brighter flame. “Alles ist dein, alles ... aber,” and he caught at me with his clawlike hand, cold already with the very chill of earth, “remember that thou the last Jennico bist. Royal blood, Kerlchen, Knut, Plantagenet, Stuart ... noblesse oblige, remember. Bring no roturière into the family.”
His heiduck, who had endured his testy temper and his rigid rule for forty years, suddenly gave a kind of gulp, like a sob, from behind the chair where he stood, rigid, on duty at his proper post, but with his hands, instead of resting correctly on hip and sword-handle, joined in silent prayer. A striking-looking man, for all his short stature, with his extraordinary breadth of shoulders, his small piercing eyes, his fantastically hard features all pock-seared, that seemed carved out of some swarthy, worm-eaten old oak.
“Thou fool!” hissed my uncle, impatiently turning his head at the sound, and making a vain attempt to seek the ever-present staff with his trembling fingers. “Basil, crack me the knave on the skull.” Then he paused a moment, looked at the clock and said in a significant way, “It is time, János.”
The heiduck instantly moved and left the room, to return promptly, ushering in a number of the retainers who had evidently been gathered together and kept in attendance against my arrival.
They ranged themselves silently in a row behind János; and the dying man in a feeble voice and with the shadow of a gesture towards me, but holding them all the while under his piercing look, said two or three times:
“Your master, men, your master.” Whereupon, János leading the way, every man of them, household-steward, huntsmen, overseers, foresters, hussars, came forward, kissed my hand, and retired in silence.