Then the end came rapidly. He wandered in his speech and was back in the past with dead and gone comrades. At the very last he rallied once more, fixed me with his poor eye that I had never seen dim before, and spoke with consciousness:
“Thou, the last Jennico, remember. Be true. Tell the renegade I rejoice, his shame striketh not us. Tell him that he did well to change his name. Kerlchen, dear son, thou art young and strong, breed a fine stock. No roture! but sell and settle ... sell and settle.”
Those words came upon his last sigh. His eye flashed once, and then the light was extinguished.
Thus he passed. His dying thought was for the worthy continuance of his race. I found myself the possessor, so the tabellions informed me some days later, of many millions (reckoned by the florins of this land) besides the great property of Tollendhal—fertile plains as well as wild forests, and of this same isolated frowning castle with its fathom-thick walls, its odd pictures of half-savage dead and gone Woschutzskis, its antique clumsy furniture, tapestries, trophies of chase and war; master, moreover, of endless tribes of dependants: heiducks and foresters; females of all ages, whose bare feet in summer patter oddly on the floors like the tread of animals, whose high-boots in winter clatter perpetually on the stone flags of stairs and corridors; serf-peasants, factors, overseers; the strangest mixture of races that can be imagined: Slovacks, Bohemians, Poles, to labour on the glebe; Saxons or Austrians to rule over them and cypher out rosters and returns; Magyars, who condescend to manage my horseflesh and watch over my safety if nothing else; the travelling bands of gipsies, ever changing but never failing with the dance, the song and the music, which is as indispensable as salt to the life of that motley population.
And I, who in a more rational order of things might have been leading the life of a young squire at home, became sovereign lord of all, wielding feudal power over strings of vassals who deemed it great honour to bend the knee before me and kiss my hand.
No doubt, in the beginning, it was vastly fine; especially as so much wealth meant freedom. For my first act, on my return after the expiration of my furlough, was to give up the duties of regimental life, irksome and monotonous in these piping days of peace. Then I must hie me to Vienna, and there, for the first time of my life of six-and-twenty years, taste the joy of independence. In Vienna are enough of dashing sparks and beautiful women, of princes and courtiers, gamblers and rakes, to teach me how to spend some of my new-found wealth in a manner suitable to so fashionable a person as myself.
But how astonishingly soon one accustoms oneself to luxury and authority! It is but three months ago that, having drained the brimming cup of pleasure to the dregs, I found its first sweetness cloying, its first alluring sparkle almost insufferable; that, having basked in perpetual smiles, I came to weary of so much favour. Winning at play had no fascination for a man with some thirty thousand pounds a year at his back; and losing large slices of that patrimony which had, I felt, been left me under an implied trust, was dully galling to my conscience. I was so uniformly fortunate also in the many duels in which I was involved among the less favoured—through the kindness which the fair ladies of Vienna and Bude began to show to le beau Jennico (the old dictum had been revived in my favour)—that after disabling four of my newly-found “best friends,” even so piquant an entertainment lost all pretence of excitement.
And with the progress of disillusion concerning the pleasure of idleness in wealth, grew more pressing the still small voice which murmured at my ear that it was not for such an end, not for the gratification of a mere libertine, gambler, and duellist, that my great-uncle Jennico had selected me as the depositary of his wealth and position.
“Sell and settle, sell and settle.” The old man’s words had long enough been forgotten. It was high time to begin mastering the intricacies of that vast estate, if ever I was to turn it to the profit of that stream of noble Jennicos to come. And in my state of satiety the very remoteness of my new property, its savageness, its proud isolation, invested it with an odd fascination. From one day to the other I determined on departure, and left the emptiness of the crowd to seek the fulness of this wild and beautiful country.