“You need not be afraid of doing that,” said the Captain; “ever since I have known him, Moodie has been a very great man,—in his own eyes, at all events.”
“Why, you must know I am a great man here,” said Moodie, “whatever I was in my own country. I am a kammerjunker—no less.”
“A what?” said the Captain.
“A kammerjunker; and, in virtue of it, I have a right to go before every one of you.”
“Well, but how came you to be a what-do-you-call-him? ‘Who gave you that name?’ as the Catechism says.”
“Not ‘my godfathers and godmothers,’ certainly,” said Moodie, “and I hadn’t it ‘in my baptism;’ but I will tell you how it was. Sweden, in the winter, is as different from the same country in the summer as Connaught from Paradise. In the winter, they are fiddling, and dancing, and singing, from night to morn, and from morn to snowy eve. There is not much else to do, as you say, that is the truth of it, unless one happens to hear of a bear; so when I came to understand a little of their lingo, I was very glad to go to their jollifications. The people were always very civil in asking me, wherever I was—that I must say for them. Now we, in England, don’t care much about precedence, as you know. Most of us do not know who is first and who is last, and the rest do not care; and those who feel most secure of their rank, are generally too proud to take the trouble of asserting it. But it is not so here; they all know their places, like schoolboys, and fight for them like dogs at a feeding-trough if you happen to make a mistake about them—a thing which the natives never do. I did not care much about this at first, no Englishman would,—in fact, I did not understand it; but after a bit it got to be very unpleasant—it made me a marked man. Here was I, an English gentleman, as noble as the king—and a little more so than that Brummagem article of theirs,—shoved down, not only by counts and barons, which I did not like over and above; for half the people you meet with here are counts and barons,—and precious queer ones, some of them; but, besides this, there were their confounded orders of knighthood: there are knights of the Cherubim and Seraphim[45], and knights of the Elephant and Castle, and knights of the Goose and Gridiron, and Heaven knows what besides. Then came the officials, from the prime minister down to the post-master, and their sons and grandsons. Why, there was not a tradesman I dealt with, hardly a beggar I gave a shilling to, who had not a clear right to go before me—aye, and showed every disposition to exercise it, too!
“One day I was ass enough to be vexed because my tailor, who was knight of the Shears and Cabbage, or something of the sort, elbowed his way before me; and one of my friends, I think it was this very Bjornstjerna, the Ofwer Jagmästere, offered to get me a settled precedence. ‘Yours is not a new family,’ says he.—Of course it was not, everybody knew the Moodies, of Hampshire.—Well, that was all right; I had only to get my sixteen quarters blazoned, and he would see that I was made a kammerjunker. Sixteen quarters! thought I. I had had a great grandfather, that is certain, for there he lies in Havant Church, with a ton of marble over him, and his arms on the top of that, a chevron ermine between three mermaids ppr. to cheer him up on his road to Paradise. He was a great man, too, and looked as if he was the son of somebody, as the Spaniards say, to judge by the picture of his coach-and-six, and outriders with French-horns, which is hanging up in our hall, at Havant Manor. But he had played ‘ducks and drakes’ with his guineas, and as for his quarters, you know we don’t greatly trouble ourselves with such matters.
“Well, I told my difficulty to one of my friends in Stockholm—an idle young scamp of an attaché. ‘Why the devil don’t you write to the Herald’s College,’ said he, ‘they will trace your descent from the Preadamite Grants,[46] if you pay for it. Tell them to make you up a pedigree for Sweden, and, my life for it, they will get it up well.’
“I could not lose by it, you know, so I wrote, and, sure enough, they found out that the old family had come over with Duke Rollo, and had a hand in that conquest of ‘Normandie,’ which your fellow Torkel is continually dinning into our ears. They found out, too, that our name originally was spelt ‘Modige,’ which, in old Swedish, means ‘dashing,’ and that it was a title of honour, given to us for our gallantry in the said conquest. And, what was pat to the present purpose, Duke Rollo had conferred on us the honour of hereditary chamberlains, as soon as ever he had a court to appoint us to. How we came to England I forget—I suppose, though, it was with Duke William,—and what we did there I do not know, unless it was plundering the Saxons, like the rest; but, at all events, I got a string of shields, fit to roof Valhalla, and a beautiful tree—rather an expensive plant it was, though, for I paid sixty pounds for it. However, Bjornstjerna and my friend the attaché marched off with the chevron ermine and the three mermaids to the Hof-Ofwer-Something-or-other, and brought me back a sheet of parchment with a big seal hanging from it, giving me the privilege of pulling off the inexpressibles of the third prince of the blood royal—whenever it should please Providence to bless his Majesty with one,—and in virtue of that office to style myself kammerjunker.”