‘My grandfather was naturalised for his own interests, as you know; but our people were Croat peasants.’
‘I know I have heard you always say so; but I believe it is a fable. You do not come from any peasantry; besides, surely Sclavonia is old enough and dim enough to give you any mystical heroic ancestry you may prefer.’
‘They might be robbers,’ said Othmar, ‘I do not know. There is not much to choose.’
‘Everybody who is noble comes from robbers of some sort,’ said Princess Napraxine; ‘what were the Hohenstauffen, the Hohenzollern, the Habsburg, the Grimaldi, the Montefeltro, the Colonna? Robbers all, sitting on high in their fortresses, and swooping down like hawks on the fords, on the highways, on the moorlands, on the forests, on the little towns below them. You may be quite sure that is what your people did in Croatia.’
‘You are very kind to try and console me,’ said Othmar. ‘Nobility, I think, consists in being able to trace the past of your forefathers and to have your charters; the past of mine is lost in darkness, and my charters are lost with them. Truthfully we can only date from 1767, when Marc Othmar, who dealt in horses, began to lend money in Agram. It is not a lofty beginning; it is not even a creditable one. But I do not think that to pretend that Marc Othmar, the horse dealer or horse stealer, was a hero and saint would mend matters. I accept him as what he was, but I cannot be proud of him; even sometimes I am on the eve of cursing him; at all events, of wishing he had never existed.’
‘My dear Othmar, you are very strange sometimes——’
‘Am I? One is never content with what one has. There is nothing strange in that. If you will deign to remember me at all, you will remember that I was never pleased with being the head of the house of Othmar; I would give all its millions for an unblemished descent.’
‘Then you are ungrateful to your fortunes, and do not understand your own times.’
‘Perhaps I understand them too well, and that is why I despise what they over-estimate.’