The Pride of Jennico 2

The Pride of Jennico 2

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.’

 

“‘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