Читать книгу The Pride of Jennico: Being a Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico - Castle Egerton - Страница 3

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Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico (begun, apparently in great trouble and stress of mind, at the Castle of Tollendhal, in Moravia, on the third day of the great storm, late in the year 1771)

As the wind rattles the casements with impotent clutch, howls down the stair-turret with the voice of a despairing soul, creeps in long irregular waves between the tapestries and the granite walls of my chamber and wantons with the flames of logs and candles; knowing, as I do, that outside the snow is driven relentlessly by the gale, and that I can hope for no relief from the company of my wretched self,—for they who have learnt the temper of these wild mountain winds tell me the storm must last at least three days more in its fury,—I have bethought me, to keep from going melancholy crazed altogether, to set me some regular task to do.

And what can more fitly occupy my poor mind than the setting forth, as clearly as may be, the divers events that have brought me to this strange plight in this strange place? although, I fear me, it may not in the end be over-clear, for in sooth I cannot even yet see a way through the confusion of my thoughts. Nay, I could at times howl in unison with yonder dismal wind for mad regret; and at times again rage and hiss and break myself, like the fitful gale, against the walls of this desolate house for anger at my fate and my folly!

But since I can no more keep my thoughts from wandering to her and wondering upon her than I can keep my hot blood from running—running with such swiftness that here, alone in the wide vaulted room, with blasts from the four corners of the earth playing a very demon’s dance around me, I am yet all of a fever heat—I will try whether, by laying bare to myself all I know of her and of myself, all I surmise and guess of the parts we acted towards each other in this business, I may not at least come to some understanding, some decision, concerning the manner in which, as a man, I should comport myself in my most singular position.

Having reached thus far in his writing, the scribe after shaking the golden dust of the pounce box over his page paused, musing for a moment, loosening with unconscious fingers the collar of his coat from his neck and gazing with wide grey eyes at the dancing flames of the logs, and the little clouds of ash that ever and anon burst from the hearth with a spirt when particles of driven snow found their way down the chimney. Presently the pen resumed its travels:

Everything began, of course, through my great-uncle Jennico’s legacy. Do I regret it? I have sometimes cursed it. Nevertheless, although tossed between conflicting regrets and yearnings, I cannot in conscience wish it had not come to pass. Let me be frank. Bitter and troubling is my lot in the midst of my lonely splendour; but through the mist which seems in my memory to separate the old life from the new, those days of yesteryear (for all their carelessness and fancy-freedom) seem now strangely dull. Yes, it is almost a year already that it came, this legacy, by which a young Englishman, serving in his Royal and Imperial Majesty’s Chevau-Legers, was suddenly transformed, from an obscure Rittmeister with little more worldly goods than his pay, into one of the richest landowners in the broad Empire, the master of an historic castle on the Bohemian Marches.

It was indeed an odd turn of fortune’s wheel. But doubtless there is a predestination in such things, unknown to man.

My great-uncle had always taken a peculiar interest in me. Some fifty years before my birth, precluded by the religion of our family from any hope of advancement in the army of our own country, he had himself entered the Imperial service; and when I had reached the age of manhood, he insisted on my being sent to him in Vienna to enter upon the same career. To him I owe my rapid promotion after the Turkish campaign of 1769. But I question, for all his influence at Court, whether I should have benefited otherwise than through his advice and interest, had it not been for an unforeseen series of moves on the part of my elder brother at home.

One fine day it was announced to us that this latter had been offered and had accepted a barony in the peerage of Great Britain. At first it did not transpire upon what grounds a Catholic gentleman should be so honoured, and we were obliged, my uncle and I, to content ourselves with the impossible explanation that “Dear Edmund’s value and abilities and the great services he had rendered by his exertions in the last Suffolk Elections had been brought to the notice of his Majesty, who was thus graciously pleased to show his appreciation of the same.”

Our good mother (who would not be the true woman she is did she not set a value on the honours of this world), my excellent brother, and, of course, his ambitious lady, all agreed that it was a mighty fine thing for Sir Edmund Jennico to become My Lord Rainswick, and they sent us many grandiloquent missives to that effect.

But with my great-uncle things were vastly different. To all appearance he had grown, during the course of his sixty odd years in the Imperial service, into a complete unmitigated foreigner, who spoke English like a German, if, indeed, the extraordinary jargon he used (under the impression that it was his mother tongue) could be so called. As a matter of fact it would have been difficult to say what tongue was my great-uncle’s own. It was not English nor French—not even the French of German courts—nor true German, but the oddest compound of all three, with a strong peppering of Slovack or Hungarian according as the country in which he served suggested the adjunction. A very persuasive compound it proved, however, when he took up his commanding voice, poor man! But, foreigner as he was, covered as his broad chest might be with foreign orders, freely as he had spent his life’s energy in the pay of a foreign monarch, my great-uncle Jennico had too much English pride of race, too much of the old Jennico blood (despite this same had been so often let for him by Bavarian and Hanoverian, Prussian, French, and Turk), to brook in peace what he considered a slight upon his grand family traditions.

Now this was precisely what my brother had committed. In the first place he had married a lady who, I hear, is amazingly handsome, and sufficiently wealthy, but about whose lineage it seems altogether unadvisable to seek clear information. Busy as he was in the midst of his last campaign, my great-uncle (who even in the wilds of Bulgaria seemed to keep by some marvellous means in touch with what moves were being played by the family in distant Suffolk) nevertheless had the matter probed. And the account he received was not of a satisfactory nature. I fear me that those around him then did not find the fierceness of his rule softened by the unwelcome news from that distant island of Britain.

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 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.

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.

Here for a time I tasted interest in life again; knew a sort of well-filled peace; felt my soul expand with renewed vigour, keenness for work and deeds, hope and healthy desire, self-pride and satisfaction. Then came the foolish adventure which has left me naked and weak in the very midst of my wealth and power; which has left rudderless an existence that had set sail so gaily for glorious happiness.

The bell of the horologe, from its snow-capped turret overlooking the gate of honour in the stronghold of Tollendhal, slowly tolled the tenth hour of that tempestuous night; and the notes resounded in the room, now strongly vibrating, now faint and distant, as the wind paused for a second, or bore them away upon its dishevelled wing. Upon the last stroke, as Basil Jennico was running over the last page of his fair paper, the door behind him, creaking on its hinges, was thrown open by János, the heiduck, displaying in the next chamber a wide table, lit by two six-branched chandeliers and laid for the evening meal. The twelve yellow tongues of flame glinted on the silver, the cut glass, and the snow-white napery, but only to emphasise the sombre depth of the mediæval room, the desolate eloquence of that solitary seat at the huge board. János waited till his master, with weary gesture, had cast his pen aside, and then ceremoniously announced that his lordship’s supper was ready.

Impatiently enough did the young man dip his fingers in the aiguière of perfumed water that a damsel on his right offered to him as he passed through the great doors, drying them on the cloth handed by another on his left. Frowning he sat him down in his high-backed chair behind which the heiduck stood ready to present each dish as it was brought up by other menials, to keep the beaker constantly filled, to answer with a bow any observation that he might make, should the lord feel disposed to break silence.

But to-night the Lord of Tollendhal was less disposed than ever in such a direction. He chafed at the long ceremony; resented the presence of these creatures who had seen her sit as their mistress at that table, where now lay nought but vacancy beyond the white cloth; resented even the silent solicitude that lurked in János’s eyes, though the latter never broke unauthorised his rule of silence.

The generous wine, in the stillness and the black solitude, bred presently a yet deeper melancholy. After a perfunctory meal the young man waved aside a last glass of the amber Tokay that was placed at his hand, rose, and moodily walked to and fro for some time. Feeling that the coming hours had no sleep in reserve for a mind in such turmoil as his, he returned to his writing-table, and, whilst János directed the servants to bring in and trim fresh candles, and pile more logs upon the hearth, Basil Jennico resumed his task.