Read Ebook: The Pride of Jennico: Being a Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico by Castle Agnes Castle Egerton

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PART I

Page

PART II

THE PRIDE OF JENNICO

PART I

MEMOIR OF CAPTAIN BASIL JENNICO

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 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 , 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 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 , 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 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.

It is undoubtedly to that craze that I owe my accession of fortune--ay, and my present desolation of heart....

"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 H?riti?re des Woschutzski, the most beautiful woman in Silesia, the richest, pardi! the noblest?" And his Excellency turned to me with sudden solemnity: "You will answer me," he said in an altered voice, "you will answer me , 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:

"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.'

"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!"

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 roturi?re 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, J?nos."

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 J?nos; 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, J?nos 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 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.

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 J?nos, 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 mediaeval room, the desolate eloquence of that solitary seat at the huge board. J?nos 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 aigui?re 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 J?nos'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 J?nos directed the servants to bring in and trim fresh candles, and pile more logs upon the hearth, Basil Jennico resumed his task.

BASIL JENNICO'S MEMOIR CONTINUED

MY great-uncle's will, forcible, concise, indisputable as it was, had been drawn out in a great hurry, dictated, indeed, between spasms of agony and rage. Doubtless, had he felt sure of more time, he would have burdened the inheritance with many directions and conditions.

From his broken utterances, however, and from what I had known of him in life, I gathered a fair idea of what his wishes were. His fifty years of foreign service had filled him, old pandour that he seemed to have become, with but increased contempt for the people that surrounded him, their ways and customs, while his pride as an Englishman was only equalled by his pride as a Jennico.

"Sell and settle...."

The meaning of the words was clear in the light of the man as I knew him. I was to sell the great property, carry to England the vast hoard of foreign wealth, marry as befitted one of the race, and raise a new and splendid line of Jennicos, to the utter mortification, and everlasting confusion, of the degenerate head of the house.

Now, though I knew it to be in me, and felt it, indeed, not otherwise possible, to live my life as true a Jennico as even my uncle could desire, I by no means deemed it incumbent upon me to set to work and carry out his plans without first employing my liberty and wealth as the humour prompted me. Nor was the old country an overpoweringly attractive place for a young man of my creed and kidney. In Vienna I was, perhaps, for the moment, the most noted figure--the guest most sought after that year. In England, at daggers drawn with my brother, I could only play an everyday part in an unpopular social minority.

It was in full summer weather that, as I have written, already tried by the first stage of my career of wealth, I came to take possession of my landed estates. The beauty and wildness of the scenery, the strangeness of the life in the well-nigh princely position to which this sudden turn of fortune's wheel had elevated me, the intoxicating sensation of holding sway, as feudal lord of these wide tracts of hill and plain, over so many hundreds of lives--above all, the wholesome reaction brought about by solitude and communion with nature after the turmoil of the last months--in short, everything around me and in me made me less inclined than ever to begin ridding myself of so fair a possession.

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