“Upon your mother’s side of the family,” she said, “of course.”
My Aunt was silent. “Me descended from a king?”
My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. “There seems to be the possibility of it.”
“I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?”
It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse in me.
“And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?”
“If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--”
“Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated to trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, or Elizabeth.”
At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt’s eye; but I did not, and I continued imprudently:--
“Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody present to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do about--”
She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have alluded above.
“Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room.”
“Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant--”
“I cannot understand what impels you to adopt such a manner to me, when I am trying to do something for you.”
I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming the possible descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Aunt was pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now broached her favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy, beginning with her own.
“If your title to royal blood,” she said, “were as plain as mine (through Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful research.”
She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not one family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that a grandmother of my mother’s grandfather had been a Fanning, and there were sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for me was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it was Fanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance, then I was no king’s descendant.
“Worthy New England people, I understand,” said my Aunt with her nod of indulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard species, “but of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, was a mere gardener’s son--while the Alamance Fanning was one of those infamous regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any such cattle could you be one of us,” said my Aunt.