The family had often spoken of an hereditary and devastating imbecility. Their fortune, it seemed, was intact; the ancestral dwelling stood, as it always had, amidst the open grasslands and wooded uplands which, in our country, are considered mountains—a terrain rich in both fodder and lumber and the hunting grounds men of means so deeply cherish.
The family came into my acquaintance by one of those accidents that members of my class run into when our official business with gentlemen ends of an evening and the civilized retire over their pipes and cognac to speak of perhaps less civilized matters.
"The depth of this disease," said one of the family's more prosperous sons, "is yet unknown." He tugged at his brush of a beard and appeared to scan the titles of the leather-bound volumes on the den's far wall.
"It seems to skip a generation, maybe two," and he stubbed out his cigar in a great brass ashtray. "But let me tell you of my uncle."
The uncle, my companion recounted, was one of these eccentric aristocrats who seldom descend from their high-country estates and into the country's major cities, preferring the windswept fields and frozen tarns to the constant social obligations of the town.
This particular uncle had taken it into his head that the family's ancestral estate was under threat from the neighboring estates and from "the influx of barbarians precipitous to the Hun."
He was also deathly afraid of dragons.
The uncle put all of his efforts into creating a series of towers and fortified gates at the estate's borders. Hewn from native stone, a few of the towers topped forty yards high and came complete with castellated lookouts, thin slits through which guards might discharge a weapon, and, the uncle maintained, his "greatest invention," a sort of steel alloy from which he fashioned all of the doors and gates of his system of fortification. "Impenetrable, resistant to corrosion, and, above all, fireproof," the uncle once said.
The latter was on account of dragons.
The family patriarch felt it necessary to confront his son on the matter of this system of fortifications.
"But Carl," he blubbered one evening as the rest of the family retired after a particularly heavy supper of the local grouse, "have you, or has anyone, actually seen any dragons of late?"
The uncle flew into an apoplexy.
"Father!" he shouted. "Who are we, mere mortals, to question the wisdom of antiquity? Was not Saint George, our patron and ancient protector, also a slayer of dragons? In these times of great peril—surrounded as we are by enemies both foreign and domestic—are we not obligated to protect our homeland from all possible threats?"
"But the debts . . . " grandfather suggested.
"What are debts, when our very survival from the dragons and foreign hordes is at stake!" the uncle thundered.
And so the matter was settled, or at least not spoken of again.
The building of these defenses continued until few views from the family manse were not accompanied by a tower or fortified gate, most of them unmanned, but some glowing with the telltale light of a sleepy peasant "mustered" by the uncle to keep watch for as long as the guard's supply of the local fruit brandy would hold out.
In time, the family patriarch left this world, his soul to contend with adoration or purgation as befitted a sophisticated man of the world, and the second son, father to the man I spoke with this evening of leisure, quietly took command of the family estate, modernizing its lumber mill and organizing its hunting season into a clever and profitable enterprise.
"But your uncle," I asked, unable to let a tale rest before its natural end, "whatever happened to him?"
"Well, he's now prime minister, of course," retorted my friend, stirring the ice in his water and Scotch.