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Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson
page 17 of 184 (09%)
magnates of whom, I believe, the world has never heard and would
not care to hear: So strange a thing is this hereditary pride. Of
Mr. Jackson, beyond the fact that he was Fleeming's grandfather, I
know naught. His wife, as I have said, was a woman of fierce
passions; she would tie her house slaves to the bed and lash them
with her own hand; and her conduct to her wild and down-going sons,
was a mixture of almost insane self-sacrifice and wholly insane
violence of temper. She had three sons and one daughter. Two of
the sons went utterly to ruin, and reduced their mother to poverty.
The third went to India, a slim, delicate lad, and passed so wholly
from the knowledge of his relatives that he was thought to be long
dead. Years later, when his sister was living in Genoa, a red-
bearded man of great strength and stature, tanned by years in
India, and his hands covered with barbaric gems, entered the room
unannounced, as she was playing the piano, lifted her from her
seat, and kissed her. It was her brother, suddenly returned out of
a past that was never very clearly understood, with the rank of
general, many strange gems, many cloudy stories of adventure, and
next his heart, the daguerreotype of an Indian prince with whom he
had mixed blood.

The last of this wild family, the daughter, Henrietta Camilla,
became the wife of the midshipman Charles, and the mother of the
subject of this notice, Fleeming Jenkin. She was a woman of parts
and courage. Not beautiful, she had a far higher gift, the art of
seeming so; played the part of a belle in society, while far
lovelier women were left unattended; and up to old age had much of
both the exigency and the charm that mark that character. She drew
naturally, for she had no training, with unusual skill; and it was
from her, and not from the two naval artists, that Fleeming
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