CHAPTERVI.
Dr. M.’s dilemma—Apprehensions of poisoning—Mr. Cooper’s dray-boy—Memoirs of a Peeress—Lady B. and the Duchess of ——Novel scheme for making maids obedient—English servants—Lady J.—Lord C.—Mr. Pitt, and the disturbed state of England—Peers made by Mr. Pitt—Footmen’s nosegays—Mr. Pitt’s last words, as related by Gifford—Melancholy reflections—Mr. Pitt’s signature—Mr. Pitt a Statesman inferior to Lord Chatham—Mr. Fox—Sir Walter Scott—Shaykh Mohammed Nasýb—Turkish dervises—Anecdote of Sir William Pynsent—Sir John Dyke—High and low descent exemplified in Captain —— and Count Rewisky—Lady Charlotte Bury—The Empress Josephine—Buonaparte—Mr. Pitt’s physiognomy—Advantageous offers refused by Lady Hester—Her house in Montague Square—The Cheshire Squire—Ingratitude of the world—Trust not in man, but in God.
Monday, April 30.—For three days I find a blank in my diary. The fact is, I had been so much fatigued for the last month that I threw my memorandums aside, and, on retiring to my house, gave myself up to the enjoyment of a little conversation with my family, or else buried my cares and anxieties in sleep.
On the day when I paid my visit to Prince Pückler Muskau in Sayda, he had asked me, in the course of conversation, if I had been long in Syria, and whether I had any intention of returning to Europe. I answered, that I had come with the understanding of remaining some months only, and probably should go back in the summer. “But you will not leave my lady whilst she is so ill?” he exclaimed. These words of his were ever running in my mind. I saw no prospect of Lady Hester’s realizing her hopes respecting the property she supposed had been left her. I was fairly worn off my legs by late hours, multiplied occupations, and fruitless endeavours to soothe an irritated and neglected, although a high-born and gifted creature—the victim of fallen greatness, false hopes, and superhuman efforts to effect vast projects of philanthropy and political combinations on small means and ruined resources. I was therefore anxious to close my labours, and retire to the obscurity from which she had called me: but still the fatal words—“You will not leave my lady whilst she is so ill”—recurred to my thoughts, and I knew not what to do. Lady Hester would often say to me—“You are of no use to me: what good do you do me? I was just as well without you.”—But, during a long period of thirty years, in which I was either with, or in correspondence with her, I had good reason for believingthat I had been of much service to her, both as respected her health and her affairs—indeed I may say, without presumption, of greater service than any other person. This was felt by everybody around her; and throughout all her dilemmas and illnesses, the constant cry was—“My lady, you must send for the doctor: there is nobody suits you or understands your constitution so well as he does.” That I was devotedly attached to her, the best part of a life spent in her service will sufficiently testify; but I was now grown too old and infirm to be equal to the task of meeting her constant calls on my time and my energies: I had become nervous. Doctor C., an Englishman, had fled from her dwelling, fearing to be poisoned by her villanous servants; yet I had much greater reason to apprehend such a fate than he had: for the cook (who dressed my family dinner every day,) was the particular object of Lady Hester’s suspicions in what regarded the enormous waste of stores; and, although not entertaining the same suspicions myself, (from having had him once as my own servant, and having kept my eye upon him for some years, and from knowing also that there were worse depredators living in the house;) still, as she directed her daily attacks against him, and even said I suffered him to rob her by the forbearance I showed in not having him chastised, I was worked up, on manyoccasions, into a state of excitement against him that carried me beyond all restraint, and necessarily made me hateful in his eyes, inasmuch as he considered me the principal hindrance to his peculations. I had rated him in unmeasured terms for his rascality, and the hot-blooded children of the East do not easily forget or forgive such language. All this anxiety could not render a man gay, and I wasted away visibly to the eye. I had nobody to confide in; for I studiously concealed all these vexations from my family, and endeavoured to put on a cheerful air before them, when my mind was far from being tranquil. Can it be wondered at, therefore, if I looked to Europe with a longing desire of returning thither?
But the prince had said, “You will not surely leave her whilst she isso ill:” and I was constantly reiterating to myself, “How can I leave her whilst she isso poor?” Her embarrassed circumstances, now that my stay with her could be considered as disinterested, seemed to be an insuperable barrier to my departure. Had she been rich, I need not have used any ceremony: the state of my health, now that hers was somewhat improved, would have been a sufficient plea: but she was known to be short of money and beset with creditors; and to leave her would seem to be the result of a mercenary calculation. Under all these circumstances, I held my peace, and was resolved toremain, as long as I thought my presence could be either useful or consolatory to her.
The first subject of conversation to-day was this very cook’s peculations: “What am I to do?” said Lady Hester; “if nobody will help me, I’ll go myself, and stand from morning to night in the kitchen, and see everything come and go. Here am I ruined, because those about me are so proud and so particular about their dignity that they can’t put their heads into a kitchen. I presume your father was not better than Mr. Cooper of Sevenoaks; and, if he had had a son, a doctor, I’ll venture to say he would not have been so mighty fine.” Here her thoughts were luckily carried away from the vile cook to Mr. Cooper, and she went on: “What beautiful teams of gray horses Mr. Cooper had! There was a boy, who used to ride on one of the dray-horses dressed in green; a little fellow, who, having seen the Prince of Wales drive through Sevenoaks, going somewhere, set off by himself one fine day for London, found out where the Prince lived, and went and knocked at the gate of Carlton House. The porter was a giant, and wanted to know what the boy knocked so loudly for: he said he had something to say to the Prince of Wales. The porter called him an impudent little scoundrel, and told him to go about his business; but the boy would not go, and the fight between the giant andthis Tom Thumb made a sort of an uproar: upon which the Prince, who was at dinner, inquired what was the matter, and desired that the young urchin might be brought in; who, nothing abashed, being asked what he wanted, said that, having seen the Prince’s fine servants go along the road, he had come to London to be one of them; the Prince said very well, and sent him to the stables. Doctor, he became an excellent groom, and was afterwards for many years one of his best coachmen.”
This anecdote seemed to have tranquillized Lady Hester’s mind, as was generally the case when she talked about old times. She proposed that I should read a little of Lady Charlotte Bury’s novel, the “Memoirs of a Peeress.” After listening to a few pages, at the mention of some incident, interrupting me, she said:—“Ah! that was Lady B., who placed a cast of the statue of Antinous amidst myrtle-pots in a vestibule of her house: she had ten times more cleverness than her sister the duchess. The duchess’s reputation was, in great part, the effect of her position: for fine horses, fine carriages, and thatéclàtthat attends a great personage wherever she goes, made up the greatest part of it. Why, she sometimes would employ her own people to puff her off. You would see a man in a shop in Bond Street say to the people of the shop—‘Whose fine carriage is that yonder?’—‘That’sthe Duchess of **********’s, sir,’ the shopman would reply. Then another man, pretending to be a stranger to the first, would cry out, ‘Good God!—the Duchess of **********; do let me look: I would give more to get a sight of her grace than I would of the king.—Pray, excuse me; I shall be back in a moment;’—and off he would run.
“The Duchess of **********, when she did not smile, had something satanic in her countenance. Then her affectation was so high charged. No matter to whom—to a dirty clerk of the Foreign Office—she would say, ‘If you would be so very good, sir, just to give yourself the trouble to deliver this note—I am sure you are so kind a looking gentleman.’ And then she would speak in French to whoever was with her—‘Quels beaux yeux! ne le trouvez vous pas? C’est un bel homme, n’est ce pas?’ just as if the clerks in the Foreign Office might not know French.”
Wednesday, May 2, 1839.—To-day, as was usual on Wednesdays, I did not see Lady Hester until after sunset; but dinner was scarcely over, when came the accustomed message of “The Syt will be glad to see you as soon as you are at liberty?” She could not bear to be alone: and I was, therefore, summoned that she might have somebody to talk to. She made inquiries whether the dinner had been to ourliking; whether the tartlets and bread-pudding were well cooked; and, on such occasions, I always knew she had been lecturing the cook about his negligence, and answered accordingly, anxious, if possible, to avoid the broils which kept the house in a continual uproar; but I seldom succeeded in averting them entirely; for, after having manifested her anxiety about my family’s comfort, she would begin about her own, with—“Thus it is: I am obliged to look after everybody’s dinner, and am left to starve myself.” She then launched out into her customary complaints, and told me how she had contrived the means of at last bringing her maids down; for she had ordered a thing to be made like a clothes’ horse, which was to stand in her room with a sheet hanging over it, behind which the maids were to take turns to wait alternately, hour by hour, that she might be sure she had them within call: “for,” said she, “if they will not move fast enough when I ring, I’m determined I’ll keep them on their legs, one or the other, all day; and I have told them I put them behind a screen that I may not see their ugly faces. That beast, Sâada, scratches herself before me, just like an Italian or a Frenchman: I have never been used to such behaviour in servants, and will not bear it.
“When I recollect how differently servants conduct themselves in England! There was the groom of thechamber at Mr. Pitt’s—I don’t think I ever held half an hour’s conversation with him the whole time he was there; he was, however, a man with quite a distinguished look, and ten times more of a gentleman than half those who call themselves so. He came in, delivered a note or a message with a proper air; and, if I had one to send anywhere, I threw it along the table to the end, so,” (and here Lady Hester put on one of those—what shall I call them?—queen-like airs, which she was fond of assuming)—“or else gave it into his hand, telling him, or not telling him—for he could see by looking at it—where it was to go. Do you think servants ever dared to smile, or scratch themselves, or seem to notice anything, as these beasts do? He afterwards married one of the maids, and took Thomas’s, or some such named, hotel, where he was well patronized by the great.
“Servants work twice as hard in England as they do here. Why, there was the boy of twelve or thirteen years old that used to go to Sevenoaks to fetch papa’s letters. Every day but one in the week did that boy ride backward and forward; and sometimes I have seen him lifted off his horse, with his fingers so benumbed that he could not even ring the bell; and his face and hands were rubbed with snow, and he was walked about for a quarter of an hour before he was allowed to go into the servants’ hall. There was theshepherd’s daughter, who would take up a sheep over her shoulders, and carry it like a nothing; ay, and whilst it was struggling, too, pretty stoutly, I can tell you. Then the washerwomen, who used to begin on Monday morning half an hour after midnight, and work all through the day and the next night until eleven or twelve, without ever sitting down, except to their meals:—there was hard work! Here they have their sleep in the middle of the day, and will not eat or drink when they are warm, for fear of getting the lampas.”
Thursday, May 3.—I read a few more pages of Lady Charlotte Bury’s novel. The Duchess of Rochester was now set down as Lady J. “Those girls of hers,” observed Lady Hester, “were brought up so prim. I recollect seeing three of them sitting together in a box at the Opera, and nothing could be more beautiful. They had charming countenances, with fine eyes, very good teeth, and complexions quite ravishing; but none of them were remarkably clever.”
The narrative comes to where Mrs. Fitzirnham regrets how she was taking her pleasure, and putting her husband to the expense of hiring a country-house for her, when she should have been at home saving his money. “Ah!” said Lady Hester, “she should have been making his shirts;” and this text afforded her an opportunity of pronouncing an encomium onLady Mahon,[18]her brother’s wife. “She had,” said Lady Hester, “one good point about her, that, after her marriage, whilst my brother was poor, she was not extravagant:” then, reverting to other branches of her family, she dwelt for some time on the merits and demerits of them all, until she came round again to her brother and to his father-in-law. “Yes,” she said, “giving Lord Carrington a peerage was one of Mr. Pitt’s errors. I once asked Mr. Pitt if he did not repent of making so many peers; and he answered, if he had to go over his time again, he never would; ‘Age, Hester,’ said he, ‘brings experience.’ But he was in such a situation, that, to prevent a revolution in England, or to hinder England from becoming a province of France, he was obliged to patch up things as he could. He was like an ambassador, going in ill-health to some distant court on a mission of importance, and who would say to his physician, ‘You must patch me up in the best way you can for this journey; so that I get to the end of it, never mind what becomes of me.’ England at that time was not like France: the latter was obliged to go through a salivation; the former only wanted a dose of physic. Besides, fancy, what a revolution would have been in England. I have seen what an English mob is at an election:they are the most horrid set I have ever beheld: a word will lead them any way; and as for reason, they will never listen to it. But there, doctor, go on with the book: it interests me, when I think who wrote it, and what we are both come to.”
I read on, until we came to where mention is made of a footman’s nosegay on a levée day. Upon this, Lady Hester remarked, “My footman always used to give a guinea for his on the Queen’s birthday. When you consider,” she added, “what those footmen spent in nosegays and silk stockings, and bags, and shoe-buckles, it was a pretty round sum. As for the fine ladies who make such a show in the fashionable world, I have known some of them borrow five guineas of their footmen. I sometimes went down to Putney, and shut myself up not to be seen, that I might not spend all my money on rich dresses; but I saved it for other purposes, to give away to poor people.”
As the work proceeded, I came to the account of Fitzirnham’s sufferings and his approaching dissolution: she told me to skip all that—“I don’t wish to hear it,” she said; “it is too melancholy.” Alas! I felt it applied to Mr. Pitt’s and to her own situation too much not to give her pain: so, shutting the book, I tried to converse on some other subject, but her thoughts still reverted to what I had been reading about. At last she broke out in these words:“Poor Mr. Pitt! one of the nourishing things they gave him before his death was the yolk of an egg beat up so thick with pounded sugar that it was quite stiff: ‘I wonder,’ said the footman who prepared it for him, ‘that they persist in giving him the egg; for he brings it up every time.’” Lady Hester went on:—“Mr. Pitt died in the night, doctor.[19]Dr. Bailey acquainted me with his impending death the day before: Sir Walter Farquhar kept saying to the last that I need not afflict myself—always giving me hopes.The carriages had been waiting at the door, ready for a long time: as soon as all was over, Williams and James,” (her brother) “set off for Downing Street, and sealed up everything. Miss Williams then took just what clothes she wanted for me, and they both returned to Putney, bringing with them Mr. Adams, Mr. Pitt’s secretary, whom they called up at his house in Queen Street, Westminster. On their way back they met the doctors going to town.”
I happened to observe that I had read an account of Mr. Pitt’s last moments in Gifford’s Life of him, and that his dying words, praying for forgiveness through the merits of his Redeemer, or words to that effect, together with the whole scene of his death-bed, appeared, as I thought, too much made up, and too formal to be true: leaving the impression that the author, and those from whom he gathered his information, had considered it a duty to make the close of a great man’s life conformable to their religious feelings rather than to facts and reality.[20]“Who is it that says it of him?” asked Lady Hester. “Dr. Prettymanand Sir Walter Farquhar.”—“Oh! it’s all a lie,” she replied, rather indignantly:—“Dr. Prettyman was fast asleep when Mr. Pitt died: Sir Walter Farquhar was not there; and nobody was present but James. I was the last person who saw him except James, and I left him about eight o’clock, for I saw him struggling as if he wanted to speak, and I did not like to make him worse.” After a short pause, she resumed:—“What should Mr. Pitt make such a speech for, who never went to church in his life? Nothing prevented his going to church when he was at Walmer: but he never even talked about religion, and never brought it upon the carpet.
“When I think of poor Mr. Pitt, I am the more and more persuaded that the greater part of mankind are not worth the kindness we bestow on them. Never did so pure an angel enter upon life as he: but, good God! when he died, had he had to begin the world again, he would have acted in a very different manner. The baseness and ingratitude that he found in mankind were inconceivable. All the peers that he had made deserted him, and half those he had served returned his kindness by going over to his enemies.
“Then see, doctor, what fortune and luck are!Mr. Pitt, during his life spent in his country’s service, could seldom get a gleam of success to cheer him, whilst a Liverpool and a Castlereagh have triumphs fall upon them in showers. Oh! it makes me sick to think that Mr. Pitt should have died through hard labour for his country; that Lord Melville, so hearty as he was, should almost have sunk under it, and should have had nothing but difficulties and disappointments; whilst such fellows as H. and C., who do not care if the country were ruined, provided they kept their places, should have nothing but good fortune attend them, as if it was the effect of their stupid measures. But, not contented with that, they must even bring discredit on his memory by attributing to him a line of conduct he never pursued. To think of Canning’s going about and saying, ‘This is the glorious system of Pitt;’ and the papers echoing his words—‘this is the glorious system of Pitt!’ Why, when Louis XVIII. came to England, Mr. Pitt would not receive him as King, but only as Count Somebody, (I declare I forget what, it made so slight an impression on me;) and when I used to say to Mr. Pitt, ‘Oh, Lord! what does it signify?—do let him be king if he wants it’—‘No,’ replied Mr. Pitt, ‘I am not fighting to re-establish the Bourbons on the throne: only let the French have some stable government that we can make peace with, that’s all; I am notgoing to sacrifice the interests of my country to the Bourbons, Hester.’”
I quitted her about three o’clock, when she said she was going into the bath, which she did about every third day; no proper place certainly for her in her state of health.
In crossing the courtyard to go to my house, there seemed somehow to be an unusual solitude about the premises. The stories, too, I had been hearing and reading were doleful; so that I became very melancholy for the rest of the day, and could not rally my spirits, do what I would. As I sat in my room, I reflected that, although Lady Hester would probably get through the summer, yet how surely, though slowly, disease was making irreparable inroads on her reduced frame.
May 8.—My fears about the servants now began to revive. Monsieur Guys had made his preparations for his departure, and was going in a few days to Aleppo—he, who knew all her servants, their names, where they had sprung from, and everything about them, and who, had they committed any crime, could have at once traced them to their hiding-places. I felt my loneliness: I had no one to look to, to help me in any great difficulty. I saw, when I returned from a walk, or entered the house unexpectedly, how the older ones were often sitting in close cabal together, and Iheard their whispers, like conspirators laying their heads together for some evil purpose. Why had I not written down more for these last three days? I said to myself, when I saw the scantiness of my memorandums: alas! my mind was ill at ease.
The name of Sir Francis Burdett was often mentioned, and various conjectures formed to account for his long silence. The prince, who had promised to write, where was he got to? Every hope seemed to fail. The prince, when he left Lady Hester Stanhope, had been entrusted with a copy of the correspondence, such as it afterwards appeared in the newspapers, and he had undertaken to make it public: she was therefore in daily expectation of receiving information from him of its transmission to Europe, and through what channel it would appear. But no letter came, and this rendered her fidgety and uneasy; for she conceived it to be of vital importance to her interests that her case should be made known as speedily as possible, hoping, from publicity, to come more speedily at the truth about the property to which she thought herself entitled, and which, she supposed, was withheld from her.
The time meanwhile was beguiled in reading Lady Charlotte Bury’s novel, which, from the remarks and anecdotes it called forth, lasted out much longer than it would with a common reader. In that part of the“Memoirs” where mention is made of the doubts that existed as to the validity of the Duke of Rochester’s will, Lady Hester observed, “A person, who is in the daily habit of writing like another, might easily imitate his signature. Mr. Pitt, when I had written a paper, used to say, ‘Sign it for me,’ and I did; because, when you write quickly, you write like another if you will. It is those who sit down to forge, and make their strokes slowly, that are found out, because there is an uncertainty in what they do.”
Something else called forth another observation: “Oh!” said Lady Hester, “I used very often to tell Mr. Pitt ‘Youare not the grand statesman; it was your father;—you are a little God Almighty sent from Heaven, who are always thinking of the respect due to the king, of complaisance to the peers, and who kill yourself out of compassion:hemade them all tremble.’ Nevertheless, doctor, I know that he thought just as his grandfather did.”
Wednesday, May 9.—I resumed reading at that part where Squire Mordaunt returns to Spetchingly on New-year’s Day. When the narrative comes to Mrs. de Vere’s meeting with Mr. Fox, Lady Hester said, “Fox, I think, was thrown into a position with the Prince and his dissipated friends from which he never afterwards could extricate himself, otherwise he would have been a different man; but, mixed up with them,the king never could bear him: for, when Mr. Pitt took office in 1803, the king wrote to him (for I saw the letter,) ‘Would you force on me Mr. Fox, who debauched my son?’ &c. The last time I saw Mr. Fox, he was at Vauxhall with Mrs. Fox. She was dressed as some respectable housekeeper might be, with a black bonnet and some sort of a gown. I looked at her several times, but I could see nothing like what I should have expected in Mrs. Armstead: there was none of that manner.—” (here Lady Hester made up a kind of courtezan look that conveyed what she meant to say.) “Mr. Fox looked like the landlord of a public-house; yet, when he spoke, doctor, he was sometimes very eloquent. On Mr. Hastings’s trial he made many people cry. There were all the peers with their pocket-handkerchiefs out—quite a tragedy! but he made such a business of it—” (here Lady Hester sat up in bed, and, to show what she meant, threw her arms first to the right and then to the left, and then thumped the bed violently, making me wonder where she had found such strength;)—“he was worse than Punch.”
Sir Walter Scott was mentioned in one place in the novel with great praise. “I’m not sure about Scott,” observed Lady Hester: “he pretended to be a great Pittite, but he was half inclined to go over to Fox. He sent some of his poetry, where he praisedFox, before he published it, to say he would not publish it, if it were displeasing; but I told him he was to do just as he liked, and to let it stand, as it made no difference what he wrote.”
Thursday, May 10.—Lady Hester Stanhope was very low to-day, seemingly exhausted with coughing, when I saw her about one o’clock. She continued to follow her own mode of cure, which now consisted in swallowing the yolks of fresh eggs, sucking oranges by dozens, sipping finjàns of strong coffee with ambergris in it, and drinking small glasses of rum and milk. Her food was of the most objectionable kind. She thought, as many others do, that what are reputed strong viands give strength to the body, without the slightest regard as to whether the stomach could digest and assimilate them so as to afford nourishment. Thus she often had meat pies, eating the meat and jelly, forced meat balls, beef cabóbs, &c.
Shaykh Mohammed Nasýb, a Mograbyn, whom I had sent away on the 19th of April without a present, made his appearance again to-day. He had been to the Emir Beshýr and to other great persons in the mountain, to collect a hundred piasters or two here and there, a practice common with these shaykhs versed in the Mahometan religion and in the commentaries on the Alcoran. They go from palace to palace, are lodged and fed for a night or two, discoursewith the great man once or twice a day, if he is at liberty, and repay the hospitality they receive either by their learning, or by their skill as alchymists, or as astrologers, or by the news they bring from the cities they have passed through, and of the great men they have seen: for they find admission everywhere.
The dervises are another set of visitors, very frequent in the houses of the rich. They are the mendicant friars of the East, itinerant monks, whose pretensions to sanctity are heightened by a strange costume. Some of them—for they are of different orders—let their hair and beards grow long and hang dishevelled, and wear black and shaggy sheep or bear or tiger skins. By their side hang a score of strange-looking implements—a carved cup in wood, a back-scratcher, to facilitate the chase after vermin in parts where their hands cannot easily reach, a pottle for water, a bullock’s horn, or a conch shell to blow instead of it, long rosaries of immense beads, an ostrich’s egg—God knows what! They are all impudent, intrusive beggars, and are well known and appreciated in the East as the Franciscans, Capuchins, and other friars, are in the West, who are but the humble imitators of their more audacious, and, let me say, cleverer prototypes.
It was on a winter’s day that one of these people,being refused a night’s lodging and a bakshysh at Lady Hester’s, invoked a curse on the house and its inmates. He took his horn from his side, blew three or four blasts, and uttered some imprecations which were unintelligible to me. The whole scene was a picture. He was a dervise of the order called Bektashy, daring and fearless as men are who know that none will venture to lay hands on them, athletic, with raven locks of disproportionate thickness and length, and clad in as wild-looking garments as the imagination of a stage-manager could invent for Caliban, or some such monster. His large, rolling eye, his features darkened by a weather-beaten existence, his white teeth, his shaggy and hairy breast, his naked feet and legs, and his strange accoutrements, made him altogether a remarkable being. The wind blew high at the time, the rain swept up through the valley from the sea in a white sheet, as the squalls every now and then succeeded each other; and there he stood, under the cover of a dilapidated building, which those who have visited Dar Jôon may recollect as being near the entrance gate. He had been fed with a good dinner—for nobody ever came without having something to eat put before him—but he had heard that other dervises had left the house with fifty, a hundred, nay, even two hundred piasters, and he expected to force a compliance with his demands forhimself. It must not be imagined that the servants beheld this action of his, and heard his anathema, with the same indifference that I did: they looked gloomy and apprehensive. It so happened that some pewits, or green plovers, had appeared in the mountain and in our neighbourhood just about the same time. The melancholy cry of these birds, as they are not common in Syria, is considered of bad augury by the Turks. It was in the month when Lady Hester was in the worst stage of her illness; and they coupled these things together, and drew from them unfavourable omens. But Lady Hester had said to me—“Keep away, if you can, all those shaykhs and dervises; it will only torment me to know they are there, for I can’t see them. I have no money to give them, and they are too cunning to trust their news and information, if they have any to give, to anybody but me.” I was determined, therefore, to send him off; the more so, as I did not like his physiognomy, and as the village was close at hand, where he would find a night’s lodging in the khan or caravansery.
But let us return to the Mograbyn shaykh. When I told him that Lady Hester was ill, and could see nobody, he said, if I would but let her know who he was, he was sure she would receive him: that he had several times had the honour of an audience, and thather Felicity had expressed herself so pleased with his conversation as once to have engaged him to quit Zyb, where he lived, and to come and settle at Jôon with his family. I therefore represented this to her ladyship, but she refused to see him. The circumstance, however, gave rise to the following conversation:—
“People,” said she, “never should be sent away who show a very great earnestness to be admitted; for, although many times they might be but beggars, sometimes it was not so. When my grandfather was ill, a man on horseback came to the door and insisted on seeing him. My grandmamma presented herself, and asked him what was his business, telling him Lord Chatham was so ill that he could receive nobody. The man signified that nothing would do, but he must see Lord Chatham himself. After ineffectually trying to induce him to disclose his business, grandmamma Chatham at last admitted him into my grandfather’s room, but behind a screen, so that they were still invisible to each other. ‘That will not do,’ observed the persevering man; ‘I must see your lordship’s face, and be sure it is you.’ The screen being removed, and the man assured of whom he was speaking to, drew out a tin case, containing the will of Sir Something Pynsent, leaving my grandfather two estates, one in Wiltshire, of £4,000 a year, and the other, Burton Pynsent, of £10,000; his will only sayinghe had done it in admiration of his character. The Wiltshire estate was sold immediately, and the money frittered away (as I heard from Mr. Wilson, the tutor) nobody knows how. Of the pictures my grandfather only reserved two, the portraits of the Marquis of Granby and of Admiral Saunders, to give to the corporation of Plymouth. Of the rest, which were old family pictures, like Lady Cobham, &c., he took no notice whatever.”[21]
Thursday, May 11.—I read to Lady Hester for three hours out of the “Memoirs of a Peeress.” As she lay on her bed, pale, wan, and exhausted, she looked like a person in the last stage of illness; but, as the day advanced, she generally grew more animated. She made few remarks. The Duchess of Rochester now was become the Marchioness of T*******. The “jokes of Stowe,” as alluded to in the Memoirs, she exemplified in this way: “One morning, whilst General Grenville was staying there, there came a letter, with his address on the cover, and ‘Montrose’ in the corner. The general, not being intimate with the duke, said—‘What’s this? let’s see: what canmake the duke write to me?’ On opening the letter, out came about fifty fleas, all jumping up to his face. The general’s extreme aversion to fleas was well known: he was so angry at this that he ordered a postchaise, and never would go to Stowe again. On Lord Glastonbury they played a joke of another sort: they put a paragraph in the papers, with initials and other indications, that he had run off to Gretna Green. His aversion to women and to marriage was as great as the general’s aversion to fleas.”
As I read on, the old squire’s death affected Lady Hester. “How rare is such a character now!” said she: “I recollect some in my time. There was Sir John Dyke, who was an excellent man, but careless in his affairs, and perhaps ruined by this time. But such men, when you get over the first two or three days, in which a few expressions may be strange in their conversation, become afterwards most agreeable society, and have much sterling worth. They are men who know something, and have real straitforwardness of character: I always liked them.”
In another place she said—“Doctor, when you reflect on this book, don’t you see the wide difference there is between refined people and vulgar ones? There is Lady Isabella and Lady Helen, with a tyrannical and unkind mother—see how obedient and submissive they are; and, I dare say, though thedaughters of a duchess, had she put them to do the most menial offices, they would have done them; but vulgar people are always fancying themselves affronted, and their pride is hurt, and they are afraid of being lowered, and God knows what. You will think it a strange thing to say, but it is my opinion that the vices of high-born people are better than the virtues of low-born ones. By low-born I do not mean poor people; for there are many without a sixpence who have high sentiments. It is that, among the low-born, there is no spring of action that is good, even in their virtues. If they are laborious and industrious, it is for gain, not for the love of labour; if they are learned, it is from pedantry; if they are charitable, it is from ostentation; if religious, from hypocrisy; if studious of health, it is to gratify their gormandizing; and so on. I repeat it again—the vices of the great are preferable to the virtues of such persons. Those of them that rise in the world always show their base origin: for if you kill a chicken and pick the feathers, they may fly up into the air for a time, but they fall down again upon the dunghill. The good or bad race must peep out. God created certain races from the beginning; and, although the pure may be crossed, and the cart-horse be taken out of the cart and put to the saddle, their foals will always show their good or bad blood. High descent always shows itself, and lowalways will peep out. I never have known above two or three persons of common origin who had not something vulgar about them.”
It was curious to hear how she would quote the opinion of the commonest persons as affirmative of her notions in this respect. “A peasant told me, one day,” said Lady Hester, in a conversation on this subject, “that he had met Captain —— on the road, in his way to some part of the mountain; and I asked him what he thought of him. ‘Why,’ replied the man, ‘there is something of good blood about him, and something that is not: he is half thorough-bred and halfkedýsh:’” (The reader has already been told thatkedýshesare horses of no pedigree, used by shopkeepers and pedlars for the road:) “and the man was right,” added Lady Hester. “But, only think, what quickness of observation these people have: you cannot deceive them; for, at a glance, they discover at once what a man is. The girls, too, said Captain —— is not quiteakâber:” (akâber means distinguished in appearance) “he has a third part of a bad breed in him: and they were right as well as the peasant; for his mother was a Miss ——, because his father, disappointed in marrying Miss ——, whom Lord O—— danced with at a ball and married the next day, went and married a young lady well brought up, but not thorough bred. He took his marines to the EmirBeshýr on horseback; horse marines, doctor!—and the natives to this day talk with astonishment of the calves of the legs of one of the officers who was with him.
“Did you ever know a better proof again how high descent will show itself than in what I believe I told you about Count Rewisky? When coming to see me from Beyrout, he was met by a common shepherd, of whom he asked the road to Sayda. The count was dressed like a Bedouin Arab, and was mounted on a shabby mare, of good blood, it is true, but to all appearance not worth a hundred piasters. The shepherd, looking at him, replied, ‘Sir, you don’t want to go to Sayda; it is the way to Jôon you want to know. You are going to see the Englishmeleky’ (queen); ‘for a man of your rank is fitting only to be her guest.’ This was exactly the case; he was coming to see me; and, mean and poor as his appearance was, the peasant detected his noble blood at a glance.
“That noble-minded man, doctor, was a perfect convert to my opinions. He assured me that I had appeared to him at different times, and once in particular he told me the following story. He had been in conversation with the Emperor Alexander on a state affair of great importance, and the Emperor had tried to induce him to do something which the Count felt was the course he ought not to pursue as a man of integrity, and he begged to be allowed some little timefor consideration before he acceded to the Emperor’s wishes. Alexander dismissed him, hoping that, by the next day, when he would see him again, the Count would recollect himself, and who he (the Emperor) was. Count Rewisky, fretted almost to death, between the ruin he might bring on his family, if he opposed the Emperor’s wishes, together with the prospect of Siberia, and the stings of conscience, still wanted resolution to follow the path of virtue. But at night, when he was in bed, I, as he told me, appeared to him with a star on my forehead, and said to him—‘Count, follow the road which conscience shows you is the right one, and fear nothing.’ The next day, the Count presented himself at the Emperor’s closet.—‘Who is that?’ said a voice from within, and Alexander himself opened the door. He started, when he saw the Count. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I trust you have got a little sense into your head since yesterday: you have changed your mind, no doubt.’—‘My mind, sire, remains unchanged,’ said the Count.... ‘What a fine black horse that was I saw you riding two or three days ago—such a beautiful creature!’ cried the Emperor, turning the conversation suddenly; and he never after mentioned the subject to the Count.”
Sunday, May 13.—I did not see Lady Hester until three o’clock in the afternoon. “Read to me,” she said, almost as soon as I had sat down, “for I amtoo exhausted to talk.” I began, in the “Memoirs of a Peeress,” at the chapter succeeding the burial of the squire, and she listened for some time without saying a word. At last she interrupted me, and observed that there was a great deal of good feeling in the book. “If I were rich enough,” she continued, “I would invite Lady Charlotte here—and she would come, for she has children, and would like to show them the East. How pleasant it would be for me to have such a companion for two or three hours a day! What a beautiful woman she was! what an arm and hand! I have seen the whole Opera-House turn to look at it on the front of the box. What a beautiful leg, too!—but the handsomest foot I ever saw in man or woman was Lord Down’s. The last time I ever met Lady Charlotte was walking with her brother in Kensington Gardens: she walked so well!—not mincing, like some women, nor striding, like others, but with a perfect use of her limbs, unaffected and graceful. The duke, too, was like her in that respect: his smile was incomparably sweet. I don’t know where they were going; but they walked up to a party, seemed to talk and inquire about somebody, and then walked away together. Her features were equally charming with her person—with hair notketeety” (the Arabic for hempy), “but approaching to a gold colour, and with a beautiful nose.”
The narrative proceeded to the remarks made on the Empress Josephine. “There, you see,” exclaimed Lady Hester, interrupting me, “was I right about Josephine? As soon as I saw that print of her, which you sent me, I saw at once she was artful beyond measure: I told you so, you know, some time ago. There are two or three lines about her face that make me think she was satanic: as for being handsome, that she never could have been. But Buonaparte, whatever Lady Charlotte may think, had naturally something vulgar in his composition. He took a little from Ossian, a little from Cæsar, a little from this book, a little from that, and made up a something that was a good imitation of a great man; but he was not in himself naturally great. As for killing the Duke d’Enghein, if he had killed all the Bourbons for the good of France, I should say nothing to that; but he had not much feeling. Whenever he laments anybody, it is always for his own sake that he does it. I don’t understand, either, a great man making complaints about the room he slept in not being good enough for him, or complaining of his champagne: I dare say he had slept in many a worse. Had I been in his place, you would have seen how differently I should have acted, and that such a man as Sir Hudson Lowe should never have seen that he could have the power of vexing me. He was notwhat I call a man of genius: a man of considerable talent he certainly was. A man of genius is like a fine diamond: what I understand by a fine diamond is one resembling a large drop of water—smooth and even on every side, so that, whichever way you look at it, there is a blaze of light that seems as if it would spread as you gaze on it. However, men of genius have seldom a look that would tell you they are so; for what a heavy-looking man Mr. Fox was! did you ever see him? Mr. Pitt, again, had nothing remarkable in his appearance; Mr. Pitt’s was not a face that gave one the idea of a clever man. As he walked through the park, you would have taken him for a poet, or some such person, thin, tall, and rather awkward; looking upwards as if his ideas wereen air, and not remarking what was passing around him: there was no expression in him at such a moment. It was my grandfather who had the fine look. The best picture of him is that at Chevening: he is represented in his robes. The colour and fire in his eyes altogether is very fine. Georgio pleased me, when (on his return from England) he said, ‘Your face, my lady, is just like your grandpapa’s:’ for the forehead, and the upper part of the nose, and the contour of the countenance, I know are the same.”
As I read on about Mr. Fox’s illness and death, Lady Hester lay absorbed in her reflections almost asif in a trance. Her pipe fell from her hands, and the bowl of it, turning downwards, emptied its lighted contents on the blanket of her bed. I had not observed this at first, until the smell of burning made me look up, and I rose to knock off the tobacco on the floor. A great round hole had been burnt; but this was a common occurrence, and she never or seldom noticed such accidents: my rising, however, disturbed her from her reverie, and she spoke as follows:—[22]
“Mr. Fox, after Mr. Pitt’s death, sent two distinct messages to me, offering me the means of securing an independence for life. One was by Mr. Ward, who said plainly to me—‘You know, Lady Hester, you can never live, with your present income, as youhave been accustomed to live; and, therefore, take my advice, and accept Mr. Fox’s civility.’ I told him that it was not from a personal disregard for Mr. Fox that I refused; because, when I asked Mr. Pitt, upon one occasion, who was the cleverest man in England, he answered, ‘Mr. Fox:’ but, as the world only knew Mr. Pitt and Mr. Fox as opposed to each other, I should be considered as receiving benefits from Mr. Pitt’s enemy. ‘You will live to repent your refusal,’ said Mr. Ward. I answered him that might be, but if he talked for a year, he never would alter my resolution.”
Lady Hester went on:—“Mr. Fox’s offer, doctor, was as good as ten thousand pounds a year to me. He was to make me ranger of some park, with a house; and then I was to have a house in town, and the rest was to be done in the way they shuffle those things through the public offices.
“By the other, I was offered apartments in” (I think she said) “Windsor Castle: but then, you know, I must have been a courtier; and I rather chose to live independent, on account of my two brothers. And why did I take that house in Mountague Square” (she always called it Mountague Square), “but on their account! When I furnished it, I had got some things which I had saved up, and which were of no use in Downing Street: these I made useof now; but there were people so mean as to come and spy about me, and to form unfair conjectures as to how I got them. —— was one, who even went to a large shop, and, from a kind of pencil drawing which he had made, inquired how much such a lamp as he had seen at my house would cost. They told him seventy-five guineas. This lamp had been given me by the Princess of Wales; but I never satisfied their malignity by telling them: I let them talk on. And, doctor, furnishing my house was no trifling expense to me. But I thought it best that my brothers should have somewhere to invite their friends to when in town; and I fitted up two bed-rooms and two breakfast-rooms for them with every luxury they could have. Neither were they furnished in a common way; for there were their libraries to each, and everything customary in fashionable life. Why, James used to have quite a levée; and breakfast was always on table from nine to twelve, with tea and coffee, and chicken, and tongue, and cold meat, and all that. Nash often used to say to me, ‘Lord, my lady, it is a great pity to make all this waste: I am sure many of those officers make their dinner off the colonel’s late breakfasts.’ But I used to answer, ‘Never mind;’ because I thought some of those men, although they were people I could not know, might be useful to him. He might want a second, or there might be some other case, where one of these personsmight be sent when another could not, and so on. I do not say I could not know them, from pride; but it would have been very awkward for me to have had a red-faced captain coming up to me with, ‘My dear Lady Hester, how do you do?’ Why, I recollect a very respectable gentleman coming once into a box at the Opera, where I was seated with some duchess and some great folks, I forget who, and claiming acquaintance with me. I very civilly answered him with, ‘I hope you are well, Mr. T——, how are all your friends in Cheshire?’ But, doctor, to hear the tittering and the whispers of—‘Who is your dear friend, Lady Hester?—really, the cut of his breeches is particularly excellent!’ and another, in a simpering voice, asking, ‘What on earth did the man wear so many watches for?’ and then some one crying, ‘Oh! they are the buttons of his coat;’ and then a laugh, so that even I could hardly stand it.
“So, doctor, what I did for James and Charles was to let them have a place to see their acquaintances; and I every now and then gave a dinner, to keep together for them a certain number of Mr. Pitt’s particular friends. And then, in the summer, I would go down to some retired spot in Wales, or somewhere, where I saved as much as I could.[23]
“But,” she continued, “would you believe it? all the time I kept house in Mountague Square, not one of these people, not one of my relations, ever sent me a single thing to help me on. Ah! now and then a sea-captain would offer me a pipe of wine: but I always put him civilly off with a ‘Not now, but when you return from India,’ or some such answer. And, from that time to this, these same relations would, I believe, have let me starve, for aught they cared.
“You often wonder why I scold and scold, and try to make you bring up your children to be useful to themselves and others, and neglect all frivolous and empty appearances: but the reason is that the world is so heartless, that if you came to want a shilling, you would not find a friend to give you one. If I,who had thousands of friends and acquaintances, have been left to linger here, deserted and neglected, what would be the lot of a common person? Has any one of my relations, any one of my friends, any one of those whom Mr. Pitt, and perhaps I, enriched, come forward to help me?—not one.
“I have had a hard time for five-and-twenty years; but you will never see me now in some of those convulsions about it I once used to have: for, thank God, my spirits are as good, when my cough leaves me quiet, as ever they were. And what is the use of trusting in man? No; my reliance is in God; and, if it is his will to get me out of my difficulties, he will do it in spite of them all. My only trouble is sometimes about my debts: but I think all will be paid, and from England too. So here I am, and we will now talk of something else: but I must first tell you a little Eastern story.
“There was a man who lived in affluence at Damascus, surrounded by a happy and prosperous family, when some reverses in business ruined his fortune, and he was reduced to the necessity of exerting his talents and industry in order to try to maintain his station in life. As he wanted neither, he flattered himself that, from his numerous connexions, he should soon re-establish his affairs: but a fatality seemed to hang over him; for, just as he was aboutto begin business again, the plague broke out in the city, and his wife and daughters were among the victims.
“Unable to bear the sight of a place where such afflictions had overtaken him, he removed to Beyrout, a seaport of some consequence even at that time, although much more so now, and there, with his son and a faithful servant, he opened a small shop, stocked with such wares as he could procure without much advance of capital. But here again he was unsuccessful; for, his son becoming answerable for the debts of a man who had befriended him, and being unable to pay, his father’s little all was disposed of to save him from prison, and by degrees beggary overtook them. He then engaged himself as clerk to a merchant, next turned schoolmaster, until his sight failing him, he at last became stone-blind, and, in despair, he resolved to quit a country, where, in spite of his exertions, his position every day had grown worse and worse.
“Accordingly, he embarked with his son for Damietta in a vessel where there were fourteen passengers besides himself, and among them two divers, people who get a living on these coasts by diving for sponges, which they bring up from the bottom of the sea. It was the winter season, and the weather proved tempestuous. In crossing the bar of Damietta, where thecurrent of the Nile, opposed to the waves of the sea, often makes a dangerous surf, the vessel foundered, and every soul perished, except the old man, who, when the others took to the boat, being blind, was unable to shift for himself, and clung to the wreck, from which he was removed the day afterwards.
“Struck with the singular decrees of Providence, that an old blind man should have escaped the dangers of the sea where even divers were drowned, he piously raised his eyes to Heaven and said, ‘I see where my fault has been: I have relied on my own exertions and the help of man, when I should have trusted in God alone. Henceforth I will put my faith in him, and nobody else.’ His peculiar case became known among the merchants of Damietta, and a subscription was made for him; so that, in a few days, he had more money at his disposal than all his friends, and all his exertions, when he looked to them alone, had ever procured for him. His serenity of mind returned: a small but sufficient subsistence was secured to him; and he spent the remainder of his days in pious gratitude to the Almighty, whose wholesome chastisements had brought him to a proper sense of the futility of human plans, unless we confide in his goodness to second our endeavours.”