Chapter VIII (2)

“Spies, as I said before, should never be what are called gentlemen, or have the appearance of such; for, however well they may be paid, somebody else will always pay them better;――unless fortune should throw in your way a man of integrity, who, from loyalty or a love of his country, will adventure everything for the cause he is engaged in: such a man is another sort of a thing!”

February 14.――Being Wednesday, I was, as usual, deprived of the honour of seeing Lady Hester until night; I therefore remained with my family, and, having recovered the lost spoon, which my servant produced out of fear of Hamâady’s examination, pretending to have found it, I took the opportunity of settling his wages and turned him away.

After sunset I waited on her. She was in low spirits. “I am very weak,” said she. “Look at my veins――they did not use to be so: look at my arms, too――mere skin and bone.” She pointed to the state of her room: “See how filthy it is again already,” she observed; “and if I say a word, those wretches seem not to mind me――they snub me, doctor.”

She attempted to dictate the letter she proposed writing to the Duke of Wellington, but was unable. We drank tea. “Do you know,” she said, “when old Malti” (this was the name Mr. Abella, the English agent, was generally designated by) “came in such a hurry, the other day, with Colonel Campbell’s letter, and made such a fuss about delivering it with his own hand, people fancied I was going to die, and that he was come up to seal my effects the moment the breath should be out of my body. But, if I do die, they sha’n’t seal anything of mine, I’ll take care of that; for I am no longer an English subject, and therefore they have nothing to do with me.”

Again she asked me to take my pen and paper, and returned to the Duke of Wellington’s letter. “I can’t collect my ideas,” she said: “one while I am thinking of what Mr. Pitt said of him; then of the letter he wrote when invited down to the country ball; then of what he is now: so put down your paper, and ring for a pipe. The duke is a man self-taught, for he was always in dissipation. I recollect, one day, Mr. Pitt came into the drawing-room to me――‘Oh!’ said he, ‘how I have been bored by Sir Sydney coming with his box full of papers, and keeping me for a couple of hours, when I had so much to do!’ I observed to him that heroes were generally vain: ‘Lord Nelson is so.’ ‘So he is,’ replied Mr. Pitt; ‘but not like Sir Sydney: and how different is Arthur Wellesley, who has just quitted me! He has given me details so clear upon affairs in India! and he talked of them, too, as if he had been a surgeon of a regiment, and had nothing to do with them; so that I know not which to admire most, his modesty or his talents: and yet the fate of India depends upon them.’ Then, doctor, when I recollect the letter he wrote to Edward Bouverie, in which he said that he could not come down to the ball which Bouverie had invited him to, for that his only corbeau coat was so bad he was ashamed to appear in it, I reflect what a rise he has had in the world. Bouverie said――‘You would like to dance with him amazingly, Lady Hester: he is a good fellow.’

“He was at first, doctor, nothing but what hundreds of others are in a country town――a man who danced, and drank hard. His star has done every thing for him; for he is not a great general.[32] He is no tactician, nor has he any of those great qualities that make a Cæsar, or a Pompey, or even a Buonaparte. As for the battle of Waterloo, both French and English have told me that it was a lucky battle for him, but nothing more. I don’t think he acted well at Paris: nor did the soldiers like him.”

Thursday, February 15.――This morning, the letter to the Duke of Wellington was written.

* * * * *

_Lady Hester Stanhope to the Duke of Wellington._

Jôon, February 13, 1838.

My dear Duke,

If you merit but half the feeling and eloquent praise I
heard bestowed upon you shortly before I saw you for the
first time, you are the last man in the world either to be
offended or to misconstrue my motives in writing to you upon
the subject in question, or not to know how to account for
the warmth of the expressions I may make use of, which are
only characteristic of my disposition.

Your Grace’s long residence in the East will have taught you
that there is no common rate character in England an
adequate judge what manner of living best answers among a
semi-barbarous people, and how little possible it is to
measure one’s expenses where frequent revolutions and petty
wars are carried on without any provision for the sufferers,
from its being considered the duty of every one to assist
them as his humanity may dictate or as his circumstances may
afford.

Acre besieged for seven months! some days, 7,000 balls
thrown in in twenty-four hours!――at last, taken by storm,
and little more than 200 of the garrison remaining!――then
the wretched inhabitants, who expected to find succour from
their old friends in the country, finding their backs turned
upon them in the dread and awe they stood in of Ibrahim
Pasha; nay, it is very strange to say that the Franks
likewise held back in a most extraordinary manner.
Therefore, these unhappy people had no resource but in me,
and I did the best I could for them all. Mahomet Ali,
Ibrahim Pasha, Sheriff Pasha, all set at me at once, in
order to make me give up certain persons, who immediately
would have lost their heads for having fought well in the
cause which they were engaged in. I opposed them all round
single-handed, and said that I neither protected these
persons in the English or French name, but in my own, as a
poor Arab, who would not give up an unhappy being but with
his own life; that there was no other chance of making me
bend by any other means than by attempting mine. In this
manner I saved some unfortunate beings, whom I got rid of by
degrees, by sending them back to their own country, or
providing for them at a distance in some way or another. Can
you, as a soldier, blame me for what I have done? I should
have acted in the same way before your eyes to the victims
of your own sword. Then the host of orphans, and widows, and
little children, who, to feed or clothe for nearly two
years, took away all the ready money with which I ought in
part to have paid my debts, and caused new ones!――yet I am
no swindler, and will not appear like one. Your Queen had no
business to meddle in my affairs. In due time, please God, I
should have known how to arrange to satisfy everybody, even
if I left myself a beggar. If she pretends to have a right
to stop my pension, I resign it altogether, as well as the
name of an English subject; for there is no family that has
served their country and the crown more faithfully than mine
has done, and I am not inclined to be treated with _moins
d’égards_ than was formerly shown to a gentleman-like
highwayman.

I have been every day in expectation of a reply from Sir F.
Burdett respecting a large property which is said to have
been left me in Ireland, and which has been concealed from
me for many years. In case of its coming into my hands, I
shall still not keep my pension, in order to cut off every
communication with the English Government, from whom only
proceed acts of folly, which any moment may rebound upon an
individual. I chose Sir Francis Burdett to look into my
affairs, because I believe him to be a truly conscientious
honest man. Although we always disagreed upon politics, we
were always the best friends, and it appears to me that he
is beginning to see things in their proper light. * * * *
All that I have to entreat of your Grace is to allow me to
appear in the light in which I really stand――attached to
humanity, and attached to royalty, and attached to the
claims that one human being has upon another. Nor can I
allow myself to be deemed an intriguer; because I have said
here, in all societies, that persons who abet those who
attempt to shake the throne of Sultan Mahmoud shake the
throne of their own sovereign, and, therefore, commit high
treason: and among that class of persons I do not choose to
rank myself. Nor am I to be reckoned an incendiary, when I
seek to vindicate my own character, that never was marked
with either baseness or folly:――it may have been, perhaps,
with too little consideration for what are called by the
world my own interests, and which I, in fact, despise, or at
least only consider in a secondary point of view. There is
nobody more capable of making the Queen understand that a
Pitt is a unique race than your Grace: there is no trifling
with them.

I have sent a duplicate of the enclosed letter to Her
Majesty to my Lord Palmerston, through the hands of the
English Consul, Mr. Moore. If it has not reached her safe, I
hope that you will see that this one does: or otherwise I
shall put it in the _Augsburg Gazette_, or in an American
newspaper.[33]

* * * * *

HESTER LUCY STANHOPE.

* * * * *

At eleven at night I joined her at tea in her bed-room. She then asked me to read all the letters over, to see if anything wanted correction. After that, calling for her old parchment-covered blotting-book, she took them one by one, and folded them herself, “in order,” as she said, “to give me instructions on that head.” Generally speaking, she never seemed more happy than when she had a huge packet of despatches to put up: I dare say it reminded her of former times.

She began――“Now, doctor, a letter to a great man should fold over exactly to the middle――thus. Lord! what counting-house paper have you got here?――this will never do” (it was the thin paper common in France as letter-paper). I told her it was the very best there was in the house, and added, to quiet her, that thick paper, when fumigated in quarantine, as this must be, generally seemed to me to suffer more than thin; which is the fact. “Humph――ah! well, it is too late now to alter it; so it must go as it is.” She then folded the cover with great exactitude; but, looking round her, she cried, “There, now, that black beast has not given me the seal!” (ding, ding). “Zezefôon, where’s the seal?” Zezefôon was the only servant who was permitted to touch the seal, and she always had orders to put it away carefully, so that the other maids should not know where it was, for fear they should lend it to some rascal, (like Girius Gemmel, she would say,) who would put her signature to some forged letter or paper: and Zezefôon, as is customary with uneducated persons, hid it very often so carefully that she could not find it herself. After turning books and papers upside down, at last she produced it.

Whilst melting the wax in the candle, Lady Hester went on:――“Doctor, you never now can seal a letter decently: you once used to do it tolerably well, but now you have lost your memory and all your faculties, from talking nothing but rubbish and empty nonsense to those nasty women; and that’s the reason why you never listen to anything one says, and answer ‘yes,’ and ‘no,’ without knowing to what.”

I gave her the letters in succession to seal, until exhausted by the effort――for now the least thing was too much for her――she fell back in her bed. She roused herself again, and said, “Now let’s direct them: where is the one to the Queen? Write Victoria Regina――nothing else――in the middle ... that will do very well. Whose is that?――the Speaker’s: very well. I wonder if it _is_ the brother I used to play driving horses with; for there were several brothers. Now, look for his address――James――ah! that’s him: direct ‘To the Right Hon. Speaker’ ... no, stop: put ‘To the Right Hon. James Abercrombie, with three et ceteras, Carlton Gardens.’”

The next letter was the Duke of Wellington’s. Lady Hester said, “Let me see――he’s a field marshal――ah, never mind: you must begin――‘To His Grace the Duke of Wellington, K.G.’” I accordingly did so, and, not knowing how much more was coming to complete the superscription, I put it all, for fear of wanting room, into one line. Her eye was on me as I wrote. “What’s that?――show it me?” she cried out; and, taking the letter in her hands, she put on her spectacles. What an exclamation burst from her! “Good God, doctor! are you mad?――what can you mean?――what is this vulgar ignorance, not to know that ‘His Grace’ should be in one line, and ‘The Duke of Wellington, K.G.’ in the other: what people will he fancy I am got among! why, the lowest clerk in the Foreign Office would not have made such a blunder: this is your fine Oxford education!” and then she gave a deep sigh, as if in utter despair, to think that a letter should go forth from her hands so different in paper, seal, and address, from those of her early days, when she reigned in Downing Street, co-equal with Mr. Pitt. Now it was a rickety old card-table, a rush-bottomed chair, a white pipe-clay inkstand, wax that would not be used in a counting-house in Cheapside; and both the Sultaness and her vizir (for so I shall presume to style her and myself), fitting their spectacles on their noses, equally blind, equally old, and almost equally ailing.

I finished the address to the Duke. “How many et ceteras have you put?” asked Lady Hester:――“what! only two? I suppose you think he’s a nobody!” The remaining letters were directed without farther trouble, but, by some unaccountable blunder, Sir Edward Sugden was made a Sir Charles of. A long deliberation ensued, whether the letter to Her Majesty should be enclosed in a cover to Lord Palmerston, or whether it should be left to be seen by the English consul at Beyrout, to frighten him.

It was now three o’clock in the morning. I quitted Lady Hester, and had Ali Hayshem, the confidential messenger, called out of his bed. I repeated to him Lady Hester’s instructions as follows:――“You are to take this packet, and start at sunrise precisely――not before, and not after――and to take care you deliver the letters into M. Guys’s hands before sunset: for it is Friday, and Friday is an auspicious day. There are ten piasters for your two days’ keep, and let no one know where you are going, nor for what.”

Ali was accustomed to this business――laid his hand on his head to signify that should answer for his fidelity――made a low salàam――went to the cook for his five bread-cakes――turned in again upon his libàd――pulled his counterpane over his body, face and all, and, I dare say, was punctual to his hour and his instructions. Men of this sort, who are generally chosen from the peasantry, are invaluable as foot-messengers. With a _naboot_ or small bludgeon, well knobbed at one end, and with a few bread-cakes in their girdle, they will set off at any hour, in any weather, for any place, and go as quick as a horseman. They sleep anywhere and anyhow, and deliver their messages and letters with exceeding punctuality. Ali was a handsome fellow, the picture of health, fearless of danger, and a great favourite with Lady Hester, to whose service he was devoted; therefore, at every Byràm, Ali was sure to be seen in a new suit of clothes, the envy of the men, and the admiration of all the girls of Jôon: but he knew how to make a proper use of his money. Already he had begun to trade with some success in silk, advancing small sums in the winter to the poor women who breed silkworms, for which he received silk in payment: this he resold in the city; and those who may chance to meet with Ali ten years hence might find in him a warm tradesman, smoking his pipe in the midst of his obsequious dependants, and dignified with the title of Shaykh or Maalem.

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Lady Hester one day said, “I have a little angel under
my command, the angel of my star――such a sweet little
creature!――not like those ridiculous ones who are
fiddling in Italian pictures. What fools painters are,
to think angels are made so!”

[25] Mr. Joseph Green, lecturer on anatomy at the Royal
Academy.

[26] There is a passage in an interesting domestic
tale recently published (_The History of Margaret
Catchpole_, by the Rev. Mr. Cobbold), which has a
strange coincidence with the superstitious belief of
the Syrians, considering how widely the English are
separated from them. It is as follows: “He told me he
was the most venemous snake in the country. His bite
is attended with swelling and blackness of the body,
and, _when the sun goes down_, death ensues.”――Vol.
ii., p. 188.

[27] I once showed Lady Hester Stanhope Raphael’s Madonna
della Seggiola, to hear what she would say about it.
“The face,” she observed, “is congruous in all the
lineaments; they all belong to the same star; but I
don’t like that style of face――that is not the star
that pleases me;” and she returned me the engraving,
with some signs of impatience. I imagined, as there
was a maid in the room, that she did so, lest the girl
should report that she adored the Virgin Mary. I then
showed her a painting of the Nozze Aldobrandini. “Ah!”
said she, after examining it, “that figure,” pointing
to the one farthest on the spectator’s right hand,
“is the star I like, only the eyes do not belong to
that countenance: if the eyes were as they ought to
be, that figure would be charming.” There was much
truth in the observations she made on the blunders
of artists and sculptors in giving incongruous
features to their works. An ordinary observer has
only to look at the statues of the ancients, and he
will find that the forehead, nose, mouth, ears, and
limbs of a Minerva, are such as he will see in grave
and dignified women, totally different from the same
features in a Diana or a Venus. Each temperament, each
class of beings in nature, has its external marks,
which never vary in character, but only in degree. But
painters are accustomed to make a selection of what
they suppose the most perfect Grecian lines, and to
clap them on to a body, whether it be for a muse, an
amazon, a nymph, or a courtezan: this is obviously
false. “There are some women who are born courtezans,”
Lady Hester would say, “and whatever their station
in life is, they must be so. Thus, Lady ―――― was so
by nature; from the time she first came out, she had
the air of a woman of the town: Mademoiselle de ――――,
who married one of the ――――, nothing could have ever
altered her. There was a woman for great passions! it
was almost indecent to be where she was.”

[28] This alludes to the childhood of Lady Hester Stanhope,
when she had played at horses with Mr. Abercrombie.

[29] Lady Hester one day showed me fourteen of these
articles of ladies’ apparel, six or seven of which
were in slits and holes, so that a maid-servant in
England would not have accepted them as a gift: she
said her maids had torn them by their rough handling
in dressing her. I had them sent to my house, and they
were all mended. She expressed herself as grateful for
this little service to my daughter and the governess,
as if she had been a pauper clothed at their door!

[30] I was once speaking of the great results which might
be expected from Messrs. Beck and Moore’s successful
investigation of the natural phenomena of the Dead
Sea: but Lady Hester damped my admiration of those
gentlemen’s hazardous undertaking, by exclaiming that
all English travellers were a pack of fools, and
that they entirely neglected the objects that ought
to be inquired into. “There are none of them,” said
she, “that know half as much as I do. I’ll venture to
say they never heard of the forty doors, all opening
by one key, in which are locked the forty wise men
who expect the Murdah. Didn’t I tell you the story
the other day?” I answered, if she had, I must have
forgotten it, which was fortunate, as I was always
reluctant to show my dissent from her opinions;
having, by experience, learned how necessary it was
to proceed cautiously in doing so. “Yes, so it is,”
rejoined Lady Hester: “I talk for half a day to you,
wasting my breath and lungs, and there you sit like a
stock or a stone――no understanding, no conviction!”

[31] The korbàsh is a thong of the raw hide of the buffalo
or rhinoceros, about the length of a hand-whip, and
cut tapering in a similar form. In the hand of a
powerful flagellant it becomes an instrument of great
torture.

[32] There is a strong resemblance between Lady Hester’s
character of the Duke of Wellington and that of
Frederick the Great of Prussia: for see what Lord
Malmesbury says of the latter, in his _Diaries and
Correspondence_, vol. i., p. 8:――

“His _fort_ is not so much his courage, nor what we
generally understand by conduct; but it consists in a
surprising discernment, in the day of battle, how to
gain the most advantageous ground, where to place the
proper sort of arms, whether horse or foot, and in the
quickest _coup d’œil_ to distinguish the weak part of
the enemy.”

[33] Several lines are here wanting, owing to a half sheet
of paper having been lost in the confusion created
by fumigating papers in quarantine. They were highly
complimentary to his grace, and their omission is to
be regretted.