There might, nevertheless, be perceived, under all this assumption and display of tattered raiments, a feeling of profound indignation at the neglect she had experienced from her former friends and acquaintances; and, for the purpose of affording evidence of the way in which she had been left, as she called it, to rot, she carefully preserved a bag of her old ragged clothes, which she would not suffer to be given away.
The frequent alarm she expresses in her letters of approaching blindness seems to have been nothing more than the defective vision incident to the decline of life. Spectacles in silver-gilt or tortoiseshell rims, which I sent her from time to time in parcels containing other small commissions, without hinting that they were intended for her, she affected to consider, when she got them, as only useful for presents to old people to whom she was charitable. I now found that she had taken to wear them, but of that kind worn by poor old women in England, without branches, such in fact as are stuck on the nose, and vulgarly called barnacles.[31] Her voice on such occasions became nasal from the compression of the nostrils, and at first she was very reluctant to betray her use of these glasses before me; but, after a short time, her objections wore away: yet she never could be persuaded to wear any other kind of spectacles, invariably giving away all gay and handsome ones that were sent to her.
The influence she had enjoyed in Syria, during the first years of her residence there, had been merely that sort of consideration which is accorded to a person of high descent and connections, who had made a great figure in England, and who had acquired a romantic celebrity by her travels: it was the homage paid to an illustrious name. But when, by degrees, her extraordinary talents came to be known, more especially her political abilities, and when it was observed that Pashas and great men really valued her opinion and feared her censure, she obtained a positive weight in the affairs of the country on her own account, independently of the prestige of birth and notoriety.
Speaking of this, she one day said, “What offers have not been made me! which, had I chosen not to be clean-handed, would have put pretty sums into my pocket.” Among the rest, she mentioned one man, who had offered her a vast sum, if she would lend her name and protection in some extensive mercantile speculation. The Sheykh Beshýr (the acknowledged chief of the Druze nation, and the powerful rival of the Emir Beshýr, the reigning prince) sent her, when he was proscribed and in flight, at three different times, carte blanche to settle with Abdallah Pasha or the Porte the amount of the sum which would save his life: “but,” she said, “knowing the Sheykh was not clean-handed, I could not undertake to buy him off; yet the whole of his treasures would have been at my disposal.”[32]
In relating this story, Lady Hester Stanhope added, “How odious has Abdallah Pasha rendered himself by his extortions and confiscations, because none of his people will speak the truth to him! When he wants money, his secretaries tell him he has only to sign an order for it, and then perhaps half a dozen families are driven into exile, or half ruined. But I speak plainly to him; and once, when I wrote to him how he was making himself hated by a particular act of oppression about money, he tore the buyurdee[33] in pieces, which gave force to that act, and drove his secretaries out of his presence for having flattered and deceived him. Why, doctor, when he receives a letter from me, if there are half a dozen others at the same time, he will let them lie on his sofa whilst he reads mine, and then will put that alone into his pocket, and take it into his harým to read over again.”
But Lady Hester’s nearest neighbour among Pashas and Princes, and the one who, consequently, was the most frequently mixed up in her affairs, was the Emir Beshýr, prince of the Druzes; and, as his name will necessarily occur very often in this diary, it is desirable to give a sketch of his career and character. At a remote period, his ancestors had migrated from the neighbourhood of Mecca to this part of Syria, and their origin was acknowledged to be noble. In the course of time, his family had attained to great consideration in Mount Lebanon, and stamped him, who sprung from it, as an Emir, or Prince.
The Emir Beshýr was now the reigning prince of the Druzes, himself a Mahometan born, but, as it is said, professing Christianity, whenever it answered his wicked ends to do so. In the annals of no country, according to Lady Hester Stanhope, can be found a man who has practised more barbarities, considering the small extent of his principality, than he has done. Not content with emasculating, he cut out the tongues and put out the eyes of five young princes, nephews and relatives of his own, whose contingent prospects to the succession gave him uneasiness. His atrocities transcend belief. All those who were obnoxious to him, high or low, were sure, in the course of his protracted despotism, to be removed, either by secret machinations or overt acts. On Mount Lebanon it was common to hear whispers that some one had been made away with, but nobody dared to give utterance to their suspicions of the agency.
This man was Lady Hester’s determined enemy. She was living within his principality—within his reach—and yet she braved him! and the greatest proofs of personal courage that she had occasion to show, perhaps, during her life, were manifested in her bold and open defiance of his power; which is the more extraordinary in a woman, apparently neglected by her country and friends, towards a prince, who has been certainly one of the most perfidious as well as bloodthirsty tyrants that ever governed a Turkish province.
Lady Hester, as I said, was domiciled within his territory, and many were the petty vexations with which he harassed her, in the hope of finally driving her away; for he considered her as a very dangerous neighbour, seeing that she openly cultivated the friendship of the Sheykh Beshýr, his rival, and made no disguise of her bad opinion of him, the Emir. Finding, however, that she was determined to remain at Jôon, some of his emissaries were employed to insinuate the peril to which she would inevitably expose her life if she persisted in her hostility to so powerful a prince. But Lady Hester Stanhope was not a woman to be frightened; and, when she found a fit opportunity, in the presence of some other persons, of getting one of the Emir’s people before her, so as to be sure that what she said must reach his ears and could not well be softened down, she desired the emissary to go and tell his master that “She knew very well there was not a more profound and bloody tyrant on the face of the earth; that she was aware no one was safe from his poisons and daggers—but that she held him in the most sovereign contempt, and set him at defiance. Tell him,” she added, “that he is a dog and a monster, and that, if he means to try his strength with me, I am ready.”
On another occasion, one of the Emir Beshýr’s people came on some message to her, but, before he entered her room, laid by his pistols and his sabre, which in Turkey these myrmidons always wear on their persons. Lady Hester’s maid whispered to her what the man was doing, when her ladyship, calling him in, bade him gird on his arms again. “Don’t think I am afraid of you or your master,” she said; “you may tell him I don’t care a fig for his poisons—I know not what fear is. It is for him, and those who serve him, to tremble. And tell the Emir Khalyl” (the Emir Beshýr’s son) “that if he enters my doors, I’ll stab him—my people shall not shoot him, but I will stab him—I, with my own hand.”