From these, and a variety of other observations, which will be found scattered through these memoirs, Lady Hester’s professed opinions on the subject of charms and supernatural agency generally cannot be mistaken. Nor, indeed, seeing how she mixed up such opinions with the actual business of life, allowing them to exercise a direct practical influence over her conduct in numerous instances, can there be any reason for supposing that she did not entirely believe in them, to all intents and purposes, as sincerely as the Syrians themselves. But I leave the consideration of this curious problem to the sagacity of the reader, limiting my more appropriate province to the simple record of her ladyship’s actual life and conversations.
To return from this digression. It might be supposed that, immediately upon my arrival, Lady Hester would have opened the urgent business upon which she had summoned me. No such thing. After congratulating me upon my escape from Europe, which, she assured me, would soon be convulsed by revolutions from one end to the other, she entered at once on her favourite topic—the coming of the Murdah. But, as her opinions and proofs were pretty much the same as those she had entertained six years before, and which have already been related, it is not necessary to recapitulate them.
July 9.—In the afternoon, I rode down to Mar Elias to see my family, and returned the following day to dinner.
July 10.—Lady Hester this day asked me if I had ever known Beau Brummell. “I should like to see that man again, doctor,” continued she, without waiting for my answer. “He was no fool. I recollect his once saying to me, in Bond Street, riding with his bridle between his forefinger and thumb, as if he held a pinch of snuff, ‘Dear creature! who is that man you were talking to just now?’—‘Why,’ I answered, ‘that is Colonel ——.’—‘Colonel what?’ said he, in his peculiar manner; ‘who ever heard of his father?’—So I replied, ‘And who ever heard of George B.’s father?’—‘Ah! Lady Hester,’ he rejoined, half-seriously, ‘who, indeed, ever heard of George B.’s father, and who would have ever heard of George B. himself, if he had been anything but what he is? But you know, my dear Lady Hester, it is my folly that is the making of me. If I did not impertinently stare duchesses out of countenance, and nod over my shoulder to a prince, I should be forgotten in a week: and, if the world is so silly as to admire my absurdities, you and I may know better, but what does that signify?’
“Three of the wits of the day in my time,” observed Lady Hester, continuing the conversation, “were Mr. Hill, Captain Ash, and Mr. Brummell, all odd in their way—the one for dry wit, the other for solemn joking, and the last for foppery. Mr. Hill, for example, when at dinner at somebody’s house, would draw towards him a dish of mashed potatoes that had a mould mark on them, as if he was going to help himself; then, eyeing it with irresistible gravity, and looking at it very oddly with his quizzing-glass, he would turn to the servant and say, ‘I wish you would tell the housekeeper, my good fellow, not to sit down on the dishes;’ pretending that he saw a mark, as if she had sat down upon it.
“Brummell would commit similar freaks at the houses of parvenus, or people who were not exactly of haut ton, where, sometimes at dinner, he would all of a sudden make horridly ludicrous grimaces, as if he had found a hair in his soup, or would abruptly ask for some strange Palmyrene sauce, or any out-of-the-way name that nobody ever heard of, and then pretend he could not eat his fish without it.”
As a specimen of Brummell’s audacious effrontery, Lady Hester said that once, in the midst of a grand ball, he asked the Duchess of Rutland—“In Heaven’s name, my dear duchess, what is the meaning of that extraordinary back of yours? I declare I must put you on a backboard: you must positively walk out of the room backwards, that I mayn’t see it.”
Another time he marched up to Lady Hester, who was remarkable for the fine turn of her cheek, and the set of her head upon her neck, and coolly took out her ear-rings, telling her she should not wear such things;—meaning that they hid the best part of her face.
Upon one occasion he went about in a ball-room, asking everybody where he could find a partner who would not throw him into a perspiration, and at last crying out—“Ah! there she is!—yes, Catherine will do; I think I may venture with her.”—And this was the Duchess of Rutland’s sister.
Sometimes he would have a dozen dukes and marquises waiting for him, whilst he was brushing his teeth, or dressing himself, and would turn round with the utmost coolness, and say to them—“Well, what do you want? don’t you see I am brushing my teeth?” (all the while slowly moving his brush backward and forward across his mouth, and hawking and spitting:) then he would cry,—“Oh! there’s a spot—ah! its nothing but a little coffee. Well, this is an excellent powder, but I won’t let any of you have the receipt for it.”