It has already been remarked, that there were thirty-four people in Lady Hester Stanhope’s establishment at the time I am now speaking of, and yet she would complain that she could not get the slightest attendance. This, of course, was mere temper. Her five maids were constantly in motion, night and day; but she had become querulous to a degree scarcely imaginable, and was, beyond all example, exigeante in her demands on the services of everybody about her. But, if such excessive requisition was ever pardonable in anybody, it was in Lady Hester Stanhope; for her vast talents seemed to lay claim to submission from all inferior beings, and even to exact it as a matter of justice. It was always customary with her (as it generally is with people who overwork their servants) to appeal first to one and then to another, whether anybody could give less trouble than she did. “What have my maids got to do?” she would say: “they think themselves mightily put upon, if I only require as much from them as some shopkeepers wife insists upon from her housemaid:—a set of lazy beasts, that sleep and stuff all day, and then pretend they are mightily hard-worked. Doctor, Logmagi says, that nothing but the korbàsh will keep them in order; and, depend upon it, it is so. If I did not tell them I would have them punished, I should not get the bell answered.” It is true she was generous to them in giving them clothes, high wages, presents of money, new year gifts, &c.; but, whilst she bestowed with one hand, she tyrannized with the other. These mixed extremities of kindness and severity produced a strange effect upon her servants. I never knew one of them who, after a time, did not wish to leave her service, or who, having left it, did not wish to return. The desire to leave her was stimulated by her restless activity, which left nobody quiet day or night, and her determined hostility to indolence, lies, and all other vices common to menials in Syria: while the anxiety to get back again might be in a great measure traced to the dishonest gains which were so readily made in her service, and by which her domestics so frequently enriched themselves—to place nothing to the account of that spell which she infallibly cast over everybody who came within the sphere of her attraction.
It cannot be denied that Lady Hester Stanhope had great reason for her strictness. During her severe illness in 1828, when Miss Williams died and she was confined to her bed-room for three months, G. G. and another rascal induced the girl, Fatôom, to steal the keys of the store-room, and, whilst they waited outside of the window, the wooden bars of which they sawed through with the adroitness of a London housebreaker, she handed them out much valuable property. Every one of the trunks was opened and examined. Hinges were wrenched off, so as to leave the locks untouched, and the trunks were replaced against the wall, and the bars of the window refitted to lull suspicion. One night, as was afterwards revealed in a confession made by one of the maids, when Mr. Dundas, a traveller, who was on a visit at Dar Jôon, was sitting with Lady Hester, Fatôom took a key from one of her ladyship’s pockets, which had been left in her bed-room, opened a small closet, and out of that closet took a bunch of keys, by means of which she ransacked almost everything Lady Hester possessed. Her beautiful Albanian dress, covered with gold, was stolen; a gold medallion,[62] commemorative of her brother’s and General Moore’s death, at Corunna, shared the same fate; stuffs, brocades, and other articles of value, were all carried off.
But the servant who committed the heaviest robberies was Zeyneb, a black slave, who afterwards became a soldier’s trull. This woman, whose career throughout was marked by every sort of profligacy, robbed Lady Hester to the amount of many thousands of piasters.
Lady Hester related, on a subsequent occasion, the winding-up of Zeyneb’s history, in the following words, which I wrote down April the 9th, 1838. “When Zeyneb stole the gold medal, with General Moore’s and my brother’s name upon it, I procured all the documents relative to the theft from Cyprus, where one of her accomplices had fled, and then sent for Zeyneb and Farez into the saloon. I called in Logmagi and Khalyl Mansôor as witnesses, and then, telling the culprits what I knew, said I could hang them if I liked. The impudent slave, Zeyneb, listened with perfect indifference, and, in going out, stopped up the door, and, in an ironical tone, thanked Logmagi (who, she thought, had told me all about it). Logmagi, surprised at her insolence, went to push her out; when, at that moment, Abu Ali, the great black, who had, it appears, found his way into the court in order to support the black girl’s cause, and had been waiting outside the saloon door, seized Logmagi, and, with his muscular grasp, tried to throttle him. I heard a strange noise, and went out; and there I saw Logmagi, with his eyes starting out of his head, held down on the ground by the negro. I caught the fellow’s hand, although one of his pistols was directed towards me, and with my other arm gave a back-handed stroke across Zeyneb’s face (who was helping the black), that knocked her down. She got up, scaled the wall, and ran off to Sayda; and I never saw her more. I called the Albanians, and had Abu Ali turned out of doors directly.” After Zeyneb ran away, she threw herself into the arms of the nizam, or soldiers, where Lady Hester, to use her own emphatic language, left her to rot.
A short detail of the annoyances to which Lady Hester Stanhope was exposed may serve to show that she was not angry with these women without reason. The endless trifling acts of ignorance, awkwardness, carelessness, forgetfulness, falsehood, and impudence, which she used to relate to me, were quite sufficient upon the whole, although many of them were individually petty enough, to justify the severe control she found it necessary to exercise over them. But then it will be asked, why did a lady of her rank, accustomed to all the refinements of European life, keep such servants in her establishment?—why did she not send for Europeans? That was the question that everybody asked—that nobody could answer. The real fact, probably, was this—she preferred these poor creatures, with all their demoralization and filthy habits, to French or English servants, because, by the customs of the East, they were habituated to despotism and bursts of passion, which neither English nor French would be very likely to brook so patiently.
Besides, no European servants could have reconciled themselves to the melancholy seclusion of Lady Hester Stanhope’s establishment, or to the never-ceasing activity, or, what is worse, the long vigils required of them. Here there was no moment of respite from doing or waiting to do. In England, the maid looks at least for some intervals of recreation, and expects, at all events, out of the four-and-twenty hours, that she shall be allowed six or eight for rest. But there was neither one nor the other at Jôon; for, even while her ladyship was engaged with her nightly conversations in the saloon, when little or no waiting was required, still there was no end to the work marked out for her servants—such as filling pipes every quarter of an hour—by which they were kept incessantly employed. Now, as Turkish servants turn in[63] almost universally in their clothes, only drawing a counterpane over themselves when they lie down, they are enabled thus to steal a short sleep at any hour they can get it, and are ready to rise at a moment’s call. This is a great advantage, especially to sick people: indeed, in Lady Hester’s case, it almost compensated for all their faults. In the twinkling of an eye, upon an emergency, the whole household, only a moment before buried in profound sleep, would start up on their feet; and, their duty once over, would suddenly drop again into a deep slumber.
One day, I went to Lady Hester’s bed-room door, without waiting to ascertain whether she was ready to receive me. It was a rule with her for many years never to see anybody, even in her saloon, whether coming from a distance or staying in her house, until she had sent for them—no matter who, prince or peasant; and she carried this species of regality to such a length, that, on one occasion, among twenty which might be mentioned, an English gentleman and his wife, for both of whom she entertained a high personal esteem, having arrived from Beyrout to within a league of her dwelling to pay her a visit, and having politely sent forward a servant with a letter to announce their approach, she returned a laconic answer, to say they would not be received. She, moreover, was accustomed to mark, not merely the day, but the precise hour, that persons coming to visit her were to present themselves. She would do so with Duke Maximilian, or with Matteo Lunardi. On the morning to which I have referred, Lady Hester was in bed. “What do you want?” said she, in rather an angry tone. I replied that I had brought her a cut-glass cup and stand for her sherbet and lemonade, as hers was so common that it gave me pain to see her use it. “No, doctor,” she said, “I am much obliged to you, but you must send it away again. If I had twenty fine things, those beasts of maids would break or steal them all. I had some beautiful cut-glass goblets, and they all disappeared, one after the other. Would you believe it? they broke one first of all, and then Miss Williams gave out another. So they kept the pieces of the broken one, and, every fortnight or three weeks, came to her first with one bit and then with another, with some plausible story of an accident, and each time got another goblet out of her, until all were gone. I found them out at last. The jades destroy everything: but it is not that which gives me pain; it is to think that I have not one person who will see me well waited on.”
Happening to observe, that perhaps some allowance should be made for their ignorance in that respect, as, after all, they were but peasant girls and slaves, who could not know what service was, seeing they were unacquainted with European customs, she exclaimed, “But my liver is destroyed by the passions I put myself in, and I dare say you, instead of helping me, will only make matters worse. They’ll only laugh at you and your sensibility. I can see an idle fellow or a rascal get a beating with the same tranquillity that I smoke my pipe: but nobody is more tender than I am, even when an animal suffers unjustly. I never shall forget how two or three of the servants turned as pale as death on hearing me on a sudden utter a cry, because a lazy villain was driving an ass with foal, heavily laden, down a steep bank. I go then almost into convulsions.
“But, oh! how I detest your sentimental people, who pretend to be full of feeling—who will cry over a worm, and yet treat real misfortune with neglect. There are your fine ladies that I have seen in a dining-room, and when, by accident, an earwig has come out of a peach, after having been half killed in opening it, one would exclaim, ‘Oh! poor thing! you have broken its back—do spare it—I can’t bear to see even an insect suffer. Oh! there, my lord, how you hurt it: stop, let me open the window and put it out.’ And then the husband drawls out, ‘My wife is quite remarkable for her sensibility; I married her purely for that.’ And then the wife cries, ‘Oh! now, my lord, you are too good to say that: if I had not had a grain of feeling, I should have learnt it from you.’ And so they go on, praising each other; and perhaps the next morning, when she is getting into her carriage, a poor woman, with a child at her breast, and so starved that she has not a drop of milk, begs charity of her; and she draws up the glass, and tells the footman, another time, not to let those disgusting people stand at her door.”
The conversation, on a subsequent occasion, having fallen on the nasty servants, and I having assented to the truth of what she said, regretting that her acute feelings made her torment herself about things which were but trifles:—“Trifles!” she vociferated; “it is trifles, as you call them, that kill me. Everybody comes to me. There are the very maids—if you were only to see—when they have a hole to mend, how they sew it up all in a spong: they even ask me how their gowns must be cut out.”