I experienced no ill effects from the nettlerash. Few persons, new to the climate of Syria, escape a rash of some description, sometimes pustular, sometimes miliary, but most frequently in the form called prickly heat, which generally attacks them in summer or autumn, and is truly distressing by the pricking sensation it produces on the skin, as if thousands of needle-points were penetrating the cuticle. Little is required in such cases but cool diet, fruit, and diluents. I performed my quarantine of four days, in compliance with Lady Hester’s wishes, and then returned to my customary mode of life.
Saturday, February 24.—As I had anticipated, a report had become very general in Beyrout and in the Mountain that Lady Hester was dead, and I received a letter from M. Guys acquainting me with it. This report was confirmed by an English gentleman, who presented himself at my gate this day after breakfast. I was carpentering at the time, and went down the yard to him with my hatchet and chisel in my hand. He seemed not to know what to make of me, dressed as I was in Turkish clothes, with a beard, and with my sleeves turned up like a mechanic. He held out a letter to me, addressed in a fair hand to Lady Hester: I told him this was not her gate, and that a little beyond he would find it. He said he had heard she was dead: I assured him that was not the case, but that she was greatly indisposed. I regretted to myself that I could not ask him in, or enter into conversation with him; but Lady Hester had exacted from me a solemn promise that I never would hold any parley with English travellers, until I had first conferred with her on the subject, and had described them, so that she might obtain the necessary indications to enable her to guess what their business was, or until she had read their letter of introduction, if they bore one. So he quitted me, first asking whether I was an Englishman; to which I answered that I left him to judge. He appeared to be about twenty-one years of age: he had with him for his servant a Ragusan, whom my servant knew, and who, he assured me, was a drunken reprobate. Short as the stop at the gate was, the Ragusan found time to tell the other that he had famous wages: I think it was eight dollars a month. Now I gave mine, who was also a European, four, which was considered good pay, the rate being, in Lady Hester’s house, from one to three. Europeans, however, always get more than people of the country, and have more wants to satisfy. How many travellers are obliged, on their landing in these countries, to take fellows into their service without a character, outcasts of society, and who in England would hardly be allowed to see the outside of a gaol!
Of this English gentleman Lady Hester never spoke to me, nor did she ever even allude to his visit: he did not see her, and, I presume, continued his road; but, if these pages ever meet his eye, he may be assured that he would have met with a hospitable reception, had she been well enough to receive him, or had I been at liberty to entertain him.
Whilst at dinner, a servant came to say Lady Hester would be glad to see me in the evening. I found her weak and wan: her cheeks were sunken, and her voice was less distinct than usual; for never was there a person who spoke generally with so clear an enunciation. Logmagi was with her. Instead of receiving her welcome, and those obliging expressions which she usually employed even after the most trifling ailment, she addressed me harshly, and seemed to take pains to mortify me by using slighting expressions in Arabic that Logmagi might understand what she said. The theme of her conversation was the debasement of men who suffered themselves to be controlled by their wives. Although to mortify people was one of her constant practices through life, whether in action, correspondence, or conversation, yet it never was done to gratify any malignant feelings of her own, but from a fearless disregard of the conventional rules of civilized society, where she hoped to rescue an individual from debasement, or counteract the machinations of designing and wicked men. On this principle it is true, likewise, that she would deliberately inflict those incurable insults which cover a man with a sort of shame for life; as may be shown, for example, by the case of Mr. Hanah Messâad, the son of the British agent at Beyrout, one of whose whiskers and eyebrows was shaved off before the whole village, for having made an assertion then supposed to be false, but which was afterwards, by her own confession to me, admitted to be true.
Hanah, or John Messâad, a handsome young man, a native of Beyrout, and the son of a former English vice-consul, was interpreter and secretary to Lady Hester for some time, and her ladyship has since bestowed great praise, in my presence, on his capacity, usefulness, and knowledge of languages. There was in her service also Michael Tutungi, son of an Armenian, who had been under-dragoman, as I understood, to the English embassy at Constantinople. Messâad, it was thought, was jealous of Michael.
It was reported in the family that Michael had been seen under a tree in very close conversation with a peasant girl, and the report was traced to Messâad. Now, the Emir Beshýr affected, or really felt, a great horror of all licentiousness, and never failed to bastinado severely every man detected, in his principality, in any such conduct. Lady Hester knew what imputations might be cast on her establishment, if such things were left unnoticed; and, fearing that Messâad’s intrigues (of which she thought this report but a link) might injure Michael’s character, and destroy his prospects of getting a place in the English embassy at Constantinople, to which he had some pretensions from his father’s services, she resolved to save him by making a signal example of Messâad.
She, therefore, ordered all the villagers from Jôon to be assembled on the green in front of her house, and sent for Mustafa, the barber, from Sayda, with two or three other tradesmen to be witnesses. Seating herself on a temporary divan, with all the assembly in a circle around her, not a soul dreaming what was going to take place, and Michael and Messâad standing in respectful attitudes, with their arms crossed, and covered, down to the fingers’ ends,[34] with their benyshes, by her side, she began: “That young man,” said she, pointing to Michael, “is accused of irregularities with” (here she mentioned the girl’s name, and the place and time of the meeting). “Now, if any one of you knows him to have been guilty of similar actions, or if, from his general conduct, under similar circumstances, any one of you thinks the thing probable, speak out, for I wish to do justice. Messâad is his accuser: they are both my people, and equally entitled to impartiality.” As nobody answered, she appealed to them all again, and all replied they did not believe it.
She then turned to Messâad, and said: “Sir, you have accused this young man, who is about to be launched into the world, and has only his good name to help him on, of abominable things: where are your witnesses?” Messâad, frightened out of his senses, replied, “that he had no witnesses; that he had seen, with his own eyes, what he had asserted, and, therefore, knew it to be so: but, as he was alone, it must rest on his own word.” Her ladyship told him his word would not do against the concurring testimony of all the servants, and of a whole village; and she added, in a judge-like tone, “As your mouth and your eye have offended, the stigma shall remain on them. Servants, seize and hold him; and, barber, shave off one side of his mustachios and one eyebrow.”
This was done. Michael was kept about a month or two, in order that the protection he enjoyed might seal his unblemished reputation, and then was packed off to Constantinople. “Thus,” said Lady Hester, “I saved a young man from destruction. Messâad has now a good place under the Sardinian consul at Beyrout; his eyebrows and mustachios are grown again; he has married, and has a family; and I dare say the Sardinian consul, if he knows anything of the story, thinks not a bit the worse of him.”
The above are the words in which Lady Hester, on the 20th of January, 1831, related this singular punishment, inflicted with the best intentions on poor Messâad. One evening, in 1837, when writing a letter to the same Messâad, for certain commissions which he had to execute for her ladyship, who was in the habit of employing him to buy pipes, cloth, and sundry other articles found in the shops at Beyrout, she spoke to me as follows. “You know, doctor, all that affair about Michael and Messâad, and how I had one side of his face shaved. Well, I found out afterwards that what Messâad had said was every bit of it true. I have made it up to him since as well as I could: he does not want abilities, and kept my house in excellent order whilst he was with me.”