Lady Hester resumed: “But now, doctor, if you can spare a minute, you must write a line by the messenger to Monsieur Guys, and tell him I had begun a letter to him, but that the arrival of two English travellers, one of whom revived a number of recollections, had obliged me to stop short, and I could write no more. Doctor, this Mr. Forster must be one of the children of the Irish Speaker. He was left with ten; and I remember very well one day that H******** was standing before me at a party, making a number of bows and scrapes, turning up his eyes, and cringing before me so, that when we got home, Mr. Pitt said to me, ‘Hester, if I am not too curious, what could H******** have to say that animated him so much: what could he be making such fine speeches about: what could call forth such an exuberance of eloquence in him?’—‘Oh! it was nothing,’ answered I; ‘he was telling me that all the power of the Treasury was at my service—that he would take care that Lady S**** N*****’s pension should be got through the different offices immediately—that he had nothing so much at heart as to execute my orders—that he would see all that was necessary should be done according to my wishes, and so on; but, as I despise the man, I only laughed at him and turned my back on him; for I drink at the fountain head.’
“‘Now, this is really too good a thing,’ interrupted Mr. Pitt, lifting up his eyes in astonishment. ‘It was but this very day, at three o’clock, that he was urging me not to let this very pension be given, or at least to prolong the business for a year, if it were possible; till, by tiring her patience, the thing might be dropped, or something turn up to set it aside; adding, that it would be opening the door to abuses, and, if I granted this too readily, I should have Forster’s ten children to provide for.’”
Lady Hester went on: “From that day, I knew my man. I then said to Mr. Pitt, ‘Let me show him who he has to deal with; do give your orders that the thing may be done immediately.’—‘Oh! but it is too late to-night,’ said Mr. Pitt. ‘No, it is not,’ I cried; ‘for I see a light in the Treasury.’ So I rang, and sent for” (here her ladyship mentioned a name which I could not catch, but I think it was Mr. Chinnery)—. When he came, I said to him, ‘Will you be so good, sir, the first thing in the morning, to see that all the signatures are put to Lady S. N.’s paper: there is Mr. Pitt; ask him if it is so or not.’ Mr. Pitt of course assented, and there the matter ended. Doctor, I had a great deal of trouble with those sort of people, like H——. Now, if Mr. Forster is about thirty-five years old, he must be one of that family.[39]
“Do tell Mr. Forster what a pack of beasts those servants are. Ask him if he ever heard of women throwing themselves down to sleep in the middle of a courtyard, or on the floor of a kitchen, dragging their quilt after them from place to place: tell him that is what mine do, and that I am obliged to wait a quarter of an hour for a glass of water.
“You may talk to them a little about stars, but I dare say you will commit some horrible blunder, as you always do, and that is what makes me so afraid of your having to say anything that concerns me. Tell Mr. Forster that in people’s stars lie their abilities, and that you may bring up a hundred men to be generals and another hundred to be lawyers, but out of these perhaps four or five only will turn out good for anything. When a grand Llama is to be chosen, why do they go about until they have found a particular boy with certain marks, known to the learned of that country—a child born under a certain star? It is because, when they have found such a one, he has no occasion for instruction; he is born the man for their purpose.
“Thus, the Duke of Wellington is not a general by trade—I mean by instruction; for, if examined before a court-martial on all the branches of military tactics, perhaps he would be found deficient. Hundreds may know more of them than he does: but he is a general by his star. He acts under a certain impulse, which makes him hit on the stratagem he ought to practise, and, without the help of previous study or even the suggestions of experience, he knows that his manœuvre is right. It was thus with me when I was young. People might preach and talk; but, when I saw them doing things or reasoning about them, I could at once distinguish the things that were right from the things that were wrong; but I could not say why or wherefore. My father said I was the best logician he ever saw—I could split a hair. The last time he saw me, he repeated the same words, and said I had but one fault, which was being too fond of royalty.”
I observed here to Lady Hester, that in many things she reminded me of the ancient philosophers, to whom she bore a strong resemblance on most points; but that in this one particular she differed from them widely, as most of them were strenuously opposed to royalty and monarchical power. “My liking for royalty,” she answered, “is not, indiscriminate, but I believe in the divine right of kings; for I have found it out. And you may ask Mr. Forster also why the bottle of oil came from India to anoint the kings of France. I dare say they never heard of Melek es Sayf, a hero whose exploits and name are hardly inferior in the East to those of Solomon. Is it not extraordinary, that in Europe they know nothing of those people—of him and his forty sons, all of whom were men of note in their time? This must be so; for some of the gates of Cairo are named after them.
“If you happen to speak about the Albanians and the other soldiers that I had here, tell them I did not see them all; I only saw the most desperate, and those whose violence was to be kept under. When I admitted them to my presence, I was always alone, and they always wore their arms; but I never feared them.”
Thus Lady Hester went on talking: the dish of potatoes, the dessert, and several other things were forgotten. So, reminding her that Mr. Forster and Mr. Knox must be all this time marvelling what could have detained me, I at last made my escape. In the mean while, the breakfast had been served up as well as the resources of the place would admit. The scene must have been highly curious to her ladyship’s guests, who could not fail to be amused as well as surprised at the sight of a deal table, rush-bottomed chairs, cheese put on first and a pudding in a copper dish after it, with other anomalies that would have made even a third-rate Brummell shudder. But the occasions for eating in the European way in Lady Hester’s house occurred very rarely, and the servants, who were habituated to Turkish usages or to the mongrel service of some Levantine dragoman, had no notions of the regulations of an English table. In my own house, I had two tolerably well-trained boys; but there was an interdict against their ever crossing the threshold of Lady Hester’s gate, in order that no information of what was going on within her walls should be carried out to the female part of my family. In the most common concerns, Lady Hester’s servants made much bustle and did little. They ran in different directions, jostled and crossed each other half a dozen at a time for the same thing, entirely reversing one of her favourite maxims, that everything in a great person’s house should be done as if by magic, and nobody should know who it was set it a going. These servants had but one spring of action, and that was the bakshysh, or present, which they all looked for on the departure of a stranger. It was a painful thought to me, as these gentlemen left the gate, that, when they were about to mount their horses, the mercenary spirit of such a set of varlets might be charged to the connivance of the mistress.
The two travellers made a miserable repast, and, when it was over, signified their desire to take leave. It seems they had taken Lady Hester’s invitation “to make the place their home for two hours or two days” in its literal acceptation; and it is scarcely necessary to say that there was no time for me to enter into an explanation on the subject, nor, indeed, to deliver a tenth part of the discursive matter with which Lady Hester had charged me. It was from these gentlemen I learned, for the first time, that a committee had been appointed, on the motion of Mr. D. W. Harvey, for inquiring into the pensions on the civil list. It had so happened that no newspapers had reached us for a long time, and, consequently, this was the first intimation her ladyship had received of a measure in which it might be supposed she felt no inconsiderable interest, although in reality she did not.