In crossing the courtyard to go to my house, there seemed somehow to be an unusual solitude about the premises. The stories, too, I had been hearing and reading were doleful; so that I became very melancholy for the rest of the day, and could not rally my spirits, do what I would. As I sat in my room, I reflected that, although Lady Hester would probably get through the summer, yet how surely, though slowly, disease was making irreparable inroads on her reduced frame.
May 8.—My fears about the servants now began to revive. Monsieur Guys had made his preparations for his departure, and was going in a few days to Aleppo—he, who knew all her servants, their names, where they had sprung from, and everything about them, and who, had they committed any crime, could have at once traced them to their hiding-places. I felt my loneliness: I had no one to look to, to help me in any great difficulty. I saw, when I returned from a walk, or entered the house unexpectedly, how the older ones were often sitting in close cabal together, and I heard their whispers, like conspirators laying their heads together for some evil purpose. Why had I not written down more for these last three days? I said to myself, when I saw the scantiness of my memorandums: alas! my mind was ill at ease.
The name of Sir Francis Burdett was often mentioned, and various conjectures formed to account for his long silence. The prince, who had promised to write, where was he got to? Every hope seemed to fail. The prince, when he left Lady Hester Stanhope, had been entrusted with a copy of the correspondence, such as it afterwards appeared in the newspapers, and he had undertaken to make it public: she was therefore in daily expectation of receiving information from him of its transmission to Europe, and through what channel it would appear. But no letter came, and this rendered her fidgety and uneasy; for she conceived it to be of vital importance to her interests that her case should be made known as speedily as possible, hoping, from publicity, to come more speedily at the truth about the property to which she thought herself entitled, and which, she supposed, was withheld from her.
The time meanwhile was beguiled in reading Lady Charlotte Bury’s novel, which, from the remarks and anecdotes it called forth, lasted out much longer than it would with a common reader. In that part of the “Memoirs” where mention is made of the doubts that existed as to the validity of the Duke of Rochester’s will, Lady Hester observed, “A person, who is in the daily habit of writing like another, might easily imitate his signature. Mr. Pitt, when I had written a paper, used to say, ‘Sign it for me,’ and I did; because, when you write quickly, you write like another if you will. It is those who sit down to forge, and make their strokes slowly, that are found out, because there is an uncertainty in what they do.”
Something else called forth another observation: “Oh!” said Lady Hester, “I used very often to tell Mr. Pitt ‘You are not the grand statesman; it was your father;—you are a little God Almighty sent from Heaven, who are always thinking of the respect due to the king, of complaisance to the peers, and who kill yourself out of compassion: he made them all tremble.’ Nevertheless, doctor, I know that he thought just as his grandfather did.”
Wednesday, May 9.—I resumed reading at that part where Squire Mordaunt returns to Spetchingly on New-year’s Day. When the narrative comes to Mrs. de Vere’s meeting with Mr. Fox, Lady Hester said, “Fox, I think, was thrown into a position with the Prince and his dissipated friends from which he never afterwards could extricate himself, otherwise he would have been a different man; but, mixed up with them, the king never could bear him: for, when Mr. Pitt took office in 1803, the king wrote to him (for I saw the letter,) ‘Would you force on me Mr. Fox, who debauched my son?’ &c. The last time I saw Mr. Fox, he was at Vauxhall with Mrs. Fox. She was dressed as some respectable housekeeper might be, with a black bonnet and some sort of a gown. I looked at her several times, but I could see nothing like what I should have expected in Mrs. Armstead: there was none of that manner.—” (here Lady Hester made up a kind of courtezan look that conveyed what she meant to say.) “Mr. Fox looked like the landlord of a public-house; yet, when he spoke, doctor, he was sometimes very eloquent. On Mr. Hastings’s trial he made many people cry. There were all the peers with their pocket-handkerchiefs out—quite a tragedy! but he made such a business of it—” (here Lady Hester sat up in bed, and, to show what she meant, threw her arms first to the right and then to the left, and then thumped the bed violently, making me wonder where she had found such strength;)—“he was worse than Punch.”
Sir Walter Scott was mentioned in one place in the novel with great praise. “I’m not sure about Scott,” observed Lady Hester: “he pretended to be a great Pittite, but he was half inclined to go over to Fox. He sent some of his poetry, where he praised Fox, before he published it, to say he would not publish it, if it were displeasing; but I told him he was to do just as he liked, and to let it stand, as it made no difference what he wrote.”
Thursday, May 10.—Lady Hester Stanhope was very low to-day, seemingly exhausted with coughing, when I saw her about one o’clock. She continued to follow her own mode of cure, which now consisted in swallowing the yolks of fresh eggs, sucking oranges by dozens, sipping finjàns of strong coffee with ambergris in it, and drinking small glasses of rum and milk. Her food was of the most objectionable kind. She thought, as many others do, that what are reputed strong viands give strength to the body, without the slightest regard as to whether the stomach could digest and assimilate them so as to afford nourishment. Thus she often had meat pies, eating the meat and jelly, forced meat balls, beef cabóbs, &c.
Shaykh Mohammed Nasýb, a Mograbyn, whom I had sent away on the 19th of April without a present, made his appearance again to-day. He had been to the Emir Beshýr and to other great persons in the mountain, to collect a hundred piasters or two here and there, a practice common with these shaykhs versed in the Mahometan religion and in the commentaries on the Alcoran. They go from palace to palace, are lodged and fed for a night or two, discourse with the great man once or twice a day, if he is at liberty, and repay the hospitality they receive either by their learning, or by their skill as alchymists, or as astrologers, or by the news they bring from the cities they have passed through, and of the great men they have seen: for they find admission everywhere.
The dervises are another set of visitors, very frequent in the houses of the rich. They are the mendicant friars of the East, itinerant monks, whose pretensions to sanctity are heightened by a strange costume. Some of them—for they are of different orders—let their hair and beards grow long and hang dishevelled, and wear black and shaggy sheep or bear or tiger skins. By their side hang a score of strange-looking implements—a carved cup in wood, a back-scratcher, to facilitate the chase after vermin in parts where their hands cannot easily reach, a pottle for water, a bullock’s horn, or a conch shell to blow instead of it, long rosaries of immense beads, an ostrich’s egg—God knows what! They are all impudent, intrusive beggars, and are well known and appreciated in the East as the Franciscans, Capuchins, and other friars, are in the West, who are but the humble imitators of their more audacious, and, let me say, cleverer prototypes.