It was on a winter’s day that one of these people, being refused a night’s lodging and a bakshysh at Lady Hester’s, invoked a curse on the house and its inmates. He took his horn from his side, blew three or four blasts, and uttered some imprecations which were unintelligible to me. The whole scene was a picture. He was a dervise of the order called Bektashy, daring and fearless as men are who know that none will venture to lay hands on them, athletic, with raven locks of disproportionate thickness and length, and clad in as wild-looking garments as the imagination of a stage-manager could invent for Caliban, or some such monster. His large, rolling eye, his features darkened by a weather-beaten existence, his white teeth, his shaggy and hairy breast, his naked feet and legs, and his strange accoutrements, made him altogether a remarkable being. The wind blew high at the time, the rain swept up through the valley from the sea in a white sheet, as the squalls every now and then succeeded each other; and there he stood, under the cover of a dilapidated building, which those who have visited Dar Jôon may recollect as being near the entrance gate. He had been fed with a good dinner—for nobody ever came without having something to eat put before him—but he had heard that other dervises had left the house with fifty, a hundred, nay, even two hundred piasters, and he expected to force a compliance with his demands for himself. It must not be imagined that the servants beheld this action of his, and heard his anathema, with the same indifference that I did: they looked gloomy and apprehensive. It so happened that some pewits, or green plovers, had appeared in the mountain and in our neighbourhood just about the same time. The melancholy cry of these birds, as they are not common in Syria, is considered of bad augury by the Turks. It was in the month when Lady Hester was in the worst stage of her illness; and they coupled these things together, and drew from them unfavourable omens. But Lady Hester had said to me—“Keep away, if you can, all those shaykhs and dervises; it will only torment me to know they are there, for I can’t see them. I have no money to give them, and they are too cunning to trust their news and information, if they have any to give, to anybody but me.” I was determined, therefore, to send him off; the more so, as I did not like his physiognomy, and as the village was close at hand, where he would find a night’s lodging in the khan or caravansery.
But let us return to the Mograbyn shaykh. When I told him that Lady Hester was ill, and could see nobody, he said, if I would but let her know who he was, he was sure she would receive him: that he had several times had the honour of an audience, and that her Felicity had expressed herself so pleased with his conversation as once to have engaged him to quit Zyb, where he lived, and to come and settle at Jôon with his family. I therefore represented this to her ladyship, but she refused to see him. The circumstance, however, gave rise to the following conversation:—
“People,” said she, “never should be sent away who show a very great earnestness to be admitted; for, although many times they might be but beggars, sometimes it was not so. When my grandfather was ill, a man on horseback came to the door and insisted on seeing him. My grandmamma presented herself, and asked him what was his business, telling him Lord Chatham was so ill that he could receive nobody. The man signified that nothing would do, but he must see Lord Chatham himself. After ineffectually trying to induce him to disclose his business, grandmamma Chatham at last admitted him into my grandfather’s room, but behind a screen, so that they were still invisible to each other. ‘That will not do,’ observed the persevering man; ‘I must see your lordship’s face, and be sure it is you.’ The screen being removed, and the man assured of whom he was speaking to, drew out a tin case, containing the will of Sir Something Pynsent, leaving my grandfather two estates, one in Wiltshire, of £4,000 a year, and the other, Burton Pynsent, of £10,000; his will only saying he had done it in admiration of his character. The Wiltshire estate was sold immediately, and the money frittered away (as I heard from Mr. Wilson, the tutor) nobody knows how. Of the pictures my grandfather only reserved two, the portraits of the Marquis of Granby and of Admiral Saunders, to give to the corporation of Plymouth. Of the rest, which were old family pictures, like Lady Cobham, &c., he took no notice whatever.”[21]
Thursday, May 11.—I read to Lady Hester for three hours out of the “Memoirs of a Peeress.” As she lay on her bed, pale, wan, and exhausted, she looked like a person in the last stage of illness; but, as the day advanced, she generally grew more animated. She made few remarks. The Duchess of Rochester now was become the Marchioness of T*******. The “jokes of Stowe,” as alluded to in the Memoirs, she exemplified in this way: “One morning, whilst General Grenville was staying there, there came a letter, with his address on the cover, and ‘Montrose’ in the corner. The general, not being intimate with the duke, said—‘What’s this? let’s see: what can make the duke write to me?’ On opening the letter, out came about fifty fleas, all jumping up to his face. The general’s extreme aversion to fleas was well known: he was so angry at this that he ordered a postchaise, and never would go to Stowe again. On Lord Glastonbury they played a joke of another sort: they put a paragraph in the papers, with initials and other indications, that he had run off to Gretna Green. His aversion to women and to marriage was as great as the general’s aversion to fleas.”
As I read on, the old squire’s death affected Lady Hester. “How rare is such a character now!” said she: “I recollect some in my time. There was Sir John Dyke, who was an excellent man, but careless in his affairs, and perhaps ruined by this time. But such men, when you get over the first two or three days, in which a few expressions may be strange in their conversation, become afterwards most agreeable society, and have much sterling worth. They are men who know something, and have real straitforwardness of character: I always liked them.”
In another place she said—“Doctor, when you reflect on this book, don’t you see the wide difference there is between refined people and vulgar ones? There is Lady Isabella and Lady Helen, with a tyrannical and unkind mother—see how obedient and submissive they are; and, I dare say, though the daughters of a duchess, had she put them to do the most menial offices, they would have done them; but vulgar people are always fancying themselves affronted, and their pride is hurt, and they are afraid of being lowered, and God knows what. You will think it a strange thing to say, but it is my opinion that the vices of high-born people are better than the virtues of low-born ones. By low-born I do not mean poor people; for there are many without a sixpence who have high sentiments. It is that, among the low-born, there is no spring of action that is good, even in their virtues. If they are laborious and industrious, it is for gain, not for the love of labour; if they are learned, it is from pedantry; if they are charitable, it is from ostentation; if religious, from hypocrisy; if studious of health, it is to gratify their gormandizing; and so on. I repeat it again—the vices of the great are preferable to the virtues of such persons. Those of them that rise in the world always show their base origin: for if you kill a chicken and pick the feathers, they may fly up into the air for a time, but they fall down again upon the dunghill. The good or bad race must peep out. God created certain races from the beginning; and, although the pure may be crossed, and the cart-horse be taken out of the cart and put to the saddle, their foals will always show their good or bad blood. High descent always shows itself, and low always will peep out. I never have known above two or three persons of common origin who had not something vulgar about them.”
It was curious to hear how she would quote the opinion of the commonest persons as affirmative of her notions in this respect. “A peasant told me, one day,” said Lady Hester, in a conversation on this subject, “that he had met Captain —— on the road, in his way to some part of the mountain; and I asked him what he thought of him. ‘Why,’ replied the man, ‘there is something of good blood about him, and something that is not: he is half thorough-bred and half kedýsh:’” (The reader has already been told that kedýshes are horses of no pedigree, used by shopkeepers and pedlars for the road:) “and the man was right,” added Lady Hester. “But, only think, what quickness of observation these people have: you cannot deceive them; for, at a glance, they discover at once what a man is. The girls, too, said Captain —— is not quite akâber:” (akâber means distinguished in appearance) “he has a third part of a bad breed in him: and they were right as well as the peasant; for his mother was a Miss ——, because his father, disappointed in marrying Miss ——, whom Lord O—— danced with at a ball and married the next day, went and married a young lady well brought up, but not thorough bred. He took his marines to the Emir Beshýr on horseback; horse marines, doctor!—and the natives to this day talk with astonishment of the calves of the legs of one of the officers who was with him.
“Did you ever know a better proof again how high descent will show itself than in what I believe I told you about Count Rewisky? When coming to see me from Beyrout, he was met by a common shepherd, of whom he asked the road to Sayda. The count was dressed like a Bedouin Arab, and was mounted on a shabby mare, of good blood, it is true, but to all appearance not worth a hundred piasters. The shepherd, looking at him, replied, ‘Sir, you don’t want to go to Sayda; it is the way to Jôon you want to know. You are going to see the English meleky’ (queen); ‘for a man of your rank is fitting only to be her guest.’ This was exactly the case; he was coming to see me; and, mean and poor as his appearance was, the peasant detected his noble blood at a glance.
“That noble-minded man, doctor, was a perfect convert to my opinions. He assured me that I had appeared to him at different times, and once in particular he told me the following story. He had been in conversation with the Emperor Alexander on a state affair of great importance, and the Emperor had tried to induce him to do something which the Count felt was the course he ought not to pursue as a man of integrity, and he begged to be allowed some little time for consideration before he acceded to the Emperor’s wishes. Alexander dismissed him, hoping that, by the next day, when he would see him again, the Count would recollect himself, and who he (the Emperor) was. Count Rewisky, fretted almost to death, between the ruin he might bring on his family, if he opposed the Emperor’s wishes, together with the prospect of Siberia, and the stings of conscience, still wanted resolution to follow the path of virtue. But at night, when he was in bed, I, as he told me, appeared to him with a star on my forehead, and said to him—‘Count, follow the road which conscience shows you is the right one, and fear nothing.’ The next day, the Count presented himself at the Emperor’s closet.—‘Who is that?’ said a voice from within, and Alexander himself opened the door. He started, when he saw the Count. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I trust you have got a little sense into your head since yesterday: you have changed your mind, no doubt.’—‘My mind, sire, remains unchanged,’ said the Count.... ‘What a fine black horse that was I saw you riding two or three days ago—such a beautiful creature!’ cried the Emperor, turning the conversation suddenly; and he never after mentioned the subject to the Count.”
Sunday, May 13.—I did not see Lady Hester until three o’clock in the afternoon. “Read to me,” she said, almost as soon as I had sat down, “for I am too exhausted to talk.” I began, in the “Memoirs of a Peeress,” at the chapter succeeding the burial of the squire, and she listened for some time without saying a word. At last she interrupted me, and observed that there was a great deal of good feeling in the book. “If I were rich enough,” she continued, “I would invite Lady Charlotte here—and she would come, for she has children, and would like to show them the East. How pleasant it would be for me to have such a companion for two or three hours a day! What a beautiful woman she was! what an arm and hand! I have seen the whole Opera-House turn to look at it on the front of the box. What a beautiful leg, too!—but the handsomest foot I ever saw in man or woman was Lord Down’s. The last time I ever met Lady Charlotte was walking with her brother in Kensington Gardens: she walked so well!—not mincing, like some women, nor striding, like others, but with a perfect use of her limbs, unaffected and graceful. The duke, too, was like her in that respect: his smile was incomparably sweet. I don’t know where they were going; but they walked up to a party, seemed to talk and inquire about somebody, and then walked away together. Her features were equally charming with her person—with hair not keteety” (the Arabic for hempy), “but approaching to a gold colour, and with a beautiful nose.”