As the consideration in which the government held Lady Hester was very well known, all those who generally take their tone from the great man hastened down to pay their respects. Besides these, came the English Consul, the Greek bishop, and the French Consul. Having seen the governor, and heard the particulars of his expedition, after a stay of five days, Lady Hester re-embarked, and sailed for Antioch. The räis (or captain) objected to enter the port of Swadiah, which is nearest to Antioch, and dropped anchor at Bussýl, the ancient Posidium, a small port to the south of it. Mr. Barker, who had been waiting at Swadiah twenty days, living under tents, hastened immediately to Bussýl, and mules were provided for the luggage. Lady Hester landed, and, in a short time, arrived on her ass at Antioch, which is distant six or seven leagues from Bussýl. Mr. Barker had caused a house to be prepared for her, and another for himself, but staid only five days at Antioch, and then departed for Aleppo, being obliged to return on account of the Prince Regent’s birthday, which he wished to celebrate in his consular house. Here Lady Hester spent seventy days, and the language she held after her return, when speaking of the Ansárys, was, that she considered them as an industrious but oppressed people. Few Europeans had at that epoch ever met with common civility at Antioch, much less with honours and consideration. It seems, however, that Lady Hester was not less regarded there than elsewhere.
She visited whatever was curious. Much of the time that she was there was spent in a retired cottage out of the town, where she might be truly said to show a fearless disposition and much courage: for a few Ansárys, had they been so disposed, could have carried her off or murdered her any hour of the night or even of the day; and some well disposed persons secretly informed her, when there, that her life was in danger. But the terror excited by the late severe vengeance exercised on their nation probably saved her; and, more than all, the magnanimous conduct which she pursued towards them; for, at her cottage in the woods, she took an occasion, when several peasants were around her, to harangue them; telling them that she had indeed revenged the death of a Frenchman, and of a man who was her country’s enemy, because she knew that all just persons abhorred the deeds committed against the defenceless in the dark—deeds such as must be disowned by the brave and the good everywhere.
Lady Hester returned to Sayda in a polacca brig, which she found lying in Latakia harbour waiting for a freight. As the heat was still too great to remain at Abra, she set off on the 6th of October for Rûm. On the 13th she returned from Rûm to receive M. Regnault, the French consul at Tripoli, who was, by invitation, come on a visit to her. He was a short, humpbacked man, formerly one of the twelve of the Institute of Egypt. His language and manners were pleasing. He was somewhat facetious, and had amiability enough to make his ugliness forgotten in the course of a few hours’ conversation.
M. Loustaunau, a sketch of whose life has been given in another work, and whom Lady Hester had long since dubbed the Prophet, was still living on her bounty. He was ever brooding over portentous events about to happen to her ladyship: of whom he now always spoke as a person destined by the Almighty to play a great part in the world. On all subjects he discovered remarkable good sense, excepting on the Bible, the texts of which he perverted in a most extraordinary manner, to accommodate them to the events of her life, past, present, and future.
Lady Hester and M. Regnault visited the French consul at Sayda. She wore a splendid black abah, with gold brandenburghs and tassels, and, whilst sitting on a carpet on the ground, after the Turkish fashion, she reclined on a short crutch beautifully inlaid with mother of pearl, after the manner of the great personages of the East. Such was the crowd which assembled round her when she entered the town that one would have said it was the first time they had ever seen her. Adults and children, Turks and Christians, all were actuated by the same spirit of curiosity to behold the woman who could stir up a whole province to take revenge upon the Ansárys for the death of a Frank.
Lady Hester’s acts of beneficence to a number of individuals, coupled with this last generous and disinterested labour for M. Boutin, had caused her name to spread very widely through the country, and herself to be regarded as the protectress of the unfortunate and the almoner of the poor. On her return to the convent, she found a suppliant at her gate, whose history will claim some sympathy.
Michael Ayda was the son of an Egyptian merchant, whose father was receiver of the customs at Damietta, and afterwards katib to Gezzàr Pasha, by whom, in a fit of bloodthirstiness, he was put to death. Michael and his sister, with another brother, were left orphans to the care of their uncle, Girius Ayda, who, having been an active adherent of the French when in possession of Egypt, was obliged, on their evacuation of his country, to abandon it, and retired with them to France. He there obtained a pension from Buonaparte and the rank of general in the army.
Michael was then about nine years old. He was young and apt for literary acquirements, so that, as he grew up, he retained the Arabic language and acquired the French. At the age of seventeen, he became a teacher of Arabic, and copyist at the royal library in Paris, where he read the best authors in his native tongue, and acquired a correct knowledge of the Arabian poets. He had often heard speak of the great wealth which his father possessed; and he cherished the resolution within himself that, when arrived at man’s estate, he would go to Egypt, and try if any of it could be recovered from the hands of those who, he was told, unjustly kept possession of it. Accordingly, in May, 1816, he carried his resolution into effect, and sailing from Marseilles landed at Alexandria.
Another uncle, who was living at Alexandria, had opposed by letter, and with all the means in his power, this voyage to Egypt. Michael Ayda therefore imagined that his relations in Egypt were in a league together, to prevent the recovery of his property. After his arrival at Alexandria, he brooded over this idea so deeply that, added to the strangeness of the people among whom he found himself, and the stories which he had heard from his boyhood of the barbarity of the Turks, it turned his brain. He fancied that the object of his journey was known to everybody, and that persons set on by his uncle were conspiring against his life.
Being, therefore, on the way from Alexandria to Damietta by land, he one night thought that he observed one of the mule-drivers secretly approaching him with a knife in his hand, and fancied that it could be with no other intention than to murder him. Frantic almost to madness, he sprang upon his feet, fled, and, after wandering about for nearly twenty-four hours, arrived, worn out with fatigue and hunger, at Damietta. The cousin in some way heard that a person of his own name was arrived from France, and, finding him out, received him with the kindness of a near relation, clothed him, and expressed himself willing to give him every information respecting his father’s property. But Michael Ayda was too deeply impressed with the supposed cruel intentions of his cousin ever to feel at peace, and, in the course of a couple of days, he entered a mosque, and proclaimed himself in the middle of the assembled congregation as one resolved to become a Mahometan.