Her Ladyship, In The Right Spirit Of Hospitality, Now Sent And
Commanded Me To Repose For A While After The Fatigues Of My
Journey, And To Dine.
The cuisine was of the Oriental kind, which is highly artificial,
and I thought it very good.
I rejoiced too in the wine of the
Lebanon.
Soon after the ending of the dinner the doctor arrived with
miladi's compliments, and an intimation that she would he happy to
receive me if I were so disposed. It had now grown dark, and the
rain was falling heavily, so that I got rather wet in following my
guide through the open courts that I had to pass in order to reach
the presence chamber. At last I was ushered into a small
apartment, which was protected from the draughts of air passing
through the doorway by a folding screen; passing this, I came
alongside of a common European sofa, where sat the lady prophetess.
She rose from her seat very formally, spoke to me a few words of
welcome, pointed to a chair which was placed exactly opposite to
her sofa at a couple of yards' distance, and remained standing up
to the full of her majestic height, perfectly still and motionless,
until I had taken my appointed place; she then resumed her seat,
not packing herself up according to the mode of the Orientals, but
allowing her feet to rest on the floor or the footstool; at the
moment of seating herself she covered her lap with a mass of loose
white drapery which she held in her hand. It occurred to me at the
time that she did this in order to avoid the awkwardness of sitting
in manifest trousers under the eye of an European, but I can hardly
fancy now that with her wilful nature she would have brooked such a
compromise as this.
The woman before me had exactly the person of a prophetess - not,
indeed, of the divine sibyl imagined by Domenichino, so sweetly
distracted betwixt love and mystery, but of a good business-like,
practical prophetess, long used to the exercise of her sacred
calling. I have been told by those who knew Lady Hester Stanhope
in her youth, that any notion of a resemblance betwixt her and the
great Chatham must have been fanciful; but at the time of my seeing
her, the large commanding features of the gaunt woman, then sixty
years old or more, certainly reminded me of the statesman that lay
dying {15} in the House of Lords, according to Copley's picture.
Her face was of the most astonishing whiteness; {16} she wore a
very large turban, which seemed to be of pale cashmere shawls, so
disposed as to conceal the hair; her dress, from the chin down to
the point at which it was concealed by the drapery which she held
over her lap, was a mass of white linen loosely folding - an
ecclesiastical sort of affair, more like a surplice than any of
those blessed creations which our souls love under the names of
"dress" and "frock" and "boddice" and "collar" and "habit-shirt"
and sweet "chemisette."
Such was the outward seeming of the personage that sat before me,
and indeed she was almost bound by the fame of her actual
achievements, as well as by her sublime pretensions, to look a
little differently from the rest of womankind.
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