But Men
Struggle Vainly In The Meshes Of Their Destiny.
The unbelieved
Cassandra was right after all; the plague came, and the necessity
of avoiding the quarantine, to which I should have been subjected
if I had sailed from Alexandria, forced me to alter my route.
I
went down into Egypt, and stayed there for a time, and then crossed
the desert once more, and came back to the mountains of the
Lebanon, exactly as the prophetess had foretold.
Lady Hester talked to me long and earnestly on the subject of
religion, announcing that the Messiah was yet to come. She strived
to impress me with the vanity and the falseness of all European
creeds, as well as with a sense of her own spiritual greatness:
throughout her conversation upon these high topics she carefully
insinuated, without actually asserting, her heavenly rank.
Amongst other much more marvellous powers, the lady claimed to have
one which most women, I fancy, possess namely, that of reading
men's characters in their faces. She examined the line of my
features very attentively, and told me the result, which, however,
I mean to keep hidden.
One favoured subject of discourse was that of "race," upon which
she was very diffuse, and yet rather mysterious. She set great
value upon the ancient French {20} (not Norman blood, for that she
vilified), but did not at all appreciate that which we call in this
country "an old family." She had a vast idea of the Cornish miners
on account of their race, and said, if she chose, she could give me
the means of rousing them to the most tremendous enthusiasm.
Such are the topics on which the lady mainly conversed, but very
often she would descend to more worldly chat, and then she was no
longer the prophetess, but the sort of woman that you sometimes
see, I am told, in London drawing-rooms - cool, decisive in manner,
unsparing of enemies, full of audacious fun, and saying the
downright things that the sheepish society around her is afraid to
utter. I am told that Lady Hester was in her youth a capital
mimic, and she showed me that not all the queenly dulness to which
she had condemned herself, not all her fasting and solitude, had
destroyed this terrible power. The first whom she crucified in my
presence was poor Lord Byron. She had seen him, it appeared, I
know not where, soon after his arrival in the East, and was vastly
amused at his little affectations. He had picked up a few
sentences of the Romantic, with which he affected to give orders to
his Greek servant. I can't tell whether Lady Hester's mimicry of
the bard was at all close, but it was amusing; she attributed to
him a curiously coxcombical lisp.
Another person whose style of speaking the lady took off very
amusingly was one who would scarcely object to suffer by the side
of Lord Byron - I mean Lamartine, who had visited her in the course
of his travels.
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