Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/83

 like than the poor Doctor, who had brought his mistress's letters to Beyrout.

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 be 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 which 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 through the door-way 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 trowsers 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,