Page:Eothen, or, Traces of travel brought home from the East by Kinglake, Alexander William.djvu/95

 During the hours that this sort of conversation or rather discourse was going on, our tchibouques were from time to time replenished, and the Lady as well as I, continued to smoke with little or no intermission, till the interview ended. I think that the fragrant fumes of the Latakiah must have helped to keep me on my good behavior as a patient disciple of the Prophetess.

It was not till after midnight that my visit for the evening came to an end; when I quitted my seat the Lady rose, and stood up in the same formal attitude (almost that of a soldier in a state of "attention,") which she had assumed at my entrance, at the same time she let go the drapery which she had held over her lap whilst sitting, and allowed it to fall on the ground.

The next morning after breakfast I was visited by my Lady's Secretary—the only European, except the Doctor, whom she retained in her household. The Secretary, like the Doctor, was Italian, but he preserved more signs of European dress and European pretensions, than his medical fellow-slave. He spoke little or no English, though he wrote it pretty well, having been formerly employed in a mercantile house connected with England. The poor fellow was in an unhappy state of mind. In order to make you understand the extent of his spiritual anxieties, I ought to have told you that the Doctor (who had sunk into the complete Asiatic, and had condescended accordingly to the performance of even menial services) had adopted the common faith of all the neighboring people, and had become a firm and happy believer in the divine power of his mistress. Not so the Secretary; when I had strolled with him to a distance from the building, which rendered him safe from being overheard by human ears, he told me in a hollow voice, trembling with emotion, that there were times at which he doubted the divinity of "Milèdi." I said nothing to encourage the poor fellow in that frightful state of scepticism, which, if indulged, might end in positive infidelity. I found that her Ladyship had rather arbitrarily abridged the amusements of her Secretary, forbidding him from shooting small birds on the mountain side. This oppression had roused in him a spirit of inquiry that might end fatally—perhaps for himself—perhaps for the "religion of the place."