Letters from Egypt - Lucy Duff Gordon (best story books to read TXT) 📗

the army, and was in Sicily under Lord William Bentinck; but soon quitted an uncongenial service, and was called to the Bar. In 1819 he married Sarah, the youngest daughter of John Taylor of Norwich, {1} when they took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, close to James Mill, the historian of British India, and next door to Jeremy Bentham, whose pupil Mr. Austin was. Here, it may be said, the Utilitarian philosophy of the nineteenth century was born. Jeremy Bentham's garden became the playground of the young Mills and of Lucie Austin; his coach-house was converted into a gymnasium, and his flower-beds were intersected by tapes and threads to represent the passages of a panopticon prison. The girl grew in vigour and in sense, with a strong tinge of originality and independence and an extreme love of animals. About 1826 the Austins went to Germany, Mr. Austin having been nominated Professor of Civil Law in the new London University, and wishing to study Roman Law under Niebuhr and Schlegel at Bonn. 'Our dear child,' writes Mrs. Austin to Mrs. Grote, 'is a great joy to us. She grows wonderfully, and is the happiest thing in the world. Her German is very pretty; she interprets for her father with great joy and naivete. God forbid that I should bring up a daughter here! But at her present age I am most glad to have her here, and to send her to a school where she learns--_well_, writing, arithmetic, geography, and, as a matter of course, German.' Lucie returned to England transformed into a little German maiden, with long braids of hair down her back, speaking German like her own language, and well grounded in Latin. Her mother, writing to Mrs. Reeve, her sister, says: 'John Mill is ever my dearest child and friend, and he really dotes on Lucie, and can do anything with her. She is too wild, undisciplined, and independent, and though she knows a great deal, it is in a strange, wild way. She reads everything, composes German verses, has imagined and put together a fairy world, dress, language, music, everything, and talks to them in the garden; but she is sadly negligent of her own appearance, and is, as Sterling calls her, Miss Orson. . . . Lucie now goes to a Dr. Biber, who has five other pupils (boys) and his own little child. She seems to take to Greek, with which her father is very anxious to have her thoroughly imbued. As this scheme, even if we stay in England, cannot last many years, I am quite willing to forego all the feminine parts of her education for the present. The main thing is to secure her independence, both with relation to her own mind and outward circumstances. She is handsome, striking, and full of vigour and animation.'

From the very first Lucie Austin possessed a correct and vigorous style, and a nice sense of language, which were hereditary rather than implanted, and to these qualities was added a delightful strain of humour, shedding a current of original thought all through her writings. That her unusual gifts should have been so early developed is hardly surprising with one of her sympathetic temperament when we remember the throng of remarkable men and women who frequented the Austins' house. The Mills, the Grotes, the Bullers, the Carlyles, the Sterlings, Sydney Smith, Luttrell, Rogers, Jeremy Bentham, and Lord Jeffrey, were among the most intimate friends of her parents, and 'Toodie,' as they called her, was a universal favourite with them. Once, staying at a friend's house, and hearing their little girl rebuked for asking questions, she said: '_My_ mamma never says "I don't know" or "Don't ask questions."'

In 1834 Mr. Austin's health, always delicate, broke down, and with his wife and daughter he went to Boulogne. Mrs. Austin made many friends among the fishermen and their wives, but 'la belle Anglaise,' as they called her, became quite a heroine on the occasion of the wreck of the _Amphitrite_, a ship carrying female convicts to Botany Bay. She stood the whole night on the beach in the howling storm, saved the lives of three sailors who were washed up by the breakers, and dashed into the sea and pulled one woman to shore. Lucie was with her mother, and showed the same cool courage that distinguished her in after life. It was during their stay at Boulogne that she first met Heinrich Heine; he sat next her at the _table d'hote_, and, soon finding out that she spoke German perfectly, told her when she returned to England she could tell her friends she had met Heinrich Heine. He was much amused when she said: 'And who is Heinrich Heine?' The poet and the child used to lounge on the pier together; she sang him old English ballads, and he told her stories in which fish, mermaids, water-sprites, and a very funny old French fiddler with a poodle, who was diligently taking three sea-baths a day, were mixed up in a fanciful manner, sometimes humorous, often very pathetic, especially when the water-sprites brought him greetings from the North Sea. He afterwards told her that one of his most charming poems,

'Wenn ich am deinem Hause
Des Morgens voruber geh',
So freut's mich, du liebe Kleine,
Wenn ich dich am Fenster seh',' etc.,

was meant for her whose magnificent eyes he never forgot.

Two years later Mr. Austin was appointed Royal Commissioner to inquire into the grievances of the Maltese. His wife accompanied him, but so hot a climate was not considered good for a young girl, and Lucie was sent to a school at Bromley. She must have been as great a novelty to the school as the school-life was to her, for with a great deal of desultory knowledge she was singularly deficient in many rudiments of ordinary knowledge. She wrote well already at fifteen, and corresponded often with Mrs. Grote and other friends of her parents. {4} At sixteen she determined to be baptized and confirmed as a member of the Church of England (her parents and relations were Unitarians). Lord Monteagle was her sponsor and it was chiefly owing, I believe, to the influence of himself and his family, with whom she was very intimate in spite of her Radical ideas, that she took this step.

When the Austins returned from Malta in 1838, Lucie began to appear in the world; all the old friends flocked round them, and many new friends were made, among them Sir Alexander Duff Gordon whom she first met at Lansdowne House. Left much alone, as her mother was always hard at work translating, writing for various periodicals and nursing her husband, the two young people were thrown much together, and often walked out alone. One day Sir Alexander said to her: 'Miss Austin, do you know people say we are going to be married?' Annoyed at being talked of, and hurt at his brusque way of mentioning it, she was just going to give a sharp answer, when he added: 'Shall we make it true?' With characteristic straightforwardness she replied by the monosyllable, 'Yes,' and so they were engaged. Before her marriage she translated Niebuhr's 'Greek Legends,' which were published under her mother's name.

On the 16th May, 1840, Lucie Austin and Sir Alexander Duff Gordon were married in Kensington Old Church, and the few eye-witnesses left still speak with enthusiasm of the beauty of bridegroom and bride. They took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, (No 8, with a statue of Queen Anne at one corner), and the talent, beauty, and originality, joined with a complete absence of affectation of Lady Duff Gordon, soon attracted a remarkable circle of friends. Lord Lansdowne, Lord Monteagle, Mrs. Norton, Thackeray, Dickens, Elliot Warburton, Tennyson, Tom Taylor, Kinglake, Henry Taylor, and many more, were habitues, and every foreigner of distinction sought an introduction to the Duff Gordons. I remember as a little child seeing Leopold Ranke walking up and down the drawing-room, and talking vehemently in an _olla-podrida_ of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with now and then a Latin quotation in between; I thought he was a madman. When M. Guizot escaped from France on the outbreak of the Revolution, his first welcome and dinner was in Queen Square.

The first child was born in 1842, and soon afterwards Lady Duff Gordon began her translation of 'The Amber Witch'; the 'French in Algiers' by Lamping, and Feuerbach's 'Remarkable Criminal Trials,' followed in quick succession; and together my father and mother translated Ranke's 'Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg' and 'Sketches of German Life.' A remarkable novel by Leon de Wailly, 'Stella and Vanessa,' had remained absolutely unnoticed in France until my mother's English version appeared, when it suddenly had a great success which he always declared he owed entirely to Lady Duff Gordon.

In a letter written to Mrs. Austin from Lord Lansdowne's beautiful villa at Richmond, which he lent to the Duff Gordons after a severe illness of my father's, my mother mentions Hassan el Bakkeet (a black boy): 'He is an inch taller for our grandeur; _peu s'en faut_, he thinks me a great lady and himself a great butler.' Hassan was a personage in the establishment. One night, on returning from a theatrical party at Dickens', my mother found the little boy crouching on the doorstep. His master had turned him out of doors because he was threatened with blindness, and having come now and then with messages to Queen Square, he found his way, as he explained, 'to die on the threshold of the beautiful pale lady.' His eyes were cured, and he became my mother's devoted slave and my playmate, to the horror of Mr. Hilliard, the American author. I perfectly recollect how angry I was when he asked how Lady Duff Gordon could let a negro touch her child, whereupon she called us to her, and kissed me first and Hassan afterwards. Some years ago I asked our dear friend Kinglake about my mother and Hassan, and received the following letter: 'Can I, my dear Janet, how can I trust myself to speak of your dear mother's beauty in the phase it had reached when first I saw her? The classic form of her features, the noble poise of her head and neck, her stately height, her uncoloured yet pure complexion, caused some of the beholders at first to call her beauty statuesque, and others to call it majestic, some pronouncing it to be even imperious; but she was so intellectual, so keen, so autocratic, sometimes even so impassioned in speech, that nobody feeling her powers could go on feebly comparing her to a statue or a mere Queen or Empress. All this touches only the beauteous surface; the stories (which were told me by your dear mother herself) are incidentally illustrative of her kindness to fellow-creatures in trouble or suffering. Hassan, it is supposed, was a Nubian, and originally, as his name implies, a Mahometan, he came into the possession of English missionaries (who had probably delivered him from slavery), and it resulted that he not only spoke English well and without foreign accent, but was always ready with phrases in use amongst pious Christians, and liked, when he could, to apply them as means of giving honour and glory to his beloved master and mistress; so that if, for example, it happened that, when they were not at home, a visitor called on a Sunday, he was sure to be told by Hassan that