Letters from Egypt | Page 5

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