III
The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s, remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge in the noisy sport of pistol practice.
Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron lurked in his huge palace guarded by a growling English bulldog and a squad of chattering retainers captained by a giant Venetian gondolier.
The poets liked the younger son. He was a rebel too, in his way, his piratic career made him interesting, he had good stories to tell, and above all, he was a man of action who could be trusted to do practical things for the impractical. A boat is to be built, Tre will attend to it; a boat is to be sailed, Tre will do that; household goods are to be moved, we must talk with Tre. Affection forms quickly in such an isolated group, and there seems to have been a certain affection for piratic Tre, perhaps the first the man had ever known.
As the weather grew hot, Tre advised the Shelleys to go north, and found them a house at Lerici on the Gulf of Shezzia. The place was but a shabby barrack, but it was on the sea, and Shelley rejoiced. In the evenings, the whole population of men, women and children took to the water like ducks, and their shouts of joy filled the house. Shelley and Tre joined in the frolic, but Mary Shelley looked grave, and said it was “improper.” “Hush, Mary,” said the poet, “that insidious word has never been echoed by these woods and rocks; don’t teach it to them.”
The late spring ripened into summer, and with July came the historic tragedy.
Early in the spring a kind of yachtsman’s fever had descended upon the little group. Byron had arranged for the building of a yacht, and Williams had designed a boat for Shelley and the friends at Lerici. In designing the hull, Williams had probably attempted an imitation of the fast American vessels he had seen along the coast; it was a model he did not understand. One Captain Roberts, a sometime British naval officer then living in Italy, had the boat built under his eye at Genoa; she was twenty-four feet long and eight in the beam; she drew four feet of water and was schooner rigged with gaff topsails. Not a boat, this, to fire a sailor’s heart, for the rig needs a crew to run it, and is difficult to handle quickly, especially in a small space. Two English sailors and a ship’s boy had sailed the vessel from Genoa to Lerici. When asked how she sailed, the tars had replied that she was a “ticklish boat to manage,” and that they had “cautioned the gents accordingly.”
Originally christened the “Don Juan,” the fateful vessel was now re-christened the “Ariel.” To give her more stability, Williams filled her with ballast,—a dangerous business, for the vessel was undecked. The designer would hear no criticism of his craft.
“Williams is as touchy about the reputation of his boat as if she were his wife,” grumbled Tre.
Such was the yacht in which Shelley, Williams and the English sailor lad, Charles Vivian, sailed from the port of Leghorn on July the eighth, 1822. The poet had sailed down from Lerici to welcome Leigh Hunt and his family to Italy, and this friendly office done, was returning home again by sea.
Two o’clock in the afternoon, haze, July dulness, and almost no wind in the Gulf of Spezzia. Trelawny, busy doing something aboard Byron’s yacht, the Bolivar, watched his friends sail away. He had hoped to escort them to sea in Byron’s vessel, but at a last moment difficulty over sailing papers had arisen with the port authorities. The haze was thickening and growing dark, a menacing thunder was rolling nearer; presently the Ariel vanished from Trelawny’s sight into the leaden gloom.
A squall, needless to say, is a swift business anywhere, but the Mediterranean variety has a certain thunderbolt burst and a drenching vengefulness all its own. On the ships anchored about the Bolivar, barefooted seamen were running along the decks preparing their vessels for the squall which moment by moment assumed a more threatening look. Suddenly came rain, and in the rain the wind; the storm blustered through the night.
Trelawny went ashore, and listened all night long to the wind and the beat of the rain. He was restless with anxiety. Everything that there was of sailor in the man distrusted the Ariel, and he knew only too well that Shelley would be of little use in an emergency. The poet would be dreaming or reading a book at the very moment the wind leaped at the sails. The dawn revealed the shipping in the harbour rolling and pitching about under pouring rain; the anxious day ended without news. The following days found Tre searching among the vessels which had been at sea during the storm, questioning sailors, patrolling the coast with the coast guards, and offering rewards.
Presently comes a messenger in some shabby-showy uniform, and an official letter written in Italian. The bodies have been found on the sands, poor, broken bodies of men lost at sea.
“Oh, bitter, bitter gifts of the lord Poseidon,” said the Greeks, remembering the bruised flesh turning in the waves. What was to be done? Tre says that it was decided by “all concerned,” that Shelley should be buried in Rome beside his little son. Before this might be done, however, there were laws and a thousand regulations to be fought through, for Italy was then divided in separate jurisdictions, and, moreover, bodies washed ashore were regarded by the law as possible victims of the plague. This, of course, was not Shelley’s case, but the law was the law.
It was Tre who found a way out of the difficulty. Was his notion possibly a memory of something he had witnessed in the East? He would cremate the bodies, and send Shelley’s ashes to Rome. It is no injustice to Tre to say that he made his preparations and gathered the funerary material with the business-like directness of an undertaker. He was the man of action as ever, the practical friend who could be trusted to get things done.
He attended to Williams first, and then gathered the forlorn little world of the exiles to see the last of Shelley.
It was a hot August day, and the whitish sands of Villareggio were tremulous with heat. A dead calm lay upon the sea, and save for Byron’s schooner anchored close off shore, the vast gulf revealed no sign of human life. Behind the beach lay a wood of tall, branchless pines, “their dark blue tops packed so close together that no sun could penetrate,” and far away, over the wood rose the marble-crested Apennines. The pyre stood in the open between the wood and the sea. Byron was there and Leigh Hunt, a detail of soldiers, a few coast guards, and some Italian great folk who had ridden out in their carriages to watch so unaccountable a proceeding. Following ancient ritual, the exiles poured salt, oil and wine upon the pyre; the little first flames rose yellow towards their hands. A lonely sea bird came circling near, the pyre burnt with little smoke, and thus the body of Shelley dissolved into the air.
Only the heart refused to burn, though in the hottest of the flame. Tre snatched it forth, and burnt his hand so doing. When all was done, and the pyre burnt out, he gathered the ashes together, put them in an oaken box, paid his soldiers, and went off to Rome with his parcel.
A chapter of his life had come to an end. The little group dispersed, Byron remained to quarrel on with the Hunts, the widows went to England. Tre had been a staunch and helpful friend, and Mary Shelley never forgot the debt. She could write later that Trelawny’s conduct “impressed us all with an affectionate regard and a perfect faith in the unalterable goodness of his heart.” She knew that it was good to have a friend. The Gentleman’s Magazine, on hearing of the drowning, had remarked, “Mr. Percy Shelley is a fitter subject for the penitentiary dying speech than a lauding elegy, for a muse of the rope rather than that of the cypress.”
Italy in the autumn, and an empty world. Tre lingered on a year, and found diversion in riding about the countryside. An American-born negro followed him as a groom; the peasants stared at the strange pair galloping by.
Then came a letter from Byron, and life began again with adventure and war.