V
With the return from Greece, the great days of adventure are at an end, the rest of Trelawny’s long life is the story of the kind of man the world calls a “character.”
The pause in England was brief, and in 1829 he returned to Italy, took a house in Florence, and busied himself bringing up his little daughter Zela, born to him of his Greek wife, and writing his autobiographical romance. It seems reasonably sure that sometime during these Italian years he proposed to Mary Shelley, but without success; the lady was not exactly a person to be an incident in anybody’s life. The pirate, now a man of forty, then translated his affections to Claire (Jane) Clairmont whom he had met at Lerici in the romantic days. This love affair by letter lasted for long years. Tre was still Tre the corsair and Byronic lover. “Yes, Jane,” he wrote, in a letter full of rhetoric and misspelling,—“much as endurance has hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures.”...
This friendship had one unfortunate result; the lady hated Byron and his memory with an all consuming hate, and this poison spread to Trelawny’s mind, making him cruelly hostile to a man he had never understood.
England again, and then a voyage to the United States, the purchase of the freedom of a slave, and a swim in the Niagara River. At Niagara a ferryman muttered that he was all “tuckered out.” “How old are you?” cried Tre as he scrambled up the bank after his wild swim. “Thirty-eight,” replied the ferryman. “Then you are not worth a damn,” shouted the adventurer rudely. “You had better look out for the alms house!”
English society welcomed him back; Shelley was coming into his own, the Byron legend had taken root, the “Adventures of a Younger Son” had been a striking success, and all the English world was anxious to see the last of the great company. Picturesque, dark and Arabic as ever, and possessed of great physical strength, Tre moved among the mirrors, the teacups and the talk, spinning his wild yarns and blazing out in fine rhetorical damnations of all poppycock and snobbery. After 1846, he retired to Usk in Monmouthshire, married, and busied himself planting, building and teaching scientific husbandry.
The seventies found him the last survivor of the past though Byron’s giant gondolier, the romantic “Tita,” had grown old along with him. The Hercules had come to England, found a place with the Disraelis, and married Mrs. Disraeli’s maid.
Trelawny had now become venerable, grown a white beard, and brought up two sons and a daughter. The little Greek girl had married very happily. “Our friend Tre” was now a fierce, venerable, wild-eyed, magnificent old man full of opinionated notions on many subjects. He had taken to preaching natural living, the virtues of abstemiousness, and the folly of wearing heavy underwear. To the generation of Rossetti and Burne Jones, he was “Captain” Trelawny, the fiery ancient who had been a comrade and friend of the gods.
Joaquin Miller saw him at the Savage Club in London. “On one occasion,” wrote the Californian, “he came in while a winter storm was raging, and he must have been wet all through. But he would not drink with us. His collar was open after the fashion of Walt Whitman, and he had neither overcoat nor umbrella. He stood with his back to the fire, straight and strong as a mast, looked about over us in quiet disdain for a while, then took off his coat, hung it over the back of a chair by the fire, and sat by and watched it drying till the storm abated.” When Miller went to visit him, old Tre “insisted in a most mysterious tone of voice that he had blood from some extinct race of kings in his veins, and that he had in early days been a famous pirate.” At eighty-one, he met undaunted the unconquerable enemy. He rests beside Shelley in Rome.
What a life the great, bony, awkward boy had made for himself, what a quality of courage and defiance it has! The man would have fought the stars in the courses. Being what he was, he had to see life as a struggle, and the best of him lies in the way that he accepted every challenge with a singing joy. The fighting type of human being very often finds a certain robust satisfaction in life, and so it was with Trelawny. Whatever he had done, whatever he had been, life had been gloriously worth living under the sun. And is it not strange that the great adventure of this life of struggle and strange lands should have centred about a lamp-lit room in a villa in Italy, and a friendship with the most fragile and the unworldly being of his time?