One more detail was added to this interesting and deeply coloured fable. The right-hand wall of the courtyard was studded, on a level with the balcony, with huge rusty iron nails. There were rows upon rows of these unlovely and apparently useless objects which tradition had not failed to turn to good account. For every man hanged on that spot by the indefatigable Tristan, a nail was, it seems, driven into the wall, which thus became a sort of baker’s tally or tavern slate. We counted forty-four nails. The woman nodded her head with serious satisfaction. Frequent repetitions of her story had brought her almost to the point of believing it. She had ministered so long to the tastes of tourists—who like to think that Louis hanged his subjects as liberally as Catherine de Medici poisoned hers—that she had gradually moulded her narrative into symmetry, making use of every available feature to give it consistency and grace. The fine old house—which may have harboured tragedies of its own as sombre as any wrought by Tristan’s hand—lent itself with true architectural sympathy to the illusion. Some habitations can do this thing, can look to perfection the parts assigned them by history or by tradition. Who that has ever seen the “Jew’s House” at Lincoln can forget the peculiar horror that broods over the dark, ill-omened doorway? The place is peopled by ghosts. Beneath its heavy lintel pass little trembling feet. From out the shadows comes a strangled cry. It tells its tale better than Chaucer or the balladists; with less pity and more fear, less detail and more suggestiveness. We shudder as we peer into its gloom, yet we linger, magnetized by the subtlety of association. It may be innocent,—poor, huddled mass of stone,—but we hope not. We are like the children at the altar-foot, spellbound by the vision of a crime.
ALLEGRA
A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made;
A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being;
Graceful without design, and unforeseeing;
With eyes—Oh! speak not of her eyes! which seem
Two mirrors of Italian heaven.
In these Wordsworthian lines Shelley describes Lord Byron’s little daughter, Allegra, then under two years of age; and the word “toy”—so keenly suggestive of both the poetic and the masculine point of view—has in this case an unconscious and bitter significance. Allegra was a toy at which rude hands plucked violently, until death lifted her from their clutches, and hid her away in the safety and dignity of the tomb. “She is more fortunate than we are,” said her father, with a noble and rare lapse into simplicity, and the words were sadly true. Never did a little child make a happier escape from the troublesome burden of life.
In the winter of 1816, a handsome, vivacious, dark-eyed girl sought the acquaintance of Lord Byron, and begged him to use his influence in obtaining for her an engagement at Drury Lane. She was the type of young woman who aspires to a career on the stage, or in any other field, without regard to qualifications, and without the burden of study. She wrote in her first letter (it had many successors): “The theatre presents an easy method of independence.” She objected vehemently to “the intolerable drudgery of provincial boards.” She wanted to appear at once in London. And she signed her name, “Clara Clairmont,” which was prettily alliterative, and suited her better than Jane.
It was an inauspicious beginning of an unhappy intimacy, destined to bring nothing but disaster in its train. Miss Clairmont’s stepfather, William Godwin, had confessed, not without reason, “a feeling of incompetence for the education of daughters.” His own child, Mary, had fled to Europe eighteen months before, with the poet Shelley. Miss Clairmont accompanied their flight; and their inexplicable folly in taking her with them was punished—as folly always is—with a relentless severity seldom accorded to sin. To the close of Shelley’s life, his sister-in-law continued to be a source of endless irritation and anxiety.