There was no need of heroics on the one side, nor of apprehension on the other. While Miss Clairmont was fretting and scheming in Florence, fever was scourging the Romagna, so seldom visited by infection, and the little English-born girl fell one of its earliest victims. Allegra died at her convent school in the spring of 1822. Byron admitted that death was kind. “Her position in the world would scarcely have allowed her to be happy,” he said, pitying remorsefully the “sinless child of sin,” so harshly handicapped in life. But he felt his loss, and bitterly, though silently, mourned it. The Countess Guiccioli was with him when the tidings came. In her eyes, he had always been a fond and solicitous father; yet the violence of his distress amazed and frightened her. He sent her away, and faced his grief, and his remorse—if he felt remorse—alone. The next day, when she sought him, he said very simply, “It is God’s will. She is more fortunate than we are;” and never spoke of the child again. “From that time,” she adds, “he became more anxious about his daughter Ada;—so much so as to disquiet himself when the usual accounts sent him were for a post or two delayed.”

Byron’s letters to Shelley, to Murray, and to Scott, bear witness to the sincerity of his grief, and also to his sense of compunction. He was still ready to defend his conduct; but to Shelley, at least, he admitted: “It is a moment when we are apt to think that, if this or that had been done, such an event might have been prevented.” Indeed, of the four actors so deeply concerned in this brief tragedy of life, Shelley alone could hold himself free from blame. From first to last he had been generous, reasonable, and kind. It was his painful part to comfort Miss Clairmont, to restrain her frenzy of anger and wretchedness, to make what shadow of peace he could between the parents of the dead child. In all this he endured more than his share of worry and vexation. Two weeks after Allegra’s death, he wrote to Lord Byron:

“I have succeeded in dissuading Clare from the melancholy design of visiting the coffin at Leghorn, much to the profit of my own shattered health and spirits, which would have suffered greatly in accompanying her on such a journey. She is much better. She has, indeed, altogether suffered in a manner less terrible than I expected, after the first shock, during which, of course, she wrote the letter you enclose. I had no idea that her letter was written in that temper; and I think I need not assure you that, whatever mine or Mary’s ideas might have been respecting the system of education you intended to adopt, we sympathize too much in your loss, and appreciate too well your feelings, to have allowed such a letter to be sent to you, had we suspected its contents.”

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble. By early summer, Shelley was able to report Miss Clairmont as once more “talkative and vivacious.” It was he who befriended her to the end, and who bequeathed her a large share of his estate. It was he who saw—or deemed he saw—the image of Allegra rise smiling and beckoning from the sea.

According to the Countess Guiccioli, Byron bore the “profound sorrow” occasioned by his little daughter’s death “with all the fortitude belonging to his great soul.” In reality his sense of loss was tempered by relief. Allegra’s future had always been to him a subject of anxiety, and it was not without an emotion of joy that he realized the child’s escape from a world which he had found bad, and which he had done little to make better. Two days after she died, he wrote to Murray: “You will regret to hear that I have received intelligence of the death of my daughter, Allegra, of a fever, in the convent of Bagnacavallo, where she was placed for the last year to commence her education. It is a heavy blow for many reasons, but must be borne,—with time.”

A fortnight later he wrote to Scott: “I have just lost my natural daughter, Allegra, by a fever. The only consolation, save time, is the reflection that she is either at rest or happy; for her few years (only five) prevented her from having incurred any sin, except what we inherit from Adam.

“‘Whom the gods love die young.’”

In a third letter, published by Mr. Prothero, Byron repeats these sentiments with even greater emphasis, and with a keener appreciation of their value. “Death has done his work, and I am resigned.... Even at my age I have become so much worn and harassed by the trials of the world, that I cannot refrain from looking upon that early rest which is at times granted to the young, as a blessing. There is a purity and holiness in the apotheosis of those who leave us in their brightness and their beauty, which instinctively lead us to a persuasion of their beatitude.”

It was the irony of fate that, after being an innocent object of contention all her life, Allegra should, even in death, have been made the theme of an angry and bitter dispute. Her body was sent to England, and Byron begged Murray to make all the necessary arrangements for her burial. His directions were exceedingly minute. He indicated the precise spot in Harrow Church where he wished the child interred, and he wrote the inscription to be engraved upon her tablet.

IN MEMORY OF
ALLEGRA,
DAUGHTER OF G. G. LORD BYRON,
WHO DIED AT BAGNACAVALLO,
IN ITALY, APRIL 20TH, 1822,
AGED FIVE YEARS AND THREE MONTHS.