Claire Clairmont, that unfortunate mortal, who where'er she came brought calamity, vibrated discontentedly between here and Florence, and it seemed that sometimes I saw her, a little, unhappy, self-conscious ghost, looking from the upper windows of Shelley's palace.
And here, too, after the storm and the shipwreck in which their lives' happiness had gone down, came those two forlorn women, Mary Shelley and Jane Williams. Upon the picture of such sorrow I could not trust myself to gaze; only now and then I heard their shadowy weeping in some dim, great chamber of a half-deserted house.
At other times, I returned to my first friend, the great piazza, whose marvels it seemed impossible to exhaust, and for which I grew to entertain a curiously personal affection.
But as the spring came on, and the mild, enervating breezes ousted more and more their colder comrades, I began to long with all my soul and body for the country. The brown hills, so near and yet so far, inspired me with a fervour of longing. I had promised never to go beyond the city walls; even the great park, or Casine, where already the trees were burgeoning, was forbidden ground, though sometimes, indeed, I drove out there with the ladies. The cool and distant peaks of the Apennines drew my heart towards them with an ever-growing magnetism.
The cypresses and ilexes springing up beyond the high white walls of a garden, the scent of spring flowers borne across to me in passing, filled me with a longing and a melancholy which were new to me.
As a matter of fact, the enervating climate, the restricted life and the solitude—for solitude, when all were said, it was—were beginning to tell upon my health. I was not unhappy, but I grew thin and pale, and was developing a hitherto unknown mood of dreamy introspection.
In June, I gathered, the whole Brogi household would adjourn to the family villa near the baths of Lucca. It was taken for granted that I was to accompany them, and, indeed, I had determined on making out my full year, should my services be required for so long.
After that, no doubt, a husband would be found for Bianca, and I could return to England with a clear conscience and quite a nice little amount of savings. Mother should have a deep arm-chair, and Rosalind a really handsome wedding present; and with my new acquisition of Italian I hoped to be able to command a higher price in the educational market.
The evenings were generally passed in chatter, in which I soon learnt to take my part; and I began to be included in the invitations to the houses of the various ladies who "received," like the Marchesa, on certain evenings of the week.
No subject of gossip was too trivial for discussion; and I could not but admire the way in which the tiniest incident was taken up, turned inside out, battledored this way and that, and finally wore threadbare before it was allowed to drop, by these highly skilled talkers. Talk, indeed, was the business of their lives, the staple fare of existence.