Trelawny interrupted to tell him that his wife was waiting for him at the edge of the wood. He started up, snatched up his scattered books and papers and thrust them into his hat and jacket pockets, sighing, “Poor Mary! hers is a sad fate. She can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead.”
He began to proffer excuses to her, but she, either to hide her emotions or form a Godwinesque lack of any, began in a bantering tone: “What a wild goose you are, Percy! If my thoughts have strayed from my book, it was to the Opera, and my new dress from Florence, and especially to the ivy wreath so much admired for my hair, and not to you, you silly fellow! When I left home my satin slippers had not arrived. These are serious matters. . . .”
But in Mary’s pleasantries there was always a note which rang false.
CHAPTER XXXIV
II SAMUEL XII. 23
Byron, after promising Shelley to bring Allegra to Pisa, arrived without her, and Claire, who had come expressly from Florence to wait about the city in the hopes of seeing the child, was horribly alarmed on learning she had been left in the convent of Bagna-Cavallo. Her Italian friends gave her a sinister description of this convent, set down in the middle of the marshes of the Romagna, and in the most unhealthy climate. The nuns—Capucins—ignored hygiene, fed the children disgracefully, and did not warm them at all. Claire could not see a fire without thinking of her poor little darling who never saw or felt a cheerful blaze.
This high-spirited young woman was brought, through maternal anguish, to an abnegation that was sublime. She wrote to Byron that she would renounce ever seeing Allegra again so long as she lived, if he would consent to put her in a good English School. “I can no longer resist,” she said, “the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her any more.”
Byron made no reply. There was some talk amongst Claire’s friends of rescuing Allegra by stratagem, but Shelley begged her to have patience. While agreeing with her as to Byron’s cruelty, he disapproved of thoughtless violence. . . . “Lord Byron is inflexible and you are in his power. Remember, Claire, when you rejected my earnest advice, and checked me with that contempt which I had never merited from you at Milan and how vain is now your regret! This is the second of my sibylline volumes. If you wait for the third, it may be sold at a still higher price.”
He called upon Byron to plead Claire’s cause, but the moment Byron heard her name he gave an impatient shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, women can’t exist without making scenes!” Shelley told him what Claire had heard about the unsuitability of the convent. “What do I know about it?” he said. “I have never been there.” Then, when Claire’s anguish and her fears were described to him, a smile of malicious satisfaction passed over his face.
“I had difficulty in restraining myself from knocking him down,” said Shelley afterwards at Lady Mountcashell’s. “I was furious but I was wrong. He can no more help being what he is than that door can help being a door.”
But old Mr. Tighe told him, “You are quite wrong in your fatalism. If I were to horsewhip that door it would still remain a door, but if Lord Byron were well horsewhipped my opinion is he would become as humane as he is now inhumane. It’s the subserviency of his friends that makes him the insolent tyrant he is.”