At midday came letters. There was one from Hunt for Shelley. Mary opened it trembling all over. Hunt said: “Pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say that you had bad weather after you sailed on Monday, and we are anxious.”
The letter fell from her hands. Jane picked it up, read it, and said, “Then it is all over!”
“No, my dear Jane, it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful! Come with me—we will go to Leghorn. We will post to be swift and learn our fate.”
The road from Lerici to Leghorn passes by Pisa. They stopped at Lord Byron’s house to see if there was any news. They knocked at the door, and some one called out “Chi è?” for it was already late in the evening. It was the Guiccioli’s maid. Lord Byron was in bed, but the Countess, all smiles, came down to meet them. On seeing the terrifying aspect of Mary’s face, very white, looking like marble, she stopped astonished.
“Where is he? Sapete alcuna cosa di Shelley?” said Mary. Byron who followed his dama knew nothing more than that Shelley had left Pisa the preceding Sunday, and had sailed on Monday in bad weather.
It was now midnight, but refusing to rest the two women went on to Leghorn, which they reached at two o’clock in the morning. Their coachman took them to the wrong inn where they found neither Trelawny nor Captain Roberts. They threw themselves dressed on their beds and waited for daylight. At six o’clock they visited all the inns of the town one after the other, and at the Globe Roberts came down to them with a face which told them that the worst was true. They learned from him all that occurred during that agonizing week.
Yet hope was not entirely extinct. The Ariel might have been blown to Corsica, or Elba, or even farther. They sent a courier from tower to tower along the coast as far as Nice to know if anything had been seen or found, and at 9 a.m. they quitted Leghorn for Casa Magni. Trelawny went with them. At Via Reggio they were told that a punt, a water-keg, and some bottles had been cast up on the beach. Trelawny went to look at them and recognized the little skiff of the Ariel. But there was the possibility that, finding it cumbersome in bad weather, they had thrown it overboard.
When Jane and Mary reached home, the village was holding high festival. The noise of dancing, laughing and singing kept them awake the whole night through.
⁂
Five or six days later Trelawny, who had promised a reward to any of the coastguard who should send him news, was called to Via Reggio where a body had been washed up by the sea. It was a corpse terrible to look upon, for the face and hands and those parts of the body not protected by the clothes had been eaten away by the fish. But the tall slight figure, the jacket, the volume of Sophocles in one pocket and Keats’ poems in the other, doubled back as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to Trelawny to leave a doubt on his mind that this mutilated body was any other than Shelley’s. Almost at the same time the corpse of Williams was found not far off, more mutilated still, and three weeks later a third body was found, that of Charles Vivian, the sailor boy, about four miles from the other two. It was a mere skeleton.