Trelawny had the remains buried temporarily in the sand to preserve them from the sea, and galloped off towards Casa Magni.
At the threshold of the house he stopped. There was no one to be seen . . . a lamp burned in the big room . . . perhaps the two widows were suggesting to one another new grounds for hope. . . . Trelawny thought of his last visit there. Then the two families had all been on the terrace overhanging a sea so calm and clear that every star was reflected in the waters. Williams had cried “Buona notte!” and Trelawny had rowed himself on board the Bolivar at anchor in the bay. From afar he had listened to Jane singing some merry tune to the accompaniment of her guitar. Shelley’s shrill laugh had pierced the quiet night, and Trelawny had looked back with regret on a set of human beings who had seemed to him the happiest and most united in the whole world.
His reverie was broken by a shriek from the nurse Caterina, as crossing the hall she saw him in the doorway. He went upstairs and unannounced entered the room where Mary and Jane sat waiting. He could not speak a word. Mary Shelley’s hazel eyes fixed themselves on his with a terrible intensity. She cried out: “Is there no hope?” Trelawny, without answering, left the room, and told the servant to take the children to the two poor mothers.
CHAPTER XXXVII
LAST LINKS
Mary wished to have Shelley buried near their little boy in the Roman cemetery which he had thought so beautiful, but the sanitary laws forbade that bodies once buried in quicklime on the sands, should be transferred elsewhere. Trelawny suggested, therefore, that the remains should be burned on the shore, according to the custom of the ancient Greeks. When the day was fixed for this ceremony, he sent word to Byron and Hunt, who wished to be present, and came himself on the Bolivar. The Tuscan authorities had provided a squad of soldiers armed with mattocks and spades.
The remains of Williams were dug out first. Standing round on the loose sand that scorched their feet his friends watched the soldiers at work and waited with curiosity and horror the first appearance of the body. A black silk handkerchief was pulled out, then some shreds of linen, a boot with the bone of the leg and the foot in it, then a shapeless mass of bones and flesh. The limbs separated from the trunk on being touched. The soldiers performed their work with long-handled tongs, nippers, poles, with iron hooks, spikes, and divers other tools all resembling implements of torture.
“Is that a human body?” exclaimed Byron. “Why, it’s more like the carcase of a sheep!”
He was greatly moved, and tried to hide his emotion, which he thought maudlin and unmanly, under an air of indifference. When they were lifting the skull, “Stop a moment, let me see the jaw,” he said. “I can recognize by the teeth anyone with whom I have talked. I always watch the mouth, it tells me what the eyes try to conceal.”
A funeral pyre had been prepared, Trelawny applied the fire, and the materials being dry and resinous the pine-wood flamed furiously, and the heat drove the spectators back. The body and skull, burning fiercely, gave the flames a silvery and wavy look of indescribable brightness and purity. When the heat was a little diminished Byron and Hunt threw on to the fire frankincense, salt and wine.
“Come,” said Byron suddenly, “let us try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends. . . . How far out do you think they were when their boat sunk?”