“This then is the honourable advice of a brother?” said Elizabeth with disdain.
It was useless to hope to make any impression on a character become futile beyond any possible cure. “Why should I deceive myself? She is lost, lost to everything. She talks nothing but cant and twaddle. What she wants of me is that, like a fashionable brother, I should act as a jackal for husbands, well, I refuse! I refuse emphatically.”
He had returned to Field Place merely to see Elizabeth. There was no good in remaining. Invitations elsewhere were not wanting. Captain Pilfold would have been glad to have him again at Cuckfield. Westbrook was going to pass the summer in Wales, and his daughters pressed Shelley to join them. Hogg wanted him to come for a month to York; it was this last idea which tempted him most. But his father, who doubtless saw a symbolic value in the separation of the two Oxford criminals, would not have tolerated it, and as the first quarter’s allowance was due on the first of September it was better to be patient. Hogg wrote jestingly that it was easy to see the lovely Harriet took precedence over old friends.
“Your jokes amuse me,” Shelley answered.
“If I know anything about love I am not in love. But I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem.”
While he still hesitated where to go, Thomas Grove, a cousin of his mother’s, invited him to Cwm Elan, a wild corner of Radnorshire. Here he could economize while awaiting his allowance. He accepted the Groves’ invitation.
On his way through London he would have liked to have seen Miss Kitchener and have taken her to lunch. But the school-teacher with the Roman nose feared this would not be quite a proper thing to do, there was such an immense social difference between her and Mr. Shelley. Indignant at the mere idea, Shelley wrote her a long letter on equality, in which he addressed her as “his soul’s sister.” Miss Kitchener began to think that Lady Shelley was a fine name and to study her reflection in the looking-glass.
CHAPTER VIII
THIS DESPOTIC CHAIN . . .
Now for the first time Shelley was among mountain solitudes, and heard the voices of mountain torrents, but the power of hills was not upon him. “This is most divine scenery,” he wrote to Hogg, “but all very dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable; indeed, the place is a very great bore.” Sitting near some tree-shaded waterfall he passed his time in reading and re-reading the letters he received from his friends. He was the director of innumerable “souls”: Miss Kitchener, the faithful Hogg, Captain Pilfold, the terror of the pious, Eliza and Harriet Westbrook, without counting many whose names are unknown.
The Westbrooks had just gone back to London when he received from Harriet a most disturbing letter. Her father insisted on her returning to Mrs. Fenning’s school where she had been so miserable, where her schoolfellows had sent her to Coventry, and called her “an abandoned wretch.” Rather than exist in such a prison she would kill herself. “Why live? No one loves me, and I have no one to love. Is suicide a crime in one who is useless to others and insupportable to herself? Since there is no law of God, has the law of man any right to forbid so natural an action?”