With this idea in her head she announced her intention of returning to London to join Eliza. Her hostesses did nothing to dissuade her, beyond the few words of regret which politeness requires. “Poor Shelley,” these ladies remarked, just as the Godwin girls had done, “he has not got the wife he ought to have.”
Harriet fell into the way of going up to stay with Eliza for weeks at a time, leaving her husband alone at Bracknell. Soon the usual “kind friend” let Shelley know that his wife was going about with Major Ryan. For the first time since his marriage the idea of a possible infidelity occurred to him. It was a question which in the abstract he had always treated with the greatest contempt. Suddenly brought up against it with Harriet and himself as possible actors, he was overwhelmed with the most violent grief he had yet known.
Reason told him he ought to consider himself lucky if he were freed from a very ordinary woman. If at that moment he loved at all, was it not rather the heavenly Cornelia than Harriet whose miserable spite had recently annoyed him so much? And, if he no longer loved her, to break with her would be best. He had always taught that when passion’s trance is over-past each should be free again. But it was in vain that he reasoned thus with himself. He discovered with stupefaction that Percy Shelley and Harriet Westbrook were no longer two separate and free beings. The sum of past memories, caresses, joys, and sufferings enmeshed them both in a web from which there was no escape.
He rushed up to town, determined either to offer Harriet his excuses or to confess his faults. But she received him with harshness and irony. Any heart-to-heart talk was out of the question.
His child-wife, so gentle and submissive only three months ago, now showed herself cold and haughty. How had such a change come about? There were instants when Shelley thought he detected, beneath pride’s hard surface, a fleeting image of the other Harriet, but when he sought to hold it by a loving word, it was gone. Against the steely armour of her heart he knocked in vain.
Wandering about the streets without any object, he thought: “What a fool I have been! Here I am tied for ever to a woman who does not love me, who has never loved me. Evidently she only married me for the money and title. . . . Now that she sees her hopes upset, she punishes me for her mistake. . . .” And he repeated with disgust: “A heart of ice . . . a lump of ice!”
Perhaps had he ever seen her alone he would have succeeded in thawing it, but Eliza, prim, hostile, formidable, stood always between them, and the gallant Major Ryan was in the wings, ready to commiserate the cruelties of a doctrinaire husband.
After struggling for a few days, Shelley’s ardour was suddenly quenched. Capable by fits and starts of an energy when nothing was impossible to him, he fell as formerly after his long tramps at Oxford into an insurmountable torpor, and his will-power like a dying candle-flame threw up a final blaze of light before it expired.
When he saw that Harriet was obdurate, he gave up all hope of saving the remnants of his married happiness, and he wrote to Bracknell to announce he was coming on a month’s visit, and coming alone. He knew well that after a month’s interval he would find Harriet completely ruined by her hateful surroundings, he knew that a catastrophe would be the result of the Bracknell interlude, but he was too tired to carry on the fight.
“What more am I now but an insect warming itself in a ray of sunshine? The next cloud that passes will plunge me into the frozen darkness of death.” And, in melancholy mood, he recited the lines from Burns: