“Alas! why do I say My? Our Union would have healed feuds, in which blood had been shed by our fathers; it would have joined lands broad and rich; it would have joined at least one heart, and two persons not ill-matched in years (she is two years my elder); and—and—and—what has been the result? She has married a man older than herself, been wretched, and separated. I have married, and am separated; and yet we are not united.”
This last fact, indeed, may well have impressed him as the cruellest of all. There had been two desperately unhappy marriages, and a shivering and scattering of two sets of household gods; and yet he and she, through whatever misunderstandings and scruples, had failed to set up their new structure on the ruins. He, indeed, on his part, would have asked nothing better than to be allowed to try that task of reconstruction; but she, on hers, had been too good, or too weak, or too much under the influence of well-meaning friends who believed the whole duty of woman to consist in forgiving her husband and keeping up appearances. She had kept them up, accepting martyrdom with a resignation worthy of a better cause than any which her hard-drinking husband was capable of representing, believing that she only sacrificed herself, and earning no gratitude worth speaking of by doing so. But she had also sacrificed her lover.
He was one of those exceptional men who may do exceptional things with impunity—and also one of those self-willed men who, having made up their minds what is best, can never be contented with the second-best, but must always be kicking against the pricks. Hence the stormy emotional career through which we have followed him, and the many experiments, reckless but half-hearted, with new ways of life; a reckless but half-hearted marriage; reckless but half-hearted intrigues, first with the Drury Lane actresses, and then with the Venetian light-o’-loves; a reckless but half-hearted career as the cicisbeo of an Italian nobleman’s wife.
Two thoughts had been present to his mind through all these phases: the thought in the first place that he owed it to himself to prove that he was a better and a greater man than he had seemed to be, and to redeem the mess which he had made of his life by some impressive action; the thought, in the second place, of Mary Chaworth. We have seen the former thought flashing out in a letter to Moore, who was probably one of the last men in the world capable of understanding it. The latter thought is blazoned in the letter written to Mary Chaworth in the midst of the Venetian revels, and so absurdly asserted by Lord Lovelace to be a letter to Augusta Leigh. It reappears, as we have seen, in the Detached Thoughts, and also in poem after poem, from “The Dream” to the piece just cited. Evidently, therefore, it was, indeed, the thought which Byron lived with—the thought which, if not always with him, was always waiting for him when the reaction following upon excitement made room for it. There would be no escape from it until the hour when, as he put it, he looked around, and chose his ground, and took his rest; and it only remains for us to picture the last stormy scenes at the end of which rest was reached.
CHAPTER XXXII
DEATH IN A GREAT CAUSE
The end was not to come, as Byron may have hoped, on the field of battle. It was his health, as he had apprehended (though without, for that reason, taking any special care of it) that was to fail him. An imprudent plunge into the winter sea while on his way to Missolonghi had upset him; and though he had temporarily recovered, he was in no state to resist the pestilential climate of that dismal swamp. He knew it, and at the very time when Stanhope was writing home that “Lord Byron burns with military ardour and chivalry,” he was keenly conscious, as his own letters show, of the danger attending his residence in the most malarious quarter of a malarious town.
“If we are not taken off by the sword,” he wrote on February 5, “we are like to march off with an ague in this mud basket; and, to conclude with a bad grace better marshally than marti-ally. The dykes of Holland, when broken down, are the deserts of Arabia in comparison with Missolonghi.”