“On the crown of the head of each is a red Albanian skull-cap, with a blue tassel spread out and fastened down like a star. Near the edge or bottom of the skull-cap is a handkerchief of various colours bound round their temples. The youngest wears her hair loose, falling on her shoulders.”
The Maid of Athens.
That, no doubt, was how Theresa wore her hair when Byron flattered her with his attentions. She also, it seems, wore “white stockings and yellow slippers,” and had “teeth of pearly whiteness” and “manners such as would be fascinating in any country.” It was the usual thing, according to Williams, for their mother’s lodgers to flirt with one or other of them. It would have been “remarkable,” he thinks, if they had not done so. Presumably he did so himself. At all events he admired them very much as they sat “in the Eastern style, a little reclined, with their limbs gathered under them on the divan, and without shoes”; but he insists with no less emphasis upon their propriety than upon their graces. “Modesty and delicacy of conduct,” he comments, “will always command respect”; and further:
“Though so poor, their virtues shine as conspicuous as their beauty.... Not all the wealth of the East, or the complimentary lays even of the first of England’s poets could render them so truly worthy of love and admiration.”
Moore tells us that Byron, in Oriental style, gashed himself across the breast with a dagger as a symbolic demonstration of his conquest by Theresa’s charms, and that Theresa “looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no degree moved to gratitude.” And that, of course, is what one would expect. The game was being played according to the rules, and Theresa was child enough to enjoy the fun. One can imagine that it was a game which the girls often played with the lodgers, teaching them the rules when they did not already know them. One would be churlish indeed to begrudge them their enjoyment, or to protest that they were “forward” or suspect that they were “designing.” The landlady’s daughter can often do much to make life in a lodging-house agreeable; and youth must have its hour though time flies and love, like a bird, is on the wing.
Our next glimpse of Theresa, taken from Walsh’s “Narrative of a Residence in Constantinople,” shows us that time is, indeed, an “ever-rolling stream,” carrying its daughters, as well as its sons away upon the flood. “Lord Byron’s poem,” writes Walsh in 1817, “has rendered the poor lady no temporal service though it has ensured her immortality”; and he continues:
“She was once very lovely, I was informed by those who knew her, and realised all the descriptive part of the poem; but time and, I suppose, disappointed hopes preyed upon her, and though still very elegant in her person, and gentle and lady-like in her manners, she has lost all pretensions to beauty, and has a countenance singularly marked by hopeless sadness.”
That, no doubt, is the exaggeration of a sentimentalist. Theresa’s hopes can hardly have been serious. Landladies’ daughters, have too many hopes deferred and disappointed to allow the disappointment of any hope in particular to blight their lives. Theresa, in due course, became Mrs. Black, the wife, like her mother, of a vice-consul; and she lived to the great age of eighty, “a tall old lady,” writes the United States Consular Agent at Athens, “with features inspiring reverence, and showing that at a time past she was a beautiful woman.” Her countrymen, however, did not forget that she had been the Maid of Athens; and, Byron’s services to the Greek cause being also remembered, a public subscription provided for the necessities of her last years. That is all that there is to say about her unless it be to repeat that she played but a very minor part in the pageant of Byron’s life, and cannot even be spoken of as Mrs. Spencer Smith’s only rival.
For there were others; and though the other stories are clouded with a good deal of doubt, they cannot fail to leave a certain collective impression of Byron as a man whom all women found attractive and many women found susceptible.