There was little about him now to remind Mary of the fat boy whom she had laughed at. The Turkish baths, the Epsom salts, and the regimen of biscuits and soda-water had done their work. He came to her as a man of ethereal beauty, fascinating manners, and undisputed genius; and he left other women—women of higher rank, greater importance, and more widely acknowledged charm—in order to come to her. Nor did he come with the triumphant air of a man who was resolved to dazzle her in order to avenge a slight. He came, as it were, because he could not help himself—because he felt cords drawing him—because this was his destiny and he must fulfil it, though he forfeited the whole world in doing so.
Her case was hard. She was not one of the women who readily do desperate things in scorn of consequence. The traditions of her class, the claims of her family—the precepts, also, one imagines, of her religion—had too strong a hold on her for that. These very hesitations, no doubt,—so different from the “on coming” ways of Lady Caroline, and Lady Oxford’s “terrible love,” as Balzac phrases it, “of the woman of forty”—were a part of her charm for Byron. But she was very unhappy, and Byron was offering her a little happiness; and it was very, very difficult for her to refuse the gift. So the history of the matter seems, in a sentence or two, to have been this: that she was slow to yield, but yielded; that she had no sooner yielded than she repented; that her repentance left Byron a desperate, heart-broken man, profoundly cynical about women—so cynical about them that he could speak even of her, while he still loved her, to Medwin, as “like the rest of her sex, far from angelic”—ready to marry out of pique, or from any other motive equally unworthy.
The details must remain obscure. They passed in the secret orchard; and Byron was not, like Victor Hugo, a man who treated his secret orchard as a park to be thrown open to excursionists. He knew that there was a time to keep silence as well as a time to speak; and though there were some episodes in his life of which he spoke too much, of this particular episode he only spoke to Moore and Mrs. Leigh, whom he could trust. Yet, given the clues, the story constructs itself; and we must either believe the story which arises out of those clues, or else believe that the most passionate poems which Byron ever wrote were the outcome of a spiritual crisis about nothing in particular. And that, of course, is absurd.
We find him, at the beginning of the crisis, pondering two escapes from it—the escape by way of marriage, and the escape by way of foreign travel. He talks, in the middle of July, of proposing to Lady Adelaide Forbes; he talks, at the end of August, of proposing to anyone who is likely to accept him; but in neither instance does he talk like a man who really means what he says. This is the July announcement:
“My circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman had I a chance.... The Staël last night said that I had no feeling, was totally insensible to la belle passion, and had been all my life. I am very glad to hear it, but did not know it before.”
Then in August he writes:
“After all, we must end in marriage; and I can conceive nothing more delightful than such a state in the country, reading the county newspaper, &c., and kissing one’s wife’s maid. Seriously, I would incorporate with any woman of decent demeanour to-morrow—that is, I would a month ago, but at present——.”
The word “seriously” there is evidently a façon de parler. The writer’s mood may be serious, but his intentions evidently are not. It may be doubted whether the thoughts of travel were any more serious, though they lasted longer. In letter after letter we find Byron making inquiries about a passage in a ship of war bound for the Levant. When such a passage is offered to him, however, he declines it on the ground that he is unable to obtain accommodation for as many servants as he desires to take with him; and that explanation inevitably strikes one as a pretext rather than a reason—the pretext of a man who, while he knows that it would be better to go, is looking for an excuse to stay.
Projects of travel with his sister and with various friends fell through at about the same time, for reasons which are nowhere stated, but can very easily be guessed. We cannot read the letters, dark though the allusions are, without being conscious of a thickening plot. It thickens very perceptibly when we discover Byron at Newstead at a time when Mary Chaworth, forsaken by her husband, is at Annesley. There is nearly a month’s gap in the published letters at this point; but conjecture can easily fill the gap in the light of the letter from Byron to Mrs. Leigh, already quoted, which is dated November 8:
“It is not Lady Caroline nor Lady Oxford; but perhaps you may guess, and if you do, do not tell.