It will be remembered that when Mary Chaworth married she was exactly eighteen. Her husband was:
‘Tall, stately, formed to lead the courtly van
On birthdays. The model of a chamberlain.’
‘But there was something wanting on the whole—
don’t know what, and therefore cannot tell—
Which pretty women—the sweet souls!—call Soul.
Certes it was not body; he was well
Proportioned, as a poplar or a pole,
A handsome man.’
This description would answer equally well for ‘handsome Jack Musters,’ who married Mary Chaworth. Adeline, we are told, took Juan in hand when she was about seven-and-twenty. That was Mary’s age in 1813. But this may have been a mere coincidence.
‘She had one defect,’ says Byron, in speaking of Adeline: ‘her heart was vacant. Her conduct had been perfectly correct. She loved her lord, or thought so; but that love cost her an effort. She had nothing to complain of—no bickerings, no connubial turmoil. Their union was a model to behold—serene and noble, conjugal, but cold. There was no great disparity in years, though much in temper. But they never clashed. They moved, so to speak, apart.’
Now, when once Adeline had taken an interest in anything, her impressions grew, and gathered as they ran, like growing water, upon her mind. The more so, perhaps, because she was not at first too readily impressed. She did not know her own heart:
‘I think not she was then in love with Juan:
If so, she would have had the strength to fly
The wild sensation, unto her a new one:
She merely felt a common sympathy
In him.’
‘She was, or thought she was, his friend—and this
Without the farce of Friendship, or romance
Of Platonism.’
‘Few of the soft sex,’ says Byron, ‘are very stable in their resolves.’ She had heard some parts of Juan’s history; ‘but women hear with more good humour such aberrations than we men of rigour’:
‘Adeline, in all her growing sense
Of Juan’s merits and his situation,
Felt on the whole an interest intense—
Partly perhaps because a fresh sensation,
Or that he had an air of innocence,
Which is for Innocence a sad temptation—
As Women hate half-measures, on the whole,
She ’gan to ponder how to save his soul.’
After a deal of thought, ‘she seriously advised him to get married.’
‘There was Miss Millpond, smooth as summer’s sea,
That usual paragon, an only daughter,
Who seemed the cream of Equanimity,
Till skimmed—and then there was some milk and water,
With a slight shade of blue too, it might be
Beneath the surface.’