The younger son, having decided to throw in his lot with the poet’s,
remained in Pisa. He liked the group and the environment, though the
bookish intellectualism of the Shelleys swept him often enough beyond his
depth. Byron, also living in exile, was a familiar figure, and there were
rides together out into the country and pauses by the roadside to indulge
in the noisy sport of pistol practice.
Shelley read, and hidden away in a little pine wood, wrote poetry; Byron
lurked in his huge palace guarded by a growling English bulldog and a
squad of chattering retainers captained by a giant Venetian gondolier.
The poets liked the younger son. He was a rebel too, in his way, his
piratic career made him interesting, he had good stories to tell, and
above all, he was a man of action who could be trusted to do practical
things for the impractical. A boat is to be built, Tre will attend to
it; a boat is to be sailed, Tre will do that; household goods are to be
moved, we must talk with Tre. Affection forms quickly in such an isolated
group, and there seems to have been a certain affection for piratic Tre,
perhaps the first the man had ever known.
As the weather grew hot, Tre advised the Shelleys to go north, and found
them a house at Lerici on the Gulf of Shezzia. The place was but a shabby
barrack, but it was on the sea, and Shelley rejoiced. In the evenings,
the whole population of men, women and children took to the water like
ducks, and their shouts of joy filled the house. Shelley and Tre joined
in the frolic, but Mary Shelley looked grave, and said it was “improper.”
“Hush, Mary,” said the poet, “that insidious word has never been echoed
by these woods and rocks; don’t teach it to them.”
The late spring ripened into summer, and with July came the historic
tragedy.
Early in the spring a kind of yachtsman’s fever had descended upon
the little group. Byron had arranged for the building of a yacht, and
Williams had designed a boat for Shelley and the friends at Lerici. In
designing the hull, Williams had probably attempted an imitation of the
fast American vessels he had seen along the coast; it was a model he did
not understand. One Captain Roberts, a sometime British naval officer
then living in Italy, had the boat built under his eye at Genoa; she was
twenty-four feet long and eight in the beam; she drew four feet of water
and was schooner rigged with gaff topsails. Not a boat, this, to fire a
sailor’s heart, for the rig needs a crew to run it, and is difficult to
handle quickly, especially in a small space. Two English sailors and a
ship’s boy had sailed the vessel from Genoa to Lerici. When asked how she
sailed, the tars had replied that she was a “ticklish boat to manage,”
and that they had “cautioned the gents accordingly.”
Originally christened the “_Don Juan_,” the fateful vessel was now
re-christened the “_Ariel_.” To give her more stability, Williams filled
her with ballast,—a dangerous business, for the vessel was undecked. The
designer would hear no criticism of his craft.
“Williams is as touchy about the reputation of his boat as if she were
his wife,” grumbled Tre.
Such was the yacht in which Shelley, Williams and the English sailor lad,
Charles Vivian, sailed from the port of Leghorn on July the eighth, 1822.
The poet had sailed down from Lerici to welcome Leigh Hunt and his family
to Italy, and this friendly office done, was returning home again by sea.
Two o’clock in the afternoon, haze, July dulness, and almost no wind in
the Gulf of Spezzia. Trelawny, busy doing something aboard Byron’s yacht,
the _Bolivar_, watched his friends sail away. He had hoped to escort them
to sea in Byron’s vessel, but at a last moment difficulty over sailing
papers had arisen with the port authorities. The haze was thickening
and growing dark, a menacing thunder was rolling nearer; presently the
_Ariel_ vanished from Trelawny’s sight into the leaden gloom.
A squall, needless to say, is a swift business anywhere, but the
Mediterranean variety has a certain thunderbolt burst and a drenching
vengefulness all its own. On the ships anchored about the _Bolivar_,
barefooted seamen were running along the decks preparing their vessels
for the squall which moment by moment assumed a more threatening look.
Suddenly came rain, and in the rain the wind; the storm blustered through
the night.
Trelawny went ashore, and listened all night long to the wind and the
beat of the rain. He was restless with anxiety. Everything that there
was of sailor in the man distrusted the _Ariel_, and he knew only too
well that Shelley would be of little use in an emergency. The poet would
be dreaming or reading a book at the very moment the wind leaped at
the sails. The dawn revealed the shipping in the harbour rolling and
pitching about under pouring rain; the anxious day ended without news.
The following days found Tre searching among the vessels which had been
at sea during the storm, questioning sailors, patrolling the coast with
the coast guards, and offering rewards.
Presently comes a messenger in some shabby-showy uniform, and an official
letter written in Italian. The bodies have been found on the sands, poor,
broken bodies of men lost at sea.
“Oh, bitter, bitter gifts of the lord Poseidon,” said the Greeks,
remembering the bruised flesh turning in the waves. What was to be done?
Tre says that it was decided by “all concerned,” that Shelley should be
buried in Rome beside his little son. Before this might be done, however,
there were laws and a thousand regulations to be fought through, for
Italy was then divided in separate jurisdictions, and, moreover, bodies
washed ashore were regarded by the law as possible victims of the
plague. This, of course, was not Shelley’s case, but the law was the law.
It was Tre who found a way out of the difficulty. Was his notion possibly
a memory of something he had witnessed in the East? He would cremate the
bodies, and send Shelley’s ashes to Rome. It is no injustice to Tre to
say that he made his preparations and gathered the funerary material with
the business-like directness of an undertaker. He was the man of action
as ever, the practical friend who could be trusted to get things done.
He attended to Williams first, and then gathered the forlorn little world
of the exiles to see the last of Shelley.
It was a hot August day, and the whitish sands of Villareggio were
tremulous with heat. A dead calm lay upon the sea, and save for Byron’s
schooner anchored close off shore, the vast gulf revealed no sign of
human life. Behind the beach lay a wood of tall, branchless pines, “their
dark blue tops packed so close together that no sun could penetrate,” and
far away, over the wood rose the marble-crested Apennines. The pyre stood
in the open between the wood and the sea. Byron was there and Leigh
Hunt, a detail of soldiers, a few coast guards, and some Italian great
folk who had ridden out in their carriages to watch so unaccountable a
proceeding. Following ancient ritual, the exiles poured salt, oil and
wine upon the pyre; the little first flames rose yellow towards their
hands. A lonely sea bird came circling near, the pyre burnt with little
smoke, and thus the body of Shelley dissolved into the air.
Only the heart refused to burn, though in the hottest of the flame. Tre
snatched it forth, and burnt his hand so doing. When all was done, and
the pyre burnt out, he gathered the ashes together, put them in an oaken
box, paid his soldiers, and went off to Rome with his parcel.
A chapter of his life had come to an end. The little group dispersed,
Byron remained to quarrel on with the Hunts, the widows went to England.
Tre had been a staunch and helpful friend, and Mary Shelley never forgot
the debt. She could write later that Trelawny’s conduct “impressed us
all with an affectionate regard and a perfect faith in the unalterable
goodness of his heart.” She knew that it was good to have a friend. _The
Gentleman’s Magazine_, on hearing of the drowning, had remarked, “Mr.
Percy Shelley is a fitter subject for the penitentiary dying speech than
a lauding elegy, for a muse of the rope rather than that of the cypress.”
Italy in the autumn, and an empty world. Tre lingered on a year, and
found diversion in riding about the countryside. An American-born
negro followed him as a groom; the peasants stared at the strange pair
galloping by.
Then came a letter from Byron, and life began again with adventure and
war.