DON JUAN CONQUERED
Mary’s child was born before its time, and the doctor said it would not
live. Shelley kept watch between the cradle and the bed in company with
Livy and Seneca. Fanny came round with baby-clothes sent by Mrs. Godwin
in her capricious way, but the Philosopher remained inflexible. Hogg
dropped in to gossip, to tell the great news of the day, the return from
Elba, and he did Mary good by his common sense and sarcasm. With a
temperature, and always in the society of Shelley, she had the rather
terrifying if pleasant impression of slipping away out of life. Hogg
brought her back to a sense of reality.
In spite of predictions the child did live and grew. Mary began to feel
easy about it, when at the end of the month she found on waking one
morning that it was dead. This was a great sorrow.
Shelley and Claire continued their walks together, while Mary stayed at
home. She sat knitting and thinking of her little child. “I was a
mother, and am so no longer,” she kept repeating, and at night she
dreamed that the baby was not dead, and that by rubbing it before the
fire they had brought it back to life. Then she awoke to find the cradle
empty. From the streets floated up the hoarse shouting of crowds. It was
a time of riots. France threatened war. Mary saw everything through a
mist of tears.
Claire’s presence in the house vexed her more and more. She was certain
that Claire was in love with Shelley, had always been in love with him.
Percy’s loyalty was self-evident, his morality super-human, angelic; but
he thought it possible to read Petrarch with an impassioned girl, to
direct her studies, to sit up with her the whole night through, without
danger. Mary said to herself: “My charming Shelley understands the elves
better than he does women.”
When she was alone with him in the evening, she confessed her jealousy.
It was a sentiment he could not understand. He thought it base, and that
it belittled his divine Mary. He knew his capacity for love to be
infinite, and that in dividing it with another woman he took away
nothing from his mistress. The company of the wild and brilliant Claire
was very precious to him, but he had to acknowledge that the atmosphere
of this threefold union was becoming irrespirable.
Mary besought him to send Claire away. “Your friend,” as she now always
called her. They tried, during many weeks, to find a place for her as
governess or companion, but the unfortunate reputation which her flight
to France had earned her rendered all such attempts futile.
Claire herself had not the smallest desire to leave. She delighted in
her intellectual intimacy with Percy, and she awaited its inevitable
result without fear. Finally, however, Mary’s gentle firmness carried
the day, and it was arranged that Claire should go to Lynmouth, and
lodge there with a friend of Godwin’s, a Mrs. Bricknell, a widow.
_Mary’s Journal._
“_Friday._—Not very well. After breakfast read Spenser. Shelley
goes out with his friend, he returns first. Construe Ovid—90
lines—Jefferson Hogg returns. Read over the Ovid to Jefferson.
Shelley and the lady walk out. After tea talk. Shelley and his
friend have a last conversation.
“_Saturday._—Claire goes; Shelley walks with her. Jefferson
does not come till five. Gets very anxious about Shelley, goes
out to meet him: returns: it rains. Shelley returns at half-past
six; the business is finished. Read Ovid. Charles Clairmont
comes to tea. Talk of pictures. I begin a new journal with our
regeneration.”
* * *
Claire, exiled to the country, enjoyed after such storm and stress her
first days of profound peace. But she was not the girl to put up for
long with rural solitude. She must have a reason for living—and she did
not fail to find one.
When people are in love they always imagine, quite wrongly, that it is
because they have come across an exceptional being who has inspired them
with the passion. The truth is that love, existing already in the soul,
seeks out a suitable object, and if it does not find one, then creates
it. But if, in an ordinary girl, this love-seeking is unconscious, it
was otherwise with the brilliant and hot-blooded Claire. Realizing the
impossibility of taking Shelley from her sister, or even of sharing him
with her, she deliberately looked round for some other hero on whom to
expend her unemployed affection. Some women in such case send letters to
great writers, or soldiers, or actors. But Claire, who was poetical,
desired a poet.
She found none more worthy of her than George Gordon, Lord Byron, the
man the most worshipped and the most hated in the whole of England. She
knew his poems by heart, Shelley had so often read them to her with
enthusiasm. She knew the stories of vice and wit, of diabolical charm
and infernal cruelty which were woven round his name.
His extraordinary beauty, his title, his genius as a writer, the
boldness of his ideas, the scandals of his love affairs, all contributed
to make of him the perfect hero. He had had mistresses among the highest
in the land, the Countess of Oxford, Lady Frances Webster, and the
unfortunate Lady Caroline Lamb, who the first day that she met him wrote
in her journal: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”: and then underneath,
“But this pale handsome face holds my destiny.”
He had married, and all London repeated the tale that, when he got into
the carriage after the ceremony, he said to Lady Byron: “You are now my
wife, and that is enough for me to hate you. Were you some one else’s
wife, I might perhaps care about you.” He had treated her with such
contempt that she had been driven to ask for a separation from him at
the end of the first year.
Claire, who sought only for difficult adventures, and had supreme
confidence in herself, found out Byron’s address and decided to chance
her luck.
_Claire to Byron._
“An utter stranger takes the liberty to addressing you. . . . It
is not charity I demand for of that I stand in no need. . . . I
tremble with fear at the fate of this letter. I cannot blame if
it shall be received by you as an impudent imposture. It may
seem a strange assertion, but it is not the less true that I
place my happiness in your hands. . . . If a woman, whose
reputation has yet remained unstained, if without either
guardian or husband to control, she should throw herself on your
mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she
has borne you many years, if she should return your kindness
with fond affection and unbounded devotion, could you betray
her, or would you be silent as the grave? . . . I must entreat
your answer without delay. Address me as E. Trefusis, 21 Noley
Place, Mary Le Bonne.”
Don Juan made no reply. This unknown writer of ornate style was small
game for him. But there is no one more tenacious than a woman tired of
her virtue. Claire returned to the attack a second time. “Sunday
Morning. Lord Byron is requested to state whether seven o’clock this
evening will be convenient to him to receive a lady to communicate with
him on business of peculiar importance. She desires to be admitted alone
and with the utmost privacy.”
Lord Byron sent out word by the servant that he had left town.
Then Claire wrote in her own name that, wanting to go on the stage, and
knowing that Lord Byron was interested in Drury Lane Theatre, she would
like to ask his advice. Byron’s reply was to recommend her to call on
the stage manager. Undeterred, she made, at once, a skilful change of
front. It was not a theatrical career but the literary life which she
now desired. She had written half a novel and would so very much like to
submit it to Byron’s judgment. As he continued to keep silence, or to
send evasive replies, she risked offering him the only thing which a man
with any self-respect seldom refuses.
“I may appear to you imprudent, vicious, but one thing at least time
shall show you, that I love gently and with affection, that I am
incapable of anything approaching to the feeling of revenge or malice. I
do assure you your future shall be mine.
“Have you any objection to the following plan? On Thursday evening we
may go out of town together by some stage or mail about the distance of
ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return
early the following morning. I have arranged everything here so that the
slightest suspicion may not be excited. Pray do so with your people.
“Will you admit me for two moments to _settle_ with you _where_? Indeed,
I will not stay an instant after you tell me to go. . . . Do what you
will or go where you will, refuse to see me and behave unkindly, I shall
ever remember the gentleness of your manners and the wild originality of
your countenance.”
It was then that Don Juan, trapped and tired by the long pursuit,
decided to accept his defeat. He had already decided to leave England
and fix himself in Switzerland or Italy, and the prospect of a speedy
departure set welcome limits to this unwelcome amour.