II SAMUEL XII. 23
Byron, after promising Shelley to bring Allegra to Pisa, arrived without
her, and Claire, who had come expressly from Florence to wait about the
city in the hopes of seeing the child, was horribly alarmed on learning
she had been left in the convent of Bagna-Cavallo. Her Italian friends
gave her a sinister description of this convent, set down in the middle
of the marshes of the Romagna, and in the most unhealthy climate. The
nuns—Capucins—ignored hygiene, fed the children disgracefully, and did
not warm them at all. Claire could not see a fire without thinking of
her poor little darling who never saw or felt a cheerful blaze.
This high-spirited young woman was brought, through maternal anguish, to
an abnegation that was sublime. She wrote to Byron that she would
renounce ever seeing Allegra again so long as she lived, if he would
consent to put her in a good English School. “I can no longer resist,”
she said, “the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I
shall never see her any more.”
Byron made no reply. There was some talk amongst Claire’s friends of
rescuing Allegra by stratagem, but Shelley begged her to have patience.
While agreeing with her as to Byron’s cruelty, he disapproved of
thoughtless violence. . . . “Lord Byron is inflexible and you are in his
power. Remember, Claire, when you rejected my earnest advice, and
checked me with that contempt which I had never merited from you at
Milan and how vain is now your regret! This is the second of my
sibylline volumes. If you wait for the third, it may be sold at a still
higher price.”
He called upon Byron to plead Claire’s cause, but the moment Byron heard
her name he gave an impatient shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, women can’t
exist without making scenes!” Shelley told him what Claire had heard
about the unsuitability of the convent. “What do I know about it?” he
said. “I have never been there.” Then, when Claire’s anguish and her
fears were described to him, a smile of malicious satisfaction passed
over his face.
“I had difficulty in restraining myself from knocking him down,” said
Shelley afterwards at Lady Mountcashell’s. “I was furious but I was
wrong. He can no more help being what he is than that door can help
being a door.”
But old Mr. Tighe told him, “You are quite wrong in your fatalism. If I
were to horsewhip that door it would still remain a door, but if Lord
Byron were well horsewhipped my opinion is he would become as humane as
he is now inhumane. It’s the subserviency of his friends that makes him
the insolent tyrant he is.”
On hearing of Shelley’s failure, Claire fell into such despair that Mary
and Shelley would not allow her to return to Florence alone amongst
strangers. They were going to spend the summer at the sea with the
Williamses and they invited her to go with them.
Shelley looked forward with eagerness to this plan. Williams and he had
consulted Trelawny about a boat, and he was having one built for them at
Genoa by Captain Roberts, a friend of his. They had already christened
her the _Don Juan_ in honour of Byron, who had also commissioned Roberts
to build him a schooner with a covered-in deck; the _Bolivar_.
Shelley and Williams saw themselves masters of the Mediterranean. Their
wives were less enthusiastic. While the two young men drew charts of the
bay upon the sand, Mary and Jane walked together, philosophized, and
picked violets by the road-side.
“I hate this boat!” said Mary.
“So do I,” Jane agreed. “But it’s no use saying anything, it would do no
good and merely spoil their pleasure.”
So as to put their projects into action, two houses were necessary at
the seaside. They thought of the Bay of Spezzia. Shelley and Williams
hunted for these houses along its shores in vain. Lord Byron, who wished
to join them, must have a palazzo, but he was obliged to give up the
idea at once, since even two fishermen’s houses were not to be had.
Williams and his wife determined to make one last search; to distract
Claire from her troubles they took her with them.
They had left Pisa but a few hours when Lord Byron wrote to Shelley that
he had received bad news of Allegra. An epidemic of typhus had broken
out in the Romagna. The nuns had taken no preventative measures. The
child, already weak and tired, had caught the fever. She was dead. “I do
not know,” he added, “that I have anything to reproach in my conduct and
certainly nothing in my feelings and intentions towards the dead. But it
is a moment when we are apt to think that, if this or that had been done
such events might have been prevented—though every day and hour shows
us that they are the most natural and inevitable. I suppose that Time
will do his usual work—Death has done his.”
The Shelleys went to call on him. He was paler than usual, but as calm
as ever.
Two days later the Williamses and Claire came back from their
expedition. Shelley, fearing some act of violence on her part if she
were told of her misfortune while in Byron’s neighbourhood, resolved to
say nothing to her so long as they remained in Pisa.
Williams had not found the two furnished houses he sought. Along the
entire coast there was but one house to let, a big unfurnished and
abandoned building known as the Casa Magni at Lerici, with a veranda
facing the sea and almost over it.
Shelley, who desired above all things to get Claire out of Pisa, decided
to take the Casa Magni. The two households must live together.
Inconvenient? That didn’t matter. No furniture? Furniture could be sent
from Pisa. When Shelley was really determined on a thing, nothing could
resist him. “I go forward,” said he, “until I am stopped. But nothing
ever does stop me.”
The Custom House officials, the boatmen, raised scores of difficulties.
Shelley brushed them aside by the sheer force of a will-power that takes
no notice of the outside world, and in a few days the two families were
settled in at the seaside.
* * *
Casa Magni has been a Jesuit convent. It was a white house standing
almost in the sea, and backing against a forest. A terrace, supported on
arches, overhung the superb Bay of Spezzia. The ground floor was unpaved
and uninhabitable, being reached by the waves when the sea was rough. It
was used simply for storing boat-gear and fishing tackle. The single
storey over this was divided into a large hall or saloon, and four small
bedrooms which opened from it: two for Shelley and Mary, one for the
Williamses and one for Claire. The accommodation was scanty, and the
first evening depressing. Down below the waves beat against the rocks
with a mournful persistency. The Williamses and Shelleys could think of
nothing but Claire, and she, with no idea of the dreadful truth,
imagined they were annoyed at having her there with them in a house
which was obviously too small. She said so, and offered to go back to
Florence. Every one cried out against this. Jane whispered something to
Mary, and the two withdrew to the Williamses’ room. Shelley joined them.
Claire went towards the room after a moment or two: she found them in
eager conversation which instantly ceased as they saw her. Then before a
single word had been uttered, she said:
“Allegra is dead?”
The next day she wrote Byron a terrible letter, which he returned to
Shelley complaining of Claire’s harshness towards him, and begging
Shelley to let her know he would allow her to make any arrangements she
liked for the burial of their child.
She replied with a sombre irony that for the future she left everything
to him, and that all she asked was a portrait of Allegra and a piece of
her hair. Byron became surprisingly pliable, sent almost at once a very
pretty miniature and a dark curl. Claire took leave of her friends at
Casa Magni, and went back to Florence to live amongst strangers, who,
knowing nothing of her grief, could do nothing to revive it.
Byron decided to have his daughter buried in England, in the church of
Harrow-on-the-Hill, where he had been at school, and to place on the
wall above the grave a marble tablet with the words:
TO THE MEMORY OF ALLEGRA
DAUGHTER OF GEORGE GORDON LORD BYRON
DIED AT BAGNA-CAVALLO, THE 20TH APRIL, 1822.
AGED FIVE YEARS AND SIX MONTHS.
I shall go to her, but she
shall not return to me.
II Sam. xii. 23.
But the Rector of Harrow and the church-wardens considered it immoral to
admit into their church the body of an illegitimate child, more
particularly if the epitaph disclosed the name of the father. Allegra
was therefore buried outside the church, and with no inscription, which
was of course the proper thing to do.
Lord Byron, who had never set foot inside the convent of Bagna-Cavallo
while Allegra was alive, went to visit it some time after the child’s
death, for now his regrets lent it a romantic and sentimental interest,
inspired him with a fine meditation on death and on himself: “I shall go
to her, but she shall not return to me.”
The second Samuel was quite right.