LAST LINKS
Mary wished to have Shelley buried near their little boy in the Roman
cemetery which he had thought so beautiful, but the sanitary laws
forbade that bodies once buried in quicklime on the sands, should be
transferred elsewhere. Trelawny suggested, therefore, that the remains
should be burned on the shore, according to the custom of the ancient
Greeks. When the day was fixed for this ceremony, he sent word to Byron
and Hunt, who wished to be present, and came himself on the _Bolivar_.
The Tuscan authorities had provided a squad of soldiers armed with
mattocks and spades.
The remains of Williams were dug out first. Standing round on the loose
sand that scorched their feet his friends watched the soldiers at work
and waited with curiosity and horror the first appearance of the body. A
black silk handkerchief was pulled out, then some shreds of linen, a
boot with the bone of the leg and the foot in it, then a shapeless mass
of bones and flesh. The limbs separated from the trunk on being touched.
The soldiers performed their work with long-handled tongs, nippers,
poles, with iron hooks, spikes, and divers other tools all resembling
implements of torture.
“Is that a human body?” exclaimed Byron. “Why, it’s more like the
carcase of a sheep!”
He was greatly moved, and tried to hide his emotion, which he thought
maudlin and unmanly, under an air of indifference. When they were
lifting the skull, “Stop a moment, let me see the jaw,” he said. “I can
recognize by the teeth anyone with whom I have talked. I always watch
the mouth, it tells me what the eyes try to conceal.”
A funeral pyre had been prepared, Trelawny applied the fire, and the
materials being dry and resinous the pine-wood flamed furiously, and the
heat drove the spectators back. The body and skull, burning fiercely,
gave the flames a silvery and wavy look of indescribable brightness and
purity. When the heat was a little diminished Byron and Hunt threw on to
the fire frankincense, salt and wine.
“Come,” said Byron suddenly, “let us try the strength of these waters
that drowned our friends. . . . How far out do you think they were when
their boat sunk?”
Perhaps mingled with his grief was the thought that he, who had swum the
Hellespont, would not have let himself be drowned in this less dangerous
sea.
He stripped, went into the water, and swam out. Trelawny and Hunt
followed him. When they turned to look back at the pyre it seemed a mere
little glittering patch upon the sand.
* * *
The ceremony was repeated next day for Shelley, who had been buried in
the sand, nearer to Via Reggio, between the sea and a pine-wood.
The weather was glorious. In the strong sunlight, the yellow sands and
the deep violet sea made a wonderful contrast. Above the trees, the
snow-capped Appenines paved the sky with a cloudy and marmoreal
background such as Shelley would have loved. All the children of the
country-side were gathered round to witness so unusual a spectacle, but
not a word was spoken among them. Byron himself was silent and
thoughtful. “Ah, Will of iron! This then is all that remains of your
splendid courage. . . . Like Prometheus you defied Jupiter, and behold
. . .”
The soldiers dug for nearly an hour without finding the exact place.
Suddenly a dull hollow sound following the blow of a mattock warned them
that the iron had struck a skull. Byron shuddered. He thought of Shelley
during the storm on Lake Leman, whose crossed arms, heroic yet impotent,
had seemed to him at the time an accurate symbol of his life. “How
brutally mistaken men have been about him! He was without exception the
_best_ and least selfish man I ever knew. And as perfect a gentleman as
ever crossed a drawing-room.”
The body had been covered with lime, which had almost completely
carbonized it. Once more incense, oil and salt were thrown upon the
flames, and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had
ever consumed during life. The intense heat made the atmosphere
tremulous and wavy. At the end of three hours the heart, which was
unusually big, remained unconsumed. Trelawny snatched it from the fiery
furnace, burning his hand severely in doing so. The frontal bone of the
skull where it had been struck by the mattock fell off, and the brains
literally seethed, bubbled and boiled as in a cauldron for a very long
time.
Byron could not face this scene. As on the previous day he stripped and
swam to the _Bolivar_, which was anchored in the bay. Trelawny gathered
together the fragments of bone and human ashes, and placed them in an
oaken casket lined with black velvet, which he had brought with him.
The village children, looking on with all their eyes, told each other
that from these bones, once they reached England, the dead man would
come to life.
* * *
Now to tell what became of the other actors in this story.
Sir Timothy Shelley lived to the age of ninety-one, dying in 1844. He
made Mary a small allowance, but she had to promise not to publish her
husband’s posthumous poems, nor any biography of him so long as the old
baronet lived. At his death, Percy Florence came into the title and the
fortune, Harriet’s son Charles having died in his eleventh year.
A common misfortune had united the two widows, Mary and Jane. For a long
time they lived together in Italy, and afterwards in London. Shelley’s
friends were so faithful to them that Trelawny asked the hand of Mary in
marriage, and a little later Hogg, the sceptic, asked the hand of Jane.
Mary refused, saying that she thought Mary Shelley so pretty a name she
wished to have it on her tombstone. Jane accepted, but then had to
confess she had never been married to Williams. She still had a husband
somewhere in India. This did not trouble Hogg, and freed them both from
any ceremony. They never left each other, and lived under decorous
appearances. Although Hogg was accurate and a hard worker, he was
considered mediocre at the Bar, where he pleaded without warmth or
eloquence. Towards the end of his life he became a timorous,
disillusioned old gentleman, reading Greek and Latin all day long to
kill time and cheat his immense boredom.
Claire remained on the Continent, was a governess in Russia, and at the
death of Sir Timothy inherited the twelve thousand pounds left her by
Shelley, and was freed from poverty.
The older they grew the more these three women quarrelled amongst
themselves. Jane declared to everyone that during the last months at
Casa Magni Shelley had loved her alone. These assertions repeated to
Mary exasperated her so much that she refused to see Jane again. Little
by little Miranda became an old woman, a trifle deaf, but always
charming. Her eyes would still sparkle when she spoke of the Poet.
During many years Claire occupied herself in writing a book in which she
intended to point out, by the examples of Shelley, Byron and herself,
how necessary it is to have only conventional ideas on the question of
love. But, having had a mental illness, she was obliged to give up work
during a long period. She passed the end of her life in Florence, where
she became a Roman Catholic and occupied herself in charities.
One day in the spring of 1878 a young man searching for documents on
Byron and Shelley came to ask her for reminiscences of them. When he
pronounced these two names, there appeared beneath the old lady’s
wrinkles one of those smiles, girlish yet full of promises, which had
made her so fascinating at eighteen.
“Come,” she said, “I suppose you are as crass as most men, and think
that I loved Byron?”
Then, as he looked at her with surprise:
“My young friend,” said she, “no doubt you will know a woman’s heart
better some day. I was dazzled, but that does not mean love. It might
perhaps have grown into love, but it never did.”
There was a silence. The visitor, hesitating a little, asked:
“Have you never loved, Madame?”
A delicate blush suffused the withered cheeks, and this time she made no
reply, gazing on the ground.
“Shelley?” he murmured.
“With all my heart and soul,” she replied, without raising her eyes.
Then with a charming coquetry she gave him a tap on the cheek with her
closed fan.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Minor changes to spelling and punctuation have been made silently to
achieve consistency.
[The end of _Ariel (A Shelley Romance)_ by Maurois, André (Emile Salomon
Wilhelm Herzog), and Ella D’Arcy (translator)]