CHAPTER XXII

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.