CHAPTER XXVI

“QUEEN OF MARBLE AND OF MUD”

The clear sky of Italy, the constant cloudless sky. Once more the caravan of three went down towards the lands of forgetfulness and sunshine. The babies and nursemaids who this time went with it, were hardly any drag on its rapid and whimsical progress.

Milan was reached by way of the Mont Cenis, where the first halt was made to await news of Byron to whom Shelley had written informing him of the arrival of his daughter. Shelley passed his days in the Cathedral reading the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_, in a solitary spot behind the altar where the light of day beneath the storied window is yellow and dim. Churches no longer inspired in him the horror they used to do. He was surprised to find that since he had suffered so keenly, no place now seemed to fit his feelings better or to be a finer background to the greatness of human passions than a church. In the company of Dante, and in the midst of a symphony of warm, rich colours, the Catholic religion no longer seemed to be the invention of charlatans.

Byron’s answer came. Nothing on earth would induce him to see Claire, and he would leave at once any town to which she should come. As to the child, he was willing to undertake the charge of its education, but his possession must be absolute. Shelley considered that this condition was cruel, and pleaded with Byron to soften it. But Byron, who above all things dreaded scenes with Claire, refused to cede an iota. A Venetian met in Milan gave tidings that the “English Lord” was leading a life of debauchery, and keeping a whole harem. Such news was hardly reassuring for Allegra’s education, and Shelley begged Claire to give up all idea of help from Byron rather than let him have the child. As usual he undertook to pay for everything himself. But Claire, proud of Allegra’s birth, wanted to obtain for her all the advantages of it. She had every confidence in Elise the Swiss nurse who had brought the baby up, and she decided to send them both to Venice. In spite of Shelley’s affectionate remonstrances Allegra was handed over to her father.

* * *

Disquieting news of the child soon came to trouble Claire. Byron had only kept it a few weeks. At first very proud of its beauty and of seeing it admired and made much of by the Venetians on the Piazza, he soon tired of this and allowed Mrs. Hoppner, wife of the English Consul, to take charge of it. Who was this Mrs. Hoppner? Elise wrote that she was a very kind lady, but Claire began to suffer from terrible remorse. During a whole year she had never been parted from the child for a single hour. She adored it. Allegra was the only creature in the whole world she could call her very own, since her family renounced her, and her lover refused to see her. Shelley, unable to bear the sight of her misery, offered to go with her to Venice. Mary consented to the arrangement in spite of her dislike at seeing these two start on a journey together. Paolo, the servant, who was energetic and seemed reliable, went with them as courier. In order not to irritate Byron who had forbidden Claire to enter any town where he might happen to be, it was decided that she should stop at Padua and wait there the upshot of Shelley’s embassy. But finding herself so near to Allegra, she could not resist going on. She thought that by keeping her presence secret she could manage to see the child, and so she and Shelley took a gondola and went down the Brenta. They crossed the lagoon in the middle of the night, in a violent storm of wind, rain and lightning, while in the distance the lights of Venice shone dimly behind a curtain of mist.

The next morning they went to the Hoppners who received them with courtesy and kindness. Mrs. Hoppner sent at once for Elise and the baby. She was much grown, was pale, and had lost a great deal of her liveliness, but was as beautiful as ever. Then they had a long conversation on the subject of Byron. The Hoppners, worthy people of conventional ideas, young lovers much excited by all the intrigues going on round them though humanized a little by Venetian indulgence, related with many head-shakes:

From the third day of his arrival Byron had provided himself, as he liked to boast, with a gondola and a mistress. The mistress was Marianna Segati, wife of a cloth-merchant, who was the poet’s landlord, for he had let rooms to Byron in his house. A most imprudent proceeding, but the cloth-business was doing badly. Marianna was twenty-two, had splendid black eyes, and a delicious voice. Although belonging to the middle classes, she was received by the aristocracy of Venice on account of her singing. That she should lose her heart to the noble lord who was as generous as he was handsome, and who lived under the same roof, was as inevitable as are the simplest chemical reactions. As to the Merchant of Venice, Byron was free with his ducats, and Venetian morals always permitted _one_ lover. Mrs. Hoppner, a friendly little woman with intelligent eyes, had told this story with that mixture of Christian sorrow and mundane relish which the virtuous employ in talking of the vicious. Her husband, with many hums and haws, added that this was not all. The Venetian populace circulated a tale that somewhere in the city the English Lord had a closed villa, in which, one Muse not sufficing him, he had gathered together the whole Nine. A legendary history was growing up concerning Byron, and the travelling British spoke with bated breath of Nero and Heliogabalus. The lower classes adored him, and at Carnival time the women took advantage of their masks and dominoes to hook themselves on to his person.

Such gossip was far from reassuring to Claire. She asked what ought she to do? The Consul advised her above all things not to let Byron suspect she was in Venice, for he often expressed his extreme horror of her arrival.

At three o’clock Shelley went to the Palazzo Mocenigo to call on Byron, who was delighted to see him, Shelley being perhaps the only man in the world with whom Byron would talk seriously and as crowned head to crowned head. Even when told of the reason for Shelley’s journey, and Claire’s great desire to see the child again, he remained calm and reasonable. He said he understood perfectly Claire’s anxiety, but that he could not send Allegra back to her, because the Venetians who already accused him of capriciousness, would say he had grown tired of her. However, he would think the matter over, and find some way to arrange everything. On which, he invited Shelley to go for a ride with him along the Lido.

The gondola took them across the lagoon, and they disembarked on the long, sandy island which defends Venice from the Adriatic. Nothing grows here but sea-wrack and thistle. They found Byron’s horses waiting for them. Shelley loved all wild and solitary places, and this gallop along the edge of the sea was delightful to him. Only the knowledge that Claire, at the Hoppners’, anxiously awaited his return, spoiled his pleasure.

Byron inveighed against the stupidity of the English. Those who came to Venice persecuted him with their curiosity, and even offered money to his servants to allow them to see his bedroom. Then he spoke of Shelley’s own misfortunes with many protestations of friendship. “Had I been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, I would have moved heaven and earth to get you back your children.”

This led him on to speak of the wickedness of humanity which he judged to be infinite. “Men are filled with hatred of one another, to expect or hope for anything else is the mark of the visionary.”

“Why?” asked Shelley. “You appear to believe that man is the victim of his instincts without being able to direct them. . . . My faith is quite different. I think that our will creates our virtue. . . . And though wickedness may be natural that does not prove it to be invincible.”

Byron pointed out the patrician city that the setting sun suffused with gold and sombre purple. “Let us get into the gondola again,” he said, “I want to show you something.” When they had glided for some moments over the lagoon, “Look over to the west. Don’t you hear the clang of a bell?”

Shelley, looking, saw on a small island a windowless, deformed, and dreary building, and on the top of it an open tower in which a bell swung in black relief against the crimson sky. With the splash of the oars seemed to mingle distant, stifled cries for help.

“That,” Byron said, “is the madhouse. Every evening when I cross the water at this hour, I hear the bell clanging the maniacs to vespers.”

“No doubt that they may thank the Creator for his mercy towards them?”

“Always the same Shelley!” laughed Byron. “Infidel and blasphemer! You who can’t swim, beware of providence! But you spoke just now of vanquishing our instincts. Does it not seem to you that this spectacle rather is an image of our life? Conscience is the bell that calls us to virtue. We obey it like the madmen without knowing why. Then the sun sets, the bell stops, it is the night of death.”

He looked towards Venice, which, huddled in the twilight, had become a rose-tinged grey.

“We Byrons,” said he, “die young . . . on my father’s side, and on my mother’s as well. . . . It’s all the same to me, but I intend first to enjoy my youth.”

* * *

The next day Shelley, who had come to Byron filled with forebodings, was agreeably surprised to find him quite reasonable. He offered to lend Shelley and Claire for two months a villa he owned at Este, and to allow Allegra to go and stay there with her mother. Shelley joyfully accepted this generous offer, and he wrote to Mary to come at once and join them:

“I have been obliged to decide on all these things without you. I have done for the best; and, my own beloved Mary, you must soon come and scold me if I have done wrong, and kiss me if I have done right, for I am sure I do not know which, and it is only the event that will show. We shall at least be saved the trouble of introduction, and have formed acquaintance with a lady (Mrs. Hoppner) who is so good, so beautiful, so angelically sweet, that were she as wise too, she would be quite a Mary, but she is not very accomplished. Her eyes are like a reflection of yours; her manners are like yours when you know and like a person. . . . Kiss the blue-eyed darlings for me, and do not let Willmouse forget me. Ca cannot recollect me.”

Mary’s journey was slow and disagreeable. At Florence she was held up by passport difficulties. The baby Clara, who was cutting her teeth, suffered from heat, fatigue and the change of milk; when Este was reached, she was dangerously ill.

During fourteen days she remained in a state of fever. The doctor seemed a stupid fellow, and Mary decided to go on to Venice that she might call in a better one. At Fusina the Austrian custom-house officers stopped them and attempted to prevent them from crossing the lagoon. Shelley, who had gone to meet them at Padua, insisted with extraordinary violence on passing, and rushed for a gondola. The baby had curious convulsive twitchings of the eyes and mouth. During the voyage she was almost unconscious. When the hotel was reached her condition was still more alarming. Examined by a doctor, he said at once there was no hope. Within an hour she died silently and without pain.

Mary found herself standing in the hall of a strange inn with her dead child in her arms. Mr. Hoppner came and took her and Shelley away to his own house. The next morning Shelley carried the little corpse in a gondola for burial on the Lido, and Mary tried to shake off her grief. It was one of Godwin’s doctrines that only weak and cowardly natures abandon themselves to sorrow, which could not last did we not feed it in secret by finding a sort of painful vanity in our sufferings. His daughter shared his ideas on this point. The day after little Ca was buried, she wrote in her journal:

“_Sunday, September 27._ Read fourth canto of _Childe Harold_. It rains. Go to the Doge’s Palace, Ponte dei Sospiri, etc. Go to the Academy with Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner, and see some fine pictures, call at Lord Byron’s and see the Fornarina.”

* * *

The Fornarina was Byron’s latest mistress, a peasant woman with a face of the fine antique Venetian type. “You will see how beautiful she is,” Byron had told Shelley. “Very fine black eyes and the figure of a Juno, wavy black hair which reflects the moonlight: one of those women who would go to hell for love. I like that sort of animal, and I should certainly have preferred Medea to any other woman in the world.”

Certainly this beautiful baker’s wife was a strange sort of animal, and quite untamable. She was so fierce that all the servants were terrified of her, even Tita, the gigantic gondolier. She was jealous, insupportable, and false as the devil, besides being perfectly ridiculous from the moment she had insisted on replacing her veil and shawl by fashionable gowns and hats with ostrich feathers. Byron flung these into the fire every time he saw them, and then she went out and bought others. But he put up with her follies because she amused him. He liked her vivacity, her Venetian dialect, her violence. Her coarse and animal nature was, he imagined, more of a rest to him than anything else after intellectual labour. Thanks to her his poem advanced with a splendid motion, with something of the wild and natural movement of the sea or the passionate love of a woman.

To the Shelleys, who were ultra-refined, this magnificent animal was highly displeasing. They exchanged sorrowful glances. During the few days they spent in Venice, Shelley became better acquainted with Byron’s mode of life and he judged it with severity. The Poet admitted to his orgies the lowest women picked up by his _gondolieri_ in the streets. Then, despising himself, he decreed that man is despicable. His cynicism now appeared to Shelley to be nothing but a graceful mask for his sensuality.

At length the Shelleys went back to Este, depressed by their return there without their little girl. Yet the house was cheerful. In the garden a vine-covered pergola led to a summer-house which Shelley made his study. From thence you saw the ruins of the ancient castle of Este in the foreground, then, like a green sea, Lombardy’s waveless plains, on which cities and villages seemed like islands bounded by vaporous air . . . in the distance many-domed Padua, a peopled solitude, and the towers of Venice glittering in the sunshine against a sapphire sky.

He worked hard. He had begun _Prometheus Unbound_, a lyrical drama on the Book of Job. He tried to fix in verse light as wing-beats the melancholy beauty of these autumn days. But no sooner had the intoxicating joy of composition faded than he felt himself once more alone and forgotten. It seemed to him that in the frail bark which carried beneath an alien sky his group of youthful exiles Misery stood at the helm.