CHAPTER XXXIV

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.