CHAPTER XXXVII
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)]