Charles Clairmont was not informed at all of Fanny’s death; a letter from him a year later contains a message to her. Mrs. Godwin busied herself with putting the blame on Shelley. Four years later she informed Mrs. Gisborne that the three girls had been simultaneously in love with Shelley, and that Fanny’s death was due to jealousy of Mary! This shows that the Shelleys’ instinct did not much mislead them when they held Mary’s stepmother responsible for the authorship and diffusion of many of those slanders which for years were to affect their happiness and peace. Any reader of Fanny’s letters can judge how far Mrs. Godwin’s allegation is borne out by actual facts; and to any one knowing aught of women and women’s lives these letters afford clue enough to the situation and the story, and further explanation is superfluous. Fanny was fond of Shelley, fond enough even to forgive him for the trouble he had brought on their home, but her part was throughout that of a long-suffering sister, one, too, to whose lot it always fell to say all the disagreeable things that had to be said—a truly ungrateful task. Her loyalty to the Godwins, though it could not entirely divide her from the Shelleys, could and did prevent any intimacy of friendship with them. Her enlightened, liberal mind, and her generous, loving heart had won Shelley’s recognition and his affection, and in a moment a veil was torn from his eyes, revealing to him unsuspected depths of suffering, sacrifice, and heroism—now it was too late. How much more they might have done for Fanny had they understood what she endured! There was he, Shelley, offering sympathy and help to the oppressed and the miserable all the world over, and here,—here under his very eyes, this tragic romance was acted out to the death.

Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came,—and I departed,
Heeding not the words then spoken—
Misery, ah! misery!
This world is all too wide for thee.

If the echo of those lines reached Fanny in the world of shadows, it may have calmed the restless spirit with the knowledge that she had not lived for nothing after all.

During the next two months another tragedy was silently advancing towards its final catastrophe. Shelley was anxious for intelligence of Harriet and her children; she had, however, disappeared, and he could discover no clue to her whereabouts. Mr. Peacock, who, during June, had been in communication with her on money matters, had now, apparently, lost sight of her. The worry of Godwin’s money-matters and the fearful shock of Fanny’s self-sought death, followed as it was by collapse of his own health and nerves, probably withdrew Shelley’s thoughts from the subject for a time. In November, however, he wrote to Hookham, thinking that he, to whom Harriet had once written to discover Shelley’s whereabouts, might now know or have the means of finding out where she was living. No answer came, however, to these inquiries for some weeks, during which Shelley, Mary, and Clare lived in their seclusion, reading Lucian and Horace, Shakespeare, Gibbon, and Locke; in occasional correspondence with Skinner Street, through Mrs. Godwin, who was now trying what she could do to obtain money loans (probably raised on Shelley’s prospects), requisite, not only to save Godwin from bankruptcy, but to repay Shelley a small fraction of what he had given and lent, and without which he was unable to pay his own way.

The plan for settling at Marlow was still pending, and on the 5th of December Shelley went there again to stay with Mr. Peacock and his mother, and to look about for a residence to suit him. Mary during his absence was somewhat tormented by anxiety for his fragile health; fearful, too, lest in his impulsive way he should fall in love with the first pretty place he saw, and burden himself with some unsuitable house, in the idea of settling there “for ever,” Clare and all. To that last plan she probably foresaw the objections more clearly than Shelley did. But her cheery letters are girlish and playful.

On 6th December the journal records—

Letter from Shelley; he has gone to visit Leigh Hunt.

This was the beginning of a lifelong intimacy.

On the 14th Shelley returned to Bath, and on the very next day a letter from Hookham informed him that on the 9th Harriet’s body had been taken out of the Serpentine. She had disappeared three weeks before that time from the house where she was living. An inquest had been held at which her name was given as Harriet Smith; little or no information about her was given to the jury, who returned a verdict of “Found drowned.”

Life and its complications had proved too much for the poor silly woman, and she took the only means of escape she saw open to her. Her piteous story was sufficiently told by the fact that when she drowned herself she was not far from her confinement. But it would seem from subsequent evidence that harsh treatment on the part of her relatives was what finally drove her to despair. She had lived a fast life, but had been, nominally at any rate, under her father’s protection until a comparatively short time before her disappearance, when some act or occurrence caused her to be driven from his house. From that moment she sank lower and lower, until at last, deserted by one—said to be a groom—to whom she had looked for protection, she killed herself.

It is asserted that she had had, all her life, an avowed proclivity to suicide. She had been fond, in young and happy days, of talking jocosely about it, as silly girls often do; discoursing of “some scheme of self-destruction as coolly as another lady would arrange a visit to an exhibition or a theatre.”[22] But it is a wide dreary waste that lies between such an idea and the grim reality,—and poor Harriet had traversed it.

Shelley’s first thought on receiving the fatal news was of his children. His sensations were those of horror, not of remorse. He never spoke or thought of Harriet with harshness, rather with infinite pity, but he never regarded her save in the light of one who had wronged him and failed him,—whom he had left, indeed, but had forgiven, and had tried to save from the worst consequences of her own acts. Her dreadful death was a shock to him of which he said (to Byron) that he knew not how he had survived it; and he regarded her father and sister as guilty of her blood. But Fanny’s death caused him acuter anguish than Harriet’s did.

As for Mary, she regarded the whole Westbrook family as the source of grief and shame to Shelley. Harriet she only knew for a frivolous, heartless, faithless girl, whom she had never had the faintest cause to respect, hardly even to pity. Poor Harriet was indeed deserving of profound commiseration, and no one could have known and felt this more than Mary would have done, in later years. But she heard one side of the case only, and that one the side on which her own strongest feelings were engaged. She was only nineteen, with an exalted ideal of womanly devotion; and at nineteen we may sternly judge what later on we may condemn indeed, but with a depth of pity quite beyond the power of its object to fathom or comprehend.

No comment whatever on the occurrence appears in her journal. She threw herself ardently into Shelley’s eagerness to get possession of his elder children; ready, for his sake, to love them as her own.

It could not but occur to her that her own position was altered by this event, and that nothing now stood between her and her legal marriage to Shelley and acknowledgment as his wife. So completely, however, did they regard themselves as united for all time by indissoluble ties that she thought of the change chiefly as it affected other people.

No time was lost in putting things on their legal footing. Shelley took Mary up to town, where the marriage ceremony took place at St. Mildred’s Church, Broad Street, in presence of Godwin and Mrs. Godwin. On the previous day he had seen his daughter for the first time since her flight from his house two and a half years before.

Both must have felt a strange emotion which, probably, neither of them allowed to appear.

Mary for a fortnight left a blank in her journal. On her return to Clifton she thus shortly chronicled her days—

I have omitted writing my journal for some time. Shelley goes to London and returns; I go with him; spend the time between Leigh Hunt’s and Godwin’s. A marriage takes place on the 29th of December 1816. Draw; read Lord Chesterfield and Locke.

Godwin’s relief and satisfaction were great indeed. His letter to his brother in the country, announcing his daughter’s recent marriage with a baronet’s eldest son, can only be compared for adroit manipulation of facts with a later letter to Mr. Baxter of Dundee, in which he tells of poor Fanny’s having been attacked in Wales by an inflammatory fever “which carried her off.”

He now surpassed himself “in polished and cautious attentions” both to Shelley and Mary, and appeared to wish to compensate in every way for the red-hot, righteous indignation which, owing to wounded pride rather than to offended moral sense, he had thought it his duty to exhibit in the past.

Shelley’s heart yearned towards his two poor little children by Harriet, and to get possession of them was now his feverish anxiety. On this business he was obliged, within a week of his return to Bath, to go up again to London. During his absence, on the 13th of January, Clare’s little girl, Byron’s daughter, was born. “Four days of idleness,” are Mary’s only allusion to this event. It was communicated to the absent father by Shelley, in a long letter from London. He quite simply assumes the event to be an occasion of great rejoicing to all concerned, and expects Byron to feel the same. The infant, who afterwards developed into a singularly fascinating and lovely child, was described in enthusiastic terms by Mary as unusually beautiful and intelligent, even at this early stage. Their first name for her was Alba, or “the Dawn”; a reminiscence of Byron’s nickname, “Albé.”

Most of this month of January, while Mary had Clare and the infant to look after, was of necessity spent by Shelley in London. Harriet’s father, Mr. Westbrook, and his daughter Eliza had filed an appeal to the Court of Chancery, praying that her children might be placed in the custody of guardians to be appointed by the Court, and not in that of their father. On 24th January, poor little William’s first birthday, the case was heard before Lord Chancellor Eldon. Mary, expecting that the decision would be known at once, waited in painful suspense to hear the result.

Her fears were realised, for two months were to elapse ere judgment was pronounced.

Saturday, January 25.—An unhappy day. I receive bad news and determine to go up to London. Read the Arcadia and Amadis. Letter from Mrs. Godwin and William.

Accordingly, next day, Mary went up to join her husband in town, and notes in her diary that she was met at the inn by Mrs. Godwin and William. Well might Shelley say of the ceremony that it was “magical in its effects.”

As it turned out, this was her final departure from Bath: she never returned there. On her arrival in London she was warmly welcomed by Shelley’s new friends, the Leigh Hunts, at whose house most of her time was spent, and whose genial, social circle was most refreshing to her. The house at Marlow had been taken, and was now being prepared for her reception. Little William and his nurse, escorted by Clare, joined her at the Hunts on the 18th of February, but Clare herself stayed elsewhere. At the end of the month they all departed for their new home, and were established there early in March.

CHAPTER X

The Shelleys’ new abode, although situated in a lovely part of the country, was cold and cheerless, and, at that bleak time of year, must have appeared at its worst. Albion House stood (and, though subdivided and much altered in appearance, still stands) in what is now the main street of Great Marlow, and at a considerable distance from the river. At the back the garden-plot rises gradually from the level of the house, terminating in a kind of artificial mound, overshadowed by a spreading cedar; a delightfully shady lounge in summer, but shutting off sky and sunshine from the house. There are two large, low, old-fashioned rooms; one on the ground floor, somewhat like a farmhouse kitchen; the other above it; both facing towards the garden. In one of these Shelley fitted up a library, little thinking that the dwelling, which he had rashly taken on a more than twenty years’ lease, would be his home for only a year. The rest of the house accommodated Mary, Clare, the children and servants, and left plenty of room for visitors. Shelley was hospitality itself, and though he never was in greater trouble for money than during this year, he entertained a constant succession of guests. First among these was Godwin; next, and most frequent, the genial but needy Leigh Hunt, with all his family. With Mary, as with Shelley, he had quickly established himself on a footing of easy, affectionate friendliness, as may be inferred from Mary’s letter, written to him during her first days at Marlow.

Not only did Shelley keep open house for his friends; his kindliness and benevolence to the distressed poor in Marlow and the surrounding country was unbounded. Nor was he content to give money relief; he visited the cottagers; and made himself personally acquainted with them, their needs, and their sufferings.

In all these labours of love and charity he was heartily and constantly seconded by Mary.

No more alone through the world’s wilderness,
Although (he) trod the paths of high intent,
(He) journeyed now.[23]

From the time of her union with him Mary had been his consoler, his cherished love, all the dearer to him for the thought that she was dependent on him and only on him for comfort and support, and enlightenment of mind; but yet she was a child,—a clever child,—sedate and thoughtful beyond her years, and full of true womanly devotion,—but still one whose first and only acquaintance with the world had been made by coming violently into collision with it, a dangerous experience, and hardening, especially if prolonged. From the time of her marriage a maturer, mellower tone is perceptible throughout her letters and writings, as though, the unnatural strain removed, and, above all, intercourse with her father restored, she glided naturally and imperceptibly into the place Nature intended her to fill, as responsible woman and wife, with social as well as domestic duties to fulfil.

The suffering of the past two or three years had left her wiser if also sadder than before; already she was beginning to look on life with a calm liberal judgment of one who knew both sides of many questions, yet still her mind retained the simplicity and her spirit much of the buoyancy of youth. The unquenchable spring of love and enthusiasm in Shelley’s breast, though it led him into errors and brought him grief and disillusionment, was a talisman that saved him from Byronic sarcasm, from the bitterness of recoil and the death of stagnation. He suffered from reaction, as all such natures must suffer, but Mary was by his side to steady and balance and support him, and to bring to him for his consolation the balm she had herself received from him. Well might he write—

Now has descended a serener hour,
And, with inconstant fortune, friends return;
Though suffering leaves the knowledge and the power
Which says: Let scorn be not repaid with scorn.[24]

And consolation and support were sorely needed. In March Lord Chancellor Eldon pronounced the judgment by which he was deprived, on moral and religious grounds, of the custody of his two elder children. How bitterly he felt, how keenly he resented, this decree all the world knows. The paper which he drew up during this celebrated case, in which he declared, as far as he chose to declare them, his sentiments with regard to his separation from Harriet and his union with Mary, is the nearest approach to self-vindication Shelley ever made. But the decision of the Court cast a slur on his name, and on that of his second wife. The final arrangements about the children dragged on for many months. They were eventually given over to the guardianship of a clergyman, a stranger to their father, who had to set aside £200 a year of his income for their maintenance in exile.

Meanwhile Godwin’s exactions were incessant, and his demands, sometimes impossible to grant, were harder than ever to deal with now that they were couched in terms of friendship, almost of affection. On 9th March we find Shelley writing to him—

It gives me pain that I cannot send you the whole of what you want. I enclose a cheque to within a few pounds of my possessions.

On 22d March (Godwin has been begging again, but this time in behalf of his old assistant and amanuensis, Marshall)—

On 15th April Godwin writes on his own behalf—

One can imagine how such a letter would work on his daughter’s feelings.

Nor was Charles Clairmont backward about putting in his claims, although his modest little requests require, like gems, to be extracted carefully from the discursive raptures, the eloquent flights of fancy and poetic description in which they are embedded. In January he had written from Bagnères de Bigorre, where he was “acquiring the language”—

The following extract is from a letter to Mary, written in August (the matrimonial scheme is now quite forgotten)—

Shelley, when this letter arrived, was writing The Revolt of Islam. To this poem, in spite of duns, sponges, and law’s delays, his thoughts and time were consecrated during his first six months at Marlow; in spite, too, of his constant succession of guests; but society with him was not always a hindrance to poetic creation or intellectual work. Indeed, a congenial presence afforded him a kind of relief, a half-unconscious stimulus which yet was no serious interruption to thought, for it was powerless to recall him from his abstraction.

Mary’s life at Marlow was very different from what it had been at Bishopsgate and Bath. Her duties as house-mistress and hostess as well as Shelley’s companion and helpmeet left her not much time for reverie. But her regular habits of study and writing stood her in good stead. Frankenstein was completed and corrected before the end of May. It was offered to Murray, who, however, declined it, and was eventually published by Lackington.

The negotiations with publishers calling her up to town, she paid a visit to Skinner Street. Shelley accompanied her, but was obliged to return to Marlow almost immediately, and as Mrs. Godwin also appears to have been absent, Mary stayed alone with her father in her old home. To him this was a pleasure.

“Such a visit,” he had written to Shelley, “will tend to bring back years that are passed, and make me young again. It will also operate to render us more familiar and intimate, meeting in this snug and quiet house, for such it appears to me, though I daresay you will lift up your hands, and wonder I can give it that appellation.”

To Mary every room in the house must have been fraught with unspeakable associations. Alone with the memories of those who were gone, of others who were alienated; conscious of the complete change in herself and transference of her sphere of sympathy, she must have felt, when Shelley left her, like a solitary wanderer in a land of shadows.

“I am very well here,” she wrote, “but so intolerably restless that it is painful to sit still for five minutes. Pray write. I hear so little from Marlow that I can hardly believe that you and Willman live there.”

Another train of mingled recollections was awakened by the fact of her chancing, one evening, to read through that third canto of Childe Harold which Byron had written during their summer in Switzerland together.

Do you remember, Shelley, when you first read it to me one evening after returning from Diodati. The lake was before us, and the mighty Jura. That time is past, and this will also pass, when I may weep to read these words.... Death will at length come, and in the last moment all will be a dream.

What Mary felt was crystallised into expression by Shelley, not many months later—

The stream we gazed on then, rolled by,
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee
In the light of life’s dim morning.

On the last day of May, Mary returned to Marlow, where the Hunts were making a long stay. Externally life went quietly on. The summer was hot and beautiful, and they passed whole days in their boat or their garden, or in the woods. Their studies, as usual, were unremitting. Mary applied herself to the works of Tacitus, Buffon, Rousseau, and Gibbon. Shelley’s reading at this time was principally Greek: Homer, Æschylus, and Plato. His poem was approaching completion. Mary, now that Frankenstein was off her hands, busied herself in writing out the journal of their first travels. It was published, in December, as Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour, together with the descriptive letters from Geneva of 1816.

But her peace and Shelley’s was threatened by an undercurrent of ominous disturbance which gained force every day.

Byron remained abroad. But Clare and Clare’s baby remained with the Shelleys. At Bath she had passed as “Mrs.” Clairmont, but now resumed her former style, while Alba was said to be the daughter of a friend in London, sent for her health into the country. As time, however, went by, and the infant still formed one of the Marlow household, curiosity, never long dormant, became aroused. Whose was this child? And if, as officious gossip was not slow to suggest, it was Clare’s, then who was its father? As month after month passed without bringing any solution of this problem, the vilest reports arose concerning the supposed relations of the inhabitants of Albion House—false rumours that embittered the lives of Alba’s generous protectors, but to which Shelley’s unconventionality and unorthodox opinions, and the stigma attached to his name by the Chancery decree, gave a certain colour of probability, and which in part, though indirectly, conduced to his leaving England again,—as it proved, for ever.

Again and again did he write to Byron, pointing out with great gentleness and delicacy, but still in the plainest terms, the false situation in which they were placed with regard to friends and even to servants by their effort to keep Clare’s secret; suggesting, almost entreating, that, if no permanent decision could be arrived at, some temporary arrangement should at least be made for Alba’s boarding elsewhere. Byron, at this time plunged in dissipation at Venice, shelved or avoided the subject as long as he could. Clare was friendless and penniless, and her chances of ever earning an honest living depended on her power of keeping up appearances and preserving her character before the world. But the child was a remarkably beautiful, intelligent, and engaging creature, and its mother, impulsive, uncontrolled, and reckless, was at no trouble to conceal her devotion to it, regardless of consequences, and of the fact that these consequences had to be endured by others.

Those who had forfeited the world’s kindness seemed, as such, to be the natural protégés of Shelley; and even Mary, who, not long before, had summed up all her earthly wishes in two items,—“a garden, et absentia Claire,”—stood by her now in spite of all. But their letters make it perfectly evident that they were fully alive to the danger that threatened them, and that, though they willingly harboured the child until some safe and fitting asylum should be found for it, they had never contemplated its residing permanently with them.

To Mary Shelley this state of things brought one bitter personal grief and disappointment in the loss of her earliest friend, Isabel or Isobel Baxter, now married to Mr. David Booth, late brewer and subsequently schoolmaster at Newburgh-on-Tay, a man of shrewd and keen intellect, an immense local reputation for learning, and an estimation of his own gifts second to that of none of his admirers.

The Baxters, as has already been said, were people of independent mind, of broad and liberal views; full of reverence and admiration for the philosophical writings of Godwin. Mary, in her extreme youth and inexperience, had quite expected that Isabel would have upheld her action when she first left her father’s house with Shelley. In that she was disappointed, as was, after all, not surprising.

Now, however, her friend, whose heart must have been with her all along, would surely feel justified in following that heart’s dictates, and would return to the familiar, affectionate friendship which survives so many differences of opinion. And her hope received an encouragement when, in August, Mr. Baxter, Isabel’s father, accepted an invitation to stay at Marlow. He arrived on the 1st of September, full of doubts as to what sort of place he was coming to,—apprehensions which, after a very short intercourse with Shelley, were changed into surprise and delight.

But his visit was cut short by the birth, on the very next day, of Mary’s little girl, Clara. He found it expedient to depart for a time, but returned later in the month for a longer stay.

This second visit more than confirmed his first impression, and he wrote to his daughter in warm, nay, enthusiastic praise of Shelley, against whom Isabel was, not unnaturally, much prejudiced, so much so, it seems, as to blind her even to the merits of his writings.

After a warm panegyric of Shelley as

A being of rare genius and talent, of truly republican frugality and plainness of manners, and of a soundness of principle and delicacy of moral tact that might put to shame (if shame they had) many of his detractors,—and withal so amiable that you have only to be half an hour in his company to convince you that there is not an atom of malevolence in his whole composition.

Mr. Baxter proceeds—

Her father’s letter made Isabel waver, but in vain. It had no effect on Mr. Booth, who had been at the trouble of collecting and believing all the scandals about Alba, or “Miss Auburn,” as she seems to have been called. He was not one to be biassed by personal feelings or beguiled by fair appearances, in the face of stubborn, unaccountable facts. He preferred to take the facts and draw his own inference—an inference which apparently seemed to him no improbable one.

For a long time nothing decisive was said or done, but while the fate of her early friendship hung in the balances, Mary’s anxiety for some settlement about Alba became almost intolerable to her, weighing on her spirits, and helping, with other depressing causes, to retard her restoration to health.

On the 19th of September she summed up in her journal the heads of the seventeen days after Clara’s birth during which she had written nothing.