Mary enjoyed fox-hunting herself, and she looked particularly fetching on horseback in her red jacket and top hat, so she protested: “These pursuits—well, save for the fox-hunting of course—provide meat for the table. But I observe, Mr. Shelley, you have not partaken of anything but bread and raisins.”
Shelley was expounding on the moral necessity of an all-vegetable diet when the church bell chimed the hour, and her strange guest broke off and exclaimed— “is it really three o’clock already? I was supposed to meet my new landlord at one o’clock—I quite forgot. My dear Mrs. Crawford, pray allow me to call on you tomorrow.”
And he left—without offering to settle the bill for the meal, as any gentleman might have.
* * * * * * *
On the following day, Mary and her new companion began by admiring the fine prospects afforded by their walk along the Lima river, and the growth of this or that handsome tree. But Shelley’s mind habitually soared above the clouds, in the highest levels of the firmament. What the world calls polite small talk made no part of his conversation.
Peculiar, self-centred and childlike though he was, Shelley was entirely engaging. He talked, in fact, better than most people could write. They had visited many of the same cities in Italy, admired the same ruins, traipsed through the same cathedrals, viewed the same paintings. But his recollections were so well-expressed, his taste so discriminating, his observations so interesting, so as to make her feel she had looked without seeing half of what she saw. And like her late brother, he bestowed his entire attention upon her, as though she were the only woman in the world, and he was privileged to listen to her. When she said she did not really care for Byron’s poetry, he cheerfully disputed her, but seemed especially delighted when she would not yield in her disapprobation.
They were sitting together on a low stone wall, overlooking a stand of chestnuts, and he asked for her life story, and she found herself relating it all to him; in fact, she confided in him as she had never unburdened herself to anyone since her brother Henry’s death.
She told him the story of how she had lost Henry, of how her own husband Edmund had challenged him to a duel.
Shelley was transfixed by Mary’s relation of the tragedy, and when she described the duplicity of Fanny Price, he exclaimed. “If she had not misled your husband, then your husband would not have challenged your brother and he would not have died in an accident on his way to the duelling grounds. What a chain of events—truly, it unfolds like a Greek tragedy! If only I were a better dramatist, I should be unable to resist proclaiming your wrongs to the world.
“Except,” he added, in a calmer tone, “except that ‘Fanny’ is no very good name for the villainess. All the Fannys I have known were exceptionally sweet-tempered.”
Mary had to brush away some awkward feelings here, for in describing the events leading to her brother’s death, she had excused his errors, softening down everything that was selfish, deceitful and reckless in his behaviour, and she had thrown the greatest possible opprobrium upon the actions and motives of the others.
She protested, “I cannot condemn my husband entirely.” Shelley exclaimed over her saintly nature, as Mary added that Edmund was a good man, a well-principled man, but unfortunately very cold-tempered. He could not properly understand her, a creature of deep feeling.
Shelley’s countenance lit up with exquisite sympathy. He appeared to share her sorrows with every particle of his being. To her surprise, Mary found herself weeping in his arms.
“It is like being trapped in ice, is it not?” he exclaimed softly, his breath brushing her ear. “Waiting, hoping, longing for some smile of warmth, some humanity. Two souls bound together in the most intimate ties, yet separated by a wall of reserve, of reproach, the living coupled with the dead.”
Mary was pleased to be so well understood, at last! And she realized that she knew nothing at all of the man who was now embracing her. She pulled back, Shelley released her instantly. She asked him to tell her of himself. Shelley drew his knees close to his chest and gently rocked back and forth on top of the wall as he recounted why he was at Mr. Longdill’s office on that January day a year and a half ago.
When he was not even nineteen years old, a beautiful young school-girl grew enamoured of him. She became his eager disciple. As he swept away the cobwebs of superstition from her mind, she fell passionately in love with him. “So, neither of us being of age, we eloped to Scotland.”
He leaned forward and picked up some large pebbles scattered about the ground at their feet, and began to idly throw them into the river.
“But after several years of marriage, the inequality of her understanding and the limitations of her temperament made our life together unendurable.” He looked at Mary in a pleading fashion. “Everyone who knows me must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet could do neither. We parted, although I was resolved to always be her firm friend and protector. But she became the mistress of another—or so I heard.
“By then we had a boy and a girl. Her family, actuated by narrow-mindedness and spite, was determined to deny me my own children. They used my published writings—my avowal of atheism and my belief in Free Love—in their petition.
