Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822
It was now midnight, but refusing to rest the two women went on to
Leghorn, which they reached at two o’clock in the morning. Their
coachman took them to the wrong inn where they found neither Trelawny
nor Captain Roberts. They threw themselves dressed on their beds and
waited for daylight. At six o’clock they visited all the inns of the
town one after the other, and at the _Globe_ Roberts came down to them
with a face which told them that the worst was true. They learned from
him all that occurred during that agonizing week.
Yet hope was not entirely extinct. The _Ariel_ might have been blown to
Corsica, or Elba, or even farther. They sent a courier from tower to
tower along the coast as far as Nice to know if anything had been seen
or found, and at 9 a.m. they quitted Leghorn for Casa Magni. Trelawny
went with them. At Via Reggio they were told that a punt, a water-keg,
and some bottles had been cast up on the beach. Trelawny went to look at
them and recognized the little skiff of the _Ariel_. But there was the
possibility that, finding it cumbersome in bad weather, they had thrown
it overboard.
When Jane and Mary reached home, the village was holding high festival.
The noise of dancing, laughing and singing kept them awake the whole
night through.
* * *
Five or six days later Trelawny, who had promised a reward to any of the
coastguard who should send him news, was called to Via Reggio where a
body had been washed up by the sea. It was a corpse terrible to look
upon, for the face and hands and those parts of the body not protected
by the clothes had been eaten away by the fish. But the tall slight
figure, the jacket, the volume of Sophocles in one pocket and Keats’
poems in the other, doubled back as if the reader, in the act of
reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to Trelawny
to leave a doubt on his mind that this mutilated body was any other than
Shelley’s. Almost at the same time the corpse of Williams was found not
far off, more mutilated still, and three weeks later a third body was
found, that of Charles Vivian, the sailor boy, about four miles from the
other two. It was a mere skeleton.
Trelawny had the remains buried temporarily in the sand to preserve them
from the sea, and galloped off towards Casa Magni.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account