Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/51

 DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY

silent, when she has so much need to speak. We can only wonder at this mystery, not account for it.

No, there is no way of finding out what Harriet s state of feeling was during the month that Shelley was disporting himself in the Bracknell paradise. We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabu list does when he has nothing more substantial to work with. Then we easily conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet s heart grew heavier and heavier under its two burdens shame and resent ment; the shame of being pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a disreputable captivity. Deserted wives deserted whether for cause or without cause find small charity among the virtuous and the dis creet. We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call; that one after another they got to being &quot;engaged&quot; when Harriet called; that finally they one after the other cut her dead on the street; that after that she stayed in the house daytimes, and brooded over her sorrows, and night times did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep should have charitably bridged, but didn t.

Yes, mischief had been wrought. The biographer arrives at this conclusion, and it is a most just one. Then, just as you begin to half hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away disappointed. You are disappointed, and

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