Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/71

 DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY

What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumors from malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl s head? Her very defenselessness should have been her protec tion. The fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a voice, while every pen-stroke which could help her husband s side had been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought to trial. Her witnesses have all disappeared, yet we see her summoned in her grave-clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the help of an ad vocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed i jury.

Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July. On the 28th her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire to the Continent. He deserted his wife when her confine ment was approaching. She bore him a child at the end of November, his mistress bore him another one something over two months later. The truants were back in London before either of these events occurred.

On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support his mistress with that he went to his wife and got some money of his that was in her hands twenty pounds. Yet the mistress was not moved to gratitude; for later, when the wife was troubled to meet her engagements, the mistress makes this entry in her diary :

Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now we shall have to change our lodgings.

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