Devotion
Page 28
Tom Marlowe went to Australia. You may be confounded to learn that he went there of his own will; there were certainly many who said that if he had not gone willing he must have gone unwilling.11 But by this noble action he cheated his enemies (who by the time of his departure seemed to number all the inhabitants of England) of malignant triumph.
It is not only female virtue that may be rewarded with a coach and four. Even so, John Amaury’s reward exceeded the material. Surrounded by his new family, both loving and beloved, and no longer merely living for himself, Amaury became exactly what he ought to be. His wishes now centered in quiet domestic life and his character shook off the selfishness of former habits and fully acquired the delicacy of principal it had wanted; although it was not acquired through Georgiana as he at first had supposed. Mr. and Mrs. Amaury, shortly Lord and Lady Marlowe, were in harmony with each other’s dearest sensations, and there could be no two hearts so open to one another, no trust so reciprocal, no confidence so mutual, but each received an occasional surprise from the other’s thoughts or actions. However if their understanding of each other was not perfect, their devotion to each other was.
Almost all sins may be forgiven one who is in solid possession of legitimacy and a handsome fortune, and what legitimacy and fortune will not soften, time and liberality of opinion – and not necessarily a great deal of either – will accomplish the rest, for rank, after all, is rank. Quite soon nearly the whole world was delighted by Lord and Lady Marlowe’s acquaintance and set itself to enjoy all the advantages of the connexion. Their past indiscretions were forgotten and they moved always in the first set.
∞
∞
∞
∞
∞
∞
∞
∞
ENDNOTES
∞
∞
∞
1Observers reported snow (in London) on April 14, 1816. The year 1816 was cold and wet, famously known as the “year without a summer”. The anomalous weather, which caused widespread crop failure in Europe and America, leading to starvation in many areas, is now believed to have been the result of the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815.
2Jane Austen completed Persuasion in August 1816, although it was published in December 1817 and dated 1818.
3Observers also reported snow in London on May 12, 1816.
4John Milton (1608-1674), Paradise Lost.
5Frances (Fanny) Burney, The Wanderer, or, Female Difficulties (1814), volume 4, Chapter 45.
6George Gordon, Lord Byron; the verse may now be found in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza XCII.
7William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. It is also inscribed on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s headstone in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. Shelley drowned in Italy in 1822, at the age of 29.
8George Gordon, Lord Byron; the verse may now be found in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, stanza IX. And yes, Lord Byron quoted his own poetry in his letters.
9Seneca the Younger, Troades (The Trojan Women), written c. 54 AD. Translated from the Latin it reads, “After Death there is nothing, and Death itself is nothing … you ask in what place you shall lie after your decease? There where the unborn lie.”
10With Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati near Cologny on Lake Geneva were Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Polidori, Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont (the mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra, born in January 1817). Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Shelley’s wife, wrote Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) and John Polidori wrote The Vampyre (1819).
11Australia was a British penal colony from 1788 to 1868.