Grimaldi returned to Woolwich next day, and anxiously hoped on Sunday to see the misguided man to dinner, agreeably to a promise he had made. The day passed away, but he did not come; a few more days elapsed, and then he received an intimation from a stranger that his son was ill. He immediately wrote to a friend, (Mr. Glendinning the printer,) requesting him to ascertain the nature of his indisposition, which he feared was only the effect of some new intemperance, and if it should appear necessary, to procure him medical assistance. For two days he heard nothing; but this did not alarm him, for he entertained no doubt that his son's illness would disappear when the fumes of the liquor he had drunk had evaporated.
On the 11th of December, a friend came to his house as he was sitting by his wife's bed, to which she was confined by illness, and when, with much difficulty, he had descended to the parlour, told him with great care and delicacy that his son was dead.
In one instant every feeling of decrepitude or bodily weakness left him; his limbs recovered their original vigour; all his lassitude and debility vanished; a difficulty of breathing, under which he had long laboured, disappeared, and starting from his seat, he rushed to his wife's chamber, tearing, without the least difficulty, up a flight of stairs, which, a quarter of an hour before, it had taken him ten minutes to climb. He hurried to her bed-side, told her that her son was dead, heard her first passionate exclamation of grief, and falling into a chair, was once again an enfeebled and crippled old man.
The remains of the young man were interred, a few days afterwards, in the burial-ground of Whitfield's Tabernacle, in Tottenham-court-road; but some circumstances, apparently of a suspicious nature, being afterwards rumoured about, and it being whispered that marks of blows had been seen upon his head by those who laid him out, an inquest was holden upon the young man's body. Grimaldi states that the body was exhumed: from some passages in the newspapers of the day, it would appear that an informal inquest was held, and that the body was not disinterred. Be this as it may, it was proved before the coroner that his death had arisen from the natural consequences of a mis-spent life; that his body was covered with a fearful inflammation, and that he had died in a state of wild and furious madness, rising from his bed and dressing himself in stage costume to act snatches of the parts to which he had been most accustomed, and requiring to be held down to die, by strong manual force. This closing scene of his life took place at a public house in Pitt-street, Tottenham-court-road, and here the dismal tragedy ended.
It was long before Grimaldi in any degree recovered this great shock; his wife never did. She lingered on in a state of great suffering for two years afterwards, until death happily relieved her.
He was now left alone in the world; he had always been a domesticated man, delighting in nothing more than in the society of his relations and friends; and the condition of solitary desolation in which he was now left, nearly drove him into a state of melancholy madness. His crippled limbs and broken bodily health rendered it necessary to his existence that he should have an attentive nurse, and occasionally at least cheerful society; finding his situation wholly insupportable, he resolved to return to town, and wrote to a friend,[94] whose wife was his only remaining relative, to procure a small house for him in his own neighbourhood, where he too had lived so long and happily. A neat little dwelling, next door to this friend's house, in Southampton-street, Pentonville, being at that time to let, was taken and furnished for him, and thither he removed without more delay. Many of his old friends came from time to time to cheer him with a few minutes' conversation, and he experienced the warmest and kindest treatment from his neighbours, and from Mr. Richard Hughes, who bore in mind his promise to his dying sister, to the last moment of Grimaldi's life.
[94] Mr. Arthur, then residing at 35, Southampton-street, but since dead: his widow and family have left the neighbourhood. Mrs. Arthur was not "Grimaldi's only remaining relation;" she was originally a servant to Mr. Hughes, Joe's brother-in-law. Grimaldi's house was No. 33 in the same street, not "next door," and his solicitude to reach town, and occupy this house, his last home, is the subject of a long letter, now among many of Joe's autographs, in the possession of a gentleman resident in Highbury Park, Islington.
Early in the biography of Grimaldi, it will be remembered, mention is made of a sister, and in fact she is noticed as having made her début with him at Sadler's Wells, in 1781. This sister, according to Decastro, was named Mary, and married Signor Grimaldi's pupil, Lascelles Williamson; but of late years had been altogether lost sight of. Joe remembered her not in the disposal of his effects in his will; but soon after his death—and the circumstance became known through the newspapers—Joe's executor received a letter, in the name of Jane Taylor, which stated that she was in extreme poverty; that she was Joe's sister, and mournfully asked if he had borne her in mind, and had bequeathed her any assistance. The executor replied, that she had not been mentioned by Grimaldi in any way; and the recipients of what he possessed had been named by himself.
No further application followed; and probably she sleeps too with her kindred clay.
He concludes his Memoirs by taking a more cheerful view of his condition than could well have been expected of a man suffering so much, and ends in these words:—