Everything was done that could be done both by John Clare and Everard Lisle in the way of benefiting Luigi Rispani and furnishing him with the opportunity of earning an honourable livelihood, but to no purpose. By means of certain influence which was brought to bear, three different situations were obtained for him, not one of which he kept longer than a month or two. Simply to give him money from time to time was merely helping to demoralise him still further. At length a situation was found for him as drawing-master in a college of his mother’s sunny clime, and though he would never reach fame or fortune, aware that he had now only his own endeavours to trust to, he managed to keep his head above water, and earn a very modest livelihood.
Kirby Griggs, to whom, in one sense, John Clare felt that he owed so much, was not forgotten by him. For the man himself he could do nothing, but he succeeded in placing two of his sons with excellent City firms, and, by finding the requisite premium, in having one of his daughters, who had a natural gift that way, apprenticed to one of the best-known milliners at the West End.
In the course of the winter the marble tablet, which had been put up in the church of St. Michael to the memory of John Alexander Clare, was quietly removed.
When at length Sir Gilbert got back to the Chase, it was declared by everybody who saw him that he seemed to have taken a fresh lease of life. And so indeed he had, for when a man’s constitution has nothing radically amiss with it, happiness undoubtedly helps to lengthen our days, and Sir Gilbert had now everything to render him happy. The MS. of his County History, so long laid aside, was enthusiastically taken in hand again as soon as his grandson-in-law returned from his honeymoon, and in the course of the following winter was brought to a triumphant conclusion. The title-page records that it is the joint production of “Sir Gilbert Clare, Bart., and Everard Lisle Clare,” for before the marriage took place Sir Gilbert insisted upon the young man taking out letters-patent authorising him to add to his own name the surname of the ancient and honourable family of which he was about to become a member.
During the years of his expatriation, John Clare had devoted much of his spare time to experimental physics. It is a study which exercises a potent charm over such of its votaries as venture beyond the threshold of its temple of severe delights, and in the laboratory, which John caused to be fitted up at the Chase, he spent many happy hours in the effort to master those more abstruse secrets, and to arrive at a more correct knowledge of those subtler elements of the material universe, than the conditions of his life had heretofore allowed of his doing.
A few parting words are due to Lady Pell. As soon as the wedding was over she set out to pay a long-deferred round of visits, but by the middle of autumn she was back at the Chase, which henceforward was de facto her home. It was not to be expected that her restless proclivities would quite desert her, and occasionally she would start off at an hour’s notice, or no notice at all, for some place a couple of hundred miles away, but always to come back with increasing satisfaction, as time went on, to the old roof-tree, under whose shadow, the romance of her life had had its beginning and its end.
Of Ethel and Everard what can be said in conclusion save that theirs was the quiet happiness of well-ordered lives, of duties conscientiously performed, and of unselfish devotion to the well-being of others? In such a soil the sweet flower of content blooms perennially and changes not with the seasons as they come and go.