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.
THE END.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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