Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [133]
For the next few weeks, John pretended to go back to work. But an invalid sheriff was an even greater embarrassment for the government than one facing charges of corruption, and eventually John’s old friend Lewis Wallbridge, the Speaker of the Assembly, persuaded him to resign his position before his appeal was heard. Early in 1862, John Dunbar Moodie resigned as the sheriff of the County of Hastings after twenty-three years of service. At sixty-four, he was old, sick and broke. The Moodies’ only assets were their cottage and fifteen acres of land, heavily mortgaged, and the various debts still owed to John as sheriff. He continued to hope for another job, and received a vague indication that something might be found for him, but his wife was the greater realist. “I build very little upon these promises,” Susanna wrote sadly to her sister. “I wish the dear husband would cease to hope, and resign himself to the probability of disappointment. The anxiety and uncertainty of his position is killing him by inches.”
Susanna was scared about the future, but, as usual, she was resourceful in a crisis. The only way she knew how to earn money was through writing, so she picked up her pen again. She sent two sketches to a new Toronto periodical, the British-American Magazine. She encouraged John to prepare a collection of all his past writings and publish them with a biographical introduction. Despite his trembling hand and failing eyesight, John managed to produce Scenes and Adventures as a Soldier and Settler during Half a Century, which would appear in 1866. Susanna explained their predicament to Richard Bentley and requested his help in getting a story that she wrote years earlier published, to keep “the gaunt wolf poverty from the door.”
Her loyal old friend could not have responded more sympathetically. “Your letter just received gave me very sincere grief,” Bentley replied in April 1865. “It is indeed very hard that after the faithful discharge of arduous duties for many years, and in the decline of life as your good husband is, when personal comforts may be acceptable and frequently required, a public officer should lose his means of support without any pension.” Tears came to Susanna’s eyes as she read his letter, and when she reached the second page she ran out onto the verandah to show John the kind words before sitting down to express her fervent gratitude. “God bless you for your goodness,” she scrawled, and went on to thank God “for raising me up a true friend.” Bentley was confident that he could secure for Susanna a grant from the Royal Literary Fund in London. In due course, a bank draft for sixty pounds arrived from Octavian Blewett, the Fund’s secretary.
This was the only formal recognition, in England or Canada, that Susanna Moodie ever received for her work during her lifetime. The meagre grant was soon consumed by the Moodies’ living expenses and legal bills, but in Susanna’s mind, it compensated for the meanness of both her Canadian critics and John’s political friends. “I hold, perhaps, the first place among the female authors residing within the Colony,” she told Bentley, “and my contributions to their periodical literature [have] always enjoyed great popularity. But this has not made them more ready to give my dear husband a small place under the government, to keep us from the Author’s fate—a dry crust and the garret.”
John knew