Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [135]
The visit raised the Moodies’ spirits. Old friends stopped John and Susanna in the street and recalled the youthful adventures they had all shared (Susanna mistook many of the grey-whiskered men for their fathers). “I do not remember that I ever spent a happier or more enjoyable fortnight in my whole life,” Susanna told Richard Bentley. “My dear old husband forgot for a few days his cares, and enjoyed himself as much as I did.” There were family reunions in The Homestead, Sam’s mansion. “My brother,” Susanna told Bentley, “has a handsome and commodious house and a beautiful garden which would amply satisfy the taste of any gentleman of moderate fortune.” Sam himself was in poor health; his muscular body was aging rapidly, and his eyes were clouded due to diabetes. His pretensions soon began to grate on Susanna, who preferred cosy evenings in Catharine’s pretty little cottage, on the banks of the Otonabee. Their sister Agnes’s successive triumphs in literature and society were a recurrent topic of conversation. In a recent letter to Catharine, Agnes had described a visit to the fifth Earl Spencer, at Althorp, “where I found the finest library in England.” It is easy to imagine Susanna’s expression as she read her sister’s smug account of “three weeks in these classic shades having much homage paid to me.”
John and Susanna made one more pilgrimage, a poignant one, to the property, a mile outside Lakefield’s centre, that had been their home from 1832 to 1839. “I did not know the place,” Susanna noted. In Lakefield, nature might have been tamed and shaped to suit colonists’ tastes, but out there, it was back in control. Their lakeside log cabin had disappeared, and most of the acres had reverted to cedar swamp. The only evidence of the Moodies’ sojourn were the stones of their well—mute testimony to the blood, sweat and tears they had expended on survival.
Susanna stood at the edge of Lake Katchewanooka, watching the yellow water-lilies rocking up and down on the lake and the iridescent blue dragonflies hovering over them. Memories of her younger self flooded back. She thought about how hard they had worked to clear the land, and the miseries of hunger, disease, cold and disappointment they had endured. But she also remembered the twilight sails that she and John had taken on the lake, and the cheerful laughter of Peter Nogan and Mrs. Tom, their Chippewa friends. She had been a slim, active woman in those days who, for all her grumbles, firmly believed that her backwoods trials were the dark hours before the dawn. Now she was a tired, grey-haired sixty-two-year-old, convinced that she had never been “among fortune’s favourites.” What had she achieved with all those struggles? The Moodies had left England in order to give their children more opportunities in the New World. So far, their children’s lives were no easier than Susanna’s and John’s. Had it all been worth it?
On their return to Belleville, Moodie fortunes went from bad to worse. Dunbar created the first problem. When John gave up the sheriff ’s job, he’d given the Bridge Street house to Dunbar, in the expectation that his oldest son would look after his parents in their old age. But Dunbar had quickly sold the house so that he and his new wife, Eliza, could travel to Delaware and buy a farm there. Eliza and her sister, Julia Russell, had first entered the Moodie household as boarders, from Jamaica, a few years earlier. In those days, Susanna had found them “a great comfort.” She told Catharine that “dear Lizzie … is a daughter to me in my trouble and dear little Julia does her best with her angelic voice to drive away care.” But once Eliza had married Dunbar, Susanna began to blame her for Dunbar’s shortcomings and constant requests for money. All of Susanna’s broad-minded liberalism deserted her when she came to blows with a daughter-in-law who had negro blood. She described Eliza as a “a selfish, cold-hearted arrogant Quadroon, a woman of little intellect and who despises it in others.”
John