Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [137]
The two old people pottered their way through the day. In the evening, they settled into chairs on each side of the parlour stove, and John read aloud while Susanna knitted new socks for him. After thirty-eight years of marriage, they still delighted in each other’s company. “He looked so beautiful,” Susanna recalled a few days later. “The silky snow white hair waving on his shoulders. The noble face illumined by the lamp and the pure fair complexion just tinged with a bright glow, that gave to lip and cheek almost the bloom of youth.” At nine o’clock, Susanna brought her husband a tumbler of milk and a bun and remarked that it was time “for respectable old people like you and I to be in bed.” She helped him into the bedroom, where he still slept in their iron bedstead and she slept on a low couch nearby, and started unbuttoning his shirt for him. “Dear Susy,” John grinned, “I give you a deal of trouble.” Susanna smiled back. “It is no trouble. I always bless God that I am here to help you.”
John manoeuvred his stiff left leg awkwardly into bed, then Susanna plumped up the pillows to make him comfortable. She leaned down and kissed his broad brow, and “bade God to bless my old darling, and give him a good night’s rest.” John reached up to her, pulling her down to his breast, and said in an exaggerated Scots accent, “My dear auld wife, may He bless you.” They were the last words of love Susanna ever heard from John.
It was still dark when Susanna awoke with a start. Someone had cried out, “Mother!” She quickly struggled off the couch and went to his bedside. “Dear Johnnie, are you ill? What is the matter?” John appeared quite coherent as he replied, “Mother, I did not call you. But I am very thirsty. Have you any drink here?” Susanna lit the oil lamp, and brought him a glass of water.
As she watched John brush the glass away and struggle to speak again, Susanna realized that something was wrong. She rose to send the servant for the doctor, but John insisted that, “Doctors can do me no good … Get me over the bed and open the window, I want more air.” By now, the sky was gradually changing from inky black to luminous blue, but the wind from the open window was icy. John, in the grip of a second stroke, was struggling for breath. Susanna wrapped a cloak round him, but he promptly threw up a quantity of slimy foam. He was dying, and Susanna knew it.
John leaned heavily on the window sill, gasping for air. Susanna finally got him back into bed. Desperation creeping into her voice, she begged him to say a few final words—a final message of love to his children. He waved his hand, took two deep breaths, closed his eyes and, as Susanna tearfully put it, “passed through the dark river as peacefully as a child going to sleep.” As Susanna stared in horror at his body, she heard the mill bell tolling six times in the distance. It had all been so quick, so abrupt. How could John have left her in such a rush?
Robert Moodie, his sister Agnes and brother-in-law John Vickers arrived by train the same day to help Susanna with the funeral arrangements. Neither Dunbar nor Donald showed up to mourn their father, but the town of Belleville came out in force to honour John Dunbar Moodie. The Belleville Intelligencer noted that, “Mr. Moodie was a man of warm social affections, had a great many personal friends, and died very generally regretted.” The town council moved a resolution expressing its sympathy to Mrs. Moodie and family in the loss they had sustained. The funeral procession, led by a horse-drawn hearse, straggled almost the full length of the road from the Moodies’ humble cottage to St. Thomas’s Anglican Church on Bridge Street East, on the smart side of town. “Even the men whose persecutions had shortened his days paid respect to his remains,” Susanna wrote to a friend. Nevertheless, black-coated Tory well-wishers like Allan