Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [157]
Even after all these years, the English sisters winced when they saw references in the London press to their Canadian sisters’ humble circumstances. All that Roughing It in the Bush mortification flamed again in Jane Strickland, who wrote a tetchy letter to Susanna. Jane dismissed James Ritchie as “Sir Snob” and deplored his patronizing style: “While praising [Catharine’s] elegant arrangements he takes care to inform his readers ‘it is only a wooden house.’…We all thought him a disgusting child. He must have written in pure spite.”
Susanna’s interview with James Ritchie was amongst the last encounters she had with anyone outside her family circle. Strange fantasies began to flood her mind—fantasies that she had been robbed and was now penniless. The fantasies intensified over the next few months as Susanna’s sanity slowly slipped away. She could no longer read; she could not walk without assistance; she confused her children with her grandchildren. By the end of 1884, she required constant nursing, and Robert Moodie and his sister Katie Vickers decided to move their mother to Katie’s mansion at 52 Adelaide Street.
Susanna’s daughter Katie and her husband John Vickers, with seven of their ten children, in the parlour of their opulent mansion on Toronto’s Adelaide Street.
Yet it was not until March 1885 that the old lady seemed ready to relinquish her hold on life. Catharine arrived to sit with her and listen to her inchoate ramblings. Susanna was a wreck of her former independent, private self. Catharine wrote to Ellen Dunlop: “I cannot leave her as she frets if I go away and when she comes in to me she keeps talking and rambles so that I lose all thought of anything and every one else…. My sister who used to rail against dolls to play with and call them hideous idols and find fault with mothers for giving little children dolls to play with has a great wax doll dressed like a baby and this she nurses and caresses—and believes it is her own living babe and cannot bear it out of her sight….This is to me the saddest sight for it shews the entire change that has come over her fine intellect. She is a child again in very truth.”
It was a wretched, anguished death. On Easter Sunday, the new bell of St. Andrew’s Church on King Street began to clang. Susanna grew dreadfully agitated. She got it into her head that the bell tolled for a murderer who had cut off her head, and she struggled out of bed to kneel on the floor and pray for his soul. For the next thirty-six hours, the poor old woman was repeatedly startled awake by fearsome delusions and nightmares. Finally, as her nurse, daughter and sister slumped exhausted by her bedside, she fell into a coma. Catharine listened to her laboured breaths. “The total loss of your dear aunt’s faculties,” Catharine told her daughter Annie Atwood, “had indeed reconciled us to the final close of her life on earth … the restful peace of God seemed to have taken the place of all the sad harassed pained expression that was for so long sad to witness on that beloved face.” Staring at her sister’s face, Catharine was transported to the bedroom of Reydon Hall, where she had last seen her own mother “calmly sleeping” fifty-two years earlier. As she watched and prayed, Susanna drew her last breath.
Robert Moodie arranged for his mother’s remains to travel to Belleville by train. Susanna Moodie was buried in the newly laid-out graveyard to the west of the city, overlooking the Bay of Quinte. The bodies of her husband John and her two sons were taken from the old graveyard, in the centre of town, and buried next to her. John Vickers paid for a splendid white marble angel, wearing a Moodie-like expression of fierce pride and holding a star aloft, to be erected at the grave. The Globe published a long obituary, applauding Susanna’s determination to help create a Canadian literature: “Many a struggling Canadian author has reason to thank her for encouragement and advice kindly