I am very glad indeed that Susy has taken up Mental Science, and I do hope it may do her as much good as she hopes. Last winter we were so very anxious to have her get hold of it, and even felt at one time that we must go to America on purpose to have her have the treatment, so it all seems very fortunate that it should have come about as it has this winter.
Just how much or how little Susy was helped by this treatment cannot be known. Like Stevenson, she had “a soul of flame in a body of gauze,” a body to be guarded through the spirit. She worked continuously at her singing and undoubtedly overdid herself. Early in the year she went over to Hartford to pay some good-by visit, remaining most of the time in the home of Charles Dudley Warner, working hard at her singing. Her health did not improve, and when Katie Leary went to Hartford to arrange for their departure she was startled at the change in her.
“Miss Susy; you are sick,” she said. “You must have the doctor come.”
Susy refused at first, but she grew worse and the doctor was sent for. He thought her case not very serious—the result, he said, of overwork. He prescribed some soothing remedies, and advised that she be kept very quiet, away from company, and that she be taken to her own home, which was but a step away. It was then that the letter was written and the first cable sent to England. Mrs. Crane was summoned from Elmira, also Charles Langdon. Mr. Twichell was notified and came down from his summer place in the Adirondacks.
Susy did not improve. She became rapidly worse, and a few days later the doctor pronounced her ailment meningitis. This was on the 15th of August—that hot, terrible August of 1896. Susy's fever increased and she wandered through the burning rooms in delirium and pain; then her sight left her, an effect of the disease. She lay down at last, and once, when Katie Leary was near her, she put her hands on Katie's face and said, “mama.” She did not speak after that, but sank into unconsciousness, and on the evening of Tuesday, August 18th, the flame went out forever.
To Twichell Clemens wrote of it:
Ah, well, Susy died at home. She had that privilege. Her dying
eyes rested upon no thing that was strange to them, but only upon
things which they had known & loved always & which had made her
young years glad; & she had you & Sue & Katie & John & Ellen.
This was happy fortune—I am thankful that it was vouchsafed to her.
If she had died in another house—well, I think I could not have
borne that. To us our house was not unsentient matter—it had a
heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes &
deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived
in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home
from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its
eloquent welcome—& we could not enter it unmoved. And could we
now? oh, now, in spirit we should enter it unshod.
A tugboat with Dr. Rice, Mr. Twichell, and other friends of the family went down the bay to meet the arriving vessel with Mrs. Clemens and Clara on board. It was night when the ship arrived, and they did not show themselves until morning; then at first to Clara. There had been little need to formulate a message—their presence there was enough—and when a moment later Clara returned to the stateroom her mother looked into her face and she also knew. Susy already had been taken to Elmira, and at half past ten that night Mrs. Clemens and Clara arrived there by the through train—the same train and in the same coach which they had taken one year and one month before on their journey westward around the world.
And again Susy was there, not waving her welcome in the glare of the
lights as she had waved her farewell to us thirteen months before, but
lying white and fair in her coffin in the house where she was born.
They buried her with the Langdon relatives and the little brother, and ordered a headstone with some lines which they had found in Australia: