At that moment Aunt Betty appeared in the doorway, beckoning to them.
A moment later they were all there gathered round the bed.
Now Henry could see his mother. She was lying, her eyes closed, but with that same determined expression in the face that he had so often seen before. She might be dead or she might be asleep. He didn't feel any drama in connection with his vision of her. Too many years had now intervened since his time with her. He did indeed recall with love and affection some woman who had been very good to him, who had taken him to Our Boys' Clothing Company to be fitted on, who had written to him and sent him cake when he was at school, and of whom he had thought with passionate and tearful appeal when he had been savagely bullied. But that woman had died long ago. This stern, remorseless figure, who had cursed her children because they would not conform to the patterns that she had made for them, had confronted all his love of justice, of tolerance, of freedom. There had been many moments when he had hated her, and now when he was seeing her for the last time he could not summon false emotion and cry out at a pain that he did not feel. And yet he knew well that when she was gone remorse would come sweeping in and that he would be often longing for her to return that he might tell her that he loved her and wished to atone to her for all that he had done that was callous and selfish and unkind.
Worst of all was the unreality of the scene, the dim light, the faint scent of medicine, the closed-in seclusion as though they were all barred from the outside world which they were never to enter again. He looked at the faces—at Aunt Betty upset, distressed, moved deeply because in her tender heart she could not bear to see any one or any thing unhappy; Aunt Aggie, severe, fancying herself benign and dignified, thinking only of herself; the doctor and the nurse professionally preoccupied, wondering perhaps how long this tiresome old woman would be "pegging out"; his father struggling to recover something of the old romance that had once bound him, tired out with the effort, longing for it all to be over; Millie, perfectly natural, ready to do anything that would help anybody, but admitting no falseness nor hypocrisy; Katherine——!
It was Katherine who restored Henry to reality. Katherine was suffering terribly. She was gazing at her mother, an agonized appeal in her eyes.
"Come back! Come back! Come and say that you forgive me for all I have done, that you love me still——"
She seemed to have shed all her married life, her home with Philip, her bearing of children to him, her love for him, her love for them all. She was the daughter again, in an agony of repentance and self-abasement. Was the victory after all to Mrs. Trenchard?
Katherine broke into a great cry:
"Mother! Mother; speak to me! Forgive me!"
She fell on her knees.