When the three friends came, Harriett said, “I shall be glad and thankful when it’s all over. I couldn’t want to keep her with me, just for this.”
Yet she did want it. She was thankful every morning that she came to her mother’s bed and found her alive, lying there, looking at her with her wonderful smile. She was glad because she still had her.
And now they were giving her morphia. Under the torpor of the drug her face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened, swollen mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the beautiful calm eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half imbecile, was a mask flung aside. She couldn’t bear to look at it; it wasn’t her mother’s face; her mother had died already under the morphia. She had a shock every time she came in and found it still there.
On the day her mother died she told herself she was glad and thankful. She met her friends with a little quiet, composed face, saying, “I’m glad and thankful she’s at peace.” But she wasn’t thankful; she wasn’t glad. She wanted her back again. And she reproached herself, one minute for having been glad, and the next for wanting her.
She consoled herself by thinking of the sacrifices she had made, how she had given up Sidmouth, and how willingly she would have paid the hundred pounds.
“I sometimes think, Hatty,” said Mrs. Hancock, melancholy and condoling, “that it would have been very different if your poor mother could have had her wish.”
“What—what wish?”
“Her wish to live in Sidmouth, near your Aunt Harriett.”
And Sarah Barmby, sympathizing heavily, stopping short and brooding, trying to think of something to say: “If the operation had only been done three years ago when they knew it would save her——”
“Three years ago? But we didn’t know anything about it then.”