Bertram crushed the paper in his hands, and dropped it on the seat by his side. It was his father’s field night. He would enjoy himself vastly upholding the “absolute necessity of putting down these murders with the firm hand of British Justice,” appealing to the old Mosaic law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, denouncing those who would treat with rebels to the Crown and “shake hands with murder.”
Well, it would keep the governor late at the House. That was the only comfort. He would be able to see his mother alone, and avoid a savage altercation with his father, who treated him as a traitor to the British Empire—Bertram Pollard, D.S.O., M.C., who had been three times wounded in the Great War, and loved England with a kind of passion.
“Mother!”
She met him in the hall of the house in Sloane Street, and at the sight of her little figure and sad face, his jangled nerves, so tautly drawn during Joyce’s long ordeal, gave a kind of snap, and when he put his arms round her he dropped his forehead on to her shoulder, and his eyes filled with tears, as in the old days when he came home from school, or left her after the holidays.
“My poor boy!” she said soothingly, “I understand. . . . I’m sorry about the poor little baby.”
She took him by the hand into her small sitting-room and asked him to tell her all the details of his ordeal.
“Joyce’s ordeal, mother!” he said, but she shook her head, and said, “It’s worse for the men, if they’re sensitive. The agony of waiting—”
There were many things he wanted to tell his mother, this little woman with her thin grey hair, and her worn face and kind brown eyes, to whom, as a boy, he had told all his secrets, confessed all his peccadilloes, and had no worse reproof than “Oh, darling!” She had spoilt him as she had spoilt all of them, Dorothy, Susan, young Digby, and himself, shielding them from their father’s harsh and hasty temper, his Irish impatience, his old-fashioned Protestant intolerance—he was Southern Irish, but Protestant—with any license of youth. She had even told “fibs” to shield them, and they had loved her for it, and traded abominably on her fear of “the governor” and his sudden rages.
She was more afraid of him than they had ever been. Even as small children they had defied his authority. Dorothy had been the greatest rebel, long before her marriage to a Prussian officer whom she had met at Wiesbaden, in 1912, when already there was a whisper of war with Germany—pooh-poohed by Dorothy, as by many others who knew nothing in those days about international politics, and cared less. That was her last rebellion. Michael Pollard, K.C., M.P., had wiped his daughter out of his mind and heart. He hated “the Hun” worse because of her.
And Susan! . . . She took a pleasure in braving his wrath—“our Ogre,” as she called him. She never tired of maintaining her right to breakfast in bed, which he denounced as “the slummocky instinct of her wild Irish blood.”