“I’m here on a forlorn hope, sir,” he said. “It’s to make a plea for a man condemned to death. My sister’s husband, Dennis O’Brien.”
Colonel Lavington sat up in his chair, and did not hide his surprise.
“That man O’Brien! Your brother-in-law?”
“Didn’t my brother Digby tell you?”
“Not a word!”
The Colonel was sympathetic. He made no concealment of his hatred of the whole show in Ireland.
“I ought not to say so—I’m a Regular, you know!—but the politicians in England seem to be bungling frightfully. I don’t approve of these executions. They only inflame passion still further, and make martyrs of the condemned men. The scenes that go on round the prison on the morning of execution are hair-raising!”
There was no doubt about Dennis O’Brien’s guilt. He had been captured in the ambush, after shooting a British officer—poor young Stewart-MacKey. He’d been tried by Court Martial and condemned to death for murder. Of course, in a way, it wasn’t murder. The Irish argued that men captured like that ought to be treated as prisoners of war. As a soldier, he saw something in that. Still, as long as the present policy continued, he could not criticise. It was all a dirty business. Dreadful! Worse than war!
He would ring up the Judge Advocate. He might go as far as that.
Bertram listened while he “rang up.” He listened with a sense of Fate in the disjointed words spoken at last over that little instrument in a white-washed room furnished with a table, two chairs, and a map of Dublin on the wall.