Digby! That kid! A baby only a few years ago, to whom he told fairy-tales as he lay in bed! Now dead by a sniper’s bullet. What year of the Christian era? Yes, 1921! Bertram in his room at the Shelbourne laughed aloud, harshly, and then wept.
XXXIV
One of the tragic moments of Bertram’s life, which afterwards he could never remember without a shadow darkening his mind, was when he entered his father’s house after that visit to Dublin.
His way back had been delayed by the Coal Strike. The fast train from Holyhead was cancelled, and he had to come by a slow train, crowded with men thrown out of work by the shutting down of factories for lack of fuel. “It’s the end of England if this lasts long,” said one of them, but Bertram thought only of his journey’s end, and of his meeting with his mother, now that Digby lay dead, with a sniper’s bullet through his brain.
The news had come to her, he found, through a report in The Evening News, confirmed, almost immediately, by a telegram to his father from the Irish Secretary. Mrs. Pollard was in her little sitting-room when Bertram arrived, and tried to rise from her desk when he bent and put his arms about her. She didn’t weep very much, except for one brief agony of tears, but was quite broken. Over and over again she spoke the name of the dead boy, her last child, and said many times that she knew he was doomed. She was almost too weak to walk across her room, and complained that her heart had gone “queer.”
Bertram carried her up to bed that evening, and sent for a doctor, who looked grave, and told Bertram that his mother was in a very feeble state of health, with a pulse far below normal. Nothing organically wrong, except a cardiac weakness, but general lack of vitality. She would need constant attention, and he would send a trained nurse round that night.
Bertram sat by his mother’s side before the nurse came that evening. She clasped his hand almost like a child afraid to be left alone in the dark, as once he had held hers. Several times she seemed to be wandering in her mind, wandering back to the early days of her motherhood, when her children were young. She seemed to be worried because Dorothy had torn her frock, and a little later, told Bertram not to tease Susan.
“Do you hear me—?” she asked suddenly, after a long silence.
Bertram bent over her, and told her that he heard.
“You mustn’t tease little Susan,” she said. “You’re getting a big boy now.”