“She’s dead,” said his father.
He lurched a little as he walked across the room, and then sat heavily in his chair and put his arms down on his desk, and his head on his arms, and wept with a passion of grief.
It was the first time Bertram had seen him give way to any emotion, except that of anger, and at the sight of that grief all hostility to his father, because of so much hardness and intolerance, was thrust aside by pity. He had loved young Digby best of all his children, and the boy’s death had struck him a frightful blow, which only his pride and his freshly-inflamed hatred of Sinn Fein enabled him to bear with self-control. But his wife’s death, so sudden and so utterly unexpected, smote him beyond all endurance.
He had been hard with her sometimes, he had made her afraid of his temper, and many a time she had wept because of his stern way with “the children,” but she’d never had cause to doubt his love for her. He had loved her, in spite of all tempers, perhaps because of it, with what he believed to be never-failing devotion. To him she was the perfect wife and perfect mother, and perhaps his intense egotism, his old-fashioned belief in the “mastery” of the husband, and the submission of the wife, were never shocked by the knowledge that his wife sometimes described him to her children as “very trying,” and—regarding Dorothy’s marriage—as “most unjust.”
He had depended on her for his comfort, for his sense of security in home life, for the thousand little duties which she had done for him as a daily routine. Now that she had been taken away from him like this, after Digby had been killed—the boy he had loved best in the world—he felt fearfully alone, and was broken-hearted.
Bertram put his hand on his father’s shoulder and said: “Courage, father!”
He remembered the better side of his father’s nature now, the old days, before politics—the madness in Ireland—had so embittered their relations. Michael Pollard had not been always harsh. He had been playful when his children were young; humorous and comradely at times. Perhaps his children were partly to blame for the irascibility which had overtaken him in later years. They had been self-willed, deliberately rebellious of his authority, sarcastic when he had laid down the law, regarding obedience and discipline, stubbornly intolerant of his intolerance.
So Bertram thought now, in the presence of this stricken man, forgetful for a while of his own tremendous loss, his loneliness of soul, while he watched his father’s agony, and tried to comfort him, and could not.
XXXV
It was after his mother’s funeral that Bertram’s courage failed him. He had a letter from Joyce which put all but the finishing touch to his sense of abandonment by any kindliness of fate. She wrote to him from Paris—the Hotel Meurice—where she had gone with Lady Ottery. She still called him “My dear Bertram,” but her letter did not warm his soul.