XV
Not a word of news had come from Susan or Dennis O’Brien, and Bertram’s anxiety had been allayed for a time because of the argument he used to his mother, and to his own sense of uneasiness—that no news is good news.
His mother was fretting miserably. It seemed to age her, and he noticed that she was weak in health, and no longer had that placid resignation to the worries of life which had made her so comforting as a mother to unruly but devoted children.
A greyness had crept beneath her skin, so white and transparent in the old days. She seemed to have lost her interest in the little duties of domestic life which had filled her time in all the days and years of Bertram’s remembrance, and it came as a shock to him, greater than any other sign of distress in her, that on his last visit some withered flowers remained unchanged in the vase on her table, and her writing desk was disorderly with many letters and household bills hopelessly mixed up, as he remarked when she tried to find a letter from his brother Digby. She had made a religion of “tidiness.” Susan’s rampageous carelessness had been a source of constant annoyance to her sense of order. This litter in her desk, and those unchanged flowers, were signs that something had broken in her spirit, and Bertram was shocked by that, and by the grey sadness of the little woman who had given him life, as she sat, with restless hands in her lap, and a kind of hidden fear in her eyes.
She was afraid because Susan hadn’t written one word to her about her secret marriage or her present whereabouts. That marriage, which Bertram had revealed, was like a blow to her. She had prayed that Susan might marry a “nice” man, so that she would settle down and have babies, and be happy. She’d even asked God to let her live until she had that sense of security in Susan’s happiness—her wild, beautiful, reckless Susan. But now this secret wedding with a young man who was in conflict with the law, and had done dangerous and dreadful things, was worse than anything she had feared.
“What does the governor think?” asked Bertram.
Mrs. Pollard’s eyelids quivered as she looked at her son.
“Your father thinks it’s all my fault.”
“He would!” said Bertram, bitterly.
“First Dorothy. Now Susan. One married to a German, the other to an Irish rebel! It makes him feel like King Lear, he says. He forbids me to mention his daughters.”