 8 While the men talked thus, Bertram Ingledew's ears ought to have burned behind the bushes. But to say the truth, he cared little for their conversation, for had he not turned aside down one of the retired gravel paths in the garden, alone with Frida. "'That's General Clavager of Herat, I suppose,' he said in a low tone, as they retreated out of earshot beside the clump of syringas. "'What a stern old man he is, to be sure, with what a stern old face! He looks like a person capable of doing or ordering all the strange things I've read of him in the papers.' "'Oh, yes,' Frida answered, misunderstanding for the moment her companion's meaning. "'He's a very clever man, I believe, and a most distinguished officer.' Bertram smiled in spite of himself. "'Oh, I didn't mean that,' he cried, with the same odd gleam in his eyes Frida had so often noticed there. I meant he looked capable of doing or ordering all the horrible crimes he's credited with in history. You remember it was he who was employed in massacring the poor savage Zulus in their last stand at bay, and in driving the Afghan women and children to die of cold instavation on the mountaintops after the taking of Kabul. A terrible fighter indeed, a terrible history.' "'But I believe he's a very good man in private life,' Frida put in apologetically, feeling compelled to say the best she could for her husband's guest. "'I don't care for him much myself, to be sure, but Robert likes him, and he's awfully nice, every one says, to his wife and step-children.' "'How can he be very good?' Bertram answered in his gentlest voice. If he hires himself out indiscriminately to kill or maim whoever he's told to, irrespective even of the rights and wrongs of the private or public quarrel he happens to be employed upon. It's an appalling thing to take a fellow creature's life, even if you're quite, quite sure it's just and necessary. But fancy contracting to take any body's and every body's life you're told to, without any chance, even of inquiring whether they may not be in the right, after all, and your own particular king or people, most unjust and cruel and blood-stained aggressors, why, it's horrible to contemplate. "'Do you know, Mrs. Montieth?' he went on with his faraway air. "'It's that that makes society here in England so difficult to me. "'It's so hard to mix on equal terms with your paid high priests and your hired slaughterers, and never display openly the feelings you entertain towards them. "'Fancy if you had to mix so yourself with the men who flogged women to death in Hungary, or with the governors and jailers of some Siberian prison. "'That's the worst of travel. When I was in Central Africa, I sometimes saw a poor black woman tortured or killed before my very eyes. And if I tried to interfere in her favour, to save or protect her, I'd only have got killed myself, and probably have made things all the worse in the end for her. And yet it's hard, indeed, to have to look on at or listen to such horrors as these without openly displaying one's disgust and disapprobation. Whenever I meet your famous generals, or your judges and your bishops, I burn to tell them how their acts affect me. Yet I'm obliged to refrain, because I know my words could do no good and might do harm, for they could only anger them. My sole hope of doing anything to mitigate the rigor of your cruel customs is to take as little notice of them as possible in any way, whenever I find myself in unsympathetic society. Then you don't think me unsympathetic, Frida murmured with a glow of pleasure. Oh, Frida! the young man cried, bending forward and looking at her. You know very well, you are the only person here I care for in the least, or have the slightest sympathy with. Frida was pleased, he should say so, he was so nice and gentle. But she felt constrained, none the less, to protest, for form's sake at least, against his calling her once more so familiarly by her Christian name. Not, Frida, to you, if you please, Mr. Ingledew, she said, as stiffly as she could manage. You know it isn't right. Mrs. Montieth, you must call me. But she wasn't as angry somehow at the liberty he had taken as she would have been in anybody else's case. He was so very peculiar. Bertram Ingledew paused and checked himself. You think I do it on purpose, he said, with an apologetic air. I know you do, of course, but I assure you I don't. It's all pure forgetfulness. The fact is, nobody can possibly call to mind all the intricacies of your English and European customs at once, unless he's to the man aborn, and carefully brought up to them from his earliest childhood, as all of you yourselves have been. He may recollect them after an effort when he thinks of them seriously, but he can't possibly bear them all in mind at once, every hour of the day and night, by a pure tour de force of mental concentration. You know it's the same with your people in other barbarous countries. Your own travellers say it themselves about the customs of Islam. They can't learn them and remember them all at every moment of their lives, as the Mohammedans do, and to make one slip there is instant death to them. Frida looked at him earnestly. But I hope," she said, with an air of deprecation, pulling a rose to pieces, petal by petal, nervously, as she spoke, you don't put us on quite the same level as Mohammedans. We are so much more civilised, so much better in every way. Do you know, Mr. Ingledew?" and she hesitated for a minute. I can't bear to differ from you or blame you in anything, because you always appear to me so wise and good and kind-hearted and reasonable. But it often surprises me and even hurts me when you seem to talk of us all as if we were just so many savages. You're always speaking about taboo and castes and puja and fetishes, as if we weren't civilised people at all, but utter barbarians. Now, don't you think, don't you admit to yourself, it's a wee bit unreasonable, or at any rate impolite of you?" Graham drew back with a really pained expression on his handsome features. Oh, Mrs. Montice! he cried. Frida, I'm so sorry if I've seemed rude to you. It's all the same thing, pure human inadvertence, inability to throw myself into so unfamiliar an attitude. I forget every minute that you do not recognise the essential identity of your own taboos and pujas and fetishes with the similar and often indistinguishable taboos and pujas and fetishes of the savages generally. They all come from the same source, and often retain to the end, as in your temple superstitions and your marriage superstitions, the original features of their savage beginnings. And as to your being comparatively civilised, I grant you that at once. Only it doesn't necessarily make you one bit more rational. Certainly not one bit more humane or moral or brotherly in your actions. I don't understand you!" Frida cried, astonished. But there I often don't understand you. Only I know when you've explained things I shall see how right you are. Bertram smiled a quiet smile. You're certainly an apt pupil, he said, with brotherly gentleness, pulling a flower as he went, and slipping it softly into her bosom. Why, what I mean's just this. Civilisation, after all, in the stage in which you possess it, is only the ability to live together in great organised communities. It doesn't necessarily imply any higher moral status or any greater rationalities than those of the savage. All it implies is greater cohesion, more unity, higher division of functions. But the functions themselves, like those of your priests and judges and soldiers, may be as barbaric and cruel, or as irrational and unintelligent as any that exist among the most primitive peoples. Science in civilisation doesn't necessarily involve either advancing real knowledge of one's relations to the universe, or advancing moral goodness and personal culture. Some highly civilised nations of historic times have been more cruel and barbarous than many quite uncultivated ones. For example, the Romans, at the height of their civilisation, went mad drunk with blood at their gladiatorial shows. The Athenians of the age of Pericles and Socrates offered up human sacrifices at the Thargalia, like the various savages, and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most civilised commercial people of the world in their time, as the English are now, gave their own children to be burned alive as victims to bail. The Mexicans were far more civilised than the ordinary North American Indians of their own day, and even in some respects than the Spanish Christians who conquered, converted, enslaved and tortured them. But the Mexican religion was full of such horrors as I could hardly even name to you. It was based entirely on cannibalism, as yours is on Mammon. Human sacrifices were common, commoner even than in modern England, I fancy. Newborn babies were killed by the priests when the corn was sown, children when it had sprouted, men when it was full-grown, and very old people when it was fully ripe. How horrible, Frieda exclaimed. Yes, horrible, Bertram answered, like your own worst customs. It didn't show either gentleness or rationality, you'll admit. But it showed what the one thing is essential to civilisation. Great coherence, high organisation, much division of function. Some of the rites these civilised Mexicans performed would have made the blood of kindly savages run cold with horror. They sacrificed a man at the harvest festival by crushing him like the corn between two big flat stones. Sometimes the priests skinned their victim alive and wore his raw skin as a mask or covering, and danced hideous dances so disguised in honour of the hateful deities whom their fancies had created. These even more hateful and cruel, perhaps, than the worst of your own Christian Calvinistic fancies. I can't see myself that civilised people are one whit the better in all these respects than the uncivilised barbarian. They pull together better, that's all. But war, bloodshed, superstition, fetish worship, religious rites, casts, class distinctions, sex taboos, restrictions on freedom of thought, on freedom of action, on freedom of speech, on freedom of knowledge, are just as common in their midst as among the utterly uncivilised. Then what you yourself aim at? Frida said, looking hard at him, for he spoke very earnestly. What you yourself aim at is? Bertram's eyes came back to solid earth with a bound. Oh, what we at home aim at? He said, smiling that sweet, soft smile of his that so captivated Frida. Is not mere civilisation, though of course we value that too in its meat degree, because without civilisation and co-operation no great thing is possible, but rationality and tenderness. We think reason the first good, to recognise truly your own place in the universe, to hold your head up like a man before the face of high heaven, afraid of no ghosts or fetishes or phantoms, to understand that wise and right and unselfish actions are the great requisites in life, not the service of nonexistent and misshapen creatures of the human imagination. Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in, these seem to us of first importance. After that we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness. For mere rule of thumb goodness, which comes by rote and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If anyone were to say with us, after he had passed his first infancy, that he always did such and such a thing, because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers, still more because priests or fetish men had commanded it, he would be regarded not as virtuous, but as feeble or wicked, a sort of moral idiot, unable to distinguish rationally for himself between good and evil. That's not the sort of conduct we consider right or befitting the dignity of a grown man or woman, an ethical unit in an enlightened community. Rather is it their prime duty to question all things, to accept no rule of conduct or morals as sure till they have thoroughly tested it. Mr. Ingledew, Frieda exclaimed. Do you know when you talk like that? I always long to ask you where on earth you come from. And who are these your people you so often speak about? A blessed people. I would like to learn about them, and yet I'm afraid to. You almost seem to me like a being from another planet. The young man laughed a quiet little laugh of deprecation, and sat down on the garden bench beside the yellow rose-bush. Oh, dear, no, Frieda! he said, with that transparent glance of his, now don't look so vexed. I shall call you, Frieda, if I choose. It's your name, and I like you. Why let this funny taboo of one's own real name stand in the way of reasonable friendship? In many savage countries a woman's never allowed to call her husband by his name, or even to know it, or, for the matter of that, to see him in the daylight. In your England the arrangements exactly reversed. No man's allowed to call a woman by her real name, unless she's tabooed for life to him. What you Europeans call married to him. But let that pass. If one went on pulling oneself up short at every one of your customs, one had never get any further in any question one was discussing. Now don't be deceived by nonsensical talk about living beings in other planets. There are no such creatures. It's a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human pattern. When people chatter about life in other worlds they don't mean life, which of a sort there may be there. They mean human life, a very different and much less important matter. Well, how could there possibly be human beings or anything like them in other stars or planets? The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively mundane. We are things of this world and of this world only. Don't let's magnify our importance. We are not the whole universe. Our race is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like animal, the andropithecus of the upper Uganda eocene. This monkey-like animal itself, again, is the product of special antecedent causes, filling a particular place in a particular tertiary fauna and flora, and impossible even in the fauna and flora of our own earth and our own tropics before the evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like seeds for feeding on which it was specially adapted. Without edible fruits in short there could be no monkey, and without monkeys there could be no man. That meant there be edible fruits in the other planets. Frida inquired half timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of Bertram's knowledge than really to argue with him, for she dearly loved to hear his views of things they were so fresh and unconventional. Edible fruits, yes, possibly, and animals or something more or less like animals to feed upon them. But even if there are such, which planetoscopists doubt, they must be very different creatures in form and function from any we know on this one small world of ours. For just consider, Frida, what we mean by life. We mean a set of simultaneous and consecutive changes going on in a complex mass of organised carbon compounds. When most people say life, however, especially here with you where education is undeveloped, they aren't thinking of life in general at all, which is mainly vegetable. But only of animal and often indeed of human life. Well then, consider, even on this planet itself, how special are the conditions that make life possible. There must be water in some form, for there's no life in the desert. Water must be heat up to a certain point, and not above or below it, for fire kills and there's no life at the poles, as among alpine glaciers. Or what little there is depends upon the intervention of other life, wafted from elsewhere, from the lands or seas, in fact, where it can really originate. In order to have life at all as we know it, at least, and I can't say whether anything else could be fairly called life by any true analogy until I've seen and examined it, you must have carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen and many other things under certain fixed conditions. You must have liquid water, not steam or ice. You must have a certain restricted range of temperature, neither very much higher nor very much lower than the average of the tropics. Now, look, even with all these conditions fulfilled, how diverse is life on this earth itself the one place we really know? Being as much as from the oak to the cuttlefish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the seaweed or the jelly speck. Every one of these creatures is a complex result of very complex conditions, among which you must never forget to reckon the previous existence and interaction of all the antecedent ones. Is it probable then, even a priori, that if life for anything like it exists on any other planet, it would exist in forms at all as near our own as a buttercup is to a human being or a sea anemone is to a cat or a pine tree? Well, it doesn't look likely, now you come to put it so, Frida answered thoughtfully, for though English she was not wholly impervious to logic. Likely, of course not, Bertrand went on with conviction. Planetoscopists are agreed upon it, and above all, why should one suppose the living organisms or their analogues, if any such there are, in the planets or fixed stars, possess any such purely human and animal faculties as thought and reason? That's just like our common human narrowness. If we were oaks, I suppose, we would only interest ourselves in the question whether acorns existed in Mars and Saturn. He paused a moment, then he added in an afterthought, No, Frida, you may be sure all human beings, you and I alike, and thousands of others a great deal more different, are essential products of this one-we planet, and of particular times and circumstances in its history. We differ only as births and circumstances have made us differ. There is a mystery about who I am, and where I come from, I won't deny it, but it isn't by any means so strange or so marvellous a mystery as you seem to imagine. One of your own old sacred books says, as I remember hearing in the Joss House I attended one day in London, God hath made of one blood all the nations of the earth. If for God in that passage we substitute common descent, it's perfectly true. We are all of one race, and I confess, when I talk to you, every day I feel our unity more and more profoundly. He bent over on the bench and took her tremulous hand. Frida, he said, looking deep into her speaking dark eyes. Don't you yourself feel it? He was so strange, so simple-minded, so different in every way from all other men, that for a moment Frida almost half-forgot to be angry with him. In point of fact in her heart she was not angry at all. She liked to feel the soft pressure of his strong man's hand on her dainty fingers. She liked to feel the gentle way he was stroking her smooth arm with that delicate white palm of his. Frida gave her a certain immediate and unthinking pleasure to sit still by his side and know he was full of her. Then suddenly with a start she remembered her duty. She was a married woman, and she ought not to do it. Quickly, with a startled air, she withdrew her hand. The virgin gazed down at her for a second, half taken aback by her hurried withdrawal. Then you don't like me, he cried in a pained tone. After all, you don't like me. One moment later a ray of recognition broke slowly over his face. Oh, I forgot, he said, leaning away. I didn't mean to annoy you. A year or two ago, of course, I might have held your hand in mine as long as ever I liked. You were still a free being, but what was right then is wrong now, according to the kaleidoscopic etiquette of your countrywomen. I forgot all that in the heat of the moment. I recollected only we were two human beings of the same race and blood, with hearts that beat and hands that lay together. I remember now. You must hide and stifle your native impulses in future. You were tabooed for life to Robert Monteith. I must need's respect his seal set upon you. And he drew a deep sigh of enforced resignation. Frida sighed in return. These problems are so hard, she said. Bertram smiled a strange smile. There are no problems, he answered confidently. You make them yourselves. You surround life with taboos, and then you talk despairingly of the problems with which your own taboos alone have saddled you. CHAPTER IX At half-past nine, one evening that week, Bertram was seated in his sitting-room at Miss Blake's lodgings, making entries as usual on the subject of taboo in his big black notebook. It was a large bear-room furnished with the customary round rosewood-centre table, and decorated by a pair of green china vases, a set of wax flowers under a big glass shade, and a picture representing two mythical beings with women's faces and birds' wings hovering over the figure of a sleeping baby. Suddenly a hurried knock at the door attracted his attention. Come in, he said softly, in that gentle and almost deferential voice which he used alike to his equals and to the lodging-house servant. The door opened at once, and Frida entered. She was pale as a ghost, and she stepped light with a terrified tread. Bertram could see at a glance she was profoundly agitated, for a moment he could hardly imagine the reason why. Then he remembered all at once the strict harem rules by which married women in England are hemmed in and circumvented. To visit an unmarried man alone by night is contrary to tribal usage. She rose and advanced towards his visitor with outstretched arms. Why, Frida, he cried. Mrs. Montieth, no, Frida, what's the matter? What has happened since I left? You look so pale and startled. Frida closed the door cautiously, flung herself down into a chair in a despairing attitude, and buried her face in her hands for some moments in silence. Oh, Mr. Ingelledew! she cried at last, looking up in an agony of shame and doubt. Bertram! I know it's wrong. I know it's wicked. I ought never to have come. Robert would kill me if he found out. But it's my one last chance, and I couldn't bear not to say goodbye to you. Just this once, for ever. Bertram gazed at her in astonishment. Long and intimately as he had lived among the various devotees of divine taboos the whole world over, it was with difficulty still he could recall each time each particular restriction of the various systems. Then it came home to him with a rush. He removed the poor girl's hands gently from her face, which she had buried once more in them for pure shame, and held them in his own. Dear Frida! he said tenderly, stroking them as he spoke. Why? What does all this mean? What's this sudden thunderbolt? You've come here to-night without your husband to leave, and you're afraid he'll discover you. Frida spoke under her breath in a voice half choked with frequent sobs. Don't talk too loud! She whispered. Miss Blake doesn't know I'm here. If she did, she'd tell on me. I slipped in quietly through the open-packed door, but I felt I must. I really, really must. I couldn't stop away. I couldn't help it. Bertram gazed at her, distressed. Her tone was distressing. Horror and indignation for a moment overcame him. She had had to slip in there like a fugitive or a criminal. She had had to crawl away by stealth from that man, her keeper. She, a grown woman and a moral agent, with a will of her own and a heart and a conscience, was held so absolutely in serfdom as a particular man's thrall and chattel that she could not even go out to visit a friend without these degrading subterfuges of creeping in unperceived by a back entrance. And talking low under her breath lest a lodging-house crone should find out what she was doing. And all the world of England was so bandied in league with the slave-driver against the soul he enslaved that if Miss Blake had seen her she could hardly have come in. While once in she must tremble and whisper and steal about with muffled feet for fear of discovery in this innocent adventure. He held his breath with stifled wrath, it was painful and degrading. But he had no time just then to think much of all this, for there sat Frida, tremulous and shivering before his very eyes, trying hard to hide her beautiful white face in her quivering hands, and murmuring over and over again in a very low voice like an agonised creature. I couldn't bear not to be allowed to say good-bye to you, for ever. Bertram smoothed her cheek gently. She tried to prevent him, but he went on in spite of her with a man's strong persistence. Notwithstanding his gentleness he was always virile. Good-bye, he cried. Good-bye! Why on earth good-bye, Frida? When I left you before dinner you never said one word of it to me. Oh, no! Frida cried, sobbing. It's all Robert, Robert! As soon as ever you were gone he called me into the library, which always means he's going to talk over some dreadful business with me. And he said to me, Frida, I've just heard from Phil that this man angled you, who's chosen to voice himself upon us, holds opinions and sentiments which entirely unfit him from being proper company for any lady. Now he's been coming here a great deal too often of late. Next time he calls I wish you to tell Martha you're not at home to him. Bertram looked across at her with a melting look in his honest blue eyes. And you came round to tell me of it, you dear thing! He cried, seizing her hand and grasping it hard. Oh, Frida, how kind of you! Frida trembled from head to foot. The blood throbbed in her pulse. Then you're not vexed with me! She sobbed out all tremulous with gladness. Vexed with you! Oh, Frida, how could I be vexed! You poor child! I'm so pleased, so glad, so grateful! Frida let her hand rest unresisting in his. But Bertram, she murmured, I must call you Bertram. I couldn't help it, you know. I like you so much, I couldn't let you go forever without just saying good-bye to you. You don't like me, you love me! Bertram answered with masculine confidence. No, you needn't blush, Frida. You can't deceive me. My darling, you love me, and you know I love you. Why should we to make any secret about our hearts any longer? He laid his hand on her face again, making it tingle with joy. Frida, he said solemnly, you don't love that man you call your husband. You haven't loved him for years. You never really loved him. There was something about the mere sound of Bertram's calm voice that made Frida speak the truth more plainly and frankly than she could ever have spoken it to any ordinary Englishman. Yet she hung down her head even so, and hesitated slightly. Just at first she murmured half inaudibly. I used to think I loved him. At any rate I was pleased and flattered he should marry me. Pleased and flattered, Bertram exclaimed, more to himself than to her. Great heavens, how incredible! Pleased and flattered by that man, one can hardly conceive it. But you've never loved him since, Frida. You can't look me in the face and tell me you love him. No, not since the first few months, Frida answered, still hanging her head. But Bertram, he's my husband, and of course I must obey him. You must do nothing of the sort, Bertram cried authoritatively. You don't love him at all, and you mustn't pretend to. It's wrong. It's wicked. Sooner or later, he checked himself. Frida, he went on after a moment's pause. I won't speak to you of what I was going to say just now. I'll wait a bit till you're stronger and better able to understand it. But there must be no more silly talk of farewells between us. I won't allow it. You're mine now, a thousand times more truly mine than ever you were Montice, and I can't do without you. You must go back to your husband for the present, I suppose. The circumstances compel it, though I don't approve of it. But you must see me again, and soon, and often, just the same as usual. I won't go to your house, of course, the house is Montice, and everywhere among civilised and rational races the sanctity of the home is rightly respected. But you yourself, he has no claim or right to taboo, and if I can help it, he shan't taboo you. You may go home now to-night, dear one, but you must meet me often. If you can't come round to my rooms for fear of Miss Blake's fetish, the respectability of her house, we must meet elsewhere till I can make fresh arrangements." Frida gazed up at him in doubt. "'But will it be right, Bertram?' she murmured. The man looked down into her big eyes in dazed astonishment. "'Why, Frida?' he cried, half-pained at the question. Do you think if it were wrong I'd advise you to do it? I'm here to help you, to guide you, to lead you on by degrees to higher and truer life. How can you imagine I'd ask you to do anything on earth unless I felt perfectly sure and convinced it was the very most right and proper conduct?' His arms stole round her waist and drew her tenderly towards him. Frida allowed the caress passively. There was a robust frankness about his love-making that seemed to rob it of all taint or tinge of evil. Then he caught her bodily in his arms, like a man who has never associated the purist and noblest of human passions with any lower thought, any baser personality. He had not taken his first lessons in the art of love from the wearied lips of joyless courtesans whom his own kind had debased and unsext and degraded out of all semblance of womanhood. He bent over the woman of his choice, and kissed her chaste warmth. On the forehead first, then, after a short interval, twice on the lips. At each kiss from which she somehow did not shrink, as if recognizing its purity, Frida felt a strange thrill course through and through her. She quivered from head to foot. The scales fell from her eyes. The taboos of her race grew null and void within her. She looked up at him more boldly. "'Oh, Bertram!' she whispered, nestling close to his side, and burying her blushing face in the man's curved bosom. "'I don't know what you've done to me, but I feel quite different, as if I'd eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.' "'I hope you have,' Bertram answered, in a very solemn voice, for Frida you will need it. He pressed her close against his breast, and Frida Montieth, a free woman at last, clung there many minutes, with no vile inherited sense of shame or wrongfulness. "'I can't bear to go,' she cried, still clinging to him and clutching him tight. "'I'm so happy here, Bertram. Oh, so happy. So happy.' "'Then why go away at all?' Bertram asked, quite simply. Frida drew back in horror. "'Oh, I must,' she said, coming to herself, "'I must, of course, because of Robert.' Bertram held her hand, smoothing it all the while with his own, as he mused and hesitated. "'Well, it's clearly wrong to go back,' he said, after a moment's pause. "'You ought never, of course, to spend another night with that man you don't love and should never have lived with. But I suppose that's only a counsel of perfection. Too hard a saying for you to understand or follow for the present. You'd better go back, just to-night. And as time moves on, I can arrange something else for you. "'But when shall I see you again? For now you belong to me. I sealed you with that kiss. When will you come and see me?' "'Can't come here, you know,' Frida whispered, half terrified. "'For if I did, Miss Blake could see me.' Bertram smiled a bitter smile to himself. "'So she would,' he said, musing. And though she's not the least interested in keeping up Robert Montieth's proprietary claim on your life and freedom, I'm beginning to understand now that it would be an offence against that mysterious and incomprehensible entity they call respectability. If she were to allow me to receive you in her rooms. It's all very curious. But, of course, while I remain, I must be content to submit to it. By and by, perhaps, Frida, we too may manage to escape together from this iron generation. "'Meanwhile I shall go up to London less often for the present. And you can come and meet me, dear, in the middle mill fields at two o'clock on Monday.' She gazed up at him with perfect trust in those luminous dark eyes of hers. "'I will, Bertram,' she said firmly. She knew not herself what his kiss had done for her, but one thing she knew. From the moment their lips met, she had felt and understood in a flood of vision that perfect love which casteth out fear, and was no longer afraid of him. "'That's right, darling,' the man answered, stooping down and laying his cheek against her own once more. "'You are mine, and I am yours. You are not, and never were, Robert Montice, my Frida. So now, good night, till Monday at two, beside the style in middle mill meadows.' She clung to him for a moment in a passionate embrace. He let her stop there while he smoothed her dark hair with one free hand. Then, suddenly, with a burst, the older feelings of her race overcame her for a minute. She broke from his grasp, and hid her head, or crimson, in a cushion on the sofa. One second later, again, she lifted her face, unabashed. The new impulse stirred her. "'I'm proud I love you, Bertram,' she cried, with red lips and flashing eyes. "'And I'm proud you love me.' With that she slipped quietly out, and walked, erect, and graceful, no longer ashamed, down the lodging-house passage. End of CHAPTER IX When she returned, Robert Montice sat asleep over his paper in his easy chair. It was his won't at night when he returned from business. Frida cast one contemptuous glance as she passed at his burly, unintelligent form, and went up to her bedroom. But all that night long she never slept. Her head was too full of Bertram Ingledew. Yet, strange to say, she felt not one quorum of conscience for their stolen meeting. No feminine terror, no fluttering fear, disturbed her equanimity. It almost seemed to her as if Bertram's kiss had released her by magic, at once and forever, from the taboos of her nation. She had slipped out from home unperceived that night in fear and trembling, with many sinkings of heart and dire misgivings, while Robert and Phil were downstairs in the smoking-room. She had slunk round, crouching low, to Miss Blake's lodgings. And she had terrified her soul on the way with a good woman's doubts and a good woman's fears, as to the wrongfulness of her attempt to say goodbye to the friend she might now no longer mix with. But from the moment her lips and Bertram's touched, all fear and doubt seemed utterly to have vanished. She lay there all night in a fierce ecstasy of love, hugging herself for strange delight, thinking only of Bertram, and wondering what manner of thing was this promised freedom, whereof her lover had spoken to her so confidently. She trusted him now. She knew he would do right and right alone. Whatever he advised, she would be safe in following. Next day Robert went up to town to business as usual. He was immersed in palm oil. By a quarter to two, Frida found herself in the fields. But early as she went to fulfil her trist, Bertram was there before her. He took her hand in his with a gentle pressure, and Frida felt a quick thrill she had never before experienced course suddenly through her. She looked round to right and left to see if they were observed. Bertram noticed the instinctive movement. My darling, he said in a low voice, this is intolerable, unendurable. It's an insult not to be borne that you and I can't walk together in the fields of England without being subjected thus to such a many-headed espionage. I shall have to arrange something before long, so as to see you at leisure. I can't be so bound by all the taboos of your country. She looked up at him trustfully. As you will, Bertram, she answered without a moment's hesitation. I know I'm yours now. Let it be what it may. I can do what you tell me. He looked at her and smiled. He saw she was pure woman. He had met at last with a sister soul. There was a long deep silence. Frida was the first to break it with words. Why do you always call them taboos, Bertram? She asked at last sighing. Why, Frida, don't you see? He said walking on through the deep grass. Because they are taboos, that's the only reason. Why not give them their true name? We call them nothing else among my own people. All taboos are the same in origin and spirit, whether savage or civilized, eastern or western. You must see that now, for I know you are emancipated. They begin with belief in some fetish or bogey or other non-existent supernatural being. And they mostly go on to regard certain absolutely harmless, nay, sometimes even praiseworthy or morally obligatory acts, as proscribed by him and sure to be visited with his confined displeasure. So South Sea Islanders think if they eat some particular luscious fruit tabooed for the chiefs, they'll be instantly struck dead by the mere power of the taboo in it. And English people think if they go out in the country for a picnic on a tabooed day, or use certain harmless tabooed names and words, or inquire into the historical validity of certain incredible ancient documents, accounted sacred, or even dare to think certain things that no reasonable man can prevent himself from thinking, they'll be burned forever in eternal fire for it. The common element is the dread of an unreal sanction. So in Japan and West Africa the people believe the whole existence of the world and the universe is bound up with the health of their own particular king, or the safety of their own particular royal family. And therefore they won't allow their Mikado or their chief to go outside his palace, lest he should knock his royal foot against a stone, and so prevent the sun from shining and the rain from falling. In other places it's a tree or a shrub with which the stability and persistence of the world is bound up. Whenever that tree or shrub begins to droop or wither, the whole population rushes out in bodily fear and awe, bearing water to pour upon it, and crying aloud with wild cries as if their lives were in danger. If any man were to injure the tree, which of course is no more valuable than any other bush of its sort, they tear him to pieces on the spot and kill or torture every member of his family. And so too in England most people believe without a shadow of reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal relations free from tribal interference, all life and order would go to rack and ruin. The world would become one vast horrible orgy, and society would dissolve in some incredible fashion. To prevent this imaginary and impossible result, they insist upon regulating one another's lives from outside with the strictest taboos, like those which hem round the West African kings, and punish with cruel and relentless heartlessness every man and still more every woman who dares to transgress them. I think I see what you mean," Frida answered, blushing. And I mean it in the very simplest and most literal sense. Bertram went on quite seriously. I'd been among you some time before it began to dawn on me that you English didn't regard your own taboos as essentially identical with other peoples. To me, from the very first, they seemed absolutely the same as the similar taboos of Central Africans and South Sea Islanders. All of them spring alike from a common origin, the queer, savage belief that various harmless or actually beneficial things may become at times in some mysterious way harmful and dangerous. The essence of them all lies in the erroneous idea that if certain contingencies occur, such as breaking an image or deserting a faith, some terrible evil will follow to one man or to the world, which evil as a matter of fact there's no reason at all to dread in any way. Sometimes, as in ancient Rome, Egypt, Central Africa, and England, the whole of life gets enveloped at last in a perfect mist and labyrinth of taboos, a cobweb of conventions. The flamen dialys at Rome, you know, mightn't ride or even touch a horse. He mightn't see an army under arms, nor wear a ring that wasn't broken, nor have a knot in any part of his clothing. He mightn't eat wheaten flour or leavened bread. He mightn't look at or even mention by name such unlucky things as a goat, a dog, raw meat, haricot beans, or common ivy. He mightn't walk under a vine, the feet of his bed had to be daubed with mud. His hair could only be cut by a free man and with a bronze knife. He was encased and surrounded, as it were, by endless petty restrictions and regulations and taboos, just like those that now surround so many men and especially so many young women here in England. And you think they arise from the same causes? Frida said, half hesitating, for she hardly knew whether it was not wicked to say so. Why, of course they do, Bertram answered confidently. That's not matter of opinion now, it's matter of demonstration. The worst of them all in their present complicated state are the ones that concern marriage and the other hideous sex taboos. They seem to have been among the earliest human abuses, for marriage arises from the stonage practice of felling a woman of another tribe with a blow of one's club, and dragging her off by the hair of her head to one's own cave as a slave and drudge. And they are still the most persistent and cruel of any, so much so that your own people, as you know, taboo even the fair and free discussion of this, the most important and serious question of life and morals. They make it, as we would say at home, a refuge for enforced ignorance, for it's well known that early tribes hold the most superstitious ideas about the relation of men to women and dread the most ridiculous and impossible evils resulting from it. And these absurd terrors of theirs seem to have been handed on intact to civilized races, so that for fear of, I know not what, ridiculous bogey of their own imaginations, or dread of some unnatural restraining deity, men won't even discuss a matter of so much important to them all, but rather than let the taboo of silence be broken will allow such horrible things to take place in their midst, as I have seen with my eyes for these last six or seven weeks in your cities. Oh, Frida, you can't imagine what things, for I know they hide them from you. Cruelties of lust and neglect and shame, such as you couldn't even dream of. Women dying of foul disease in want and dirt deliberately forced upon them by the will of your society. Destined beforehand for death, a hateful lingering death, a death more disgusting than ought you can conceive, in order that the rest of you may be safely tabooed each a maid intact for the man who weds her. It's the hatefulest taboo of all the hateful taboos I've ever seen on my wanderings, the unworthiest of a pure or moral community. He shut his eyes as if to forget the horrors of which he spoke. They were fresh and real to him. Frida did not like to question him further. She knew to what he referred, and in a dim, vague way, for she was less wise than he, she knew, she thought she could imagine why he found it all so terrible. They walked on in silence a while through the deep, lush grass of the July meadow. At last Bertram spoke again. Frida, he said, with a trembling quiver, I didn't sleep last night. I was thinking this thing over, this question of our relations. Nor did I, Frida answered, thrilling through, responsive. I was thinking the same thing, and Bertram tossed the happiest night I ever remember. Bertram's face flushed rosy red, that native colour of triumphant love, but he answered nothing. He only looked at her with a look more eloquent by far than a thousand speeches. Frida, he went on at last. I've been thinking it all over. And I feel, if only you can come away with me for just seven days, I could arrange, at the end of that time, to take you home with me. Frida's face in turn waxed rosy red, but she answered only in a very low voice. Thank you, Bertram. Would you go with me? Bertram cried his face aglow with pleasure. You know it's a very, very long way off, and I can't even tell you where it is or how you get there. But can you trust me enough to try? Are you not afraid to come with me? Frida's voice trembled slightly. I'm not afraid, if that's all, she answered in a very firm tone. I love you, and I trust you, and I could follow you to the world's end, or if needful, out of it. But there's one other question. Bertram ought I to? She asked it more to see what answer Bertram would make to her than from any real doubt. For ever since that kiss last night, she felt sure in her own mind, with a woman's certainty, whatever Bertram told her was the thing she ought to do. But she wanted to know in what light he regarded it. Bertram gazed at her hard. Why, Frida, he said, it's right, of course, to go. The thing that's wrong is to stop with that man one minute longer than is absolutely necessary. You don't love him. You never loved him. Or, if you ever did, you've long since ceased to do so. Well, then, it's a dishonour to yourself to spend one more day with him. How can you submit to the hateful endearments of a man you don't love or care for? How wrong to yourself, how infinitely more wrong to your still unborn and unbegotten children? Would you consent to become the mother of sons and daughters, by a man whose whole character is utterly repugnant to you? Nature has given us this divine instinct of love within to tell us with what persons we should spontaneously unite. Will you fly in her face and unite with a man whom you feel and know to be wholly unworthy of you? With us such conduct would be considered disgraceful. We think every man and woman should be free to do as they will with their own persons, for that is the very basis and foundation of personal liberty. But if any man or woman were openly to confess, they yielded their persons to another for any other reason than because the strongest sympathy and love compelled them, we should silently despise them. If you don't love Maureen Teeth, it's your duty to him and still more your it's your duty to him and still more your duty to yourself and your unborn children at once to leave him. If you do love me, it's your duty to me and still more your duty to yourself and our unborn children at once to cleave to me. Don't let any softisms of taboomongers come in to obscure that plain natural duty. Do right first, let all else go. For one of yourselves, a poet of your own, has said truly because right is right, to follow right were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. Friede looked up at him with admiration in her big black eyes. She had found the truth and the truth had made her free. Oh Bertram! she cried with a tremor. It's good to be like you. I felt from the very first how infinitely you differed from the men about me. You seemed so much greater and higher and nobler. How grateful I ought to be to Robert Maureen Teeth for having spoken to me yesterday and forbidden me to see you. For if he hadn't, you might never have kissed me last night and then I might never have seen things as I see them at present. There was another long pause for the best things we each say to the other are said in the pauses. Then Friede relapsed once more into speech. But what about the children? She asked rather timidly. Bertram looked puzzled. Why, what about the children? He repeated in a curious way. What difference on earth could that make to the children? Can I bring them with me, I mean? Friede asked a little tremulous for the reply. I couldn't bear to leave them. Even for you, dear Bertram, I could never desert them. Bertram gazed at her dismayed. Leave them, he cried. Why, Friede, of course you could never leave them. Do you mean to say anybody would be so utterly unnatural, even in England, as to separate a mother from her own children? I don't think Robert would let me keep them. Friede faltered with tears in her eyes. And if he didn't, the law, of course, would take his side against me. Of course, Bertram answered with grim sarcasm in his face. Of course, I might have guessed it. If there is an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it. But you needn't fear, Friede. Long before the law of England could be put in motion, I'll have completed my arrangements for taking you, and them too, with me. There are advantages sometimes even in the barbaric delay of what your lawyers are facetiously pleased to call justice. Then I may bring them with me, Friede cried, flushing red. Bertram nodded ascent. Yes, he said, with grave gentleness. You may bring them with you, and as soon as you like, too. Remember, dearest, every night you pass under that creature's roof, you commit the vilest crime a woman can commit against her own purity. End of chapter 10. Never in her life had Friede enjoyed anything so much as those first four happy days at Hamour. She had come away with Bertram exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own nature. And she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in every cord and every fibre. They had chosen a lovely spot on a heather-clad moorland where she could stroll alone with Bertram among the gorse and ling, utterly oblivious of Robert Monteith and the unnatural world she had left for ever behind her. Her soul drank in deep drafts of the knowledge of good and evil from Bertram's lips. She felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him and listen to him. She wondered how she could ever have endured that old, bad life with the lower man who was never her equal. Now she had once tasted and known what life can be when two well-matched souls walk it together abreast in holy fellowship. The children, too, were as happy as the day was long, the heath was heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be aware of anything unusual in the fact of his accompanying them. At the little inn on the hilltop where they stopped to lodge, nobody asked any compromising questions, and Bertram felt so sure he could soon complete his arrangements for taking Frida and the children home, as he still always phrased it, that Frida had no doubts for their future happiness. As for Robert Monteith, that bleak, cold man, she hardly even remembered him. Bertram's first kiss seemed almost to have driven the very memory of her husband clean out of her consciousness. She only regretted now she had left him the false and mistaken sense of duty, which had kept her so long tied to an inferior soul she could never love and did wrong to marry. And all the time what strange new lessons, what beautiful truths she learned from Bertram. As they strolled together those sweet august mornings, hand locked in hand over the breezy upland, what new insight he gave her into men and things. What fresh impulse he supplied to her keen moral nature. The misery and wrong of the world she lived in came home to her now in deeper and blacker hues than ever she had conceived it in. And with that consciousness came also the burning desire of every awakened soul to write and redress it. With Bertram by her side she felt she could not even harbour an unholy wish or admit a wrong feeling. That vague sense of his superiority as of a higher being, which she had felt from the very first moment she met him at Brackenhurst had deepened and grown more definite now by closer intercourse. And she recognised that what she had fallen in love with from the earliest beginning was the beauty of holiness shining clear in his countenance. She had chosen at last the better part, and she felt in her soul that come what might it could not be taken away from her. In this earthly paradise of pure love undefiled she spent three full days and part of another. On the morning of the fourth she sent the country girl they had engaged to take care of the children out on the moor with the little ones, while she herself and Bertram went off alone past the barrow that overlooks the devil's saucepan and out on the open ridge that stretches with dark growth of heath and Bracken far away into the misty blue distance of Hampshire. Bertram had just been speaking to her as they sat on the dry sand, off the buried chieftain whose bones still lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives whose bodies slept beside him massacred in cold blood to accompany their dead lord to the world of shadows. He had been contrasting these hideous slaveries of taboo-ridden England past or present with the rational freedom of his own dear country wither he hoped so soon with good luck to take her, when suddenly Frida raised her eager eyes from the ground and saw somebody or something coming across the moor from eastward in their direction. All at once a vague foreboding of evil possessed her. Hardly quite knowing why she felt this approaching object augured no good to their happiness. Look, Bertram! she cried, seizing his arm in her fright. There's somebody coming! Bertram raised his eyes and looked, then he shaded them with his hands. How strange! he said simply in his candid way. It looks for all the world just like the man who was once your husband. Frida rose in alarm. Oh! what can we do? she cried, wringing her hands. Whatever can we do? It's he! it's Robert! Surely he can't have come on purpose. Bertram exclaimed, taken aback. When he sees us he'll turn aside. He must know of all people on earth he's the one least likely at such a time to be welcome. He can't want to disturb the peace of another man's honeymoon. But Frida, better used to the savage ways of the world she had always lived in, made answer shrinking and crouching. He's hunted us down and he's come to fight you. To fight me, Bertram exclaimed. Oh, surely not that. I was told by those who ought best to know you English had got far beyond the stage of private war and murderous vendetta. For everything else, Frida answered, cowering down in her terror of her husband's vengeance. Not for herself, indeed, so much as for Bertram. For everything else we have, but not for a woman. There was no time just then, however, for further explanation of this strange anomaly. Montieth had singled them out from a great distance with his keen, clear sight inherited from generations of Highland ancestors and now strode angrily across the Moor with great wrathful steps in his rival's direction. Frida nestled close to Bertram to protect her from the man to whom her country's laws and the customs of her tribe would have handed her over blindfold. Bertram soothed her with his hand and awaited in silence with some dim sense of awe the angry barbarian's arrival. He came up very quickly and stood full in front of them glaring with fierce eyes at the discovered lovers. For a minute or two his rage would not allow him to speak, nor even to act. He could but stand and scowl from under his brows at Bertram. But after a long pause his wrath found words. You infernal scoundrel! he burst forth so at last I've caught you. How dare you sit there and look me straight in the face! You infernal thief, how dare you! How dare you! Bertram rose and confronted him. His own face too flushed slightly with righteous indignation, but he answered for all that in the same calm and measured tones as ever. I am not a scoundrel, and I will not submit to be called so even by an angry savage. I ask you in return how dare you follow us. You must have known your presence would be very unwelcome. I should have thought this was just the one moment in your life and the one place on earth where even you would have seen that to stop away was your imperative duty. Mere self-respect would dictate such conduct. This lady has given you clear proof indeed that your society and converse are highly distasteful to her. Robert Monteith glared across at him with the face of a tiger. You infamous creature! he cried almost speechless with rage. Do you dare to defend my wife seductively? Bertram gazed at him with a strange look of mingled horror and astonishment. You poor wretch! he answered as calmly as before, but with evident contempt. How can you dare such a thing as you to apply these vile words to your moral superiors? Adultery it was indeed, and untruth to her own hire and purer nature, for this lady to spend one night of her life under your roof with you. What she has taken now in exchange is holy marriage, the only real and sacred marriage, the marriage of true souls, to which even the wiser of yourselves, the poets of your nation, would not admit impediment. If you dare to apply such base language as this to my lady's actions, you must answer for it to me, her natural protector, for I will not permit it. At the words, quick as lightning, Monteith pulled from his pocket a loaded revolver loaded revolver and pointed it full at his rival. With a cry of terror, Frieda flung herself between them and tried to protect her lover with the shield of her own body. But Bertram gently unwound her arms and held her off from him tenderly. No, no, darling, he said slowly, sitting down with wonderful calm upon a big gray sarsen stone that abutted upon the pathway. I had forgotten again. I keep always forgetting what kind of savages I have to deal with. If I chose, I could snatch that murderous weapon from his hand and shoot him dead with it in self-defense, for I'm stronger than he is. But if I did, what use? I could never take you home with me. And after all, what could we either of us do in the end in this bad, wild world of your fellow countrymen? They would take me and hang me, and all would be up with you. For your sake, Frieda, to shield you from the effects of their cruel taboos, there's but one course open. I must submit to this madman. He may shoot me, if he will. Stand free and let him. But with a passionate oath, Robert Monteith seized her arm and flung her madly from him. She fell, reeling on one side. His eyes were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance. He raised the deadly weapon. Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet. There was a moment's pause. For that moment, even Monteith himself in his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the alien. But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature was ill-adapted to recognize that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him. He pulled the trigger and fired. Frieda gave one loud shriek of despairing horror. Bertram's body fell back on the bare heath behind it. End of CHAPTER XI. Mad as he was with jealousy, that lowest and most bestial of all the vile passions man still inherits from the ape and tiger, Robert Monteith was yet quite sane enough to know in his own soul what deed he had wrought, and in what light even his country's barbaric laws would regard his action. So the moment he had reeked to the full, his fiery vengeance on the man who had never wronged him. He bent over the body with strangely eager eyes, expecting to see upon it some evidence of his guilt, some bloody mark of the hateful crime his own hand had committed. At the same instant, Frieda, recovering from his blow that had sent her reeling, rushed frantically forward, flung herself with wild passion on her lover's corpse, and covered the warm lips with hot despairing kisses. One marvellous fact, however, impressed them both with a vague sense of the unknown and the mysterious from the very first second. No spot nor trace of blood marred the body anywhere. And even as they looked, a strange perfume as of violence or of burning incense began by degrees to flood the moor around them. Then, slowly, while they watched, a faint blue flame seemed to issue from the wound in Bertram's right side, and rise lambant into the air above the murdered body. Frieda drew back and gazed at it, a weird thrill of mystery and unconscious hope beguiling for one moment her profound pang of bereavement. Montieth, too, stood away a pace or two in doubt and surprise. The deep consciousness of some strange and unearthly power overawing for a while even his vulgar and commonplace Scotch-Bourgeois nature. Gradually, as they gazed, the pale blue flame rising higher and higher gathered force and volume, and the perfume as of violence became distinct on the air, like the savour of a purer life than this century what's of. Bit by bit, the one blue light flickering thicker and thicker shaped itself into the form and features of a man, even the outward semblance of Bertram engled you. Shadowy but transfigured with an ineffable glory, it hovered for a minute or two above the spot on the moor where the corpse had lain. For now they were aware that as the flame shape formed, the body that lay dead upon the ground beneath dissolved by degrees and melted into it. Not a trace was left on the heath of Robert Montieth's crime. Not a dapple of blood, not a clot of gore. Only a pale blue flame and a persistent image represented the body that was once Bertram Engledews. Again, even as they looked, a still weirder feeling began to creep over them. The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in the remote distance, but it was not in space that it faded. It appeared rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion, like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical calculation. As it slowly dissolved, Frieder stretched out her hands to it with a wild cry, like the cry of a mother for her first-born. Oh, Bertram! she moaned. Where are you going? Do you mean to leave me? Won't you save me from this man? Won't you take me home with you? Dim and hollow, as from the womb of time unborn, a calm voice came back to her across the gulf of ages. Your husband willed it, Frieder, and the customs of your nation. You can come to me, but I can never return to you. In three days longer, your probation would have been finished. But I forgot with what manner of savage I had still to deal. And now I must go back once more to the place whence I came, to the 25th century. The voice died away in the dim recesses of the future. The pale blue flame flickered forward and vanished. The shadowy shape melted through an endless vista of tomorrows. Only the perfume as a violets or of a higher life still hung heavy upon the air. And a patch of daintier purple burned bright on the moor, like a pool of crimson blood where the body had fallen. Only that and a fierce ache in Frieder's tortured heart. Only that and a halo of invisible glory round the rich red lips where his lips had touched them. End of Chapter 12. Chapter 13 of The British Barbarians. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Ruth Golding. The British Barbarians by Grant Allen. Chapter 13. Frieder seated herself in her misery on the ice-worn boulder, where three minutes earlier Bertram had been sitting. Her face was buried in her bloodless hands. All the world grew blank to her. Montieth, for his part, sat down a little way off with folded arms on another sarsen stone, fronting her. The strange and unearthly scene they had just passed through impressed him profoundly. For the first few minutes a great horror held him. But his dogged Scottish nature still brooded over his wrongs, in spite of the terrible sight he had so unexpectedly evoked. In a way he felt he had had his revenge, for had he not drawn upon his man and fired at him and killed him. Still, after the fever and torment of the last few days, it was a relief to find, after all, he was not, as this world would judge a murderer. Man and crime were alike mere airy phantoms. He could go back now to the inn and explain with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called away to town on important business. There was no corpse on the moor, no blabbing blood to tell the story of his attempted murder. Nobody anywhere he felt certain in his own stolid soul would miss the mysterious alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss of centuries. With true scotch caution indeed, even in the midst of his wrath, Robert Montese had never said a word to anyone at Brackenhurst of how his wife had left him. He was too proud a man, if it came to that, to acknowledge what seemed to him a personal disgrace, till circumstances should absolutely force such acknowledgement upon him. He had glossed it over, meanwhile, with the servants and neighbours, by saying that Mrs. Montese had gone away with the children for their accustomed holiday, as always, in August. Frida had actually chosen the day appointed for their seaside journey as the fittest moment for her departure with Bertram, so his story was received without doubt or inquiry. He had bottled up his wrath in his own silent soul. There was still room, therefore, to make all right again at home in the eyes of the world, if but Frida was willing. So he sat there long, staring hard at his wife in speechless debate, and discussing with himself whether or not to make temporary overtures of peace to her. In this matter, his pride itself fought hard with his pride. That is the warrant of savages. Would it not be better now Bertram Ingledew had fairly disappeared forever from their sphere to patch up a hollow truce for a time at least with Frida, and let all things be to the outer eye exactly as they had always been? The bewildering and brain-staggering occurrences of the last half hour indeed had struck deep and far into his hard scotch nature. The knowledge that the man who had stolen his wife from him, as he phrased it to himself in his curious, belated medieval phraseology, was not a real, live man of flesh and blood at all, but an evanescent phantom of the 25th century made him all the more ready to patch up for the time being a nominal reconciliation. His nerves, for even he had nerves, were still trembling to the core with the mystic events of that wizard mourning. But clearer and clearer still it dawned upon him each moment that if things were ever to be set right at all, they must be set right then and there before he returned to the inn, and before Frida once more went back to their children. To be sure it was Frida's place to ask forgiveness first and make the first advances, but Frida made no move. So after sitting there long, salving his masculine vanity with the flattering thought that after all his rival was no mere man at all but a spirit, an avatar, a thing of pure imagination, he raised his head at last and looked inquiringly towards Frida. Well, he said slowly. Frida raised her head from her hands and gazed across at him scornfully. I was thinking. Monteith began feeling his way with caution, but with the magnanimous air. That perhaps after all, for the children's sake, Frida. With a terrible look his wife rose up and fronted him. Her face was red as fire, her heart was burning. She spoke with fierce energy. Robert Monteith, she said firmly, not even daining to treat him as one who had once been her husband. For the children's sake, or for my own sake, or for any power on earth, do you think poor empty soul, after I've spent three days of my life with him, I'd ever spend three hours again with you. If you do, then this is all. Murderer that you are, you mistake my nature. And turning on her heel, she moved slowly away towards the far edge of the moor, with a queenly gesture. Monteith followed her up a step or two. She turned and waved him back. He stood glued to the ground, that weird sense of the supernatural once more overcoming him. For some seconds he watched her without speaking a word. Then at last he broke out. What are you going to do, Frida? He asked almost anxiously. Frida turned and glanced back at him with scornful eyes. Her mean was resolute. The revolver with which he had shot Bertram Ingledew laid close by her feet, among the bracken on the heath, where Monteith had flung it. She picked it up with one hand, and once more waved him backward. I'm going to follow him! She answered solemnly in a very cold voice, where you have sent him, but alone by myself, not here before you. And she brushed him away as he tried to seize it with regal dignity. Monteith, abashed, turned back without one word, and made his way to the inn in the little village. But Frida walked on by herself in the opposite direction, across the open moor and through the purple heath, towards black despair, and the trout ponds at Broughton. End of The British Barbarians by Grant Allen