Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those first four
happy days at Heymoor. 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 chord 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 draughts 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 hill-top 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
wakened soul to right 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, of 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, whither 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. “What ever 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. Monteith 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's adultery?”
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 higher 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 and pointed it full at his rival. With a cry of terror,
Frida 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 grey 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-defence--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, Frida, 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 recognise that ineffable
air as of a superior being that others observed in him. He pulled the
trigger and fired. Frida gave one loud shriek of despairing horror.
Bertram's body fell back on the bare heath behind it.