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
bare 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. He rose,
and advanced towards his visitor with outstretched arms. "Why,
Frida," he cried,--"Mrs. Monteith--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. "O Mr. Ingledew," 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 good-bye 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's
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 back 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 banded 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
Ingledew, who's chosen to foist 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. "O 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! O 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 for ever 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 two 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 Monteith's; 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 Monteith's; 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 fetich, 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 arm 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 purest 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 unsexed and degraded
out of all semblance of womanhood. He bent over the woman of his
choice and kissed her with 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 recognising 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. "O 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 Monteith, 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?"
"I can't come here, you know," Frida whispered, half-terrified;
"for if I did, Miss Blake would 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 Monteith'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 two 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 Monteith's, my Frida. So now,
good-night, till Monday at two, beside the stile 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, all 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.
