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.
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