"Yes, we did see it," Bertram answered, with his unruffled smile; "and thinking it an uncalled-for piece of aggressive churlishness, both in form and substance,—why, we took the liberty to disregard it."

Sir Lionel glared at him. In that servile neighbourhood, almost entirely inhabited by the flunkeys of villadom, it was a complete novelty to him to be thus bearded in his den. He gasped with anger. "Do you mean to say," he gurgled out, growing purple to the neck, "you came in here deliberately to disturb my pheasants, and then brazen it out to my face like this, sir? Go back the way you came, or I'll call my keepers."

"No, I will NOT go back the way I came," Bertram responded deliberately, with perfect self-control, and with a side-glance at Frida. "Every human being has a natural right to walk across this copse, which is all waste ground, and has no crop sown in it. The pheasants can't be yours; they're common property. Besides, there's a lady. We mean to make our way across the copse at our leisure, picking flowers as we go, and come out into the road on the other side of the spinney. It's a universal right of which no country and no law can possibly deprive us."

Sir Lionel was livid with rage. Strange as it may appear to any reasoning mind, the man really believed he had a natural right to prevent people from crossing that strip of wood where his pheasants were sitting. His ancestors had assumed it from time immemorial, and by dint of never being questioned had come to regard the absurd usurpation as quite fair and proper. He placed himself straight across the narrow path, blocking it up with his short and stumpy figure. "Now look here, young man," he said, with all the insolence of his caste: "if you try to go on, I'll stand here in your way; and if you dare to touch me, it's a common assault, and, by George, you'll have to answer at law for the consequences."

Bertram Ingledew for his part was all sweet reasonableness. He raised one deprecating hand. "Now, before we come to open hostilities," he said in a gentle voice, with that unfailing smile of his, "let's talk the matter over like rational beings. Let's try to be logical. This copse is considered yours by the actual law of the country you live in: your tribe permits it to you: you're allowed to taboo it. Very well, then; I make all possible allowances for your strange hallucination. You've been brought up to think you had some mystic and intangible claim to this corner of earth more than other people, your even Christians. That claim, of course, you can't logically defend; but failing arguments, you want to fight for it. Wouldn't it be more reasonable, now, to show you had some RIGHT or JUSTICE in the matter? I'm always reasonable: if you can convince me of the propriety and equity of your claim, I'll go back as you wish by the way I entered. If not—well, there's a lady here, and I'm bound, as a man, to help her safely over."

Sir Lionel almost choked. "I see what you are," he gasped out with difficulty. "I've heard this sort of rubbish more than once before. You're one of these damned land-nationalising radicals."

"On the contrary," Bertram answered, urbane as ever, with charming politeness of tone and manner: "I'm a born conservative. I'm tenacious to an almost foolishly sentimental degree of every old custom or practice or idea; unless, indeed, it's either wicked or silly—like most of your English ones."

He raised his hat, and made as if he would pass on. Now, nothing annoys an angry savage or an uneducated person so much as the perfect coolness of a civilised and cultivated man when he himself is boiling with indignation. He feels its superiority an affront on his barbarism. So, with a vulgar oath, Sir Lionel flung himself point-blank in the way. "Damn it all, no you won't, sir!" he cried. "I'll soon put a stop to all that, I can tell you. You shan't go on one step without committing an assault upon me." And he drew himself up, four-square, as if for battle.

"Oh, just as you like," Bertram answered coolly, never losing his temper. "I'm not afraid of taboos: I've seen too many of them." And he gazed at the fat little angry man with a gentle expression of mingled contempt and amusement.

For a minute, Frida thought they were really going to fight, and drew back in horror to await the contest. But such a warlike notion never entered the man of peace's head. He took a step backward for a second and calmly surveyed his antagonist with a critical scrutiny. Sir Lionel was short and stout and puffy; Bertram Ingledew was tall and strong and well-knit and athletic. After an instant's pause, during which the doughty baronet stood doubling his fat fists and glaring silent wrath at his lither opponent, Bertram made a sudden dart forward, seized the little stout man bodily in his stalwart arms, and lifting him like a baby, in spite of kicks and struggles, carried him a hundred paces to one side of the path, where he laid him down gingerly without unnecessary violence on a bed of young bracken. Then he returned quite calmly, as if nothing had happened, to Frida's side, with that quiet little smile on his unruffled countenance.

Frida had not quite approved of all this small episode, for she too believed in the righteousness of taboo, like most other Englishwomen, and devoutly accepted the common priestly doctrine, that the earth is the landlord's and the fulness thereof; but still, being a woman, and therefore an admirer of physical strength in men, she could not help applauding to herself the masterly way in which her squire had carried his antagonist captive. When he returned, she beamed upon him with friendly confidence. But Philip was very much frightened indeed.

"You'll have to pay for this, you know," he said. "This is a law-abiding land. He'll bring an action against you for assault and battery; and you'll get three months for it."

"I don't think so," Bertram answered, still placid and unruffled. "There were three of us who saw him; and it was a very ignominious position indeed for a person who sets up to be a great chief in the country. He won't like the little boys on his own estate to know the great Sir Lionel was lifted up against his will, carried about like a baby, and set down in a bracken-bed. Indeed, I was more than sorry to have to do such a thing to a man of his years; but you see he WOULD have it. It's the only way to deal with these tabooing chiefs. You must face them and be done with it. In the Caroline Islands, once, I had to do the same thing to a cazique who was going to cook and eat a very pretty young girl of his own retainers. He wouldn't listen to reason; the law was on his side; so, being happily NOT a law-abiding person myself, I took him up in my arms, and walked off with him bodily, and was obliged to drop him down into a very painful bed of stinging plants like nettles, so as to give myself time to escape with the girl clear out of his clutches. I regretted having to do it so roughly, of course; but there was no other way out of it."

As he spoke, for the first time it really came home to Frida's mind that Bertram Ingledew, standing there before her, regarded in very truth the Polynesian chief and Sir Lionel Longden as much about the same sort of unreasoning people—savages to be argued with and cajoled if possible; but if not, then to be treated with calm firmness and force, as an English officer on an exploring expedition might treat a wrathful Central African kinglet. And in a dim sort of way, too, it began to strike her by degrees that the analogy was a true one, that Bertram Ingledew, among the Englishmen with whom she was accustomed to mix, was like a civilised being in the midst of barbarians, who feel and recognise but dimly and half-unconsciously his innate superiority.

By the time they had reached the gate on the other side of the hanger, Sir Lionel overtook them, boiling over with indignation.

"Your card, sir," he gasped out inarticulately to the calmly innocent Alien; "you must answer for all this. Your card, I say, instantly!"

Bertram looked at him with a fixed gaze. Sir Lionel, having had good proof of his antagonist's strength, kept his distance cautiously.

"Certainly NOT, my good friend," Bertram replied, in a firm tone. "Why should I, who am the injured and insulted party, assist YOU in identifying me? It was you who aggressed upon my free individuality. If you want to call in the aid of an unjust law to back up an unjust and irrational taboo, you must find out for yourself who I am, and where I come from. But I wouldn't advise you to do anything so foolish. Three of us here saw you in the ridiculous position into which by your obstinacy you compelled me to put you; and you wouldn't like to hear us recount it in public, with picturesque details, to your brother magistrates. Let me say one thing more to you," he added, after a pause, in that peculiarly soft and melodious voice of his. "Don't you think, on reflection—even if you're foolish enough and illogical enough really to believe in the sacredness of the taboo by virtue of which you try to exclude your fellow-tribesmen from their fair share of enjoyment of the soil of England—don't you think you might at any rate exercise your imaginary powers over the land you arrogate to yourself with a little more gentleness and common politeness? How petty and narrow it looks to use even an undoubted right, far more a tribal taboo, in a tyrannical and needlessly aggressive manner! How mean and small and low and churlish! The damage we did your land, as you call it—if we did any at all—was certainly not a ha'pennyworth. Was it consonant with your dignity as a chief in the tribe to get so hot and angry about so small a value? How grotesque to make so much fuss and noise about a matter of a ha'penny! We, who were the aggrieved parties, we, whom you attempted to debar by main force from the common human right to walk freely over earth wherever there's nothing sown or planted, and who were obliged to remove you as an obstacle out of our path, at some personal inconvenience"—(he glanced askance at his clothes, crumpled and soiled by Sir Lionel's unseemly resistance)—"WE didn't lose our tempers, or attempt to revile you. We were cool and collected. But a taboo must be on its very last legs when it requires the aid of terrifying notices at every corner in order to preserve it; and I think this of yours must be well on the way to abolition. Still, as I should like to part friends"—he drew a coin from his pocket, and held it out between his finger and thumb with a courteous bow towards Sir Lionel—"I gladly tender you a ha'penny in compensation for any supposed harm we may possibly have done your imaginary rights by walking through the wood here."



V

For a day or two after this notable encounter between tabooer and taboo-breaker, Philip moved about in a most uneasy state of mind. He lived in constant dread of receiving a summons as a party to an assault upon a most respectable and respected landed proprietor who preserved more pheasants and owned more ruinous cottages than anybody else (except the duke) round about Brackenhurst. Indeed, so deeply did he regret his involuntary part in this painful escapade that he never mentioned a word of it to Robert Monteith; nor did Frida either. To say the truth, husband and wife were seldom confidential one with the other. But, to Philip's surprise, Bertram's prediction came true; they never heard another word about the action for trespass or the threatened prosecution for assault and battery. Sir Lionel found out that the person who had committed the gross and unheard-of outrage of lifting an elderly and respectable English landowner like a baby in arms on his own estate, was a lodger at Brackenhurst, variously regarded by those who knew him best as an escaped lunatic, and as a foreign nobleman in disguise, fleeing for his life from a charge of complicity in a Nihilist conspiracy: he wisely came to the conclusion, therefore, that he would not be the first to divulge the story of his own ignominious defeat, unless he found that damned radical chap was going boasting around the countryside how he had balked Sir Lionel. And as nothing was further than boasting from Bertram Ingledew's gentle nature, and as Philip and Frida both held their peace for good reasons of their own, the baronet never attempted in any way to rake up the story of his grotesque disgrace on what he considered his own property. All he did was to double the number of keepers on the borders of his estate, and to give them strict notice that whoever could succeed in catching the "damned radical" in flagrante delicto, as trespasser or poacher, should receive most instant reward and promotion.

During the next few weeks, accordingly, nothing of importance happened, from the point of view of the Brackenhurst chronicler; though Bertram was constantly round at the Monteiths' garden for afternoon tea or a game of lawn-tennis. He was an excellent player; lawn-tennis was most popular "at home," he said, in that same mysterious and non-committing phrase he so often made use of. Only, he found the racquets and balls (very best London make) rather clumsy and awkward; he wished he had brought his own along with him when he came here. Philip noticed his style of service was particularly good, and even wondered at times he did not try to go in for the All England Championship. But Bertram surprised him by answering, with a quiet smile, that though it was an excellent amusement, he had too many other things to do with his time to make a serious pursuit of it.

One day towards the end of June, the strange young man had gone round to The Grange—that was the name of Frida's house—for his usual relaxation after a very tiring and distressing day in London, "on important business." The business, whatever it was, had evidently harrowed his feelings not a little, for he was sensitively organised. Frida was on the tennis-lawn. She met him with much lamentation over the unpleasant fact that she had just lost a sister-in-law whom she had never cared for.

"Well, but if you never cared for her," Bertram answered, looking hard into her lustrous eyes, "it doesn't much matter."

"Oh, I shall have to go into mourning all the same," Frida continued somewhat pettishly, "and waste all my nice new summer dresses. It's SUCH a nuisance!"

"Why do it, then?" Bertram suggested, watching her face very narrowly.

"Well, I suppose because of what you would call a fetich," Frida answered laughing. "I know it's ridiculous. But everybody expects it, and I'm not strong-minded enough to go against the current of what everybody expects of me."

"You will be by-and-by," Bertram answered, with confidence. "They're queer things, these death-taboos. Sometimes people cover their heads with filth or ashes; and sometimes they bedizen them with crape and white streamers. In some countries, the survivors are bound to shed so many tears, to measure, in memory of the departed; and if they can't bring them up naturally in sufficient quantities, they have to be beaten with rods, or pricked with thorns, or stung with nettles, till they've filled to the last drop the regulation bottle. In Swaziland, too, when the king dies, so the queen told me, every family of his subjects has to lose one of its sons or daughters, in order that they may all truly grieve at the loss of their sovereign. I think there are more horrible and cruel devices in the way of death-taboos and death-customs than anything else I've met in my researches. Indeed, most of our nomologists at home believe that all taboos originally arose out of ancestral ghost-worship, and sprang from the craven fear of dead kings or dead relatives. They think fetiches and gods and other imaginary supernatural beings were all in the last resort developed out of ghosts, hostile or friendly; and from what I see abroad, I incline to agree with them. But this mourning superstition, now—surely it must do a great deal of harm in poor households in England. People who can very ill afford to throw away good dresses must have to give them up, and get new black ones, and that often at the very moment when they're just deprived of the aid of their only support and bread-winner. I wonder it doesn't occur to them that this is absolutely wrong, and that they oughtn't to prefer the meaningless fetich to their clear moral duty."

"They're afraid of what people would say of them," Frida ventured to interpose. "You see, we're all so frightened of breaking through an established custom."

"Yes, I notice that always, wherever I go in England," Bertram answered. "There's apparently no clear idea of what's right and wrong at all, in the ethical sense, as apart from what's usual. I was talking to a lady up in London to-day about a certain matter I may perhaps mention to you by-and-by when occasion serves, and she said she'd been 'always brought up to think' so-and-so. It seemed to me a very queer substitute indeed for thinking."

"I never thought of that," Frida answered slowly. "I've said the same thing a hundred times over myself before now; and I see how irrational it is. But, there, Mr. Ingledew, that's why I always like talking with you so much: you make one take such a totally new view of things."

She looked down and was silent a minute. Her breast heaved and fell. She was a beautiful woman, very tall and queenly. Bertram looked at her and paused; then he went on hurriedly, just to break the awkward silence: "And this dance at Exeter, then—I suppose you won't go to it?"

"Oh, I CAN'T, of course," Frida answered quickly. "And my two other nieces—Robert's side, you know—who have nothing at all to do with my brother Tom's wife, out there in India—they'll be SO disappointed. I was going to take them down to it. Nasty thing! How annoying of her! She might have chosen some other time to go and die, I'm sure, than just when she knew I wanted to go to Exeter!"

"Well, if it would be any convenience to you," Bertram put in with a serious face, "I'm rather busy on Wednesday; but I could manage to take up a portmanteau to town with my dress things in the morning, meet the girls at Paddington, and run down by the evening express in time to go with them to the hotel you meant to stop at. They're those two pretty blondes I met here at tea last Sunday, aren't they?"

Frida looked at him, half-incredulous. He was very nice, she knew, and very quaint and fresh and unsophisticated and unconventional; but could he be really quite so ignorant of the common usages of civilised society as to suppose it possible he could run down alone with two young girls to stop by themselves, without even a chaperon, at an hotel at Exeter? She gazed at him curiously. "Oh, Mr. Ingledew," she said, "now you're really TOO ridiculous!"

Bertram coloured up like a boy. If she had been in any doubt before as to his sincerity and simplicity, she could be so no longer. "Oh, I forgot about the taboo," he said. "I'm so sorry I hurt you. I was only thinking what a pity those two nice girls should be cheated out of their expected pleasure by a silly question of pretended mourning, where even you yourself, who have got to wear it, don't assume that you feel the slightest tinge of sorrow. I remember now, of course, what a lady told me in London the other day: your young girls aren't even allowed to go out travelling alone without their mother or brothers, in order to taboo them absolutely beforehand for the possible husband who may some day marry them. It was a pitiful tale. I thought it all most painful and shocking."

"But you don't mean to say," Frida cried, equally shocked and astonished in her turn, "that you'd let young girls go out alone anywhere with unmarried men? Goodness gracious, how dreadful!"

"Why not?" Bertram asked, with transparent simplicity.

"Why, just consider the consequences!" Frida exclaimed, with a blush, after a moment's hesitation.

"There couldn't be ANY consequences, unless they both liked and respected one another," Bertram answered in the most matter-of-course voice in the world; "and if they do that, we think at home it's nobody's business to interfere in any way with the free expression of their individuality, in this the most sacred and personal matter of human intercourse. It's the one point of private conduct about which we're all at home most sensitively anxious not to meddle, to interfere, or even to criticise. We think such affairs should be left entirely to the hearts and consciences of the two persons concerned, who must surely know best how they feel towards one another. But I remember having met lots of taboos among other barbarians, in much the same way, to preserve the mere material purity of their women—a thing we at home wouldn't dream of even questioning. In New Ireland, for instance, I saw poor girls confined for four or five years in small wickerwork cages, where they're kept in the dark, and not even allowed to set foot on the ground on any pretext. They're shut up in these prisons when they're about fourteen, and there they're kept, strictly tabooed, till they're just going to be married. I went to see them myself; it was a horrid sight. The poor creatures were confined in a dark, close hut, without air or ventilation, in that stifling climate, which is as unendurable from heat as this one is from cold and damp and fogginess; and there they sat in cages, coarsely woven from broad leaves of the pandanus trees, so that no light could enter; for the people believed that light would kill them. No man might see them, because it was close taboo; but at last, with great difficulty, I persuaded the chief and the old lady who guarded them to let them come out for a minute to look at me. A lot of beads and cloth overcame these people's scruples; and with great reluctance they opened the cages. But only the old woman looked; the chief was afraid, and turned his head the other way, mumbling charms to his fetich. Out they stole, one by one, poor souls, ashamed and frightened, hiding their faces in their hands, thinking I was going to hurt them or eat them—just as your nieces would do if I proposed to-day to take them to Exeter—and a dreadful sight they were, cramped with long sitting in one close position, and their eyes all blinded by the glare of the sunlight after the long darkness. I've seen women shut up in pretty much the same way in other countries, but I never saw quite so bad a case as this of New Ireland."

"Well, you can't say we've anything answering to that in England," Frida put in, looking across at him with her frank, open countenance.

"No, not quite like that, in detail, perhaps, but pretty much the same in general principle," Bertram answered warmly. "Your girls here are not cooped up in actual cages, but they're confined in barrack-schools, as like prisons as possible; and they're repressed at every turn in every natural instinct of play or society. They mustn't go here or they mustn't go there; they mustn't talk to this one or to that one; they mustn't do this, or that, or the other; their whole life is bound round, I'm told, by a closely woven web of restrictions and restraints, which have no other object or end in view than the interests of a purely hypothetical husband. The Chinese cramp their women's feet to make them small and useless: you cramp your women's brains for the self-same purpose. Even light's excluded; for they mustn't read books that would make them think; they mustn't be allowed to suspect the bare possibility that the world may be otherwise than as their priests and nurses and grandmothers tell them, though most even of your own men know it well to be something quite different. Why, I met a girl at that dance I went to in London the other evening, who told me she wasn't allowed to read a book called Tess of the D'Urbervilles, that I'd read myself, and that seemed to me one of which every young girl and married woman in England ought to be given a copy. It was the one true book I had seen in your country. And another girl wasn't allowed to read another book, which I've since looked at, called Robert Elsmere,—an ephemeral thing enough in its way, I don't doubt, but proscribed in her case for no other reason on earth than because it expressed some mild disbelief as to the exact literary accuracy of those Lower Syrian pamphlets to which your priests attach such immense importance."

"Oh, Mr. Ingledew," Frida cried, trembling, yet profoundly interested; "if you talk like that any more, I shan't be able to listen to you."

"There it is, you see," Bertram continued, with a little wave of the hand. "You've been so blinded and bedimmed by being deprived of light when a girl, that now, when you see even a very faint ray, it dazzles you and frightens you. That mustn't be so—it needn't, I feel confident. I shall have to teach you how to bear the light. Your eyes, I know, are naturally strong; you were an eagle born: you'd soon get used to it."

Frida lifted them slowly, those beautiful eyes, and met his own with genuine pleasure.

"Do you think so?" she asked, half whispering. In some dim, instinctive way she felt this strange man was a superior being, and that every small crumb of praise from him was well worth meriting.

"Why, Frida, of course I do," he answered, without the least sense of impertinence. "Do you think if I didn't I'd have taken so much trouble to try and educate you?" For he had talked to her much in their walks on the hillside.

Frida did not correct him for his bold application of her Christian name, though she knew she ought to. She only looked up at him and answered gravely—

"I certainly can't let you take my nieces to Exeter."

"I suppose not," he replied, hardly catching at her meaning. "One of the girls at that dance the other night told me a great many queer facts about your taboos on these domestic subjects; so I know how stringent and how unreasoning they are. And, indeed, I found out a little bit for myself; for there was one nice girl there, to whom I took a very great fancy; and I was just going to kiss her as I said good-night, when she drew back suddenly, almost as if I'd struck her, though we'd been talking together quite confidentially a minute before. I could see she thought I really meant to insult her. Of course, I explained it was only what I'd have done to any nice girl at home under similar circumstances; but she didn't seem to believe me. And the oddest part of it all was, that all the time we were dancing I had my arm round her waist, as all the other men had theirs round their partners; and at home we consider it a much greater proof of confidence and affection to be allowed to place your arm round a lady's waist than merely to kiss her."

Frida felt the conversation was beginning to travel beyond her ideas of propriety, so she checked its excursions by answering gravely: "Oh, Mr. Ingledew, you don't understand our code of morals. But I'm sure you don't find your East End young ladies so fearfully particular?"

"They certainly haven't quite so many taboos," Bertram answered quietly. "But that's always the way in tabooing societies. These things are naturally worst among the chiefs and great people. I remember when I was stopping among the Ot Danoms of Borneo, the daughters of chiefs and great sun-descended families were shut up at eight or ten years old, in a little cell or room, as a religious duty, and cut off from all intercourse with the outside world for many years together. The cell's dimly lit by a single small window, placed high in the wall, so that the unhappy girl never sees anybody or anything, but passes her life in almost total darkness. She mayn't leave the room on any pretext whatever, not even for the most pressing and necessary purposes. None of her family may see her face; but a single slave woman's appointed to accompany her and wait upon her. Long want of exercise stunts her bodily growth, and when at last she becomes a woman, and emerges from her prison, her complexion has grown wan and pale and waxlike. They take her out in solemn guise and show her the sun, the sky, the land, the water, the trees, the flowers, and tell her all their names, as if to a newborn creature. Then a great feast is made, a poor crouching slave is killed with a blow of the sword, and the girl is solemnly smeared with his reeking blood, by way of initiation. But this is only done, of course, with the daughters of wealthy and powerful families. And I find it pretty much the same in England. In all these matters, your poorer classes are relatively pure and simple and natural. It's your richer and worse and more selfish classes among whom sex-taboos are strongest and most unnatural."

Frida looked up at him a little pleadingly.

"Do you know, Mr. Ingledew," she said, in a trembling voice, "I'm sure you don't mean it for intentional rudeness, but it sounds to us very like it, when you speak of our taboos and compare us openly to these dreadful savages. I'm a woman, I know; but—I don't like to hear you speak so about my England."

The words took Bertram fairly by surprise. He was wholly unacquainted with that rank form of provincialism which we know as patriotism. He leaned across towards her with a look of deep pain on his handsome face.

"Oh, Mrs. Monteith," he cried earnestly, "if YOU don't like it, I'll never again speak of them as taboos in your presence. I didn't dream you could object. It seems so natural to us—well—to describe like customs by like names in every case. But if it gives you pain—why, sooner than do that, I'd never again say a single word while I live about an English custom!"

His face was very near hers, and he was a son of Adam, like all the rest of us—not a being of another sphere, as Frida was sometimes half tempted to consider him. What might next have happened he himself hardly knew, for he was an impulsive creature, and Frida's rich lips were full and crimson, had not Philip's arrival with the two Miss Hardys to make up a set diverted for the moment the nascent possibility of a leading incident.



VI

It was a Sunday afternoon in full July, and a small party was seated under the spreading mulberry tree on the Monteiths' lawn. General Claviger was of the number, that well-known constructor of scientific frontiers in India or Africa; and so was Dean Chalmers, the popular preacher, who had come down for the day from his London house to deliver a sermon on behalf of the Society for Superseding the Existing Superstitions of China and Japan by the Dying Ones of Europe. Philip was there, too, enjoying himself thoroughly in the midst of such good company, and so was Robert Monteith, bleak and grim as usual, but deeply interested for the moment in dividing metaphysical and theological cobwebs with his friend the Dean, who as a brother Scotsman loved a good discussion better almost than he loved a good discourse. General Claviger, for his part, was congenially engaged in describing to Bertram his pet idea for a campaign against the Madhi and his men, in the interior of the Soudan. Bertram rather yawned through that technical talk; he was a man of peace, and schemes of organised bloodshed interested him no more than the details of a projected human sacrifice, given by a Central African chief with native gusto, would interest an average European gentleman. At last, however, the General happened to say casually, "I forget the exact name of the place I mean; I think it's Malolo; but I have a very good map of all the district at my house down at Wanborough."

"What! Wanborough in Northamptonshire?" Bertram exclaimed with sudden interest. "Do you really live there?"

"I'm lord of the manor," General Claviger answered, with a little access of dignity. "The Clavigers or Clavigeros were a Spanish family of Andalusian origin, who settled down at Wanborough under Philip and Mary, and retained the manor, no doubt by conversion to the Protestant side, after the accession of Elizabeth."

"That's interesting to me," Bertram answered, with his frank and fearless truthfulness, "because my people came originally from Wanborough before—well, before they emigrated." (Philip, listening askance, pricked up his ears eagerly at the tell-tale phrase; after all, then, a colonist!) "But they weren't anybody distinguished—certainly not lords of the manor," he added hastily as the General turned a keen eye on him. "Are there any Ingledews living now in the Wanborough district? One likes, as a matter of scientific heredity, to know all one can about one's ancestors, and one's county, and one's collateral relatives."

"Well, there ARE some Ingledews just now at Wanborough," the General answered, with some natural hesitation, surveying the tall, handsome young man from head to foot, not without a faint touch of soldierly approbation; "but they can hardly be your relatives, however remote.... They're people in a most humble sphere of life. Unless, indeed—well, we know the vicissitudes of families—perhaps your ancestors and the Ingledews that I know drifted apart a long time ago."

"Is he a cobbler?" Bertram inquired, without a trace of mauvaise honte.

The General nodded. "Well, yes," he said politely, "that's exactly what he is; though, as you seemed to be asking about presumed relations, I didn't like to mention it."

"Oh, then, he's my ancestor," Bertram put in, quite pleased at the discovery. "That is to say," he added after a curious pause, "my ancestor's descendant. Almost all my people, a little way back, you see, were shoe-makers or cobblers."

He said it with dignity, exactly as he might have said they were dukes or lord chancellors; but Philip could not help pitying him, not so much for being descended from so mean a lot, as for being fool enough to acknowledge it on a gentleman's lawn at Brackenhurst. Why, with manners like his, if he had not given himself away, one might easily have taken him for a descendant of the Plantagenets.

So the General seemed to think too, for he added quickly, "But you're very like the duke, and the duke's a Bertram. Is he also a relative?"

The young man coloured slightly. "Ye-es," he answered, hesitating; "but we're not very proud of the Bertram connection. They never did much good in the world, the Bertrams. I bear the name, one may almost say by accident, because it was handed down to me by my grandfather Ingledew, who had Bertram blood, but was a vast deal a better man than any other member of the Bertram family."

"I'll be seeing the duke on Wednesday," the General put in, with marked politeness, "and I'll ask him, if you like, about your grandfather's relationship. Who was he exactly, and what was his connection with the present man or his predecessor?"

"Oh, don't, please," Bertram put in, half-pleadingly, it is true, but still with that same ineffable and indefinable air of a great gentleman that never for a moment deserted him. "The duke would never have heard of my ancestors, I'm sure, and I particularly don't want to be mixed up with the existing Bertrams in any way."

He was happily innocent and ignorant of the natural interpretation the others would put upon his reticence, after the true English manner; but still he was vaguely aware, from the silence that ensued for a moment after he ceased, that he must have broken once more some important taboo, or offended once more some much-revered fetich. To get rid of the awkwardness he turned quietly to Frida. "What do you say, Mrs. Monteith," he suggested, "to a game of tennis?"

As bad luck would have it, he had floundered from one taboo headlong into another. The Dean looked up, open-mouthed, with a sharp glance of inquiry. Did Mrs. Monteith, then, permit such frivolities on the Sunday? "You forget what day it is, I think," Frida interposed gently, with a look of warning.

Bertram took the hint at once. "So I did," he answered quickly. "At home, you see, we let no man judge us of days and of weeks, and of times and of seasons. It puzzles us so much. With us, what's wrong to-day can never be right and proper to-morrow."

"But surely," the Dean said, bristling up, "some day is set apart in every civilised land for religious exercises."

"Oh, no," Bertram replied, falling incautiously into the trap. "We do right every day of the week alike,—and never do poojah of any sort at any time."

"Then where do you come from?" the Dean asked severely, pouncing down upon him like a hawk. "I've always understood the very lowest savages have at least some outer form or shadow of religion."

"Yes, perhaps so; but we're not savages, either low or otherwise," Bertram answered cautiously, perceiving his error. "And as to your other point, for reasons of my own, I prefer for the present not to say where I come from. You wouldn't believe me, if I told you—as you didn't, I saw, about my remote connection with the Duke of East Anglia's family. And we're not accustomed, where I live, to be disbelieved or doubted. It's perhaps the one thing that really almost makes us lose our tempers. So, if you please, I won't go any further at present into the debatable matter of my place of origin."

He rose to stroll off into the gardens, having spoken all the time in that peculiarly grave and dignified tone that seemed natural to him whenever any one tried to question him closely. Nobody save a churchman would have continued the discussion. But the Dean was a churchman, and also a Scot, and he returned to the attack, unabashed and unbaffled. "But surely, Mr. Ingledew," he said in a persuasive voice, "your people, whoever they are, must at least acknowledge a creator of the universe."

Bertram gazed at him fixedly. His eye was stern. "My people, sir," he said slowly, in very measured words, unaware that one must not argue with a clergyman, "acknowledge and investigate every reality they can find in the universe—and admit no phantoms. They believe in everything that can be shown or proved to be natural and true; but in nothing supernatural, that is to say, imaginary or non-existent. They accept plain facts: they reject pure phantasies. How beautiful those lilies are, Mrs. Monteith! such an exquisite colour! Shall we go over and look at them?"

"Not just now," Frida answered, relieved at the appearance of Martha with the tray in the distance. "Here's tea coming." She was glad of the diversion, for she liked Bertram immensely, and she could not help noticing how hopelessly he had been floundering all that afternoon right into the very midst of what he himself would have called their taboos and joss-business.

But Bertram was not well out of his troubles yet. Martha brought the round tray—Oriental brass, finely chased with flowing Arabic inscriptions—and laid it down on the dainty little rustic table. Then she handed about the cups. Bertram rose to help her. "Mayn't I do it for you?" he said, as politely as he would have said it to a lady in her drawing-room.

"No, thank you, sir," Martha answered, turning red at the offer, but with the imperturbable solemnity of the well-trained English servant. She "knew her place," and resented the intrusion. But Bertram had his own notions of politeness, too, which were not to be lightly set aside for local class distinctions. He could not see a pretty girl handing cups to guests without instinctively rising from his seat to assist her. So, very much to Martha's embarrassment, he continued to give his help in passing the cake and the bread-and-butter. As soon as she was gone, he turned round to Philip. "That's a very pretty girl and a very nice girl," he said simply. "I wonder, now, as you haven't a wife, you've never thought of marrying her."

The remark fell like a thunderbolt on the assembled group. Even Frida was shocked. Your most open-minded woman begins to draw a line when you touch her class prejudices in the matter of marriage, especially with reference to her own relations. "Why, really, Mr. Ingledew," she said, looking up at him reproachfully, "you can't mean to say you think my brother could marry the parlour-maid!"

Bertram saw at a glance he had once more unwittingly run his head against one of the dearest of these strange people's taboos; but he made no retort openly. He only reflected in silence to himself how unnatural and how wrong they would all think it at home that a young man of Philip's age should remain nominally celibate; how horrified they would be at the abject misery and degradation such conduct on the part of half his caste must inevitably imply for thousands of innocent young girls of lower station, whose lives he now knew were remorselessly sacrificed in vile dens of tainted London to the supposed social necessity that young men of a certain class should marry late in a certain style, and "keep a wife in the way she's been accustomed to." He remembered with a checked sigh how infinitely superior they would all at home have considered that wholesome, capable, good-looking Martha to an empty-headed and useless young man like Philip; and he thought to himself how completely taboo had overlaid in these people's minds every ethical idea, how wholly it had obscured the prime necessities of healthy, vigorous, and moral manhood. He recollected the similar though less hideous taboos he had met with elsewhere: the castes of India, and the horrible pollution that would result from disregarding them; the vile Egyptian rule, by which the divine king, in order to keep up the so-called purity of his royal and god-descended blood, must marry his own sister, and so foully pollute with monstrous abortions the very stock he believed himself to be preserving intact from common or unclean influences. His mind ran back to the strange and complicated forbidden degrees of the Australian Blackfellows, who are divided into cross-classes, each of which must necessarily marry into a certain other, and into that other only, regardless of individual tastes or preferences. He remembered the profound belief of all these people that if they were to act in any other way than the one prescribed, some nameless misfortune or terrible evil would surely overtake them. Yet, nowhere, he thought to himself, had he seen any system which entailed in the end so much misery on both sexes, though more particularly on the women, as that system of closely tabooed marriage, founded upon a broad basis of prostitution and infanticide, which has reached its most appalling height of development in hypocritical and puritan England. The ghastly levity with which all Englishmen treated this most serious subject, and the fatal readiness with which even Frida herself seemed to acquiesce in the most inhuman slavery ever devised for women on the face of this earth, shocked and saddened Bertram's profoundly moral and sympathetic nature. He could sit there no longer to listen to their talk. He bethought him at once of the sickening sights he had seen the evening before in a London music-hall; of the corrupting mass of filth underneath, by which alone this abomination of iniquity could be kept externally decent, and this vile system of false celibacy whitened outwardly to the eye like Oriental sepulchres: and he strolled off by himself into the shrubbery, very heavy in heart, to hide his real feelings from the priest and the soldier, whose coarser-grained minds could never have understood the enthusiasm of humanity which inspired and informed him.

Frida rose and followed him, moved by some unconscious wave of instinctive sympathy. The four children of this world were left together on the lawn by the rustic table, to exchange views by themselves on the extraordinary behaviour and novel demeanour of the mysterious Alien.



VII

As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the little square party. They felt some unearthly presence had been removed from their midst. General Claviger turned to Monteith. "That's a curious sort of chap," he said slowly, in his military way. "Who is he, and where does he come from?"

"Ah, where does he come from?—that's just the question," Monteith answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously. "Nobody knows. He's a mystery. He poses in the role. You'd better ask Philip; it was he who brought him here."

"I met him accidentally in the street," Philip answered, with an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held responsible for all the stranger's moral and social vagaries. "It's the merest chance acquaintance. I know nothing of his antecedents. I—er—I lent him a bag, and he's fastened himself upon me ever since like a leech, and come constantly to my sister's. But I haven't the remotest idea who he is or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up from all of us in the profoundest mystery."

"He's a gentleman, anyhow," the General put in with military decisiveness. "How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler being probably a near relation! Most men, you know, Christy, would have tried to hide it; HE didn't for a second. He admitted his ancestors had all been cobblers till quite a recent period."

Philip was astonished at this verdict of the General's, for he himself, on the contrary, had noted with silent scorn that very remark as a piece of supreme and hopeless stupidity on Bertram's part. No fellow can help having a cobbler for a grandfather, of course: but he need not be such a fool as to volunteer any mention of the fact spontaneously.

"Yes, I thought it bold of him," Monteith answered, "almost bolder than was necessary; for he didn't seem to think we should be at all surprised at it."

The General mused to himself. "He's a fine soldierly fellow," he said, gazing after the tall retreating figure. "I should like to make a dragoon of him. He's the very man for a saddle. He'd dash across country in the face of heavy guns any day with the best of them."

"He rides well," Philip answered, "and has a wonderful seat. I saw him on that bay mare of Wilder's in town the other afternoon, and I must say he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler."

"Oh, he's a gentleman," the General repeated, with unshaken conviction: "a thoroughbred gentleman." And he scanned Philip up and down with his keen grey eye as if internally reflecting that Philip's own right to criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle doubtful. "I should much like to make a captain of hussars of him. He'd be splendid as a leader of irregular horse; the very man for a scrimmage!" For the General's one idea when he saw a fine specimen of our common race was the Zulu's or the Red Indian's—what an admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his fellow-creatures!

"He'd be better engaged so," the Dean murmured reflectively, "than in diffusing these horrid revolutionary and atheistical doctrines." For the Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression: and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean's crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic.

"He's very like the duke, though," General Claviger went on, after a moment's pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frida disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringas. "Very like the duke. And you saw he admitted some sort of relationship, though he didn't like to dwell upon it. You may be sure he's a by-blow of the family somehow. One of the Bertrams, perhaps the old duke who was out in the Crimea, may have formed an attachment for one of these Ingledew girls—the cobbler's sisters: I dare say they were no better in their conduct than they ought to be—and this may be the consequence."

"I'm afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful conversation," the Dean put in, with a tone of professional disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the high-placed. "He didn't seem to set the example he ought to have done to his poorer brethren."

"Oh, he was a thorough old rip, the duke, if it comes to that," General Claviger responded, twirling his white moustache. "And so's the present man—a rip of the first water. They're a regular bad lot, the Bertrams, root and stock. They never set an example of anything to anybody—bar horse-breeding,—as far as I'm aware; and even at that their trainers have always fairly cheated 'em."

"The present duke's a most exemplary churchman," the Dean interposed, with Christian charity for a nobleman of position. "He gave us a couple of thousand last year for the cathedral restoration fund."

"And that would account," Philip put in, returning abruptly to the previous question, which had been exercising him meanwhile, "for the peculiarly distinguished air of birth and breeding this man has about him." For Philip respected a duke from the bottom of his heart, and cherished the common Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated to that highest degree in our barbaric rank-system must acquire at the same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew changes his Semitic features for the European shape on conversion and baptism.

"Oh, dear, no," the General answered in his most decided voice. "The Bertrams were never much to look at in any way: and as for the old duke, he was as insignificant a little monster of red-haired ugliness as ever you'd see in a day's march anywhere. If he hadn't been a duke, with a rent-roll of forty odd thousand a year, he'd never have got that beautiful Lady Camilla to consent to marry him. But, bless you, women 'll do anything for the strawberry leaves. It isn't from the Bertrams this man gets his good looks. It isn't from the Bertrams. Old Ingledew's daughters are pretty enough girls. If their aunts were like 'em, it's there your young friend got his air of distinction."

"We never know who's who nowadays," the Dean murmured softly. Being himself the son of a small Scotch tradesman, brought up in the Free Kirk, and elevated into his present exalted position by the early intervention of a Balliol scholarship and a studentship of Christ Church, he felt at liberty to moralise in such non-committing terms on the gradual decay of aristocratic exclusiveness.

"I don't see it much matters what a man's family was," the General said stoutly, "so long as he's a fine, well-made, soldierly fellow, like this Ingledew body, capable of fighting for his Queen and country. He's an Australian, I suppose. What tall chaps they do send home, to be sure! Those Australians are going to lick us all round the field presently."

"That's the curious part of it," Philip answered. "Nobody knows what he is. He doesn't even seem to be a British subject. He calls himself an Alien. And he speaks most disrespectfully at times—well, not exactly perhaps of the Queen in person, but at any rate of the monarchy."

"Utterly destitute of any feeling of respect for any power of any sort, human or divine," the Dean remarked, with clerical severity.

"For my part," Monteith interposed, knocking his ash off savagely, "I think the man's a swindler; and the more I see of him, the less I like him. He's never explained to us how he came here at all, or what the dickens he came for. He refuses to say where he lives or what's his nationality. He poses as a sort of unexplained Caspar Hauser. In my opinion, these mystery men are always impostors. He had no letters of introduction to anybody at Brackenhurst; and he thrust himself upon Philip in a most peculiar way; ever since which he's insisted upon coming to my house almost daily. I don't like him myself: it's Mrs. Monteith who insists upon having him here."

"He fascinates me," the General said frankly. "I don't at all wonder the women like him. As long as he was by, though I don't agree with one word he says, I couldn't help looking at him and listening to him intently."

"So he does me," Philip answered, since the General gave him the cue. "And I notice it's the same with people in the train. They always listen to him, though sometimes he preaches the most extravagant doctrines—oh, much worse than anything he's said here this afternoon. He's really quite eccentric."

"What sort of doctrines?" the Dean inquired, with languid zeal. "Not, I hope, irreligious?"

"Oh, dear, no," Philip answered; "not that so much. He troubles himself very little, I think, about religion. Social doctrines, don't you know; such very queer views—about women, and so forth."

"Indeed?" the Dean said quickly, drawing himself up very stiff: for you touch the ark of God for the modern cleric when you touch the question of the relations of the sexes. "And what does he say? It's highly undesirable men should go about the country inciting to rebellion on such fundamental points of moral order in public railway carriages." For it is a peculiarity of minds constituted like the Dean's (say, ninety-nine per cent. of the population) to hold that the more important a subject is to our general happiness, the less ought we all to think about it and discuss it.

"Why, he has very queer ideas," Philip went on, slightly hesitating; for he shared the common vulgar inability to phrase exposition of a certain class of subjects in any but the crudest and ugliest phraseology. "He seems to think, don't you know, the recognised forms of vice—well, what all young men do—you know what I mean—Of course it's not right, but still they do them—" The Dean nodded a cautious acquiescence. "He thinks they're horribly wrong and distressing; but he makes nothing at all of the virtue of decent girls and the peace of families."

"If I found a man preaching that sort of doctrine to my wife or my daughters," Monteith said savagely, "I know what I'd do—I'd put a bullet through him."

"And quite right, too," the General murmured approvingly.

Professional considerations made the Dean refrain from endorsing this open expression of murderous sentiment in its fullest form; a clergyman ought always to keep up some decent semblance of respect for the Gospel and the Ten Commandments—or, at least, the greater part of them. So he placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together in the usual deliberative clerical way, gazed blankly through the gap, and answered with mild and perfunctory disapprobation: "A bullet would perhaps be an unnecessarily severe form of punishment to mete out; but I confess I could excuse the man who was so far carried away by his righteous indignation as to duck the fellow in the nearest horse-pond."

"Well, I don't know about that," Philip replied, with an outburst of unwonted courage and originality; for he was beginning to like, and he had always from the first respected, Bertram. "There's something about the man that makes me feel—even when I differ from him most—that he believes it all, and is thoroughly in earnest. I dare say I'm wrong, but I always have a notion he's a better man than me, in spite of all his nonsense,—higher and clearer and differently constituted,—and that if only I could climb to just where he has got, perhaps I should see things in the same light that he does."

It was a wonderful speech for Philip—a speech above himself; but, all the same, by a fetch of inspiration he actually made it. Intercourse with Bertram had profoundly impressed his feeble nature. But the Dean shook his head.

"A very undesirable young man for you to see too much of, I'm sure, Mr. Christy," he said, with marked disapprobation. For, in the Dean's opinion, it was a most dangerous thing for a man to think, especially when he's young; thinking is, of course, so likely to unsettle him!

The General, on the other hand, nodded his stern grey head once or twice reflectively.

"He's a remarkable young fellow," he said, after a pause; "a most remarkable young fellow. As I said before, he somehow fascinates me. I'd immensely like to put that young fellow into a smart hussar uniform, mount him on a good charger of the Punjaub breed, and send him helter-skelter, pull-devil, pull-baker, among my old friends the Duranis on the North-West frontier."



VIII

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 Claviger of Herat, I suppose," he said in a low tone, as they retreated out of ear-shot 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 and starvation on the mountain-tops 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 anybody's and everybody'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. Monteith," he went on, with his far-away 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 jailors 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'd 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 rigour 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.

"O Frida," the young man cried, bending forward and looking at her, "you know very well you're 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. Monteith, 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 manner born, 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're 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 poojah, and fetiches, as if we weren't civilised people at all, but utter barbarians. Now, don't you think—don't you admit, yourself, it's a wee bit unreasonable, or at any rate impolite, of you?"

Bertram drew back with a really pained expression on his handsome features. "O Mrs. Monteith!" 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 poojahs and fetiches with the similar and often indistinguishable taboos and poojahs and fetiches of 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 rationality 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. Advance in civilisation doesn't necessarily involve either advance in real knowledge of one's relations to the universe, or advance in 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 Thargelia, like the veriest 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 burnt alive as victims to Baal. 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. New-born 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!" Frida 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's the one thing 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—deities 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, fetich-worship, religious rites, castes, 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 meet 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 fetiches or phantoms; to understand that wise and right and unselfish actions are the great requisites in life, not the service of non-existent 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 any one 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 fetich-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," Frida 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, Frida," he said, with that transparent glance of his. "Now, don't look so vexed; I shall call you Frida 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 arrangement's 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'd 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're 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."

"But mayn't 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. There 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—varying as much as from the oak to the cuttle-fish, from the palm to the tiger, from man to the fern, the sea-weed, 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 or 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," Bertram 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 wee planet, and of particular times and circumstances in its history. We differ only as birth 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. It 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. Bertram 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're tabooed for life to Robert Monteith: I must needs 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."



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."