The British Barbarians

Bertram raised his eyes and looked. Then he shaded them with his hands. “How strange!” he said simply, in his candid way: “it looks for all the world just like the man who was once your husband!”

Frida rose in alarm. “Oh, what can we do?” she cried, wringing her hands. “What ever can we do? It’s he! It’s Robert!”

“Surely he can’t have come on purpose!” Bertram exclaimed, taken aback. “When he sees us, he’ll turn aside. He must know of all people on earth he’s the one least likely at such a time to be welcome. He can’t want to disturb the peace of another man’s honeymoon!”

But Frida, better used to the savage ways of the world she had always lived in, made answer, shrinking and crouching, “He’s hunted us down, and he’s come to fight you.”

“To fight me!” Bertram exclaimed. “Oh, surely not that! I was told by those who ought best to know, you English had got far beyond the stage of private war and murderous vendetta.”

“For everything else,” Frida answered, cowering down in her terror of her husband’s vengeance, not for herself indeed so much as for Bertram. “For everything else, we have; but NOT for a woman.”

There was no time just then, however, for further explanation of this strange anomaly. Monteith had singled them out from a great distance with his keen, clear sight, inherited from generations of Highland ancestors, and now strode angrily across the moor, with great wrathful steps, in his rival’s direction. Frida nestled close to Bertram, to protect her from the man to whom her country’s laws and the customs of her tribe would have handed her over blindfold. Bertram soothed her with his hand, and awaited in silence, with some dim sense of awe, the angry barbarian’s arrival.

He came up very quickly, and stood full in front of them, glaring with fierce eyes at the discovered lovers. For a minute or two his rage would not allow him to speak, nor even to act; he could but stand and scowl from under his brows at Bertram. But after a long pause his wrath found words. “You infernal scoundrel!” he burst forth, “so at last I’ve caught you! How dare you sit there and look me straight in the face? You infernal thief, how dare you? how dare you?”

Bertram rose and confronted him. His own face, too, flushed slightly with righteous indignation; but he answered for all that in the same calm and measured tones as ever: “I am NOT a scoundrel, and I will not submit to be called so even by an angry savage. I ask you in return, how dare you follow us? You must have known your presence would be very unwelcome. I should have thought this was just the one moment in your life and the one place on earth where even YOU would have seen that to stop away was your imperative duty. Mere self-respect would dictate such conduct. This lady has given you clear proof indeed that your society and converse are highly distasteful to her.”

Robert Monteith glared across at him with the face of a tiger. “You infamous creature,” he cried, almost speechless with rage, “do you dare to defend my wife’s adultery?”

Bertram gazed at him with a strange look of mingled horror and astonishment. “You poor wretch!” he answered, as calmly as before, but with evident contempt; “how can you dare, such a thing as you, to apply these vile words to your moral superiors? Adultery it was indeed, and untruth to her own higher and purer nature, for this lady to spend one night of her life under your roof with you; what she has taken now in exchange is holy marriage, the only real and sacred marriage, the marriage of true souls, to which even the wiser of yourselves, the poets of your nation, would not admit impediment. If you dare to apply such base language as this to my lady’s actions, you must answer for it to me, her natural protector, for I will not permit it.”

At the words, quick as lightning, Monteith pulled from his pocket a loaded revolver and pointed it full at his rival. With a cry of terror, Frida flung herself between them, and tried to protect her lover with the shield of her own body. But Bertram gently unwound her arms and held her off from him tenderly. “No, no, darling,” he said slowly, sitting down with wonderful calm upon a big grey sarsen-stone that abutted upon the pathway; “I had forgotten again; I keep always forgetting what kind of savages I have to deal with. If I chose, I could snatch that murderous weapon from his hand, and shoot him dead with it in self-defence—for I’m stronger than he is. But if I did, what use? I could never take you home with me. And after all, what could we either of us do in the end in this bad, wild world of your fellow-countrymen? They would take me and hang me; and all would be up with you. For your sake, Frida, to shield you from the effects of their cruel taboos, there’s but one course open: I must submit to this madman. He may shoot me if he will.... Stand free, and let him!”

But with a passionate oath, Robert Monteith seized her arm and flung her madly from him. She fell, reeling, on one side. His eyes were bloodshot with the savage thirst for vengeance. He raised the deadly weapon. Bertram Ingledew, still seated on the big round boulder, opened his breast in silence to receive the bullet. There was a moment’s pause. For that moment, even Monteith himself, in his maniac mood, felt dimly aware of that mysterious restraining power all the rest who knew him had so often felt in their dealings with the Alien. But it was only for a moment. His coarser nature was ill adapted to recognise that ineffable air as of a superior being that others observed in him. He pulled the trigger and fired. Frida gave one loud shriek of despairing horror. Bertram’s body fell back on the bare heath behind it.

XII

Mad as he was with jealousy, that lowest and most bestial of all the vile passions man still inherits from the ape and tiger, Robert Monteith was yet quite sane enough to know in his own soul what deed he had wrought, and in what light even his country’s barbaric laws would regard his action. So the moment he had wreaked to the full his fiery vengeance on the man who had never wronged him, he bent over the body with strangely eager eyes, expecting to see upon it some evidence of his guilt, some bloody mark of the hateful crime his own hand had committed. At the same instant, Frida, recovering from his blow that had sent her reeling, rushed frantically forward, flung herself with wild passion on her lover’s corpse, and covered the warm lips with hot, despairing kisses.

One marvellous fact, however, impressed them both with a vague sense of the unknown and the mysterious from the very first second. No spot nor trace of blood marred the body anywhere. And, even as they looked, a strange perfume, as of violets or of burning incense, began by degrees to flood the moor around them. Then slowly, while they watched, a faint blue flame seemed to issue from the wound in Bertram’s right side and rise lambent into the air above the murdered body. Frida drew back and gazed at it, a weird thrill of mystery and unconscious hope beguiling for one moment her profound pang of bereavement. Monteith, too, stood away a pace or two, in doubt and surprise, the deep consciousness of some strange and unearthly power overawing for a while even his vulgar and commonplace Scotch bourgeois nature. Gradually, as they gazed, the pale blue flame, rising higher and higher, gathered force and volume, and the perfume as of violets became distinct on the air, like the savour of a purer life than this century wots of. Bit by bit, the wan blue light, flickering thicker and thicker, shaped itself into the form and features of a man, even the outward semblance of Bertram Ingledew. Shadowy, but transfigured with an ineffable glory, it hovered for a minute or two above the spot on the moor where the corpse had lain; for now they were aware that as the flame-shape formed, the body that lay dead upon the ground beneath dissolved by degrees and melted into it. Not a trace was left on the heath of Robert Monteith’s crime: not a dapple of blood, not a clot of gore: only a pale blue flame and a persistent image represented the body that was once Bertram Ingledew’s.

Again, even as they looked, a still weirder feeling began to creep over them. The figure, growing fainter, seemed to fade away piecemeal in the remote distance. But it was not in space that it faded; it appeared rather to become dim in some vaguer and far more mysterious fashion, like the memories of childhood or the aching abysses of astronomical calculation. As it slowly dissolved, Frida stretched out her hands to it with a wild cry, like the cry of a mother for her first-born. “O Bertram,” she moaned, “where are you going? Do you mean to leave me? Won’t you save me from this man? Won’t you take me home with you?”

Dim and hollow, as from the womb of time unborn, a calm voice came back to her across the gulf of ages: “Your husband willed it, Frida, and the customs of your nation. You can come to me, but I can never return to you. In three days longer your probation would have been finished. But I forgot with what manner of savage I had still to deal. And now I must go back once more to the place whence I came—to THE TWENTY-FIFTH CENTURY.”

The voice died away in the dim recesses of the future. The pale blue flame flickered forward and vanished. The shadowy shape melted through an endless vista of to-morrows. Only the perfume as of violets or of a higher life still hung heavy upon the air, and a patch of daintier purple burned bright on the moor, like a pool of crimson blood, where the body had fallen. Only that, and a fierce ache in Frida’s tortured heart; only that, and a halo of invisible glory round the rich red lips, where his lips had touched them.

XIII

Frida seated herself in her misery on the ice-worn boulder where three minutes earlier Bertram had been sitting. Her face was buried in her bloodless hands. All the world grew blank to her.

Monteith, for his part, sat down a little way off with folded arms on another sarsen-stone, fronting her. The strange and unearthly scene they had just passed through impressed him profoundly. For the first few minutes a great horror held him. But his dogged Scottish nature still brooded over his wrongs, in spite of the terrible sight he had so unexpectedly evoked. In a way, he felt he had had his revenge; for had he not drawn upon his man, and fired at him and killed him? Still, after the fever and torment of the last few days, it was a relief to find, after all, he was not, as this world would judge, a murderer. Man and crime were alike mere airy phantoms. He could go back now to the inn and explain with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called away to town on important business. There was no corpse on the moor, no blabbing blood to tell the story of his attempted murder: nobody anywhere, he felt certain in his own stolid soul, would miss the mysterious Alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss of centuries. With true Scotch caution, indeed, even in the midst of his wrath, Robert Monteith had never said a word to any one at Brackenhurst of how his wife had left him. He was too proud a man, if it came to that, to acknowledge what seemed to him a personal disgrace, till circumstances should absolutely force such acknowledgment upon him. He had glossed it over meanwhile with the servants and neighbours by saying that Mrs. Monteith had gone away with the children for their accustomed holiday as always in August. Frida had actually chosen the day appointed for their seaside journey as the fittest moment for her departure with Bertram, so his story was received without doubt or inquiry. He had bottled up his wrath in his own silent soul. There was still room, therefore, to make all right again at home in the eyes of the world—if but Frida was willing. So he sat there long, staring hard at his wife in speechless debate, and discussing with himself whether or not to make temporary overtures of peace to her.

In this matter, his pride itself fought hard with his pride. That is the wont of savages. Would it not be better, now Bertram Ingledew had fairly disappeared for ever from their sphere, to patch up a hollow truce for a time at least with Frida, and let all things be to the outer eye exactly as they had always been? The bewildering and brain-staggering occurrences of the last half-hour, indeed, had struck deep and far into his hard Scotch nature. The knowledge that the man who had stolen his wife from him (as he phrased it to himself in his curious belated mediaeval phraseology) was not a real live man of flesh and blood at all, but an evanescent phantom of the twenty-fifth century, made him all the more ready to patch up for the time-being a nominal reconciliation. His nerves—for even HE had nerves—were still trembling to the core with the mystic events of that wizard morning; but clearer and clearer still it dawned upon him each moment that if things were ever to be set right at all they must be set right then and there, before he returned to the inn, and before Frida once more went back to their children. To be sure, it was Frida’s place to ask forgiveness first, and make the first advances. But Frida made no move. So after sitting there long, salving his masculine vanity with the flattering thought that after all his rival was no mere man at all, but a spirit, an avatar, a thing of pure imagination, he raised his head at last and looked inquiringly towards Frida.

“Well?” he said slowly.

Frida raised her head from her hands and gazed across at him scornfully.

“I was thinking,” Monteith began, feeling his way with caution, but with a magnanimous air, “that perhaps—after all—for the children’s sake, Frida—”

With a terrible look, his wife rose up and fronted him. Her face was red as fire; her heart was burning. She spoke with fierce energy. “Robert Monteith,” she said firmly, not even deigning to treat him as one who had once been her husband, “for the children’s sake, or for my own sake, or for any power on earth, do you think, poor empty soul, after I’ve spent three days of my life with HIM, I’d ever spend three hours again with YOU? If you do, then this is all: murderer that you are, you mistake my nature.”

And turning on her heel, she moved slowly away towards the far edge of the moor with a queenly gesture.

Monteith followed her up a step or two. She turned and waved him back. He stood glued to the ground, that weird sense of the supernatural once more overcoming him. For some seconds he watched her without speaking a word. Then at last he broke out. “What are you going to do, Frida?” he asked, almost anxiously.

Frida turned and glanced back at him with scornful eyes. Her mien was resolute. The revolver with which he had shot Bertram Ingledew lay close by her feet, among the bracken on the heath, where Monteith had flung it. She picked it up with one hand, and once more waved him backward.

“I’m going to follow him,” she answered solemnly, in a very cold voice, “where YOU have sent him. But alone by myself: not here, before you.” And she brushed him away, as he tried to seize it, with regal dignity.

Monteith, abashed, turned back without one word, and made his way to the inn in the little village. But Frida walked on by herself, in the opposite direction, across the open moor and through the purple heath, towards black despair and the trout-ponds at Broughton.

THE END