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 incredib............