Bertram gazed at her dismayed. “Leave them!” he cried. “Why, Frida, of course you could never leave them. Do you mean to say anybody would be so utterly unnatural, even in England, as to separate a mother from her own children?”

“I don’t think Robert would let me keep them,” Frida faltered, with tears in her eyes; “and if he didn’t, the law, of course, would take his side against me.”

“Of course!” Bertram answered, with grim sarcasm in his face, “of course! I might have guessed it. If there IS an injustice or a barbarity possible, I might have been sure the law of England would make haste to perpetrate it. But you needn’t fear, Frida. Long before the law of England could be put in motion, I’ll have completed my arrangements for taking you—and them too—with me. There are advantages sometimes even in the barbaric delay of what your lawyers are facetiously pleased to call justice.”

“Then I may bring them with me?” Frida cried, flushing red.

Bertram nodded assent. “Yes,” he said, with grave gentleness. “You may bring them with you. And as soon as you like, too. Remember, dearest, every night you pass under that creature’s roof, you commit the vilest crime a woman can commit against her own purity.”

XI

Never in her life had Frida enjoyed anything so much as those first four happy days at Heymoor. She had come away with Bertram exactly as Bertram himself desired her to do, without one thought of anything on earth except to fulfil the higher law of her own nature; and she was happy in her intercourse with the one man who could understand it, the one man who had waked it to its fullest pitch, and could make it resound sympathetically to his touch in every chord and every fibre. They had chosen a lovely spot on a heather-clad moorland, where she could stroll alone with Bertram among the gorse and ling, utterly oblivious of Robert Monteith and the unnatural world she had left for ever behind her. Her soul drank in deep draughts of the knowledge of good and evil from Bertram’s lips; she felt it was indeed a privilege to be with him and listen to him; she wondered how she could ever have endured that old bad life with the lower man who was never her equal, now she had once tasted and known what life can be when two well-matched souls walk it together, abreast, in holy fellowship.

The children, too, were as happy as the day was long. The heath was heaven to them. They loved Bertram well, and were too young to be aware of anything unusual in the fact of his accompanying them. At the little inn on the hill-top where they stopped to lodge, nobody asked any compromising questions: and Bertram felt so sure he could soon complete his arrangements for taking Frida and the children “home,” as he still always phrased it, that Frida had no doubts for their future happiness. As for Robert Monteith, that bleak, cold man, she hardly even remembered him: Bertram’s first kiss seemed almost to have driven the very memory of her husband clean out of her consciousness. She only regretted, now she had left him, the false and mistaken sense of duty which had kept her so long tied to an inferior soul she could never love, and did wrong to marry.

And all the time, what strange new lessons, what beautiful truths, she learned from Bertram! As they strolled together, those sweet August mornings, hand locked in hand, over the breezy upland, what new insight he gave her into men and things! what fresh impulse he supplied to her keen moral nature! The misery and wrong of the world she lived in came home to her now in deeper and blacker hues than ever she had conceived it in: and with that consciousness came also the burning desire of every wakened soul to right and redress it. With Bertram by her side, she felt she could not even harbour an unholy wish or admit a wrong feeling; that vague sense of his superiority, as of a higher being, which she had felt from the very first moment she met him at Brackenhurst, had deepened and grown more definite now by closer intercourse; and she recognised that what she had fallen in love with from the earliest beginning was the beauty of holiness shining clear in his countenance. She had chosen at last the better part, and she felt in her soul that, come what might, it could not be taken away from her.

In this earthly paradise of pure love, undefiled, she spent three full days and part of another. On the morning of the fourth, she sent the country girl they had engaged to take care of the children, out on the moor with the little ones, while she herself and Bertram went off alone, past the barrow that overlooks the Devil’s Saucepan, and out on the open ridge that stretches with dark growth of heath and bracken far away into the misty blue distance of Hampshire. Bertram had just been speaking to her, as they sat on the dry sand, of the buried chieftain whose bones still lay hid under that grass-grown barrow, and of the slaughtered wives whose bodies slept beside him, massacred in cold blood to accompany their dead lord to the world of shadows. He had been contrasting these hideous slaveries of taboo-ridden England, past or present, with the rational freedom of his own dear country, whither he hoped so soon with good luck to take her, when suddenly Frida raised her eager eyes from the ground, and saw somebody or something coming across the moor from eastward in their direction.

All at once, a vague foreboding of evil possessed her. Hardly quite knowing why, she felt this approaching object augured no good to their happiness. “Look, Bertram,” she cried, seizing his arm in her fright, “there’s somebody coming.”

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.”

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