The British Barbarians

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.