“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!”