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.”