pg28948 [238]
He watched the road. They were running by Kensington Gardens. For the first time his lips opened.
"Shall we get out and go into the park," he asked.
"Yes," she said, quietly, not sure what was coming.
After a moment he took the tube from its peg. She saw the stout, strong, self-contained driver lean his head.
"Stop at Hyde Park Corner."
The dark head nodded, the car ran on just the same.
Presently they pulled up. Skrebensky paid the man. Ursula stood back. She saw the driver salute as he received his tip, and then, before he set the car in motion, turn and look at her, with his quick, powerful, animal's look, his eyes very concentrated and the whites of his eyes flickering. Then he drove away into the crowd. He had let her go. She had been afraid.
Skrebensky turned with her into the park. A band was still playing and the place was thronged with people. They listened to the ebbing music, then went aside to a dark seat, where they sat closely, hand in hand.
Then at length, as out of the silence, she said to him, wondering:
"What hurt you so?"
She really did not know, at this moment.
"When you said you wanted never to marry me," he replied, with a childish simplicity.
"But why did that hurt you so?" she said. "You needn't mind everything I say so particularly."
"I don't know—I didn't want to do it," he said, humbly, ashamed.
She pressed his hand warmly. They sat close together, watching the soldiers go by with their sweethearts, the lights trailing in myriads down the great thoroughfares that beat on the edge of the park.
"I didn't know you cared so much," she said, also humbly.
"I didn't," he said. "I was knocked over myself.—But I care—all the world."
His voice was so quiet and colourless, it made her heart go pale with fear.
"My love!" she said, drawing near to him. But she spoke out of fear, not out of love.
"I care all the world—I care for nothing else—neither in life nor in death," he said, in the same steady, colourless voice of essential truth.
"Than for what?" she murmured duskily.
"Than for you—to be with me."
And again she was afraid. Was she to be conquered by this? She cowered close to him, very close to him. They sat perfectly still, listening to the great, heavy, beating sound of the town, the murmur of lovers going by, the footsteps of soldiers.
She shivered against him.
"You are cold?" he said.
"A little."
"We will go and have some supper."
He was now always quiet and decided and remote, very beautiful. He seemed to have some strange, cold power over her.
They went to a restaurant, and drank chianti. But his pale, wan look did not go away.
"Don't leave me to-night," he said at length, looking at her, pleading. He was so strange and impersonal, she was afraid.
"But the people of my place," she said, quivering.
"I will explain to them—they know we are engaged."
She sat pale and mute. He waited.
"Shall we go?" he said at length.
"Where?"
"To an hotel."
Her heart was hardened. Without answering, she rose to acquiesce. But she was now cold and unreal. Yet she could not refuse him. It seemed like fate, a fate she did not want.
They went to an Italian hotel somewhere, and had a sombre bedroom with a very large bed, clean, but sombre. The ceiling was painted with a bunch of flowers in a big medallion over the bed. She thought it was pretty.
He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast against him. She was passive, acquiscent. But her sleep was not very deep nor very real.
She woke in the morning to a sound of water dashed on a courtyard, to sunlight streaming through a lattice. She thought she was in a foreign country. And Skrebensky was there an incubus upon her.
She lay still, thinking, whilst his arm was round her, his head against her shoulders, his body against hers, just behind