Читать «Cup of Gold (Золотая чаша)» онлайн - страница 90

"And if I find you lovely, am I to be put in fear by a dull circumstance? May I not speak my thought to you whom it most concerns next to myself? Do not let us go apart bearing black embers of a flame that has not burned itself to death."

When he had started to speak she listened carefully to his words, and then a little pain had flitted across her face; but when he had done there was only amusement in her eyes-that and the lurking ridicule under their surfaces.

Ysobel laughed softly.

"You forget only one thing, sir," she said. "I do not burn. I wonder if I shall ever burn again. You do not carry a torch for me-and I hoped you did. I came this morning to see if you did. And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn."

She was silent. Henry looked at the floor. His amazement had raised a fog of dullness in his brain.

"I took Panama for you," he said plaintively.

"Ah-yesterday I hoped you did. Yesterday I dreamed you had, but today-I am sorry." She spoke softly and very sadly.

"When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality. The long thought of it bore me up when I was paraded by my husband. He did not love me. He was flattered with the thought that I loved him. It gave him importance and charm in his own eyes, neither of which were his. He would take me through the streets and his eyes would say, 'See what I have married! No ordinary man could marry such a woman; but then, I am not an ordinary man.' He was afraid of me-a little man, and afraid of me. He would say, 'With your permission, my dear, I shall exercise the prerogative of a husband.'

Ah, the contempt I have for him!

"I wanted force-blind, unreasoning force-and love not for my soul or for some imagined beauty of my mind, but for the white fetish of my body. I do not want softness.

I am soft. My husband uses scented lotions on his hands before he touches me, and his fingers are like thick, damp snails. I want the crush of hard muscles, the delicious pain of little hurts."

She searched his face closely, as though looking once more for a quality which had been lost.

"I thought richly of you once, you grew to be a brazen figure of the night. And now-I find you a babbler, a speaker of sweet, considered words, and rather clumsy about it. I find you are no realist at all, but only a bungling romancer. You want to marry me-to protect me. All men, save one, have wanted to protect me. In every way I am more able to protect myself than you are. From the morning of my first memory I have been made sick with phrases. I have been dressed in epithets and fed endearments.