Gerald bent above her and was looking out over her shoulder. Already he
felt he was alone. She was gone. She was completely gone, and there was
icy vapour round his heart. He saw the blind valley, the great
cul-de-sac of snow and mountain peaks, under the heaven. And there was
no way out. The terrible silence and cold and the glamorous whiteness
of the dusk wrapped him round, and she remained crouching before the
window, as at a shrine, a shadow.
'Do you like it?' he asked, in a voice that sounded detached and
foreign. At least she might acknowledge he was with her. But she only
averted her soft, mute face a little from his gaze. And he knew that
there were tears in her eyes, her own tears, tears of her strange
religion, that put him to nought.
Quite suddenly, he put his hand under her chin and lifted up her face
to him. Her dark blue eyes, in their wetness of tears, dilated as if
she was startled in her very soul. They looked at him through their
tears in terror and a little horror. His light blue eyes were keen,
small-pupilled and unnatural in their vision. Her lips parted, as she
breathed with difficulty.
The passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the ringing of a
bronze bell, so strong and unflawed and indomitable. His knees
tightened to bronze as he hung above her soft face, whose lips parted
and whose eyes dilated in a strange violation. In the grasp of his hand
her chin was unutterably soft and silken. He felt strong as winter, his
hands were living metal, invincible and not to be turned aside. His
heart rang like a bell clanging inside him.
He took her up in his arms. She was soft and inert, motionless. All the
while her eyes, in which the tears had not yet dried, were dilated as
if in a kind of swoon of fascination and helplessness. He was
superhumanly strong, and unflawed, as if invested with supernatural
force.
He lifted her close and folded her against him. Her softness, her
inert, relaxed weight lay against his own surcharged, bronze-like limbs
in a heaviness of desirability that would destroy him, if he were not
fulfilled. She moved convulsively, recoiling away from him. His heart
went up like a flame of ice, he closed over her like steel. He would
destroy her rather than be denied.
But the overweening power of his body was too much for her. She relaxed
again, and lay loose and soft, panting in a little delirium. And to
him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would
have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forego one second
of this pang of unsurpassable bliss.