Kind Are Her Answers by Mary Renault Read Free Book Online Page B

Leaning close, he listened to her breathing. No: she was asleep.
    He looked round. The girl had not come into the room, but was standing where he had left her in the doorway. Her face was set with what seemed a sudden fear. He came back to her and they went together into the hall.
    “No,” he said. “It’s all right. She’s fallen asleep.”
    He saw her hands, which she had clenched tightly together, relax. She nodded her head. “It was only just—when you went over quickly like that. I thought something might have happened when I was out of the room.”
    “That did cross my mind for a moment. But there shouldn’t be any further trouble to-night. If she can sleep … How long has she been sleeping, by the way?”
    She looked up quickly. “It can’t have been for more than a very few minutes. Just since I went out.” She was twisting a little pearl ring on her finger. Women slept in their pearls, he remembered, to keep them warm. He tried to think of something professional and intelligent to say, but could only try to remember the colour of her eyes, which were hidden, and see that her lashes were tinged with the dark red of her hair and that her lids were transparent and faintly veined with blue.
    “Well,” he said at last, “you needn’t worry now.”
    “No.” She played with the knot in the silk cord of her gown. They had stopped in the hall, half-way to the door; he could not remember how long they had been standing there.
    He forced himself to go on talking. “Do you get many of these disturbed nights? You ought to make them up in the morning.”
    “Oh, I’m all right. I can sleep on if I want to. But you can’t, can you? I’m sorry. You look tired.”
    She looked up at him, meeting his eyes before he was ready. He would have to get away, to say something, he thought; but he did neither. It was she who, without seeming to have moved, was suddenly close to him. She looked up into his face with a cloudy smile.
    It did not seem to him that anything new had happened when he took her in his arms. He had known how her eyelids would feel: cool and fragile, and the soft brush of her lashes against his lips.
    This is insanity, he thought, half-awaking; and gripped her with all his strength because in a moment she would try to go away. But her firm silky shape only moulded itself more closely to his hold, and one of her arms slipped round his neck. Her mouth was still smiling, distant and dreamlike, as he closed it with his own.
    In the years of his marriage, and even before, he had forgotten what it was to be made welcome without reserve. A light cracked behind his eyes. He did not know that he had lifted her almost off her feet. She clung about his neck, her head falling back a little; he kissed her throat and the hollow of her shoulder.
    They stopped at last for breath and she rested, unmoving, in the support of his arms; her lashes lifted a little and her eyes, deep and shining, seemed to include and pass beyond him. The blood began to flow back, clear and bright, into her lips which his kiss had whitened.
    “Send me away,” he whispered. “Do you hear? For God’s sake send me away.”
    “Not yet.” She slid her hand upward along his arm, and brushed her fingertips lightly over his hair.
    He held her harder. “Send me away. I’ve no right to be here.”
    “I know.” She drew his face down again to hers. “I know all that. Not yet.”
    He could feel the stretch of her muscles, firm and flexible, as she reached upward in his tightened arms. He kissed her and felt her fingers move in a vague caress about his head. Her gown, loosened sideways, showed two ribbons of pale satin knotted at the shoulder. She shut her eyes and rubbed her face sideways, as a cat does, against his cheek.
    “I shouldn’t have called you,” she murmured under her breath.
    The yellow glare of the light, high up in its cut-glass shade, dazzled in his eyes.
    “Where can we go?”
    Am I saying this, asked a distant and